by Greg Sandoval – CNet News

Over the years, Michael Robertson, the man who founded pioneering digital music service MP3.com, has never hesitated to make a prediction about the sector’s future.

“It’s not a business,” Robertson has told me often in the past about ad-supported music sites. Frankly, in the past, I didn’t pay much attention. I do now.

The man who has fought more high-profile battles with the record industry than anybody in technology, and whose experience in digital music is nearly unmatched, has never appeared more prescient. He told me two years ago that ad-supported music sites would perish. The licensing fees required them to pay a penny, or some fraction of that, each time a service streamed a song to a user’s computer, and that was too high to sustain a business. And now just look at the sector. It’s a mess. [Read More]

By David Cotner – The Village Voice

After 20 years of being and becoming an institution, Warp Records is nearly impossible to sum up in one weekend of shows or one box set, no matter how extravagant. And yet the label—alternately christened Weird and Radical Projects or We Are Reasonable People—thus observes its two-decade anniversary in September, weathering changes in fickle music fashion and surviving the 2001 death of co-founder Rob Mitchell. Justifiably, they’re celebrating with both a multi-night, multi-venue, multi-media birthday party (much of it free, all of it aurally cataclysmic) and, for those who prefer objects to experiences, the Warp20 collection, whose size and breadth rival both Arthur C. Clarke‘s lunar monolith and Ace Hardware‘s common doorstop. [Read More]

By Elizabeth Dwoskin – The Village Voice

Mark Farese is a man with two feet and 1,400 pairs of sneakers. In his New Jersey basement, plastic shoeboxes line the floor in rows and stack up in six-foot-high walls. The boxes, custom-made for him in Japan, bear his nickname: “The Mayor.”

There’s a similar consistency inside the boxes. Almost every one contains a variation on the same product: Nike’s Air Force 1, the basketball shoe that the company introduced in 1982. [Read More]

By Vibe

  (New York NY) – InterMedia Partners, in partnership with its portfolio company Uptown Media Group along withBlackrock Digital today announced the purchase of the assets of Vibe and Vibe.com, the preeminent brands for hip-hop & R&B lifestyle and culture.  Founded in 1993 by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, Vibe has been an iconic brand for 16 years, responsible for setting trends among hip hop and mainstream culture. InterMedia is buying Vibe on the heels of the recent June shuttering of the magazine. [Read More]

By Bonnie Rosenstock – Chelsea Now

Urban Art. Street Art. Mural Art. Aerosol Art. Spray Art. Guerilla Art. Tag Art.  Call graffiti what you will — but there’s no denying it’s a big part of life in NYC (whether we realize it or not). That sentiment was expounded by painter/photographer Shell Sheddy.
Sheddy, who prefers to be called “an art activist,” is the curator of “GRAF: Reading the Writing on the Wall; images of the L.E.S. 1968 to present,” an overview of this contentious art form (currently showing at the Tompkins Square Park Library Gallery). [Read More]

By Nancy Dillon & Frank Lombardi – Daily News

Spike Lee‘s tribute to Michael Jackson is moving from Fort Greene Park to Prospect Park because big crowds are expected.

After the director announced plans for a celebration on Aug. 29, what would have been the King of Pop’s 51st birthday, some officials and community leaders pressed for a bigger venue. [Read More]

By TimeOut NewYork

On a hot, sticky night in 1988, the three 19-year-olds who made up De La Soul were getting nervous. The trio was about to play its first-ever gig, at an Irving Plaza dance party called Payday, and the main act—Stetsasonic, Tommy Boy Records’ big draw—hadn’t shown up. But even as the band waited in the wings, its troupe of dancers clutching giant cue cards with lyrics written on them—De La Soul knew it was onto something special. “I remember that night clearly,” MC Posdnuos (Kelvin Mercer to his mom) says today. “Being nervous and like, Wow, is this gonna go over well? But then we look into the crowd, and D.M.C. [of Run-D.M.C.] is in the front row! It was just amazing.” [Read More]

By Ben Detrick – The Village Voice

With his pink wardrobe, adoption of retro video-game character Sonic the Hedgehog as a spirit animal, and languid verses, Charles Hamilton was a newcomer built to thrive in a rap environment that has learned to tolerate a splash of DayGlo whimsy. The 21-year-old was cute and contempo and sensitive, but retained enough Harlem arrogance to escape being ostracized as a total pussy. After signing with Interscope Records in the summer of 2008, Hamilton spent the next year exuberantly building a reputation as an underdog smartass: He released several mixtapes, blogged with regularity, Twittered 50-some times a day, and reveled in the real-time furor he was able to create as a hip-hop fameball. [Read More]

By Julie Shapiro – The Villager

Bar owners seeking licenses will once again face tougher restrictions under a bill passed by the state Legislature this summer. 

The bill strengthens the 500-foot rule, which applies to bars and clubs if there are three or more existing liquor licenses nearby. The new legislation was prompted by a court ruling last November, which weakened the 500-foot rule and gave bar owners more leeway in neighborhoods that are densely packed with bars. [Read More]

By Ben Sisario – NY Times

A few months ago a peculiar item called “Favorite Recorded Scream” began to trickle into New York City record stores. Pressed on 12-inch vinyl in an edition of 500, it has little on its red cover except a list of 74 songs, each linked to a Manhattan record shop. [Read More]

By Deborah Sontag – NY Times

AS the peacock-blue Cadillac with the gold trim and fur lining spun on a giant turntable in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music here, Al Bell, the final owner of the late, great record label, chuckled. Decades before 50 Cent with his customized Rolls-Royce and Akon with his tricked-out Lamborghini, there was Isaac Hayeswith this pimped-out ride, an over-the-top gift from Stax to its over-the-top star, who wore slave chains like emancipatory bling across his bare, buff chest. [Read More]

By Jon Pareles – NY Times

Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains, N.Y. . He was 94.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, the Gibson Guitar Corporation and his family announced. [Read More]

By Roberta Smith – NY Times

With their first public artwork in Manhattan, which went up at the northwest corner of Houston Street and the Bowery on July 17, the Brazilian brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who call themselves Os Gêmeos, bring graffiti art to its Rococo phase. Which is to say that their fantastic, epic mural, on a concrete wall about 17 feet high and about 51 feet long, is light and frothy, a dream of happiness with an underlying chord of melancholy. And everything in it is exquisitely fine-tuned and detailed, a dazzlement of effortless technique that sustains long bouts of close looking. It will remain up until March. [Read More]