Neo-payola has been getting a lot of attention of late: it’s a factor in FCC media ownership considerations, new anti-payola legislation, and it’s particularly rife in the Latin music biz. Cliff Doerksen has written an interesting history of payola for the Washington City Paper: the truth is that payola isn’t …

MuchMusic is crazy-go-nuts lately with the coolness, what with real interactivity between TV and Internet, and with airing the Sessions@AOL concert show, as well as playing actual music videos. Now they carry the animated series: Behind the Music That Sucks is a barely in-depth look at the lives of your …

The FCC and Congress are arguing about jurisdiction over possible rules involving a “broadcast flag”: A political rift over copy-protection standards for digital TV has developed between the Federal Communications Commission and a key panel in Congress. During a hearing Thursday, members of the House of Representatives’ subcommittee overseeing intellectual-property …

New service let’s you upload entire song as your ring-tone – labels starting to twitch already: A tiny company called Xingtone on Thursday said it has developed technology to enable users to load digital songs onto cellphones for the first time, but admits the software may hit a sour note …

Kazaa is in the middle of a legal battle with the RIAA and MPAA, the outcome of which may hinge on proof of “legitimate uses” of the file sharing network. Here’s an interesting use: Digital broadcaster Pseudo.com plans to release a weekly TV show hosted by rap star Ice-T on …

Or, the unintended consequences of law: the DMCA.

About the last thing musicians want to worry about in the first flush of creative ecstasy when a new group is formed is a bunch of legalistic and contractual crap. Unfortunately, these should be among the very first issues considered and resolved. As we have all heard many times before: …

Another roundup of the status of the legit online music services, this one from David Pogue of the NY Times: THE only thing record companies know for sure is that they want to kill off the insanely popular Sons of Napster: free music-sharing services like KaZaA, Gnutella and Morpheus. After …

Cornell U. will begin a monitoring system for its computer network and will charge incrementally for “irrational consumption” of bandwidth: Cornell’s costs for providing Internet services — currently about $1.4-million a year — are going up by more than 40 percent annually, and the university says it had to do …

Chicago jazz trumpeter Ameen Muhammad died suddenly of a heart attack at 48. He is featured on the forthcoming Ernest Dawkin’s New Horizons Ensemble CD Cape Town Shuffle on Delmark Records, which ranges expertly far and wide across the musical roots of the African America: from South Side Chicago to …