Search Results for: soft play

Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl flash lasted less than three seconds, but the impact continues to ripple through Viacom, the media giant that broadcast the game. Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, right-wing radio commentators and outraged citizens are calling for stricter decency standards – and the artists and executives who make a living from edgy music, performances and videos are in retreat. MTV in particular, which produced the Super Bowl halftime show, is in the midst of a wide-scale re-evaluation of its musical, news and dramatic content. Within a week of the game, MTV – no stranger to criticism, most recently… Read more »

Access to the new, improved and perfectly legitimate version of the Napster file-sharing software was given to students at Penn State University this semester as a way to show them that downloading music doesn’t have to run afoul of copyright laws. More than 17,000 students living in on-campus residence halls were offered access Napster 2.0’s premium service, which allows for unlimited streaming and tethered downloading (playback on only one machine) of the more than 500,000 songs comprising the Napster library. Should they want to burn a downloaded song, it would cost them about 99 cents, the industry standard for a… Read more »

Beyonce Knowles may be “Crazy in Love,” but she kept her cool Sunday at one of the more sober Grammy Awards shows in memory. She was the night’s big winner, taking home a record-tying five trophies to join recent Grammy queens Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys and Norah Jones with the most wins in a single year by a female performer. OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below won Album of the Year, giving the eccentric Atlanta funk/rap group three wins, including Best Urban Alternative Performance and Best Rap Album. British band Coldplay took home the prize for Record of the Year for “Clocks,”… Read more »

On Jan. 6, San Francisco’s Moscone convention center pulses with all the energy of a rock concert. A crowd sprinkled with hip-hop teenagers, digerati, and aging hippies streams in to hear the annual state-of-the-Mac keynote from Apple Computer Inc. Chief Executive Steven P. Jobs. Every facet of the event bears the fingerprints of the obsessive Jobs – right down to the music that fills the air. This year, it’s the King himself, Elvis Presley. Later, Jobs rolls the tape of Apple’s famous “1984” ad that ran on Super Bowl Sunday that year – and hasn’t been broadcast since. Only this… Read more »

Call it progressive, nu-metal, punk, hard-core but when it comes down to the basics no matter what sub-genres people create it ´s still rock ´n ´ roll. On Friday night, the several thousand fans packing the Patriot Center at George Mason University got to experience rock music in all its many forms. Hailed as the first big rock tour of 2004, the Meteora: World Tour lived up to its billing, presenting a four-hour nonstop barrage of power chords, screaming vocalists and head-nodding beats. Kicking off the evening was up-and-coming act Story of the Year. With its major label debut “Page… Read more »

A dispute over royalty rights on copy-protected CDs and other types of music discs is helping to stall the release of some new music technology, and could result in record labels owing tens of millions of dollars in back payments to music publishers. At issue are “double session” CDs that include two versions of each song on a disc, formatted for playback on different kinds of devices. The most widely distributed type are copy-protected discs that prevent CD tracks from being copied to a hard drive, but that also include a digital version of the songs, often in Microsoft’s Windows… Read more »

It had seemed as though the record labels had seen off the internet revolution with their heads still attached to their shoulders, but it now appears clear that their one concession to the uprising – agreeing licensing deals with Apple – has landed them in an all-new power struggle. While the big five labels (BMG, EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner) have done a sterling job of wresting back control of the price and distribution of their music from the peer-to-peer networks and the average punter; they lost their focus on the final part of the chain, consumption, and in typical… Read more »

Apple announced today that over two million iPods have been sold since its introduction, solidifying its position as the number one digital music player in the world. Apple also announced the immediate availability of a new 15GB model offering customers 50 percent more storage for just $299 (US). All iPods work seamlessly with the award-winning iTunes(R) digital music jukebox software and the pioneering iTunes Music Store, which has sold over 30 million songs, providing music fans with the best digital music experience on either a Mac(R) or Windows computer. “With over two million sold, iPod is unquestionably the leading digital… Read more »

The future of the music industry is being held, quite literally, in the palm of a twentysomething’s hand. Not the “business” side of the music industry – you know, the folks you’ve perhaps heard weeping into their bowls of caviar over the 31 percent decrease in album sales over the course of the past year, a downturn the suits pin on the advent of digital music downloading and CD burning. No, the “art” side of music business is being forceably changed. Artists are either coming to terms with changes in the ways their music is distributed – or doggedly railing… Read more »

The Justice Department on Tuesday ended its two-year-old antitrust investigation into the music industry’s online ventures, finding ample competition exists in today’s world of digital music. “Consumers now have available to them an increasing variety of authorized outlets from which they can purchase digital music and consumers are using those services in growing numbers,” said R. Hewitt Pate, assistant attorney general for the antitrust division. The investigation, begun in 2001, involved joint ventures put together by major record labels, pressplay and MusicNet, to distribute music over the Internet. Before that, the labels had authorized no Internet businesses to provide consumers… Read more »