Not well: Ronnie James Dio. He's got stomach cancer, but isn't taking it lying down. His wife has stuck out a statement:
"Ronnie has been diagnosed with the early stages of stomach cancer. We are starting treatment immediately at the Mayo Clinic. After he kills this dragon, Ronnie will be back on stage, where he belongs, doing what he loves best, performing for his fans.
"Long live rock and roll, long live Ronnie James Dio.
"Thanks to all the friends and fans from all over the world that have sent well wishes. This has really helped to keep his spirit up."
A doomed dragon called stomach cancer. Even his life-threatening illnesses have fireworks in the background.
Apple has announced that iTunes is going to start selling live albums. In order to make this happen, Apple is cosying up to LiveNation, and the prices come in slightly evil tones, too. $13 for a live concert video? You could almost afford to go to see a gig for that.
It's not a good time to be involved in community radio - the longest-running community station in the UK, Forest of Dean Radio, is closing down at the end of next month because of financial problems, and now comes news that 209Radio in Cmabridge could be vanishing if it doesn't find some money soon:
The station has only recently announced big plans to offer more to the citizens of Cambridge in 2010, which include renaming the station to reposition itself more strongly within the Cambridge community, but it can now only survive if someone comes forward able to offer it a lifeline. Chairman of 209radio Clive Woodman is calling for people to support the station today or lose it for good.
"We have reached a point now whereby we need stable regular financial support to help with our core costs and continue to provide this incredible and unique service to the residents and community groups of Cambridge. We are calling for anyone who can help financially to come forward now!"
James P - who alerted us to 209's plight - explains what Cambridge would be losing:
The station provides great opportunities for local people. There are programmes made for and by the many sections of the community who aren't served elsewhere - The homeless, refugees, the elderly, those with mental health problems and many more. They've also got some brilliant music shows covering numerous genres (the indie show, Stagger, is fantastic). The station broadcasts on FM to Cambridge, and also online. All shows are podcasted too, so there are loads of opportunities for anyone who could benefit from the programmes to hear them.
Certainly give them a listen - but if you're able to help them in a more practical, cash-related way, they'd appreciate it. Membership, perhaps?
Chris Hawkins is sitting in for Cerys now - which is kind of ironic, given that Cerys was officially covering Nemone's maternity leave. You suspect that Nemone might not be expected back.
Yes, yes, it's right and proper that The Pet Shop Boys are feted as national treasures, with their po-faces on the stamps and a holiday in their honour every September 19th. But why don't we also hold parades celebrating Erasure in the same way?
They're currently out in New York, recording a new album. Perhaps we should do something nice for them when they come back?
If only Adam Lambert had been deliberately courting controversy by feigning oral sex on prime-time mainstream telly, eh? But who knew that might upset people.
If Adam had been interested in exploring exactly how liberal ABC is, he's now found out: Kicked off Good Morning America and - oh, the shame - having to relying on a counter offer to go on CBS''Look, It's This Or More Advertorials For Snuggies' programme.
On the television a lot recently; doing something in the media for which they were cruelly underprepared; part of a big brand which does little more than pump a bland nothingness out. No wonder Jedward felt so sorry for Gordon Smart they went round to cheer him up.
They're "editing" Bizarre this morning, and slipping in some revelations:
John said: "We haven't really had jobs. We do some chores for family but we don't take any money."
They've never had jobs. Whoeverwouldhaveguessed, eh?
Edward made the Hand of Jed blunder, telling me: "Thierry Henry is great at soccer.
"He is deadly. A great player. We didn't see the game because we were in rehearsals but we know he helped score a goal that people say was cheating.
"He's still a great player. He's such a cool guy."
That's hardly - as Gordon called it - "backing THIERRY HENRY"; in fact, Edward seems to be saying that as he didn't see the incident he can't really offer a comment on that.
How did Edward not see it, though? They kept showing the handball on the news all t... oh, right.
There was no political agenda behind the choice. "We are far from favouring Left or Right," said [Italian edition editor Carlo] Antonelli. "Silvio Berlusconi's daily behaviour, his furious vitality, his inimitable lifestyle have given him, especially this year, incredible international popularity."
Remember Victoria Hart? She was the subject of an unlikely PR blitz a couple of years back - the waitress who played for George Clooney and somehow landed a multimillion deal, all at the same time.
The reappearance of her in Bizarre this morning still bills her as the Waitress who sang for Hollywood, which - you'll be ahead of us here - suggests her story's ending is not entirely a happy one.
Four awards, in fact. Quite an achievement considering the man hadn't actually done very much - besides dying, of course - in the qualifying period. There was something of a stretch on display:
He was named favourite male artist in the pop/rock and soul/R&B categories. His 2003 greatest-hits album, Number Ones, also won favourite album in both categories.
Okay, you can just about get away with calling his final curtain a justification for people going "you know, the way he keeled over was superstar, man, pure superstar."
But to scrabble around to give a prize to a six year-old album which, itself, was just a coagulation of earlier work is just ridiculous. If the album was that good, why didn't it win when it came out? Or any year subsequently, come to that? I'm a sucker for cheap sentimentality, but death hasn't added anything to the record that wasn't already there. And if the music industry is in the doldrums, maybe it might want to think about not writing off an entire year's worth of releases on the basis that there was a shoddy compilation made years ago that was better.
It is, however, set alongside a piece by Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League and a member of the "Creative Coalition" which trots out the sort of muddle-headed screeches we've been hearing from record manufacturers for ten years:
There are threats as well as opportunities, not least the challenges presented by online copyright infringement, more commonly known as piracy. I prefer to call it by its real name – digital theft.
Digital theft? Or is it merely the market forcing prices down to near zero?
Scudamore trills away, apparently not noticing that his entire argument is 'never mind that the marketplace has totally changed, let's just do it the way we always have':
The reality is that unauthorised peer-to-peer filesharing, among other forms of illegal streaming, presents a very real threat. These burgeoning industries are based on a high-investment model, driving consumer demand – or in the Premier League's case, fan demand – by providing what the public want: a quality product.
The old model was based on high investment models. There's no reason why the new model has to be - the beauty of the internet is that you can find small audiences and create new ways to make them work.
Or you can just cling to the old ways of doing things, and end up with a pudgy, boring, declining business like the Premier League, where the money has got so out of line it's ceased to be a competition and become a dull carousel of the same handful of teams.
If we're looking to the Premier League for tips on how to make our nation creative, we might wonder how much home-grown talent their brilliant system has managed to generate. At least the music industry has managed a couple of worldwide successes since 1966.
The poor editors at ABC have a bit of a problem. They're showing this year's normally dull American Music Awards, and when it went out on the East Coast, Adam Lambert reminded everyone he was gay:
When Lambert finished his song — complete with simulated oral sex with a male backup dancer and a passionate kiss with a male keyboardist — earlier tonight, fans hit the Internet to debate whether the American Idol runner-up’s first major televised performance since the Idol finale pushed the envelope too far.
Lambert points out that if he was Christina Aguilera, the stampede to the internet would be merely looking for downloads:
“It’s a shame because I think that there’s a double standard going on in the entertainment community right now,” Lambert tells RS backstage after the show at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre. “Female performers have been doing this for years — pushing the envelope about sexuality — and the minute a man does it, everybody freaks out.
A little disingenuous, Adam - it's not because of what you did, it's who you did it to - but the broad point is still valid.
So ABC have to decide if they leave the faux-blow in for the West Coast broadcast. Lambert warns them they better leave him uncut:
If ABC opts not to broadcast several of the more risqué moments of “For Your Entertainment” in a few moments, “In a roundabout way it’s a form of discrimination because it is a double standard,” Lambert says. “They didn’t censor Britney and Madonna macking onstage did they? But yet two men kissing they’ll censor?”
It might be more the oral sex bit that worries ABC - who, to be fair to them, aren't MTV and are also balancing the demands of the FCC and the threat of enormous fines alongside the cultural and societal questions.
In the end, ABC left in the kiss, cut the pretend oral sex bit - I'm sure you can download Adam Lambert blowjob video footage online if that slightly-understandable fudgey compromise disappoints you.
MICHAEL EAVIS promised something special for Glastonbury's 40th birthday next year - and boy has he delivered.
U2 will headline on Friday night - the first time the Irish rockers have ever played the festival.
Well, at least it's good news for whoever's headlining the second stage at the time.
There's an unsourced source:
A source said: "Everyone is over the moon that the deal has been done.
"Michael really wanted a huge name for the 40th anniversary and the fact U2 have never played Glastonbury in their 32-year career only adds to the mystique."
"Only adds to the mystique"? What does that actually mean? What "mystique"?
Earlier this year Bono said of Glasto: "I know lots of people want us to play.
"It's something we're working up our whole life to do. We really, really want to do this."
What an utter politician Bono is. You've been working your whole life up to playing Glastonbury, have you? Your entire career trajectory has been designed to achieve a slot on the Worthy Farm stage? So what exactly has been stopping you hitherto? Did you have to harvest Golden apples and change the flow of a river before you could play? Or is it just you couldn't be arsed to do it for the money before?
Increasingly, Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace looks like a kneejerk move that confused the panic with the strategic.
Clearly, he's managed to bring this management style to MySpace, whose purchase of MySpace looks exactly the same.
As takeovers go, it has all the thought and care of that box of Milk Trayy Way grabbed from a Wild Bean Cafe shelf moments before midnight on Valentine's Day.
Admittedly, MySpace are getting something dirt cheap - the most generous estimates are putting the price tag at nine million; shrewder heads suggest it might have been scooped up for a million dollars. The company has spent more than twenty million to get to this point.
On the other hand, MySpace is already seeing its bottom line assailed by the costs of offering streaming music - does it really need to pick up more of those costs? Especially since Imeem was undermined by high royalty demands from labels - exactly the same problem MySpace is struggling with.
Yes, apparently, Wells Fargo thought there might be people getting confused by a swing band playing in East Anglia and a US bank.
There's the usual old cant from Wells Fargo about "protecting the brand" - although it's perhaps a bit insulting to the customers of the bank to suggest that they're so dense that, if by some chance they found themselves outside a pub on the Colchester bypass on a Saturday night promising "Wells Fargo tonight", they'd be rushing inside to sort out their direct debits.
Wells Fargo are now simply Fargo. Let's hope the ID card company of the same name doesn't find out.
Record labels will feel vindicated by Business Insider's chart showing whose videos are the biggest earners on YouTube. Universal, Sony, Hollywood Records, EMI... Yes, surely, this is proof that without music, YouTube would be making nothing.
On the other hand: even aggregated, the top ten earning video sources struggle to account for more than about 10% of the monetised views. Lots of source, making little bits and pieces, adding up to the whole - sure, Google would miss Universal if they weren't there. But not much.
Universal music are currently doing a spot of market research, aimed primarily at seeing what Spotify is doing to the music market. It's being run by an outfit called Angus Reid Strategies through a service called Springboard UK, and the idea behind it makes sense.
Disruptive technologies being disruptive, why wouldn't you want to try and work out what they're going to do to you?
One problem, though: when the survey gets onto torrents, it starts to sound less like a disinterested investigation, and more like it's - and let's be generous here - trying to educate. Hence the torrent systems themselves as described, more than once, as "non-legal" services.
Apart from being wrong - and deliberately confusing the networks with the data on the networks - if you make the question sound so hostile, isn't it going to skew the responses you get? "Did you touch that naughty thing?" is much less likely to get an honest answer than "do you use that thing?", right?
Dean Piper, writing in today's Sunday Mirror, seems to grasp that Amy Winehouse's newfound embrace of the scalpel is an extension of her previous love of the pipe:
Once an addict, always an addict. And now it seems Amy Winehouse is battling a new addiction – plastic surgery.
So, does Piper approach the story delicately, or like a set of new punchlines in waiting?
I can reveal that just weeks after she pumped up her boobies from a 32B to a 32D she’s booking herself to go back under the knife – this time to sort out her beak.
Ha ha ha; she's addicted.
Is it a good idea for a singer with a distinctive voice to have her nose hacked about?
There's a snarky piece in the News of the World this week. The paper has caught up with Marilyn, seemingly just to point and laugh:
HE urged us to Feed The World - but 25 years after Band Aid, Eighties star Marilyn seems only to have fed his FACE.
For the slim, 10st gender bender who recorded Do They Know It's Christmas with Bob Geldof and a host of other pop idols has ballooned to over 17 STONE.
Gone are the blond locks and girly make-up along with the millionaire lifestyle. Bloated Marilyn, 46, is now just a shambling, jobless self-confessed drug addict who lives with his MUM in an ex-council semi.
I'm a little confused about why the detail of "ex-council semi" is thrown in there - doesn't the Murdoch press love the idea of people buying their council houses? Wasn't that aspirational?
Still, I'm sure James Murdoch will be delighted to read one of the papers he runs laughing at someone for having to rely on their parent's generosity.
Marilyn talks to the paper, but doesn't have much to offer. He's been on the drucks, but we all knew that when his career was crashing down in fame. Most of the people on Band Aid were a bit cynical - but that's hardly a surprise. Status Quo took drugs to the recording - but even Status Quo trot that anecdote out.
It's all a bit of a shame. But, on the plus side, it might be the first time anyone has written an article about Marilyn without suggesting he was little more than a Boy George side-project.
There is another plus - to pad the piece out, there's a 'where are they now, the other people who were on the Band Aid' piece which might be the only time the national press has worried about 'what is Mark Unpronounceablename from Big Country up to these days'?
It's a shame about how wrong it went for Marilyn, whose career never quite worked out. Mainly, because while Boy George was happy to keep his act edging close to the pantomimic, Marilyn never attempted to recast his sexuality as theatrics. The world wasn't really ready.
Where you from? The ten most popular nations visiting No Rock this year:
1. United Kingdom 2. United States 3. Canada 4. Germany 5. Australia 6. Ireland 7. France 8. South Korea 9. Brazil 10. Netherlands
And a special hello to Timor-Leste, Republic of Congo, San Marino, Palau, Guinea, Somalia, American Samoa, Greenland, Niger, Christmas Island, Seychelles, Tajikistan, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Sierra Leone and the Solomon Islands - one resident of whom visited just the once.
Daniel Sullivan, the guy who pushed Noel Gallagher over on stage in Toronto, has pleaded guilty to assault.
His defence told the court he couldn't remember anything about the incident, except clambering over the fence. Sullivan was drunk at the time, which might explain why he never quite made it the double by pushing Liam over as well.
He'll be back in court in February for sentencing.
Taking advantage of the lack of any real competition, HMV is experimenting with ten temporary stores around the UK this Christmas. Who can explain what's going on in HMV's minds better than temproary store czar Gennaro Castaldo? Pin him down, Sky News.
HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo has admitted more temporary shops may be on the cards next year.
That's put the matter into context. Thank you.
There's a sense that this is an admission from HMV that their main (or, at least, most lucrative) market is people buying stuff to give to other people for Christmas. There must be more than a few people wondering if perhaps there's little point in keeping stores running twelve months a year when you can make a killing by taking over a cheap, abandoned shop for just two.
Still, I don't see what everyone's worried about - it's not like Glastonbury got noticeably more corporate and lost touch with itself after FR got involved there, right?
[Co-founder Katrina] Larkin said Festival Republic would provide much-needed financial security and logistical knowhow, leaving her to focus on the creative side of the festival. "I needed to protect the Big Chill, I needed to take it into a family that would look after it. There is an umbilical cord between me and that festival. I have given up too much to see it fail."
Hmm. Wasn't this pretty much the deal when Melvin Benn got involved down at Worthy Farm, too?
One of the big creditors of the Big Chill parent company was PRS - you do wonder if they were really acting in their members' best interests by not trying to work out a deal. Is it really better for musicians that Reading, Leeds, Latitude, Big Chill and Glastonbury are all in the same hands?
We all know where Lily Allen stands on filesharing, don't we? Slightly to the right of Lord Mandelson.
So if she believes that throwing households off the internet on suspicion of sharing music for free is appropriate, what terrible fate would she have in store for someone who took her music, copied it, and then sold it? Got to be boiling oil at the very least, right?
Erm, no. Apparently Lily's happy with the idea of unlicensed music sharing, providing someone's making money from it:
"If someone comes up with a burnt copy of my CD and offers it to you for £4 I haven't a problem with that as long as the person buying it places some kind of value on my music," she told Key 103.
So: stealing is bad, stealing is okay providing you sell on the things you've stolen.
Spotify are hoping to use the music you listen to in order to target adverts.
It could sort-of work: If you like Robin Beck, you might want to buy Diet Coke.
But it's not really this simple, is it?
The Spotify founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, explained the thinking behind personalised advertising.
He said: "There's a simple principle – we are trying to make a better advertising solution. We are showing that, around the data, there are things that matter. For instance, combining demography with music taste, we can group you with other users. We can then predict whether you like Audi better than BMW and then serve you advertising from either of them.
"There are certain brands that want to be associated with things that are cheerful and others with classical music and there's a lot of things we can do in this area."
Well, yes: if an advertiser wants to advertise to people who listen to classical music, that would be easy. It's not quite the same as working out whether it's better to serve a Central Office Of Information warning about Swine Flu to an 80s Matchbox B-Line Disaster listener or a Katy Perry fan?
The store, TunesPro, says it can do this price because it's absorbing a loss of 39 cents a download. It says it's happy to do that because it's cheaper than advertising. It also tells Hypebot that it is offering legal downloads.
In the comments section of Hypebot, anonymous sources are being cited suggesting that the last claim is as untrue as the first two are unlikely, but nobody seems quite sure.
Even if the organisation is legal, the business plan is very high-risk - spending forty cents to get every sale is the sort of thing that even the losing team on The Apprentice would avoid doing. You might attract price-sensitive consumers - at a huge cost - but (since they're price-sensitive) as soon as you return the prices to a level where you can make a profit, they'll be off again.
You can see the logic behind having Sony stores on the High Street - if you value the quality of their electronics, you might go to shop the brand.
Less clear is the value of a Sony store online selling digital music, movies and ebooks. I've said before that only the major labels believe that their brand offers any attraction to the consumer, and there are few customers who think "I wonder what songs EMI or Universal have on offer this week".
Locked-in items - Playstation games, for example - you might just get away with. But wasting time, money and effort building a music store which will only offer a limited range? What would the point be?
They're planning on calling it Sony Online Service. The initials say it all.
As if being dead wasn't bad enough, imagine if you found your underlife consisted of looking at Sting's pyjamas:
"I would never have said I believe in ghosts, until I saw one - and I've seen a ghost with my own eyes. I woke up at three in the morning, bolt upright, looked into the corner of the room and thought I saw Trudie standing there with a child - our child - in her arms, staring at me.
"And I thought, 'Well, that's strange - why is she standing in a corner, staring at me?'. And I then reached next to me and there was Trudie, and I suddenly got this terrible chill. And she woke up and said 'Gosh, who is that?' and she saw this woman and a child in the corner of the room. A lot of things happened in that house, a lot of flying objects and voices and strange, strange things happened.
"When you live in old houses you get this energy there. Intellectually, no I don't believe in them (ghosts), but I've experienced them on an emotional level."
It's believed that Sting had the house exorcised immediately - they won't stand for their staff having children, so it's not like they're going tolerate their ghosts having childcare issues.
