Music Industry

CAPE MAY - For the music-minded vacationer, Cape May's historic halls and watering holes are turning up the heat early. The occasion is the fifth annual Singer-Songwriter of Cape May gathering, which began Friday and runs through Saturday night. In the half-decade since the event began, this Shore town has become a springtime pilgrimage spot for independent performers from as close as Atlantic City and as far away as Australia. "It is something I make a point to schedule on my tour every year," Avi Wisnia, a Philadelphia jazz-pop songwriter, said in an e-mail from the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, this month.

DICK McGettigan was a fun-loving Irishman who never hesitated to get out on the dance floor when the music was playing or to belt out a ballad in his robust voice. He was an avid music fan, favoring jazz, big bands and swing, and tried not to miss a parade of military pomp. His favorite vocalist was Ella Fitzgerald. Richard J. McGettigan, a nearly 35-year investigator with the Department of Defense Personnel Support Center, helping to stop contract fraud and bribery, a man with a nonstop Irish wit who especially loved to entertain children, died March 21 of congestive heart failure.

THE GRAMMYS are that annual lovefest when the music industry tries to convince the rest of the world that it still has a pulse. But you know what showed a surprising heartbeat yesterday? The movie industry. For the first time since Christmas 2008, four - count 'em, four - movies opened with more than a $20 million box-office haul. "The Vow" led the way with a ridiculous $41.7 million. Who knew so many people would remember to see a movie about amnesia? In second, with $39.3 million, according to yesterday's studio estimates, was the Denzel Washington-Ryan Reynolds ' action thriller "Safe House.

WE MAY never know if Whitney Houston died by accident or intent - drowning in a bathtub Saturday afternoon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. While there's much speculation that she was under the influence of anti-depressants and alcohol, the coroner's official report won't be out for weeks. What we do know is that Whitney Houston couldn't possibly have picked a more opportune moment to make goodbyes and deliver a brutal statement about the dark side of the music biz - how the stresses of the game can drive a person to bad habits and spiraling self-destruction.

It's possible that Adele won't be the runaway winner at the 2012 Grammy Awards, to be broadcast at 8 p.m. Sunday on CBS3 from the Staples Center in Los Angeles. With the Grammys, after all, the inexplicable often occurs. Last year, Canadian indie band Arcade Fire upset heavily favored Eminem for best album, the same category in which Herbie Hancock's The River (The Joni Letters) caused a tizzy by beating out both Amy Winehouse and Kanye West in 2008. But in 2012, it would stand to reason that nothing can stand in the way of Adele.

After a tumultuous 2011 in which they opened a new Center City coffee-and-music venue amid a nasty labor dispute, no one would have faulted rising entertainment entrepreneurs Jamie Lokoff and Tommy Joyner for taking it easy in the new year. But that's not how they roll at MilkBoy, a blend of java- and music-brewed business ventures that seeks to reinvent itself in 2012. Joyner and Lokoff are focusing on Center City after a decade running a recording studio and their now well-known coffee house in Ardmore (and a smaller one in Bryn Mawr)

You could call Serena Sol Brown - singer, musician, and radio personality - a triple threat, as her friends like to say. But that would be leaving out a lot. Let's see. She also writes songs. And produces and promotes artists. And did I mention deejaying and acting? What are we up to now? Octuple threat? Suffice it to say that Serena Sol's artistic journey has taken her in and out of so many facets of the music industry that that she probably could run a label herself.

Pop Biophilia (One Little Indian ***1/2) In these days of the rapidly reshaping music industry, artists as often generate buzz with their choice of delivery system, or what bells and whistles they attach to the music, as with the music itself. That's true and then some of Björk's Biophilia , the Icelandic iconoclast's eighth album, which she is releasing not only as a CD, digital download, and LP, but also as a series of apps that can be fooled with on an iPad or iPhone.

NEW YORK - A Jewish housewife from Passaic, N.J., named Florence Greenberg was a pioneer in the '50s - first, she outsmarted the male-dominated pop record industry with her own Scepter record label. And second, the already-married Greenberg fell in love with her talented black music producer, Luther Dixon ("Sixteen Candles," "Tonight's the Night"). But for all her home-grown savvy at the pinnacle of the music industry and her strength to stand up for herself in bucking a taboo, Greenberg would have been nothing without four black girls from a Passaic high school.

Anyone deep into the local music scene ought to perk up and listen to the tunes drummer David Uosikkinen and friends are rerecording for "In the Pocket: Essential Songs of Philadelphia. " Available (along with a cool documentary) at http: POP . . . plus Anyone deep into the local music scene ought to perk up and listen to the tunes drummer David Uosikkinen and friends are rerecording for "In the Pocket: Essential Songs of Philadelphia. " Available (along with a cool documentary)