Search Results for: say anything

For months, Shira Barlow’s cell phone was flooded with wrong-number calls and text messages, mostly between 2 and 4 a.m. on weekends. Told they had reached a college student, callers refused to believe it. “Baby girl, how are you?” one man purred in a foreign accent. “Why are you doing this?” a woman asked. “This is so rude.” And there were several seemingly random references to “Paris.” As in Paris Hilton. Barlow’s story began on Valentine’s Day during a night out with friends. She was carrying her phone in a back pocket when it fell into a toilet. When she… Read more »

With his ragged mane and heavily tattooed wiry frame, former Guns N’ Roses bass player Duff McKagan looks every bit the rock star. But the 43-year-old musician doubles as a savvy investor, overseeing a diverse portfolio ranging from property and stocks to vintage guitars. While he draws the line at donning a suit and tie, McKagan also runs the business affairs for his new band, Velvet Revolver, which just released its second album, “Libertad.” “I do everything I can do so this band doesn’t get ripped off,” said McKagan, who subscribes to the online edition of The Wall Street Journal,… Read more »

By The music industry has long hoped mobile phones will help turn around weak music sales, but music executives privately fear the most obvious contender, the iPhone, may give too much clout to Apple Inc., in shaping the future of the fledgling mobile music market. Sales of CDs, still the dominant music format, have dropped more than 20 percent in 2007 from a year ago, according to Nielsen Soundscan. Digital music sales are gradually claiming a greater portion of the business, but the transition has been slow. Sales of full-length songs on cellphones still claim a small portion of the… Read more »

There comes a time in the career of nearly every band when they officially stop listening to what critics have to say about them. For Interpol, you’d think that time is now.See, recently, Britain’s fabulously, er, bandwagon-leaping music publication, the New Musical Express, wrote a fawning review of a live performance by Editors, a band that could charitably be described as “Interpol-esque.” And while the review itself wasn’t exactly newsworthy, the fact that its author chose to kick it off by calling Interpol “the worst band on the planet, a tuneless, talentless shower of Joy Division copyist f—wits” is. Not… Read more »

Lesson to all potential Fall Out Boy hecklers: If you plan on plying your craft, perhaps it’s better to do so from the relative anonymity of the arena cheap seats rather than during a private party attended by roughly 200 industry peeps and/or friends of FOB. That latter scenario is exactly what went down early Tuesday morning (June 12) at Chicago rock club Schuba’s, which hosted a Spin magazine party following Fall Out Boy’s concert at the nearby Charter One Pavilion. The band was scheduled to perform a brief acoustic set at the soiree, but thanks to one particularly aggressive… Read more »

With freedom comes responsibility. While fans and some critics cheered iTunes’ Friday roll-out of iTunes Plus – which offers songs from the EMI catalog sans digital rights management but at a premium price – you can bet that Apple wouldn’t give up DRM without getting something in return, and that something is information about you. Just days after the new downloads became available on iTunes, tech bloggers began furiously jumping on what seemed like a security system that embeds the customer’s name and Apple I.D./e-mail address in the purchased tracks. While Apple deferred comment on the matter, experts downplayed the… Read more »

Satellite radio bills itself as the Wild West of the airwaves, an uncensored outpost beyond the reach of federal regulators where expletives fly with impunity and the banter can get as raunchy as at a strip club. But the decision this week by XM Satellite Radio to suspend shock jocks Opie and Anthony for 30 days for crude sexual comments about First Lady Laura Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Queen Elizabeth II has listeners wondering whether there’s a new sheriff in town. Some XM listeners were outraged – not at the comments but at XM’s reaction. “I signed… Read more »

Net radio stations got a boost Thursday with the introduction of a new Senate bill that would block an aggressive increase in the copyright royalties webcasters pay to record labels. The new Senate bill–called the Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007–is sponsored by Rep. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Rep. Sam Brownback (R-Kansas). It’s a companion bill to another piece of legislation of the same name introduced in the House last month by Reps. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) and Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.). The new higher rates were adopted in early March by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) at the federal copyright office.… Read more »

For nearly a decade now, Tom Gabel has made a career of pissing people off. He played shows in Laundromats as a one-man acoustic act known as Against Me! before forming a full band (adding electric guitars = selling out!). He leapt from indie No Idea Records to equally indie Fat Wreck Chords (changing labels = selling out!), tinkered with Against Me!’s sound on 2003’s As the Eternal Cowboy (production = selling out!) and finally decided to sign with a major label in late 2005 (major label = selling out!). Whatever the situation, it seems he’s always derived some sort… Read more »

Melanie Brown has made her case for Eddie Murphy’s paternity in the court of public opinion–now she’s taking her tale to the court of law. The Spice Girl formerly known as Scary has moved to the next stage of her baby battle with reluctant would-be father Murphy, announcing plans to sue the actor after he allegedly ignored repeated requests to submit to a DNA test. Brown, who listed Murphy as the father on the birth certificate for her month-old daughter, Angel Iris Murphy Brown, has maintained that the Dreamgirls star was not only the father of her child but that… Read more »