Culture and Society

For all the 24-heads out there – and I’m more or less one of them – a new “talk show” about 24 will be webcast after tomorrow’s (Jan 27) episode at 10pm eastern, and after each episode from now on, called 24Inside. Tomorrow’s guests will be Penny Johnson Jerald (Sherry …

High-speed Internet access is coming to feel like a necessity to an ever-growing portion of the population, especially people who use the Internet for work and young people who have never even used dial-up (ick); Best Western International Inc. will offer free high-speed Internet in all 2,300 of its hotels …

If you bust out the heavy legal artillery in an attempt to stop the march of time rather than addressing the challenge from a business standpoint, don’t be surprised when someone uses the same weapons on you: A U.S. federal court has cleared the way for Kazaa file-sharing software owner …

“You say it’s all about control And nothing should control you If no one ever gets to close Then you’ll have nothing to live up to” (“Wrong” – School of Fish) The central issue for copyright holders is that they are going to have to learn to love, or at …

In a move clearly meant to say, “we’re still watching and we will still kick your ass and take your money if we feel like it,” the RIAA has filed new lawsuits against 532 alleged file sharers: The recording industry on Wednesday sued 532 computer users it said were illegally …

Our great pal Ed Driscoll wrote the other day asking what I thought about the DVD-Audio and SACD formats. If I could come up with something he would quote me in a story he was writing and Blogcritics would get a nice plug. Very thoughtful – Ed’s like that. But …

I totally dig the alt-country rock of Scott Miller. Upside Downside, his new one with his band the Commonwealth (Shawn McWilliams – drums, Eric Fritsch – keyboards, Park Chisolm – bass), has stomping roots-rock like “It Didn’t Take too Long” and “Raised By the Graves,” thoughtful folk-rock (“The Way,” “Red …

The technology of this may be very cool, but it is intrusive as hell: Beginning [yesterday], more than a dozen Web sites, including MSN, ESPN, Lycos and iVillage, [ran] full-motion video commercials from Pepsi, AT&T, Honda, Vonage and Warner Brothers, in a six-week test that some analysts and online executives …

A number of artists and songwriters seem to be doing their best to ensure that the free file sharing services like Kazaa and LimeWire continue to do a booming business: The world’s largest music company had been hectoring rock singer Tom Petty since last summer. You’ve got a big and …

The Fourth Annual Weblogs Awards have arrived over at Nikolai Nolan’s Fairvue site. These are the original “Bloggies.” We were honored to win the Best Weblog About Music award last year. In apparent recognition that we are so much more than a music site, this year we are very pleased …