Music Industry

Look out, Jesse Helms. Take heed, Tipper Gore. Heavy guns in the music industry, the visual and performance arts are now going on the offensive to ward off what they perceive as dangerous infringements on their constitutional, First Amendment and free speech rights. The battle cry was raised this week at the New Music Seminar in New York City, which featured 8,000 young turk rock and rap artists, music industry executives, broadcasters and journalists. Retaliatory measures to censorship also were being plotted at a recent gathering of more than 200 top music industry executives and artists in Los Angeles, convened by Virgin Records executive Jeff Ayeroff.

Now here's a fascinating paradox: The record industry lecturing its audience on immorality - the theft of copyrighted music over the Internet. This from an industry that has enriched itself by glorifying infidelity, violence and rebellion, as well as criminal, abusive and other deviant behavior. Meanwhile, you have albums such as 50 Cent's Get Rich, or Die Tryin' (Interscope, a unit of Universal Music Group) and Radiohead's Hail To The Thief (Capitol Records, owned by EMI Group)

The recording industry sued 261 music fans in U.S. federal courts yesterday, accusing each of illegally downloading and sharing at least 1,000 songs over the Internet. The civil lawsuits could eventually number in the thousands, said the Recording Industry Association of America, whose members include major record labels BMG, EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music. This summer, the RIAA issued about 1,600 subpoenas to universities and Internet service providers, demanding that they identify those allegedly sharing copyrighted music.

With the Internet and sites like MySpace revolutionizing the business, young people with music talent are on the edge of unprecedented opportunities to break into the industry, local music executives say. "You guys are spoiled and you don't even know it," said "Grouchy" Greg Watkins, cofounder of allhiphop.com. "The music industry is at ground zero. There's an opportunity to break in like never before. " To make things even easier for young students interested in careers in the music industry, the Jr Music Executive organization started a speakers series in association with the Friends Neighborhood Guild.

Behold the music industry's most coveted consumer: A girl in pigtails and tie-dye, maybe 11 years old, radiating fruity cologne from the Johnson's Kid Wash while, in her ice-cream sticky hands, she clutches a 98 Degrees T-shirt Mom just bought for $22. Like the two friends who have accompanied her to Montage Mountain, she's an enthusiastic cog in the "boy band" machine - she knows the names of all four members of 98 Degrees - and is on the lookout...

The music industry may not know where the demand is going to come from. But there's never going to be any shortage of supply. That much was obvious at the South by Southwest Music Festival, or SXSW, which ended Sunday, where more than 1,500 acts played showcases, and hundreds of others plugged in at barbecue joints and taco stands in this city that becomes the capital of the music business every March. Band managers, booking agents and label honchos played I'll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours with digital mobile devices, as panels met on such topics as "Record Companies: Who Needs Them?"

Scenes from yet another global mega-merger: Seagram's, the Canadian beverage and entertainment conglomerate, buys the multimedia company Polygram for an estimated $10.4 billion in December, linking one massive music industry operation (the purchaser's MCA, Interscope, Universal and Geffen) to another (the purchased's Mercury, Island, Motown, A&M and Def Jam) to form the Universal Music Group. Thousands of executives and support staff lose their jobs. Managers attend "integration" meetings.

Singer Jody Watley, winner of the 1987 Grammy as best new artist, was clearly outraged. Imagine: A pair of handsome, swivel-hipped performers named Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan had managed to win the same award in 1989 even though the two, better known as Milli Vanilli, never sang a note of Girl You Know It's True, the smash album that bears their names and likenesses. Watley, appearing on Arsenio Hall's show on Tuesday - the day after Pilatus and Morvan became the only personalities ever to be stripped of a Grammy - roundly chastised the dreadlocked duo for their charade.

Put away the acne cream and break out the champagne. This is the year American Idol came of age. Even though Fox's singing contest has been camped atop the Nielsen heap for three years, in the past Idol has always been considered a cheesy, teenybopper fad. But as its audience has continued to expand (up again this season 14 percent), the ultimate karaoke party has become a legitimate monster. "A confluence of cultural factors have made this show not just a hit but a supernova in the TV universe," says John Rash, media buyer for Campbell Mithun, a Minneapolis advertising agency.

You've heard a lot about two of the big cheeses in the hip-hop music business: Sean "Puffy" Combs, CEO of Bad Boy Records, produces hit records for everyone from Lil' Kim to Mase to Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men. He sang and handed out awards this year at the Grammys and the MTV Video Music Awards. Death Row Records' Marion "Suge" Knight, before he went to jail this year, had built a reputation on the West Coast as a larger-than-life, gang-associating, fear-inspiring rap kingpin who masterminded the careers of Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg, among others.

When it works well, the music business can be Darwinian: The best music will find its audience, somehow. Parquet Courts' Light Up Gold is a case in point. Released last summer on the band's own label, the album followed the Brooklyn band's noisy, lo-fi debut, which was first released only on cassette and generated little notice. But Light Up Gold , recorded in three days in the band's rehearsal space, is a bold, bracing blast of punk rock, full of sharp, rousing riffs behind wordy, witty rants, and it found enough acclaim for a larger indie label, What's My Rupture?

Friendly and outgoing, Harmonie delights in laughing at a good joke. What the 9-year-old likes most about herself are her dimples, her height (she's tall), and that she knows how to dance. Harmonie is also good at singing and has not ruled out a career in the music industry. Her favorite subjects in school are computer technology and music. She does well academically and has many friends in school and in her neighborhood. Harmonie dreams of being a billionaire some day. On the way to that goal, however, she plans to finish high school, attend college, and then become a teacher.

Back in 1994, Bill Mallonee and his Athens, Ga., band, Vigilantes of Love, attempted to introduce themselves to a national audience with their fourth album, and their first with major-label distribution. Its title, Welcome to Struggleville , was apt, even prophetic. For Mallonee is a cult artist who's never found a wide audience despite consistent critical acclaim. In 2006, he was ranked the world's 65th best living songwriter by Paste magazine - ahead of Michael Jackson, Merle Haggard, and Allen Toussaint, among others.

When Jim James comes to town, it's usually as the front man for My Morning Jacket, the adventurous jam band that has made a habit over the last few years of entertaining 7,000 or so souls at the Mann Center in Fairmount Park on steamy summer nights. It was a little different Monday night at Johnny Brenda's, the cozy Fishtown club. The singer with the haunting, luminous voice launched a tour for his debut solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God , in front of a packed house of about 200, who snapped up tickets in a matter of seconds when they went on sale last month.

From the boy-band bubblegum of Silk in the '70s to the synth-pop of Ultravox in the '80s - with stops at Thin Lizzy, the Rich Kids, and Visage in between - Midge Ure has long been a centerpiece of the musical landscape in the United Kingdom. A flourishing solo career, coauthorship of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and its Band Aid charity, and a wry pencil-thin mustache only made the Scottish-born Ure more famous. Yet, in his eyes, he's never had quite the level of platinum-plated name success in the States as he's had in Europe.

NEW YORK - Fleetwood Mac is heading back on the road, and that means the top-selling group will release new music, sort of. On its 34-city North American tour, which begins April 4 in Columbus, Ohio, and plays the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on April 6, the band will perform two new songs, and that could mean a new album will follow. Or not. Stevie Nicks recently sang on tracks that Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie worked on, calling the sessions "great. " But Nicks also said she was not sure where the band fits in today's music industry.

Chris Stamp, 70, who as a cockney kid from East London aspired to make a documentary film about the rise of British rock in the 1960s and ended up helping discover and manage a raucous working-class quartet called The Who, died Nov. 24 in Manhattan. The cause was complications of colorectal cancer, his wife, Calixte, said. "I was knocked out," Mr. Stamp recalled in 1966 of the night he first saw The Who perform in 1964. "But the excitement I felt wasn't coming from the group. I couldn't get near enough.

What's the big deal about going to see live music, anyway? Rather than plunk down a significant portion of this week's paycheck to watch dudes make scrunched-up faces while they play guitar, or rappers grab their crotches to keep their trousers from falling down, wouldn't it be more pleasurable to just digest pre-recorded sounds in the comfort of your own comfy chair? I'm being partly facetious, of course. Thrills are still to be had from revelations found only in live performance, when musicians and their instruments (and machines)

Look out Non-Comm, here comes Bob Lefsetz. Bob who? Non-what? Non-Comm is the shortened term for the annual radio industry gathering officially called the Non-Commvention, which is hosted by WXPN-FM (88.5-FM) and starts Thursday in University City. It will bring an assortment of high-wattage and up-and-coming names to World Cafe Live over the next three days, including Willie Nelson, Norah Jones, Beth Orton, Brandi Carlile, and the War on Drugs. (Tickets for all those artists are sold out, but piano man Rufus Wainwright highlights a free Saturday afternoon show at the new Penn Park, at 31st and lower Walnut Streets.)