It has been almost two years since Elbow last toured the UK, but they are due back with a comprehensive set of dates for April 2008.

Their fourth album ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ has been keeping them busy in the studio and will be due for release through Fiction Records in March of next year.

As with their previous album ‘Leaders of the Free World’ the new material was recorded at Manchester’s Blueprint Studios. ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’ sees keyboardist Craig Potter taking on production and mixing duties.

Elbow received a Mercury nomination for their debut album ‘Asleep in the Back’ a Brit Award nomination for Best New British Act, and can count the likes of John Cale and Chris Martin as part of their fanbase. Cale, co-founder of the Velvet Underground, once cited Elbow’s ‘Switching Off’ as one of the greatest songs ever written in a BBC interview.

The April 2008 tour will allow their UK based fans to hear tracks from the new album in a live context.

Tickets are on sale from 9am Tuesday 18th December through www.gigsandtours.com and usual agents.

The ex-husband of Spice Girl Melanie Brown has had a legal request to prevent his nine year old daughter going on tour with her mother, blocked by a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge.

Jimmy Gulzar married Mel B in 1998 and the couple had a daughter together, Phoenix Chi, who is now nine years old.

Gulzar, once a backing dancer for the Spice Girls, refused to alter his visitation schedule while Brown toured outside the US with Phoenix Chi.

Judge Robert Schnider blocked Gulzar’s attempt to stop the child travelling abroad and Brown still maintains sole legal and physical custody of her daughter. Gulzar, who is Dutch, will have to reschedule visitation access over the next few months.

The Spice Girls continue to receive an ecstatic response from their fans as their World Tour heads for Beijing on January 10th 2008.

Warner Music Group has finally bowed to mounting pressure from the MP3-generation, after agreeing to sell music online without copyright protection on Amazon.com’s online music store …. reports Telegraph.co.uk …

Alongside Sony BMG, Warner has been a staunch advocate of digital rights-management (DRM) technology, a kind of digital encryption that vendors place on music files to prevent illegal copying, distribution and piracy.

Until now, Universal and EMI were the only major record labels to offer DRM-free tracks on Amazon, allowing people to download tracks in the universal MP3 format - meaning they can be played on most digital music devices, including Apple iPods, Microsoft Zunes, mobile phones, and any piece of software, such as Windows Media Player.

However, for the first time ever, Warner will now offer DRM-free music downloads exclusively on AmazonMP3, a rival to Apple’s iTunes music store.

Music from Warner’s artists, which include James Blunt, Madonna and Led Zeppelin, is currently available on iTunes - which enjoys a 70pc market share of digital music sales - although it is not DRM-free. This ensures that customers that purchase Warner’s music on iTunes can only play the tracks on their iPod devices.

Read this article in full at www.telegraph.co.uk.

A year after music legend James Brown died, the people who were close to him continue to fight over the future of his fortune and legacy.

Brown, who died on Christmas Day last year at the age of 73, continues to be remembered for a larger-than-life personality, his voice and flashy footwork inspiring generations of entertainers.

The Godfather of Soul won awards, recorded more than 110 charted singles and is credited by some with inventing funk and rap music.

As thousands attended public memorial services for Brown, the legal rifts surrounding his estate were forming.

It took two months for him to be buried, his body at one point resting in a sealed gold casket in his home.

After he was buried in March on one of his daughter’s properties, his family said a more public mausoleum was planned. There is still talk of a Graceland-like mansion at his South Carolina home.

To read this article in full visit www.music-news.com.

Despite the huge controversy surrounding his win over Rhydian Roberts, Leon Jackson, this years X Factor winner, has claimed the UK’s Christmas number one.

Jackson’s debut single ‘When You Believe’ sold over 275,000 copies, more than the top ten UK singles combined.

This will be the third successive year that Simon Cowell’s X Factor winner has secured the coveted number one spot.

“I’m absolutely over the moon. It’s the best Christmas and birthday present ever,” said the young singer. “Having the Christmas number one is an amazing ending to an amazing year and I’m overwhelmed and thrilled.”

However Leon, an 18-year-old shop assistant from West Lothian, has sold far fewer copies than his predecessors. Shayne Ward sold 742,000 copies of his debut single in 2005 and Leona Lewis, last years winner, managed 571,000.

Has the general public lost its enthusiasm for X Factor? Or has it just been a very average year for X Factor applicants and Simon Cowell’s choice of song?

The 2008 Radar Music Video Awards will be held in London at the ICA on Saturday 12th January as part of the London Short Film Festival.

Finalists are expected to travel to the event from as far afield as Korea, America and Romania, not only in the hope of winning one of the coveted awards, but also to meet with other professionals from the music video industry.

Caroline Bottomley, who founded Radar, is expecting young filmmakers to attend the awards and believes that her organisation can help new talent “Radar aims to help new music video director talent by promoting them and by generating professional opportunities and contacts. At least two finalists this year are going on to commissions from record labels.”

This year’s finalists, including videos for Kylie Minogue, The Heavy and Just Jack, can be viewed and voted for at http://www.dazeddigital.com/projects/radar/

Tickets for the awards can be bought from http://www.ica.org.uk/Radar%20Awards+15784.twl

RadarMusicVideos.com makes, showcases and reviews music videos from talented filmmakers worldwide. A new Radar showroom and commissioning site is launching in the new year, meanwhile filmmakers can subscribe to Radar at http://www.radarfestival.com/subscribe.html.

This time of year the classic festive tracks are in abundance. You can’t turn on a radio without hearing one blaring out at you. My personal favourite and many others it appears looking at the media reports is ‘Fairytale of New York’ by the Pogues. The BBC reports that this song has topped a chart of the UK’s most played Christmas song on UK radio over the past five years. The chart, calculated through radio, television and public performance plays, features Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ in second place and in third place Wham’s classic ‘Last Christmas’

I have to admit to loving all these songs and am so pleased that the classics come out tops. Without wishing to bang on about the X Factor again and the lack of artists with any staying power in the charts these days here is another example of artists with said staying power and not one hit wonders that reality/talent TV shows tend to give us year in year out.

As expected Leon Jackson this years winner of the UK’s X factor took the number one spot with a rather dubious version of ‘When You Believe’ a hit for mega stars Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and very hard act to follow. Obviously, they scored a double with as expected Leona Lewis last years winner of the show who also won the battle for the number one album slot as well. Let’s see what this pair are up to next year shall we?

Regardless, no doubt this festive season will have been a winner for the Record Companies with albums being classic stocking fillers including the Itunes download gift cards that seem to be also flying out of stores. There is no doubting that even with the recent Music Industry troubles people want music more than ever before and that can only be a good thing for the consumer. How we consume may be changing or has already but most importantly people still consume it by the bucket load and that includes me……Rock on 2008!!!

Check this link out for more on the festive favourites. For more on the X Factor story click here….

It has been announced today that Arabella Spencer-Churchill, one of the co-founders of Glastonbury festival, has died at the age of 58 from pancreatic cancer, reports NME.COM.

Spencer-Churchill, granddaughter of Winston Churchill, was one of the co-founders of the festival and had lived in the Somerset area where the event takes place since the age of 21.

Glastonbury festival organiser Michael Eavis paid tribute to Spencer-Churchill on the festival’s website. “Her energy, vitality and great sense of morality and social responsibility have given her a place in our festival history second to none,” he said.

“May her place in the great eternity be always peaceful and perhaps the mysteries of the heavens will accommodate her spirit forever.”

Read report at www.nme.com

Having blamed bad weather and a tired tour bus driver for a no show in court on Wednesday this week, R Kelly eventually appeared to face charges of child pornography in a Chicago court yesterday morning.

The R&B star was arrested in 2002 and accussed of having sex with a girl said to be fourteen years old at the time of the incident.

According to reports earlier this week his tour bus was stopped by authorities in Utah who insisted that the bus driver take an eight hour rest, after checking his log book.

During the thursday hearing Circuit Judge Vincent Gaughan said he was “very disappointed” Kelly had missed the court date a day earlier. He ordered Kelly to return to court on Friday, delaying the decision whether to mete out punishment for the misdemeanor.

Expressing his dissatisfaction yesterday Gaughan noted that the Wednesday court date had been set to accommodate Kelly’s schedule. “These are extraordinary matters to have these breaks given to you and then nobody shows up,” Gaughan said. “I don’t know what I am going to do. I have to consider it.”

However Edward Genson, Kelly’s attorney, reasonably pointed out that up until Wednesday R Kelly hadn’t missed a court date in over 100 appearances since the five year old case began.

R Kelly has always adamantly protested his innocence and the existence of video footage that he alledgely took whilst having sex with an under age girl.

We wait to see what today’s hearing will unfold …..

In a fascinating interview for the latest issue of Wired Magazine, Thom York of Radiohead has spoken at length with the great David Byrne about the risky decision to release their new album, In Rainbows, as a pay-what-you-will digital download.

Radiohead, forever darlings of music critics and fans alike, could not have doubted that there would be a huge demand for any new Radiohead material from the general buying public. However their plan was radical and generally considered somewhat of a gamble.

“[The optional pricing idea] was [manager Chris Hufford's] idea. We all thought he was barmy. As we were putting up the site, we were still saying, ‘Are you sure about this?’ But it was really good. It released us from something. It wasn’t nihilistic, implying that the music’s not worth anything at all. It was the total opposite”

The venture paid off. It is reported that in the first month, approximately one million fans downloaded In Rainbows and despite the fact that only 40 percent of the downloaders paid (on average $6 each) the band still netted almost $3 million. York has stated that the group has made more digital income from the release than from the rest of their back catalogue put together.

And in addition, for the very first time, the band own the master recording of the album allowing them to license the album to TBD Records/ATO Records Group, for general release in the old fashioned way. In Rainbow is due to go on sale in the US on Jan 1st 2008.

In the interview, York explains to Byrne, legendary songwriter and founding member of Talking Heads, that the idea came about purely as a result of circumstance.

“It was simply a response to a situation. We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do?

The experiment simply proves there is plenty of room for innovation in the music business. Byrne has investigated this premise and how artists can survive within the music industry today in an article entitled: David Byrne’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars, which is also featured in Wired.

For the complete interview and related articles visit: www.wired.com