Stuck On Repeat 2009: February

Designers by appointment to Pop Will Eat Itself, Design Republic, closed down. In South Korea, the prospect of the music industry going down led to a bail out. Epic hoped that putting someone who could write songs in charge might change its fortunes, but chose Amanda Ghost by mistake. Not as bad as the mistake made by Universal in Australia which put the U2 album online too soon.

Could absolutely fucking up a Bonnie Prince Billie album be a way to fight piracy, or just ensure lousy reviews? Could not letting anyone have preview copies of the Little Man Tate album be a way to fight piracy, or just condemn the record to be ignored? Fighting peer-to-peer is a waste of time, announced a former head of the IFPI and Germany said no to three strikes.

Joey Satriani's lawyers threatened to serve papers on Coldplay during the Grammys, but realised it would be inappropriate to create interest during their set. Peter Gabriel chose to not play the Oscars when it turned out they only wanted him to do a minute. Stung that everyone thought he was a greedy tax-avoiding hypocrite, Bono tried to explain why his greedy, tax-avoiding hypocrisy was, in fact, a good thing.

The Estate of Bob Marley announced plans to slap his likeness on... well, any old crap that will pay. Andy Bell, meanwhile, was selling bread to The Cheeky Girls.

The Featured Artists Coalition put their plans on hold because of a bit of snow. The latest attempts to turn their skills to retail on the part of the music industry, TotalMusic, failed... totally.

The 3AM Girls predicted laughs aplenty with Horne and Corden hosting the Brits. They were wrong. The University Of Dublin Philosophical Society invited Pete Doherty to share his views with them. Presumably Will Young was too busy on Question Time. It's possible that Young and Morrissey's post had been muddled up; surely, that can be the only thing that explains Mozzer's turn on The One Show?

The National Audit Office sounded surprised that it's more expensive to make Radio 2 than a local radio programme. After having screwed up the Springsteen ticket sales, Ticketmaster issued a craven apology. But not to the customers. The customers were being prepared to be screwed over by a Ticketmaster/LiveNation merger. QTRax had another launch, followed by the traditional lack of success. Trinity Street went down just before the NME Awards shows and Zavvi finally gave up their struggle.

Nobody had actually asked Limp Bizkit to reform, but popular requests never had anything to do with Fred Durst's band anyway. And the same line with Blink 182 in it. Santo Gold told Santogold to change her name. She did, to Santigold. Sainty Claus consulted his lawyers.

Oh, look. Beth Ditto naked on a magazine cover. Again.

Chris Brown took Eamonn Holmes' suggestion on board.

[Part of the month by month reviews of Stuck On Repeat 2009]