By Jon Pareles – NY Times

MY 21st century started in 1998, when I got a new toy. It was the Diamond Rio PMP300, a flimsy plastic gadget the size of a cigarette pack. PMP stood for Portable Music Player. It had a headphone jack, and it played a recently invented digital file format: MPEG-1 Audio Layer Three, or MP3.

The Rio’s 32 megabytes of storage held a dozen songs at passable fidelity. Its sound was clearly inferior to a portable CD player; its capacity was comparable to a cassette or two. But the beauty of it was that it didn’t need any CD or cassette inserted, just digital files — copies of songs — loaded from a computer, to be changed at whim. They might come from albums people owned or borrowed; they might come, even back then, from strangers online. The Recording Industry Association of America sued to have the PMP300 taken off the market and failed — the prelude to a decade of lawsuits trying to corral online music. [Read More]

By Carol Vogel – NY Times

Those moving advertisements atop taxis generally deliver not-so-subtle messages, like which airlines to fly or movies to see, who makes the sexiest blue jeans or the coolest sunglasses.

High art they most certainly are not.

But for the month of January, Show Media, a Las Vegas company that owns about half the cones adorning New York City’s taxis, has decided to give commerce a rest. Instead, roughly 500 cabs will display a different kind of message: artworks by Shirin Neshat, Alex Katz and Yoko Ono. [Read More]

By Andrew Adam Newman – NY Times

ON Hulu, the popular Web site that streams free television shows and other video, users have proved to be perfectly willing to watch short commercials, and a new site is betting that the same willingness will apply to downloading music.

FreeAllMusic.com, which began a test version for invited users on Dec. 22 and plans to open to the public in January, will allow users to download songs, which may be copied and shared — unencumbered, in other words, by digital rights management restrictions.

In return, instead of paying 99 cents a song as on iTunes, users must first watch a 15- to 30-second advertisement. [Read More]

By Jon Caramanica – NY Times

“TIK TOK,” a zippy and salacious celebration of late nights and mornings-after by a new artist named Ke$ha, has spent the last few weeks zooming toward the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Along with “Rapture,” the 1981 hit by Blondie, it’s one of the most successful white-girl rap songs of all time.

Actually, that depends on who you ask.

“TiK ToK” is sung in the chorus and rapped in the verses, enhanced by Auto-Tune in a few places, in keeping with its electro-pop production. There are even a couple of ad-libs by Diddy, and a line that appears to be borrowed from Jermaine Dupri. [Read More]

By Christopher R. Weingarten – The Village Voice

If Spin was right to name “Your Hard Drive” the best album of 2000, we’d like to formally nominate “The Internet” as Most Unforgiving Asshole of the 2000s. As of ’09, bands have an official life span of about nine months dating from the launch of their MySpace pages, thanks to the comically accelerated, DSL-enhanced hype cycle. Faster than you can tweet “Serena Maneesh,” entire genres of music are “discovered” by attention-starved writers; bloggers engage in hilarious slap-fights about who was there first; magazines feel pressured into writing clueless, hackazoid, late-pass trend pieces; bands get elevated to a critical mass of attention they can’t possibly handle; and the phenomenon is promptly abandoned once we find a newer, shinier toy to play with. [Read More]

By Alex Littlefield – Newyork Press

This fall, the 76-year-old artist released Between My Head and the Sky, her first album since 1973, with the Plastic Ono Band, and a release that marked her first time sharing the studio with her son, Sean Lennon. Additionally, 2009 saw Ono drag a pile of awards back to The Dakota, including a Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Biennale, and the release of the Don’t Stop Me EP. If that wasn’t enough, in recent years, Ono has racked up five number-one dance singles. What were you doing all decade?

Alex Littlefield recently got Ono on the phone to see how she managed to make it through 2009 intact. [Read More]

By Fact Magazine

Poland’s acclaimed experimental music festival Unsound will present its first ever New York edition in 2010. 

Founded in 2003, Unsound’s base is in Krakow; following outpost events in further cities like Minsk, the festival is journeying west on a mission to “forge new links between music genres, between generations and even between artistic practices”.

The festival takes place over ten days, kicking off on Thursday 4 February. The strand of the festival likely to prove most popular is the Andy Warhol program, for which various artists have been invited to provide live soundtracks for Warhol films. On February 5 at the Lincoln Center, nsi. – Berlin-based experimental duo Tobias Freund and Max Loderbauer – will soundtrack Warhol’s Kiss, while none other than Carl Craig plays along to Blow Job. According to Unsound, both these soundtracks will be “analogue synthesizer-driven”. On the following night Groupshow – the band helmed by minimal techno innovator Jan Jelinek – will perform a (gulp) eight-hour long live improvisation to Warhol’s Empire (an unwaveringly static shot of the Empire State Building).  [Read More]

By  Djhistory.com

He’s there each night from ten to closing time, With sights and sounds to help the crowds unwind,

And from the booth each night he blows your mind With his mix and tricks

Forget – for the moment at least – Donna Summer, Silver Convention, Brass Construction, Gloria Gaynor, Bohannon, Love Unlimited – that endless ever-changing, slippery starstream of names shooting through disco heaven. The real stars of the seventies disco boom aren’t on records, they’re spinning them. [Read More]

By BBC News

Abba are to enter the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with four other acts including UK prog-rockers Genesis.

The Stooges, Jimmy Cliff and The Hollies will also be inducted in a ceremony in New York on 15 March.

The performers were chosen from a longlist announced earlier this year, which had included the Red Hot Chili Peppers and rock band Kiss.

It is unlikely that Swedish band Abba, who disbanded in 1983, will stage a reunion performance for the event. [Read More]

By Corey Kilgannon – NY Times

The man in the hooded sweatshirt and cargo pants was not recognizable, but the three letters he was rendering as a 15-foot mural on the wall of a Hell’s Kitchen building certainly were: B.N.E.

This mischievous monogram, posted by marker, spray can, roller and especially stickers, has become part of the landscape of New York and cities worldwide, thrilling graffiti admirers and roiling public officials. Its saturation has provoked one of the more enduring Internet mysteries: What and who is B.N.E.? [Read More]