Ryan Book, The Music Times

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  • Song Questions with Song Answers: Rod Stewart and Shakira, Lil Jon and Hall & Oates, and More

    Acts like One Direction and Taylor Swift have created armies of super-creepy, devoted fans. We're not talking about the typical Directioner...we're talking about the stalkers and X-rated fan fiction writers. Fortunately this isn't the '60s, where fans could apparently infiltrate the music industry and send messages to their idols. The best example is Elvis Presley, specifically his hit "Are You Lonely Tonight?," which according to Billboard generated at least four songs titled "Yes, I'm Lonely Tonight" and one "Oh, How I Miss You Tonight" as "answers" to his question. Odds are these songs were more about profits than untamed hormones, but we love the idea of response tracks.

  • Back of The Billboards: 'Long Tall Sally' by The Beatles

    Society always celebrates the records that top the Billboard 200 album chart. Back of The Billboards is a Music Times weekly segment that looks at the opposite end: the new record that finished closest to the back of the Billboard 200 for the previous week. We hope to give a fighting chance to the bands you haven't heard of. This week we look at Mexican pop star The Beatles (?) and its new EP ''Long Tall Sally' (?!?).

  • Kesha's Mom Suing Dr. Luke for "PTSD" and Emotional Distress Following Allegations of Rape and Abuse against Daughter

    Unfortunately we have nothing new to report with regard to new music from Kesha but her lawsuit against former producer/mentor Dr. Luke has just gotten even more in-depth. According to reports from Digital Music News, the pop star's mother, Pebe Sebert, has also sued the producer alleging that his implied crimes against her daughter resulted in the parent suffering from emotional breakdowns and "PTSD," resulting in blood pressure levels as high as 265/180.

  • Parklife Text Campaign Offends Those with Deceased Mothers, Earns £70,000 Fine from Information Commissioners' Office

    There are good ideas and bad ideas. Publicists are the professionals you hire to point out when your great ideas might have holes in them that could quickly become horrible ideas. The publicists for the Parklife music festival in Manchester probably should have found some issues with the event's 2014 plot to lure fans to the official after-parties by sending them a text from "Mum." It seems like a cute idea at first...until you consider the inevitable fact that at least a few of the attendees probably have deceased mothers. Anyway, that's one of several reasons why Parklife was fined £70,000 by the British Information Commisioners' Office.

  • SiriusXM Pays $3.8 Million Across 46 States as Part of Billing and Advertising Settlement

    The attorneys at SiriusXM have been busy. Not only are they dealing with a series of lawsuits involving The Turtles and pre-1972 music, but now they've completed a $3.8 million deal to be paid across 46 states with regard to shifty billing and advertising practices. According to the suit, contracts didn't make it clear to users that the service could renew itself. Users who wished to cancel their subscriptions didn't realize that they needed to take action to do so, or else the company would assume they wished to renew. More problematic is that frequently the prices had increased as well.

  • Lawsuit Alleges Apple Deleted Competitor's Music from Users' iTunes Account to Prevent iPod Use

    Apple might not even produce iPod Classic anymore but antitrust lawsuits never get old. One that might be particularly interesting to the millions of people who owned one of the most successful digital music players in history: Plaintiffs in a suit against the company allege that Apple intentionally deleted music from competing platforms that users attempted to store on iTunes, as recently as 2009.

  • 5 Versions of "Little Red Rooster" Ranked; From Howlin' Wolf to The Rolling Stones

    Fifty years on this day The Rolling Stones landed their second no. 1 track: "Little Red Rooster." As with the band's first no. 1 ("It's All Over Now"), the second time atop the charts was a cover of a previous blues track. A number of acts have made singles of the blues standard and Music Times will dare to rank the renditions of the single in terms of quality.

  • Psy Breaks YouTube as "Gangnam Style" Views Crack Limit That Video Site Is Able to Count

    Psy might not be the first person you think of when we tell you to name the first internet badass that comes to mind. But consider this: The Korean pop star and his hit "Gangnam Style" have literally broken YouTube. The video playing site acknowledged this week (via NME) that it was forced to rework its programming to continue counting the number of hits the music video for "Gangnam" has received.

  • BMG and Round Hill Attack ISP Cox Communications over Alleged Refusal to Remove Internet Service from Piracy Infringers

    Some advice for the ideological lawsuit bringer: The higher up you strike with your litigation, the more likely it is to bring sweeping changes across a broader spectrum. We sincerely doubt that BMG and Round Hill Media had ideology in mind when it decided to sue Cox Communications of Northern Virginia (hint: money was the real inspiration) but they may have struck the solution to music piracy right on the head: Punish the internet service provider (ISP) for the sins of the user, and you can bet those users won't get the chance to do it again.

  • Ed Sheeran Most Streamed Spotify Performer Worldwide in 2014; Eminem Tops U.S. Stream Numbers

    Yesterday Ed Sheeran made news when his album X cracked one million sales in the UK and today, partially thanks to his popularity in Europe, the pop star was named the most streamed performer of the year by Spotify. Sheeran amassed more than 860 million listens across all of the streaming service's markets. If Spotify's reports on pay rates are accurate, that means the performer should have brought in nearly $7.25 million in revenues from Spotify this year (before labels take their cut). According to Billboard, almost exactly half of those streams were for X.
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