Search Results for: sting

Global domination and making a new album are on the docket for chart-topping pop-rock band Plain  White T’s in 2008.Currently opening for Fall Out Boy, the Chicago quintet plans to head overseas in January to promote the recent international release of its “new” album, 2006’s “Every Second  Counts.” The group will play the U.K., Europe, Australia, New  Zealand and Japan, according to frontman Tom Higgenson.”We’re possibly bigger in the U.K. than we are in America now,” Higgenson told Billboard.com. “It’s still fresh over there. We’re going over to headline 2,000-seaters, which will be great.”But Higgenson and company are even more… Read more »

The new owner of EMI Group PLC has said he will drop artists the music group believes are not working hard enough and will overhaul the company’s own executives’ pay packages, the Financial Times reported Friday. EMI, which has Coldplay, the Rolling Stones and Kylie Minogue on its roster, also threatened to withdraw stars’ lucrative advances if record sales are disappointing, the FT said, quoting an internal memo to staff from the chief executive of the private equity firm that bought the company in August. Guy Hands, the CEO of Terra Firma Capital Partners, said the company would in the… Read more »

According to a report in the venerable entertainment industry trade rag Variety, Zucker, president and CEO of NBC Universal, asked Apple for a cut of iPod revenue as part of the failed negotiations between the two companies over a contract extension for the right to sell NBC’s shows on iTunes. (Thanks, Valleywag.) If that’s true, wow. A source familiar with NBC Universal’s negotiations confirmed that the company asked for a slice of iPod revenue but only after Apple refused to budge on variable pricing. “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made… Read more »

Relationships in the entertainment world can be famously fraught. And few are more so these days than the one between Steve Jobs and Universal Music chief Doug Morris. You may recall that Morris recently refused to re-up a multi-year contract to put his company’s music on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. That’s because Jobs wouldn’t ease his stringent terms, which limit how record companies can market their music. Now, Morris is going on the offensive. The world’s most powerful music executive aims to join forces with other record companies to launch an industry-owned subscription service. BusinessWeek has learned that Morris has… Read more »

The world was treated to “Gimme More” this summer. But Perez Hilton may have given his readers too much, too soon. Zomba Recording LLC, which is owned by Sony BMG, filed a federal copyright-infringement lawsuit Thursday against the online gossip purveyor, saying that over the past three months he illegally posted at least 10 new Britney Spears tracks, both completed cuts and unfinished demos, on perezhilton.com. “The unauthorized dissemination of recordings is a serious violation of copyright law,” said a Zomba spokesperson. “In addition, posting demos and unfinished songs as if they were final versions is grossly unfair to the… Read more »

The British music Web site Gigwise is reporting that Radiohead has sold 1.2 million digital copies of its latest album, “In Rainbows,” since sales began on Tuesday. If true (and that might be a big “if”; see below), the number would be a blow-out, suggesting the wisdom of the band’s decision to sell its wares directly to fans without the aid of a record label. The figure dwarfs first-week sales of Radiohead’s recent studio albums. “Hail to the Thief,” released in 2003, racked up 300,000 sales in its first week; “Amnesiac” managed 231,000 copies in 2001; and “Kid A” hit… Read more »

In one of the final sessions of the Future of Music Policy Summit, panelists discussed how the music industry is going through a process of “disintermediation,” where fewer steps stand between artist and audience, thanks to social networking and Internet distribution. “Someone spoke earlier about a ‘musician’s middle class,’” said Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora.com. “In this world, you don’t need to be a full-time professional musician.” Instead, the speakers noted that it’s possible for amateur musicians or independent bands to reach new and unexpected audiences over the Web. Speaking for promotional service echomusic, Pinky Gonzales pointed to Todd Rundgren… Read more »

Sumner Redstone, the billionaire businessman who grew up in Boston’s former West End and went on to build a career at the forefront of the entertainment industry, delivered a message to a standing-room-only crowd at Boston University yesterday: content is still king, but in the digital age, copyright is what matters. Redstone, 84, the majority owner of National Amusements and the chairman of the boards of Viacom, the CBS Corporation, and the MTVi Group, spoke at the School of Law Auditorium about the challenges of keeping a media company profitable in the digital age and answered questions from Bill Schwartz,… Read more »

Warner Music Group Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman on Tuesday raised the possibility of selling digital music without copy protection, in what appeared to be a softening of his previous outright opposition. Bronfman told an investor conference that while he did not see a world without digital rights management (DRM), there was a possibility of certain business models working without DRM software, which prevents music fans from sharing songs. “DRM is here to stay, whether it’s here to stay on every business model in the music business is open to question,” he said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference. Bronfman has… Read more »

It has finally come to this: labels are simply giving their music away. A new Web site named SpiralFrog.com allows visitors – with label approval – to download music free of charge. It launched Monday in the U.S. and Canada after a beta-testing period. The fine site features more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos, and promises hundreds of thousands more soon. It makes money through advertising, rather than by the 99-cent downloads popularized by Apple’s iTunes. The service, founded by Joe Mohen, pays record companies part of its advertising revenue. Thus far, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, the… Read more »