On June 3, the San Antonio–based radio and concert giant settled a suit brought in 2001 by the Denver-based independent concert promoter Nobody in Particular Presents, Inc. (NIPP) that accused Clear Channel of "monopolistic and predatory practices." NIPP charged that Clear Channel withheld radio play of musicians who signed contracts with other concert promoters and refused to advertise non–Clear Channel concerts on its radio stations.
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Clear Channel Communications, Inc. has settled the first of what could be a long string of lawsuits over its purportedly monopolistic marketing tactics.
Dolby Laboratories was demonstrating its new Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) consumer encoder, which the company says complements its professional AAC encoder, at this year's New York AES Convention. Dolby says it will license the encoder to enable "high-quality AAC encoding" for CD-rippers, hard disk–based jukebox products, Internet-based music distribution systems, portable players, and other digital audio products aimed at the consumer market.
According to Dolby, AAC perceptual encoding technology delivers digital audio quality "far superior to MP3" while requiring approximately 30% less…
Editor's Note: I received an e-mail from Leonid asking for advice on audio cables a few weeks back, and we quickly began discussing the local audio scene in his hometown in Russia. I asked him to describe it for me; what follows is his report.---JI
The "Great Land"---clear air for hundreds of miles, and, in winter, a big river flowing under the nearby ice. A city of one million people that extends from the river's bank out across the hills. This is the Russian city of Saratov, located 600 miles from Moscow on the eastern bank of the river Volga, which, near the city, is 1.8 miles wide.…
It has been an interesting week on the download battlefront. On Friday, online file-sharing service BearShare announced that it was shutting down its business. The P2P company, along with its operators Free Peers, Inc., agreed to the terms of a $30 million settlement with the recording industry. As part of the settlement, Free Peers agreed not to start any other unlicensed music services, and the company has agreed to sell BearShare's technology, rights, domain name, and user data to iMesh, Inc. (footnote 1)
iMesh paid the RIAA $4.1 million in a 2004 file-sharing settlement, but went back…
You can't stop progress—especially at Texas Instruments. The Dallas, TX–based technology giant has introduced a new two-channel digital audio amplifier chip with the world's best specifications.
The TAS5015 is the world's first 192kHz/24-bit digital amplifier capable of a dynamic range of 110dB measured at the speaker. The 48-lead thin quad flatpack (TQFP) chip can drive speakers directly with up to one or two watts of output power, but is better used as a controller for a dedicated output stage, says the company's digital audio marketing manager Niels Anderskouv. The TAS5015 supports "…
A quarter-million dollars' worth of recording and duplicating equipment and hundreds of thousands of counterfeit compact discs and cassette tapes were just part of the booty seized by New York's Suffolk County police in what has been called the "biggest bust of bootleg music in US history." Twelve people were arrested in raids during the first week of September at warehouses in Manhattan, Queens, and Long Island.
Police found more than 300,000 blank CDs, and millions of CD and cassette labels. Musical genres included "pop and Latino performers," according to police. Recording-industry…
Johnny Cash, the 71-year-old American icon, died September 12 of respiratory failure caused by complications from diabetes. The singer/songwriter had been released from the hospital the preceding day after a two-week struggle with an unspecified stomach ailment.
Cash had been in ill health for several years, suffering also from autonomic neuropathy, a disease of the nervous system, as well as pneumonia. Yet, his final days were spent in a burst of creative energy that would have put a younger, healthier man to shame. His most recent album, American IV: The Man Comes Around (Universal/…
It happens to most of us. You're tooling down the road, listening to the radio, and you hear some music that captures your interest. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to easily find out who the artist is and what label they record for without waiting for the announcer, so you can head to your favorite music outlet and buy the disc? But how about pushing a button and ordering the item right there on the spot—from the driver's seat?
To that end, Sirius Satellite Radio has just announced a marketing and technology alliance with ATX Technologies that is expected to lead to the integration of ATX…
For Vivendi Universal SA, when it rains, it pours. Just two weeks after chief executive Jean-Marie Messier ousted Pierre Lescure, the president of France's Canal Plus television company—an event that caused demonstrations in the streets of Paris and paroxysms of nationalistic fervor among France's 18 presidential candidates—a complicated stock deal got vastly more complicated, resulting in a $250 million payment due to A&M Records founders Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss.
Vivendi says it will make the payment, although it will have to borrow money to do so. Since January of this year,…
Last October, US Senate Commerce Committee chairman and former presidential hopeful John McCain hosted NBC's long-running comedy show Saturday Night Live. In a spoof of the political talk show Hardball, McCain did a devastating impression of US Attorney General John Ashcroft, a fellow Republican. Speaking of homeland security, the faux Ashcroft intoned, "This country won't be safe until every American is in jail."
That sort of irony is apparently over the heads of lawyers and executives at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). On Wednesday, June 25, the music industry…