‘Man or the Music’ [Michael Jackson Tribute Mixtape]

There are few better ways to celebrate what would be Michael Jackson’s 52nd birthday than with a tribute mixtape devoted to the King of Pop . DJ-producer J. Period joins forces with director Spike Lee and 40Acres.com to release a free limited edition mixtape Man or the Music (40 Acres Edition), an 80-minute collection of MJ classics, rare demo tracks, remixes, and behind-the-scenes interview clips.

The mixtape overlaps with Spike Lee’s 2nd Annual “Brooklyn Loves MJ” celebration in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, taking place today (Aug. 29).

“It is a tremendous honor to join a storyteller like Spike Lee in celebrating the legacy of Michael Jackson’s music with an elite mixtape for this incredible event,” stated J. Period. “Crafting the tape was a labor of love and a learning experience. Digging through hours of interview material and music, I have definitely gained a new respect for Michael’s life and legacy, and I’m excited to share that with my fans—and over 25K fellow MJ fans in attendance on Sunday!”

The mixtape offers tracks including the demos for “Billie Jean,” “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “P.Y.T.,” and “Workin’ Day and Night,” as well as remixes of “Rock With You” and the Jackson 5’s “It’s Great to Be Here.”

“Music of Ireland" series prolongs with U2, Hansard

NEW YORK - U2, Glen Hansard, Damien Rice and the Script are among the Irish pop musicians featured in the second installment of the documentary series "Music of Ireland," scheduled to roll out nationwide on public television stations in September and all through the fall.

"Music of Ireland -- Welcome to America" begins where "Welcome Home," which first aired on PBS in February, left off: in the early 1980s, when U2 was budding as a world-renowned act. It goes on to profile the careers of Sinead O'Connor, the Corrs and the Cranberries, and the international influence they cultivated. The hourlong documentary also features interviews with Academy Award winner Hansard, of the Swell Season, and songwriter Rice.

"The thing that charms me the most is that this tiny little island of 4 million has been able to turn out (this) number of top-selling artists and influential artists," says Denny Young, president and founder of Elevation Group and executive director of the series. "That was the story that hadn't been told in totality and something I felt the general public would find very interesting."

According to Clannad's Moya Brennan, who hosts the documentary, the series shows how wide the scope of Irish music is. Part 2, she says, illustrates the role America has played in the preservation of Celtic musical traditions.

"The people that (emigrated to) America were able to record and treasure what they brought with them," Brennan says. "(America) helped us sustain and remember."

Rahman to present Games song on Saturday

After a few changes in the tune and the lyrics, the much awaited and much delayed anthem of the Commonwealth Games is ready for release on Saturday. Music maestro A.R. Rahman has inserted the word ‘India’ a few more times in the lyrics and made the tempo peppier, sources said. The changes were made following suggestions from an Empowered Group of Ministers on Commonwealth Games, which gave the song, "O Yaaro! India bula liyaa" an in-principle thumbs up a few weeks ago.

The Delhi Games Organizing Committee on Thursday said the Oscar winner music director will be performing the song on Saturday. However, the venue has not been finalized. The launch of the song got delayed after the GoM asked Rahman to change it a little bit.

Churchill set to music in military chart attack

The label, part of Universal Music, hopes to reproduce the surprise success of Vera Lynn last year, when the singer, who kept up the spirits of millions of soldiers during the war, topped the album charts at the age of 92.

"The album features music dedicated to the heroes of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and we expect the RAF to be drove right to the top of the charts," said Decca's managing director Mark Wilkinson in a statement.

The agreement was signed on Wednesday in London and the album hits the shelves on September 27.

The highlight of "Reach for the Skies" will be wartime leader Winston Churchill's famous speech "The Few" set to music.

Churchill delivered the speech in 1940 but it was re-recorded after the war for posterity. His tribute to the air force included the famous line: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

Churchill's "The Finest Hour" speech, another homage to the RAF, is also on the album.

Reach for the Skies will be an official album of the Battle of Britain, marking the 70th anniversary of the crucial air campaign fought between British and German forces in 1940. It also celebrates the 90th anniversary of the RAF's Central Band.

The record will include RAF-related classics such as the "Dambusters March," "Spitfire Prelude," "633 Squadron," the "Battle of Britain March" and "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" as well as the sound of Spitfire aircraft flying overhead.

Celebrity Favorites: Chris Bosh

MTV Shows

Chris Bosh belongs to the Miami Heat's "big three" along with Dwyane Wade and LeBron James. And when it comes to hip-hop, his dream team is already lined up.

"Jay-Z, Kanye West and Drake," the All-Star said without blinking. "Easy! Well, just the fact of Jay-Z's longevity. And he can really rap. Some of his stuff from '01 and The Blueprint is stuff I'm just now getting. Like, 'Ohhhh, that's what he meant. OK, I get that line.' He was so far ahead in what he rapped about and what he did. I'm just now catching up. Kanye is super creative in what he can do with the beat machine. And his words, he's more a passionate type of guy. He puts his feelings out there and doesn't care what anybody thinks. Drake is the smooth guy. He's gonna come in and sing. Plus Drake, we share something in common: We pretty much started our professional careers in Toronto. And I think those are the best three guys out right now."

Taylor Swift Mine Music Video Teaser

Taylor Swift Mine Music Video Teaser – Taylor Swift will go throughout the ups and downs of a relationship with Toby Hemingway in her new music video for her single “Mine.” She has teased fans with shots from the video, together with some teaser clips and still images. Her upcoming album is highly expected by fans and the juicy teasers are only going to create more anticipation.

The fragment shows the couple holding hands, nestling on the coach, enjoying a long walk on the beach and getting engaged. There is also a print of the two of them on their wedding day.

The prints allow fans to get a look at the music video before it is released and have created more anticipation for the upcoming video. It is also supposed that Swift will be having an on-screen kid in the music video.

YoUnG CoMpOsEr'S PaSsIoN

From Mozart to Beethoven, Bach to Brahms, Tchaikovsky to Handel, Chopin to Debussy, the record of musical composers that showed outstanding talent as children and consequently embarked on their illustrious careers from a young age is both endless and astounding.

Even today, we hear stories of six-year-old piano and violin prodigies who write their own music and present for politicians and celebrities.

While we could learn a musical instrument at any age, it seems that the art of composing could be something one is born with.

Eighteen-year-old Mark Ahenda is one such youth who seems to have been born with a certain sum of musical genius.

He just graduated from William Aberhart High School and during his time there, he displayed astounding talent and ability.

In addition to completing his ARCT in piano, which includes 10 grades plus an associate diploma, Mark is also a talented trumpet player, winning copious citywide competitions over the last few years, including the Kiwanis Music Festival, Calgary's largest competitive music festival.

This year, for the first time after winning his class, Mark was proposed to compete in the Kiwanis Provincial Competition.

Mark's talent for playing instruments and his passion for music led him last year, in his Grade 11 year, to begin composing his own pieces and it seems he has quite a wonderful gift.

Music sovereignty talks deem cell phone mandate

A long-running dispute between radio broadcasters and the recording industry over music royalties has taken an unexpected turn with a future settlement that threatens to haul the mobile phone industry into the ring.

The negotiation under argument by radio broadcasters, recording labels and recording artists could include a federal mandate that all new cell phones come with a built-in FM radio chip. While a deal is far from final, the outlook that the government could utter a key design decision for such a ubiquitous consumer device has alarmed electronics manufacturers and wireless providers.

"This is two old-media industries offending the new wireless broadband industry," said Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumers Electronics Association. "This is a battle that doesn't involve us."
Building FM radio into cell phones involves an additional antenna, which could add weight and bulk to devices prized for their sleekness, Shapiro said. It could also consume battery life more hurriedly, which could lead manufacturers to eliminate other features from their devices, he added.
"We don't think Congress should accept a back-room deal on how an iPhone should be designed," Shapiro said. "We think consumers should choose and companies should choose."
For years, the National Association of Broadcasters has been fighting a music industry proposal that would require radio stations to pay music royalties to recording labels and performers for the right to play their songs on the air.

Current law necessitates broadcast radio stations to reimburse royalties to songwriters, but not recording labels or artists. Broadcasters disagree that the existing arrangement makes sense because radio airplay provides free promotion and drives music purchases etc.
But compact disc sales have dropped off, and sales of digital albums haven't made up the difference, punctual labels and artists — represented by a group called musicFirst — to step up their push to start collecting royalties, too.

Heirs to over-the-air radio, such as satellite radio, Internet radio and cable TV music channels, are required to pay performance royalties, noted Marty Machowsky, a spokesman for musicFirst, which is backed by the Recording Industry Association of America and the Recording Academy. Broadcast radio stations, he said, get a "free ride" — paying zero for "musical performance which is the basis of their business."

Both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have passed bills that would give recording labels and artists a cut of advertising revenue that radio stations engenders by playing their songs, but neither contains an FM chip mandate. Both bills have stalled due to stern broadcaster resistance. Faced with a stalemate, lawmakers have asked NAB and musicFirst to try to parley a compromise.
The proposed settlement would launch a tiered system of royalty payments that would bring in a total of roughly $100 million for the music industry. Commercial radio stations with more than $1.25 million in annual income would pay royalties totaling 1 percent of revenue. The smallest commercial and nonprofit stations would pay either 1 percent of revenue or $100 annually, whichever is less.

As this battle has dragged on, new rivals to broadcast radio have grown stronger and drawn more listeners as digital music players and streaming Internet radio have flourished. If Congress approves the compromise with the FM radio mandate, it would be a victory for NAB, which is seeking to expand radio station audiences.

Both the recording industry and the broadcasters trumpet the clause as a win for consumers. Machowsky said FM radio on cell phones "would give consumers more ways to listen to and enjoy music."

And Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents over-the-air radio stations, said such a requirement would provide a valuable public service — particularly in emergencies, when consumers often tune into local stations seeking critical public safety information.

But Jot Carpenter, vice president of government affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, which represents wireless carriers, insists that while consumers do like to listen to streaming Internet radio and music downloads on their wireless devices, there is "not a huge desire to listen to over-the-air, ad-laden radio" on mobile handsets. Phones with FM radio chips are not in high demand, he noted.

At this point, NAB and musicFirst are pushing ahead. They are taking the potential agreement back to their members to try to get buy-in on a deal that they can take to lawmakers after the summer recess. And they hope that Congress will act in the fall.

"Nothing is locked down just yet," said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association, "but we're on the precipice of an historic breakthrough."

First Music instrument

Music is a creative form of sound communication by means of musical instruments that make sounds and tones. Music is as aged as mankind. All the societies past and present have music. The "oldest known song" dates back 4,000 years ago and was written in prehistoric cuneiform. It is not sure how or when the first musical instrument was made-up, on the other hand, most historians point to early flutes made from animal bones that are at least 37,000 years old.

Origination Of Music

DARWIN'S theory states that music had its -starting point "in the sounds made by the half-human progenitors of man during the season of courtship" seems for many reasons to be scarce and flawed. A much more conceivable explanation, it seems to me, is to be found in the theory of Theophrastus, in which the origin of music is featured to the whole range of human emotion.

When an animal sheers a cry of joy or pain it articulates its emotions in more or less clear-cut tones; and at some remote period of the earth's history all primeval mankind must have expressed its emotions in much the same manner. When this inarticulate speech developed into the use of confident sounds as symbols for emotions - emotions that or else would have been expressed by the natural sounds juncture by them —then we have the beginnings of speech as distinguished from music, which is still the universal language. In other words, thinker development begins with articulate speech, leaving music for the phrase of the emotions.

To be a sign of the sounds used to express emotion, if I may so put it, is to weaken that expression, and it would naturally be the strongest emotion that would first feel the inadequacy of the new-found speech. Now which is the mankind’s strongest emotion? Even in the nineteenth century Goethe could say, "'Tis fear that constitutes the god-like in man." Undoubtedly before the Christian era the soul of mankind had its roots in fear. In our superstition we were like children beneath a great tree of which the upper part was as a fuzzy and mesmerizing mystery, but the roots holding it firmly to the ground were tangible, palpable facts.

The primordial savage, looking at the world subjectively, was merely part of it. He might love, hate, threaten, kill, if he willed; every other creature could do the same. But the wind was a great spirit to him; lightning and thunder endangered him as they (lid the rest of the world; the flood would destroy him as ruthlessly as it tore the trees asunder. The elements were breathing powers that had nothing in common with him; for what the brains cannot explain the power of imagination magnifies.

Fear, then, was the burly emotion. Therefore assisting aids to express and cause fear were necessary when the speech symbols for fear, drifting further and further away from expressing the actual thing, became words, and words were inadequate to express and cause fear. In that formless groping for sound symbols which would cause and express fear far better than mere words, we have the beginning of what is gradually to develop into music.

We all know that savage nations convoy their dances by striking one object with another, sometimes by a jangling of stones, the pounding of wood, or perhaps the clashing of stone spearheads against wooden shields (a custom which extended until the time when shields and spears were discarded), meaning thus to express something that words cannot. This meaning altered naturally from its original one of being the simple expression of fear to that of welcoming a chieftain; and, if one wishes to push the theory to excess, we may still see a shadowy nostalgia of it in the manner in which the violinists of an orchestra applaud an honored guest — perchance some famous virtuoso — at one of our symphony concerts by striking the backs of their violins with their bends.

To go back to the savages. While this clashing of one object against another could not be called as the beginning of music, and while it could not be said to originate a musical instrument, it did, nonetheless, bring into existence music's greatest prop, rhythm, an ally without which music would seem to be impossible. Suffice it to say that the sense of rhythm is highly urbanized even among those savage tribes which stand the lowest in the scale of civilization to-day, for instance, the Andaman Islanders, of whom I shall speak later; the same may be said of the Tierra del Fuegians and the now extinct aborigines of Tasmania; it is the same with the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula, the Ajitas of the Philippines, and the savages inhabiting the interior of Borneo.

Up to this point it is reasonable to assume that primordial man looked upon the world purely subjectively. He considered himself merely a unit in the world, and felt on a plane with the other creatures dwelling it. But from the moment he had invented the first musical instrument, the drum, he had created impressive outside of nature, a voice that to himself and to all other living creatures was elusive, an idol that spoke when it was touched, some-thing that he could call into life, something that shared the supernatural in common with the elements. A God had come to live with man, and thus was unfolded the first leaf in that venerable tree of life which we call religion.

Man now began to feel himself something apart from the world, and to look at it impartially instead of intuitively.

Taking Music to Hospital Patients

In 2002, Dr. Sickel began a pilot plan to bring music to El Camino Hospital. He arranged for a few solo musicians to play in special areas of the hospital for a pithy time. The response was awesomely encouraging, and music can now be heard around the hospital several hours a day, five days a week.

Today several professional musicians heave their solo instruments from ward to ward, playing in hallways and along bedsides for patients, staff and visitors. The soothing sounds of jazz and classical guitar, Celtic and double-strung harp, piano and voice create an out of blue warm space within the hospital environment.

* Jeff Buenz -Latin and jazz guitar and bass
* Peter Giordano - guitar, percussion and keyboard
* Barbary Grant - Celtic music and traditional song on the Irish harp
* Reta Phillips is a pianist, keyboardist, vocalist, composer and workshop catalyst.
* Dona Reyes -classical Spanish guitar music
* Verlene Schermer is an award-winning great singer
* David Snellbacher - guitar music including old English, Celtic, classical, traditional Christmas carols and contemporary music

The BBC's alternative music radio station 6 doubles its weekly listening audience

The BBC's alternative music radio station 6 Music, which recently fugitive being shut down, has doubled its weekly listeners.

The digital station, which helped launch indie bands like Florence and the Machine, above, now has an regular of 1.2million tuning in, the latest Rajar figures expose.

A campaign by 6 Music fans to save the station advanced its audience to 100.7% more than last year.

BBC Asian Network, which still faces end, increased its listeners by 22.4% this quarter to 437,000 a week.

Rdio is Opening Social Music Service to Public

The major variation between Rdio and most modern subscription services, such as Napster, Rhapsody and Zune Pass, is Rdio's use of subscribers' online social networks to recommend songs.

Where other services uses algorithms that base recommendations on the music a person listens to, Rdio base its suggestions on music a subscriber's friends like. The service does this by giving users the option to follow up the musical tastes of friends and people on Facebook and Twitter in order to discern new songs.

Rdio also offers mobile subscribers offline access to their music collection by downloading songs to their devices' hard drives. While the option is not yet regular in the industry, others, such as MOG and Europe's Spotify, offer similar services.

Industry observers look forward to Apple to eventually launch a music subscription service based on its achievement of LaLa last December. However, the company has yet to announce its plans.

Michael Jackson’s Unreleased 100 Songs Album Release

Michael Jackson’s unreleased 100 songs throughout his career plans to be released shortly. Though Michael Jackson physically left us, his music remains breathing.

Accordingly, Jackson’s previously unreleased album will be released in this November. This new unnamed album will feature ten beforehand unheard songs of Michael Jackson.

This album will be released by Sony Music as per the previous 7 years deal signed by Jackson estate. The estate has made a $250 million pact with Sony. Sony is expecting massive sales for this new album, as the album is being released after the death of Michael Jackson.

Music around the world’ has been introduced to Fairmont students

More than 25 kids, siblings, mothers and grandmothers attended the 2nd Annual Mommy & Me, "Music Around the World" event held in recent times at the Anaheim Hills campus of Fairmont Private Schools.

The event, which took place in the school's soundproof music studio, was an audience participatory musical journey to America, Jamaica, South Africa, Thailand, Wales, Israel, England and West Africa.

Activities included singing songs, listening to stories, and dancing and playing instruments representing the various countries. The kids had the chance to hear the sounds and feel the rhythm as they played such musical instruments as maracas or one of the 14 African tubano drums.

Kids and parents joined hands to form a circle, patted their legs and waved their hands in the air as they cultured a dance similar to a traditional Jewish folk dance.

The program culminated with spare time for the kids to play with the school's full set of children xylophones, called Orff instruments. Participants each received a special musical instrument, a woodblock, to take home and play the songs learned during the program.

"We know that these experiences at the early childhood level are important for their social, emotional, logical and physical growth," said SarahLynn Zavoral, music specialist. "It also helps lay the basis for when we teach them music literacy in the elementary grades."

Fairmont Private Schools offers program for preschool through eighth grades. The schools also offer summer camp programs.