If you’re in Texas for the holiday weekend, Cindy has plenty of things for you to do: Labor Day is a national legal holiday that is over 100 years old. Over the years, it has evolved from a purely labor union celebration into a general “last fling of summer” festival. …

Prince, he of the idiosyncratic spelling and periodic musical genius, holds forth on the state of the entertainment biz on the NPG Music Club site: Something happened on the way 2 the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started “converging” and “shareholder value” became far more important than customer service …

Spirit Touches Ground is the bittersweet coda to Josh Clayton-Felt’s recording career. The bitter part of the story comes from the fact that Clayton-Felt died of cancer at the age of just 32 in 2000. The sweet part is the rootsy, warm rock found on the album. Though the name …

The creepy old Butthole Surfers are now one of my 15-year-old son’s favorite bands. That, and the recent release of a surprisingly good live Nine Inch Nails CD, All That Could Have Been, reminds me of hairy experiences at the first Lollapalooza, way back in 1991. Ah, the musty air …

Please join me for my Cool Tunes radio show Saturdays from 10PM to Midnight (Eastern) through the airwaves (91.3) in the Cleveland/Akron area, or for the rest of the world, via the WAPS web site. I play modern rock, punk, electronica, jazz, reggae, ska, roots rock, Americana, blues, world, funk, …

Hackers broke into the RIAA site yesterday and committed mischief: The Recording Industry Association of America was the victim of a hack Wednesday, forcing network administrators to shut down the site and look for the hole in its Web server. ….But even if and when the organization does find out …

Brad King compares the current music biz crisis with that of 20+ years ago: The recording industry blames the rapid decline of album sales on a new technology that allows people to easily copy and transport music. It’s expected to cripple the major record labels. The year was 1979. Audio …

Per the Guardian: EMI’s eviction from the FTSE 100 at the quarterly reshuffle on September 10 was effectively decided yesterday when its share price dropped to its lowest level since 1987 amid fears of a profits warning and concern that it could be forced to pay out tens of millions …

Kevin Marks has a new blog dedicated to taking the copyright fight to the politicians: Possibly leading questions – these serve the purpose of raising the issues in a public meeting, but it may be better to ask more neutral variants to get a true opinion from the candidate. Do …

Check out this freeware tool: mp3DirectCut mp3DirectCut is a small tool for editing MPEG audio directly. You can remove parts, change the volume, split files or copy regions to several new files. All without the need to decompress your MP3 into a PCM format. This saves work, encoding time and …