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]