prince

When one rock legend covers another, there's a fine line between one-upmanship and tribute, disrespect and validation. Prince is as cool as they come--surely you've all seen him upstaging Eric Clapton at the 2004 Rock Hall of Fame induction ceremony by shredding the heck out of Clapton's original solo on the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps."

This weekend, he took a 15-year-old single by one of the biggest bands in the world--a song that the band distanced itself from and seldom plays anymore--and made it sound new again. Prince. Radiohead. "Creep." See … Read more

The Pennsylvania mother who sued Universal Music over a YouTube video of her toddler dancing to a Prince song isn't having much luck in court.

Last October, we wrote about the suit that Stephanie Lenz filed in federal court in San Jose claiming the record label had abused the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by sending YouTube a notice of copyright infringement. Three lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation are representing Lenz.

Lenz's 30-second video shows her son Holden, then 13 months old, dancing in the family's kitchen with the Prince song "Let's Go Crazy" … Read more

This week, tens of thousands of alt-music junkies are fleeing to the desert to take part in the hottest event around: the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. And when we say "hottest" we mean both temperature hot and, yes, sexy hot, as well. We're impressed with the headliners, such as Portishead , Death Cab For Cutie, Jack Johnson, but we're even more down with the bands in the small print, too, such as Little Brother, Jens Lekman, and Modeselektor.

We're not actually going to Coachella (bummer), but we will be celebrating virtually via the playlist … Read more

Facebook has denied giving the Moroccan government information to identify a man who was sentenced to prison for posting a fake profile of a Moroccan prince.

A Moroccan court last week sentenced the 26-year-old IT engineer to three years and fined him 10,000 dirhams ($1,320) for setting up a Facebook account in the name of King Mohammed's brother, Prince Moulay Rachid.

Some civil-liberties groups questioned whether Facebook helped the Moroccan government locate Fouad Mortada.

But The Wall Street Journal on Friday quoted Brandee Barker, a Facebook spokeswoman, as saying in a statement that while the company's … Read more

Looks like it's U2's turn to take a pounding from the bloggerati.

A speech on Monday by Paul McGuinness, manager of the band U2, was a call to arms against piracy. He wants to fight file sharing by forcing Internet service providers to ban people who pirate music. He suggested that Apple and other makers of digital music players were wrongly profiting from their "burglary kits."

McGuinness told a gathering of music insiders at the Midem music conference in Cannes, France, that music is making lots of people lots of money. Unfortunately, that money isn't … Read more

The music industry is preoccupied with giveaways these days.

The latest example will come on Sunday, when New York Daily News subscribers will find an access code in their paper that they can use to retrieve three free songs from EMI Music.

Subscribers punch the code into the newspaper's Web site, Nydailynews.com and the music is theirs. They have over 120,000 tracks to choose from.

Among the songs available is an unreleased track, "It's Love" by Ringo Starr. The promotion will also run on the following Sunday, the day of the Grammy awards.

Combining … Read more

Should troubled file-sharing site Qtrax, eventually strike licensing deals with the major music companies, it still may face a significant hurdle.

Web Sheriff, a company representing music acts such as Prince, Van Morrison, and The Black Crowes, has notified Qtrax that it shouldn't think about offering their music, photographs, or other intellectual property until it has secured the artists' OK.

"Whilst Qtrax is an interesting model, many major label and indie artists will not be happy about their music being given away free (to consumers) in return for a currently opaque return from advertising revenues," said John … Read more

Prince is close to making up with three fan sites that spent the past week trading nasty publicity releases with the purple music king.

Prince Fans United (PFU), a group formed by three fan sites dedicated to Prince; Housequake.com, Prince.org, and Princefams.com, was trying to hammer out an agreement with the artist's representatives on Wednesday, according to Gavin McLaughlin, a spokesman for the group.

PFU was formed after Prince allegedly demanded that the sites remove all "photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything linked to Prince's likeness," the site operators claimed.

"We'… Read more