What is it with the suits at Vivendi-owned companies demanding that they get kickbacks from every piece of entertainment-related hardware sold? Jeff Zucker of NBC is now complaining about Apple's refusal to engage in a Zune-like deal where the company would get a cut of each iPod sold, saying that the company "sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content." He's also saying that Apple "kill[ed] the music industry in terms of pricing," because surely nothing the record companies themselves could have engaged in could have helped turn off listeners. [Globe & Mail]
Last night, we checked up on the release date of Amerie's Because I Love It, the R & B singer's third album. Despite a) her attempts to pump up its pre-release cred with a mixtape and b) the fact that it's one of the better R & B albums we've heard this year, its path toward store shelves in the U.S. has been fraught with delays. Sometime over the past few weeks, another one was introduced; the album, which was most recently scheduled for a July US release (it's already out in the UK and Japan), is now coming out in the States on Aug. 21. Sure, it's not Chinese Democracy, but this album's been plagued with delays since we first heard "Take Control," the album's lead single, back in October 2006. After the jump, a timeline of our prolonged wait for Because I Love It's Stateside arrival:
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Perhaps you've heard of the High Strung, a Detroit garage-rock band that's released three well-received albums over the past few years. Well, apparently no one over at Pitchfork is paying much attention to the group, and that prompted frontman Josh Malerman to post a tongue-in-cheekish rant on the High Strung's MySpace page:
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Well, that didn't take long: Yesterday, the Police reunion tour began its inevitable meltdown, with drummer Stewart Copeland posting a 700-word rant in which he accuses Sting of acting like a "petulant pansy" and bemoans the fact that the band is "playing avant-garde twelve-tone hodgepodges."
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