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Reuters
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Jun 18, 09 4:50 PM CDT
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The New Kids on the Block have canceled a planned tour of Australia because of weak ticket sales amid the recession, Reuters reports. “We are, in fact, in the middle of a worldwide recession and we just cannot make it work,” said Donnie Wahlberg. He said the group was “saddened” because Australia is “one of our favorite places to travel.”
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Chicago Tribune
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Jun 17, 09 2:53 PM CDT
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Neil Young leaves other retrospectives in the dust with a look back at his career that spans 10 Blu-ray discs or DVDs, or eight CDs, the Chicago Tribune reports. Neil Young Archives: Volume 1, 1963-1972 contains everything from high school band recordings through Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to his first solo work, a 20-years-in-the-making collection that's "gone on to usurp even Chinese Democracy as the ultimate lost-album punchline," writes Stuart Berman of Pitchfork.
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CNET
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Jun 17, 09 2:11 PM CDT
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Ready or not, Weird Al is back. The king of geeky parody music has released a new single making fun of Craigslist, CNET reports. There’s no reference to, say, prostitution ads—just Yankovic’s goofy riff on the site’s strange brand of commerce. It’s also a musical parody, this time lampooning the style of the Doors, with former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek making a guest appearance.
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Star
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Jun 17, 09 1:40 PM CDT
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Britney Spears is engaged to be married to agent/lover Jason Trawick, Star reports. The two have been in an on-again, off-again relationship for 3 years, but sealed the deal on a recent Bahamas vacation. “He didn’t exactly get down on one knee, but Brit didn’t care,” an insider said. “She said yes, and they opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate.” There are plans for a December wedding after Spears’ tour is finished.
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Jezebel
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Jun 16, 09 2:06 PM CDT
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In a somewhat baffling move, Mary J. Blige has recorded a duet with alleged Rihanna-beater Chris Brown, Jezebel reports. Blige has been outspoken about her suffering at the hands of a former boyfriend and the terrors of growing up around domestic violence. To make matters more uncomfortable, it appears that the Blige/Brown song, leaked on the Internet, was originally intended for Brown and Rihanna.
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People
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Jun 15, 09 12:30 PM CDT
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Oksana Grigorieva is more than just Mel Gibson’s Russian lover. She’s a musician whose first single is “naked, intimate, raw emotion, little more than piano and voice as if it is a cry from the soul,” she tells People . She collaborated with her babydaddy himself on “Say My Name” from her forthcoming album Beautiful Heartbreak . Listen or download at the links below.
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Chicago Tribune
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Jun 15, 09 12:21 PM CDT
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Liz Toussaint is a rising country music star, but her journey was a bit unorthodox: The black singer grew up in Chicago with a hip-hop DJ for a brother and an R&B pianist for an uncle. “You're supposed to be a hip-hop queen,” her brother once told Liz, who sang alongside a young Jennifer Hudson. Now, Toussaint is releasing her first—country—album, the Chicago Tribune reports.
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Wall Street Journal
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Jun 13, 09 7:35 PM CDT
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Musical acts from youngster Taylor Swift to veteran Dave Matthews are hitting the road this summer, and some artists took time to fill the Wall Street Journal in on their on- and off-stage plans. A sampling: Swift: Her first headlining tour includes a gig at Madison Square Garden, but her favorite part is often circling the buses and making s’mores around a portable fire pit, she says. “Then we bust out the Michael Jackson.”
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Billboard
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Jun 13, 09 1:31 PM CDT
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Phish, the Beastie Boys, Animal Collective, and Public Enemy highlighted a gorgeous day for Bonnaroo yesterday, write Troy Carpenter and Jeff Vrable in Billboard, after a sadly sodden opening on Thursday. In the first of their two days as festival headliners, Phish announced their comeback after a 5-year hiatus with a set full of crowd-pleasers, ending the night with a playful rendition of the Beatles’ “Day in the Life.”
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Access Hollywood
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Jun 13, 09 11:38 AM CDT
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The next season of Hannah Montana will be the last, Access Hollywood reports. “I give a lot of credit to Miley for taking it to another year,” Billy Ray Cyrus said of his 16-year-old daughter. “She didn’t want it to just end with whatever was the last episode we did. She wanted it to build to where there’s a moral to the story.” Season 4 will start shooting in January. Of course, Cyrus noted, nothing is set in stone. “Anything is possible in Hollywood.”
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Access Hollywood
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Jun 12, 09 1:28 PM CDT
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Adam Lambert finds it “funny” that people are talking about him “coming out” in the new Rolling Stone . “I’ve never been in,” he tells Access Hollywood. Lambert says he didn’t discuss his sexuality during American Idol because he wanted people to focus on his talent. “I chose to kind of ignore the issue until after the voting ended,” says the second-place finisher, but he thought it wasn’t much of a secret: “I sang Cher during Hollywood week.”
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Daily Telegraph (UK)
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Jun 12, 09 12:47 PM CDT
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Holly Williams is a descendant of country legends—Hank Williams was her grandfather, Hank Williams Jr. her father—but she’s no “cowboy hat-wearing country girl,” she tells the Telegraph . The singer and boutique owner, who admires artists from Dolly Parton to Radiohead, releases her second album Tuesday, and she says she hopes Nashville is ready to see that “you can do things outside the box and still be successful.”
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Billboard
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Jun 12, 09 11:21 AM CDT
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Musicians want to connect with fans, and radio needs to survive in the Web 2.0 era: Enter artist personal experience (a.p.e.) radio. Clear Channel launches the 24/7 online channels, featuring artists’ personal radio shows, next month. “We feel that the old model of trying to get radio airplay and some video play is broken,” the CEO of Front Line Management, a partner in the venture, told Billboard .
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TMZ
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Jun 11, 09 3:50 PM CDT
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Chastity Bono—the 40-year-old activist-artist child of Sonny and Cher—is in the early stages of changing his gender from female to male. “It is Chaz’s hope that his choice to transition will open the hearts and minds of the public regarding this issue, just as his ‘coming out’ did nearly 20 years ago,” his publicist tells TMZ.
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Rolling Stone
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Jun 11, 09 3:40 PM CDT
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Twitter’s negative users appear to have scared away a celebrity tweeter, Rolling Stone reports. Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor delighted some fans by using his 140 characters to announce collaborations, diss Chris Cornell, and raise money for charity. But the social network is “now doing more harm than good,” Reznor writes on the group’s site. “The experiment seems to have yielded a result. Idiots rule.”
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USA Today
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Jun 11, 09 11:53 AM CDT
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Rock’s newest wave-makers aren’t so new, reports USA Today . Chickenfoot is a supergroup, but “not a pre-fab one. This all really grew out of friendships,” says bassist Michael Anthony. Anthony, along with fellow Van Halen alum Sammy Hagar, has been jamming with guitarist Joe Satriani and Red Hot Chili Pepper Chad Smith for years, but they recently decided to make a real go of it.
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Daily Telegraph (UK)
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Jun 11, 09 6:03 AM CDT
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A New Jersey promoter has filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent Michael Jackson from starting his 50-concert London marathon next month, the Telegraph reports. The singer contracted to play a reunion concert in the US this summer with other members of the Jackson family before performing anywhere else, the suit charges. The promoter is demanding Jackson pay $40 million for breach of contract.
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Billboard
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Jun 11, 09 1:22 AM CDT
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The Dave Matthews Band's Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King has become its fifth straight album to shoot straight to the top of the Billboard 200 chart. The first-week sales of 424,000 albums have knocked Eminem's Relapse into second place in its third week. The new Matthews' album is the third most successful of any this year so far, behind Relapse and U2's No Line On the Horizon.
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Chicago Sun-Times
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Jun 10, 09 3:56 PM CDT
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Chris Brown has beefed up his security detail after receiving death threats over his alleged beating of ex Rihanna, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Insiders say Brown is surrounded at all times by three beefy bodyguards and three or four “incognito” protectors who are often women “easily as tough as any man.” Authorities think the “group” threatening the singer might actually be a single person.
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TechCrunch
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Jun 9, 09 5:48 PM CDT
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A website hopes to meet the "tiny challenge" of cataloging every concert ever given, writes MG Siegler on TechCrunch. Songkick, a site developed in 2007 to provide recommendations for live music based on where you live and what you like, also wants to add a mix of social networking to its database. An “I Was There” button in the site’s catalog allows concertgoers to chime in about a particular show.
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