Philippe Dauman Jr., triumphant Googler, entrepreneur, and son of Viacom's CEO, you're our new hero. So we made a playlist for you. Forgive us: We didn't have a password to your music startup, Yuzu, so we used rival Pandora's algorithm to find music about coke, boys, girls, boys and girls, and other things we…
If you aren't yet familiar with magical Mormon munchkin David Archuleta, chances are you will be soon. Already dubbed the Chosen One by the LAT, the 17-year-old singing wunderkind seems as though he were literally fashioned out of plasticine by disconcertingly bedentured Idol producer Nigel Lythgoe, ready…
When GenesSecret.com burst upon the scene on Tuesday, we questioned whether it really featured Kiss bassist Gene Simmons, or just a lookalike. The revolution of the gossip culture wrought by the Web has transformed the consumption of celebrity lives. Since Paris Hilton went exposed, we're awash in fake sex-tape…
"Watch the sex tape Gene doesn't want you to see," GenesSecret.com promises. The website purportedly hosts a NSFW sex tape of Kiss frontman Gene Simmons. Leave aside the question of whether anyone wants to see Simmons in flagrante. Does Simmons himself really object to the site? Nothing revives the Q factor of an…
While American Idol is still a ratings powerhouse and one of the strongest franchises on television, there is no denying that the brand has taken more than its fair share of lumps since Jordin Sparks was crowned the winner of the show's sixth season. In addition to stillborn debuts from last season's two finalists…
What do you say about Mark Lisanti that doesn't instantly start sounding like pathetic gushing? Is he one of the funniest, most brilliant writers ever to put fingers to keyboard? Of that there is no doubt. Has he left a mark? Try a Godzilla-sized footprint. Working with him over the last three years has been nothing…
"Snoop seems to have singlehandedly snatched the is-he-or-isn't-he irony confusion crown from R. Kelly," says tech exec Anil Dash, the blogger who appeared in the New York Times in a Goatse t-shirt. Dash figures that R. Kelly's "Trapped In The Closet" got boring when the artist realized the inanity of his own…
It-girl actress Scarlett Johansson held a listening party last night to preview her upcoming album of Tom Waits covers. Waits, America's coolest living man, has reportedly given his blessing to the album for reasons known only to his own enigmatic self. Singing ditties for Barack Obama has not satisfied Scarlett,…
Jakob Lodwick's brief, one-sided spat with fellow Web-music entrepreneur Peter Rojas was just a warm-up act. Lodwick has announced his new project, Normative. We'll make this short, since Lodwick squanders endless words on a heart-wrenching tale of the music industry's slide and his efforts to purchase normative.com…
The time has come for MTV Networks beleaguered slavey permalancers to learn their fate. Brand-new human resources lady Catherine Houser issued a memo an hour ago to the Viacom subsidiary's contractors, announcing they would learn if they were among the lucky group whose positions will be converted to staff jobs, as…
Ousted Vimeo founder/CEO Jakob Lodwick has fallen into Tumblr-blogged obscurity. Without a scantily clad photo of Jakob and Julia every morning, why should we continue to care about his budding musical exploits? Lodwick must have gotten the memo, for he's taken on fellow nerd-hottie hipster entrepreneur Peter Rojas…
Buried in the bottom of Clive Thompson's interview with the man who rebutted The Tipping Point is a description of a neat little study of how music catches on in subcultures. Yahoo research scientist Duncan Watts gave eight online groups of people the same collection of songs and let them rate and discuss them. As…
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry — that's the RIAA for the rest of the world — says illegal music downloads outnumbered legal ones 20 to 1 in 2007. The music-industry association also expects CD sales, which dropped 11 percent between 2005 and 2006, to drop further in 2007. To the industry,…
Stuck coding PHP for Facebook when all you really want in life is to belt out tunes to an adoring crowd? Don't take it out on your users, indentured code monkeys — dream big! That's what geek rocker Jonathan Coulton did. "I actually meant to become a famous musician when I first moved to New York after college, but…
Yesterday, we received a poem from someone calling themselves Romantic Danzig, titled "poem for Jessica Joffe because she blocked my email." Whatever! But then we received separate information that Joffe, the glam writer (Vogue! Glamour! Observer alum!) and former Banana Republic model had broken up with scruffy…
It's not often that we run tips from maids, but something about this e-mail from a woman who purports to be a cleaning lady temporarily employed at the manse of American Idol's muscle-shirted dream-douser Simon Cowell instantly caught our attention:
Elyse Sewell, the beat-up ex-girlfriend of the indie-band Shins keyboard player (and former America's Next Top Model contestant!), had to go to court today. "Soon I will find out whether I will be prosecuted or the District Attorney will drop the felony charges," she Livejournals. (She bit the keyboardist in…
Justin Timberlake, released by Sony's Jive label, will soon be available in MP3. This big news we found buried in a report that Sony BMG, the last of the four major record labels to hold onto copy-protection software, is finally going to embrace the MP3 format. The inevitable decision has generated a lot of drivel…
Why did FuckedCompany creator Philip "Pud" Kaplan record a profane song, "Fuck," in August under the name "Farty McPoopants"? The pseudonym is easy enough to explain: His current venture is AdBrite, an online-advertising network. And selling ads is a business that's all about keeping up appearances. Given his past,…
We sacrificed vidkid Alex Goldberg to possible pneumonia and sent him to check out the joint WGA-Viacom protest outside Viacom this afternoon. There was some confusion among WGAers about what exactly they were doing in midtown, other than, you know, trying for the 39th day in a row to get paid or something. "The MTV…
