Search Results for: sting

By all accounts, Gachapin didn’t need this. After all, he’s already got millions of adoring fans and superpowered “energy balls” on his wrists. But when the Killers came calling, offering him a starring role in the video for their new single, “Read My Mind,” there was no way he could say no. After all, who else could serve as the band’s unofficial Tokyo tour guide? By now, you’ve probably seen the “Mind” clip, in which the Killers engage in various Tokyo-related shenanigans – directing traffic near Shinjuku Station, playing “DrumMania” in one of the city’s mega-arcades, getting down with an… Read more »

Ten years ago, as the Internet began to mushroom in popularity and emerging technologies enabled consumers to make nearly perfect copies of digital content, the recording industry embarked on a two-pronged strategy in response to the changing business environment. First, it emphasized copy-control technologies, often referred to as digital rights management (DRM), that many in the industry believed would allow it re-assert control over music copying. Second, it lobbied the Canadian government for a private copying levy to compensate for the music copying that it could not control. While the industry’s approach proved successful on the legal front — the… Read more »

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 16, a SWAT team from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, backed up by officers from the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office and the local police department, along with a few drug-sniffing dogs, burst into a unmarked recording studio on a short, quiet street in an industrial neighborhood near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The officers entered with their guns drawn; the local police chief said later that they were “prepared for the worst.” They had come to serve a warrant for the arrest of the studio’s owners on the grounds that they had violated the… Read more »

“We have been wrestling with the issues around interoperability for some years and have concluded that it is not so much a technology problem as a business problem,” wrote the consortium to Jobs. No kidding? And all along the world at large thought downloading DRM-free MP3 files presented huge technical issues. Seriously though, late last year Apple itself gave a few of us media folk a glimpse of why record companies fear the computer turned consumer electronics company. At the Apple Australia Christmas party in Sydney, a young band treated us all to a couple of songs. They were pretty… Read more »

WEST HOLLYWOOD, California – When he was once asked, “Can you ever conceive of a circumstance in which the Police would do a reunion tour?,” Sting replied, “I think that’d be a good cause to have me certified insane.” So … “Yes, I am certifiably insane,” Sting joked Monday (February 12) at the Whiskey a Go Go after the above sound bite was played to begin a packed press conference announcing a Police reunion tour. “If anyone comes at me with white coats, just let them through.” More than 20 years after the Police last toured – behind 1983’s massively… Read more »

With Sting’s simple “Ladies and gentlemen, we are the Police,” one of the most iconic bands of the last 30 years ended a long absence from live performing to launch the 49th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night. Blasting off with the unmistakable, reggae-fied “Roxanne” riff from guitarist Andy Summers and the hard jazz drumming of Stewart Copeland, the Police lived up to their top billing on the show, providing a spirited kickoff to one of the most anticipated reunions in a year full of get-backs. With a buff-if-balding Sting in fine form and voice, the trio’s homage to a… Read more »

A Vietnamese court reduced former British rocker Gary Glitter’s child molestation sentence today (Feb. 7), cutting his three-year term by three months as part of a nationwide Lunar New Year prison amnesty, a judge said. Glitter, convicted of molesting two Vietnamese girls, will now be released in August 2008, said Tran Thi Thien Huong, a judge on the deciding panel. Vietnam traditionally reduces the sentences of inmates with good prison records just before Tet, as the Lunar New Year is known in Vietnam. The 62-year-old Glitter, whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd, was convicted in March 2006 of committing… Read more »

In a rare open letter from CEO Steve Jobs on Tuesday, Apple urged record companies to abandon digital rights management technologies. The letter, posted on Apple’s Web site and titled “Thoughts on Music,” is a long examination of Apple’s iTunes and what the future may hold for the online distribution of copy-protected music. In the letter, Jobs says Apple was forced to create a DRM system to get the world’s four largest record companies on board with the iTunes Store. But there are alternatives, Jobs wrote. Apple and the rest of the online music distributors could continue down a DRM… Read more »

It’s no secret – particularly to various employees at Gambleversity.com, MyBookie.org and/or BetOnAnythingThatMoves.net – that we here at MTV News enjoy the occasional foray into the exhilarating world of wagering. Of course, the key word here is occasional. But with Sunday’s Grammy Awards on the horizon, we convened the MTV News Bet-ological Braintrust – which is really nothing more than a couple of writers and “Hammerin’ ” Hank Goldberg on speakerphone – and determined just which of the Grammy’s 108 categories are most ripe for some sweet speculation. While there are plenty of intriguing possibilities – the battle between Eddie… Read more »

Phew! CBS got through the halftime show without a “wardrobe malfunction.” The Artist Formerly Known as a Munchkin of Wardrobe Dysfunction began by singing “Let’s Go Crazy,” but he didn’t. Prince, who became a Jehovah’s Witness in the mid-1990s, no longer wears yellow, butt-baring pants as he did at the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards (prompting Howard Stern’s send-up at the ’92 VMAs). The closest thing to a fashion statement Sunday night was an odd kerchief on his head. So the NFL had no repeat of the 2004 Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake show, which happened the last time CBS broadcast the… Read more »