Search Results for: system of a down

The hobbled Michael Jackson and sweetly nostalgic Paul Simon made their second entrances into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Monday, joined by fellow inductees Aerosmith, Queen and Steely Dan. Fifties vocal group The Flamingos, soul singer Solomon Burke and “La Bamba” singer Ritchie Valens completed the list of honorees at a New York ceremony Monday night. Jackson, already in the Hall of Fame with his brothers as a member of the Jackson 5, was earmarked for a solo career that includes “Thriller,” which Sony estimates has sold more than 47 million copies worldwide. He wore a white… Read more »

With Napster a shell of its former self and services like MP3.com paying hefty tribute, record labels are poised to conquer cyberspace with their own streaming and downloading services. Ironically, only one thing stands in the way: copyright. Record companies aren’t the only ones that hold copyright on music recordings. Music publishers, who represent lyricists and composers, do too – owning the rights to the piece of music itself. For every copy a record company distributes, the publisher gets a small cut. That’s how the people who write the songs get paid. Suddenly, the industry finds itself on the other… Read more »

Napster has asked a U.S. District Court for a “prompt resolution” to its dispute with the major record labels and the Recording Industry Association of America over who is ultimately responsible for identifying copyrighted files for removal from the file-sharing service. Napster said it has done everything in its power to comply with the court’s injunction to remove copyrighted material, according to the compliance report it delivered to the court and the RIAA on Tuesday. The report accused the record labels and the RIAA of not holding up their end of the bargain. Napster claims to have loaded approximately 6… Read more »

Napster, the wildly popular online song-swap service, Tuesday offered to pay $1 billion over five years to the recording industry to end a bitter lawsuit that threatens its survival. Napster officials, outlining a strategy they hope will keep their company alive in the face of a threatened legal injunction, said they were willing to pay $150 million per year in licensing fees to major record companies and $50 million per year in fees to independent labels and artists. “We updated on short notice everyone in the music industry,” Andreas Schmidt, president and chief executive of the e-commerce group at German… Read more »

Napster disclosed key details of its future as a copyright-friendly subscription service Friday (February 16) – four days after a court ruling that may shut down the music-sharing service as we know it. In the new Napster, which the company says will be launched “as soon as possible,” users will still be able to swap MP3 files ripped from their own CDs. But Napster will add a new “protection layer” to MP3s as they move from one user’s computer to another, allowing the service to control what users do with the files they download, according to a statement from the… Read more »

On Monday (February 12), the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the wildly popular song-swap service Napster to stop its millions of users from trading copyrighted material. Calling the decision a major victory, recording industry officials and legal experts said the ruling by a three-judge panel could destroy Napster as a free song-swapping service. Napster, a company formed around a computer program developed by a teenage college dropout, was gloomy. “Napster is not shut down, but under this decision it could be. We are very disappointed in this ruling by the three judge panel and will seek appellate review,”… Read more »