plus: SHeDAISY member sues the karoake industry for copyright infringement. Film industry sues Aimster for copyright infringement. Another Napster lawsuit. Digital music may be exempted from sales tax. 'NSync's future. MTV and MTV2. Don't give your phone number to a music geek.

Billboard.com reported on a court case revolving around Nirvana [ tickets ]'s music:

On one side is Courtney Love, widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. On the other side are Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, the two surviving members of the defunct grunge band.

The three people make up the corporation Nirvana L.L.C., and split proceeds from the corporation three ways.

Grohl and Novoselic want to release a previously unreleased song--a song that Billboard describes as "a song recorded by Cobain with Nirvana"--on a forthcoming Nirvana box set.

Love requested, and received, a court injunction against the song's release.

Love wants to dissolve Nirvana L.L.C., saying that she was "emotionally overwrought and distraught" when she signed the agreement.

Eminem's recent conviction and sentencing on a weapons charge could result in the Australian government denying him a visa, which would mean that he couldn't play planned July shows in Sydney and Melbourne, Australian wire services reported.

Liverpool, England, is renaming its airport after John Lennon, BBC News reported.

From the It Was Only a Matter of Time Department:

Kristyn Osborn of the band SHeDAISY has filed a copyright-infringement suit against Pocket Songs, a division of MMO Music Group, described by Country.com as a "karaoke giant."

According to the article, Osborn said that she "chose to file a one-songwriter, one-song suit to educate the public about the plight of songwriters whose copyrights are ignored. In this case, she chose her song 'I Will…But,' a Top 5 hit for her group."

Speaking of SHeDAISY, here's a plea to future bands:

When naming your band, take a minute to consider the music journalists and copy editors who will have figure out exactly how your name is spelled.

Do you know how much time we've spent determining, like, does Run-DMC have hyphens, or periods, or all caps, and is the "b" in Blink-182 uppercase or lowercase, and is it (hed)pe or hed(pe)? And don't even get me started on freaking 'NSync.

Time spent seeking those answers could be much better spent hitting up record labels for CDs that we have no intention of writing about.

A little consideration, that's all we ask.

Seven major film studios--Columbia, Disney, MGM, Paramount, Sony, 20th Century Fox and Universal--have filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against music file-trading service Aimster, the Hollywood Reporter reported.

The Associated Press reported, "A company that sells meditation music has filed a federal lawsuit against Napster, alleging that a warning notice included with its product is omitted in the file-swapping service's version. The music may pose a danger to drivers or heavy-machinery operators, who could fall asleep from the mellow sound tracks, according to documents filed in Portland's U.S. District Court."

The House Energy and Commerce Committee plans to consider legislation that would make "intangible goods sold over the Internet"--such as digital music--exempt from sales tax, Reuters reported.

From a fairly positive review of 'NSync's June 22 Cleveland show in Cleveland Scene:

But there was a strange irony at work. Despite the boy-band mania (we saw girls with photos of their favorite members glued to their T-shirts, the boys' names scrawled on their arms in magic marker), 'N Sync is trying to distance itself from its teen fan base (at some shows, Joey has even been seen wearing a shirt that reads "boy bands suck"). That's right. They're boys who wanna be men. In interviews, they talk about their forthcoming album, Celebrity, as if it's sophisticated stuff--the culmination of time spent listening to cutting-edge electronic music from the U.K. They even enlisted BT (a noted American electronic producer) to tweak "Pop," a song littered with the kind of off-kilter R&B tracks that typify two-step, the latest British dance craze.

Undoubtedly, the group is trying to avoid what Entertainment Weekly is calling the impending "teen bust," the fallout inevitable when the teen audience buying records by 'N Sync, the Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears moves on to something else. The end of the boy-band fad is near, and 'N Sync is doing everything it can to ensure a long musical shelf life. That's what this PopOdyssey was really supposed to be about.

From the Seattle Weekly, regarding the arrival of the MTV2 channel to Seattle cable subscribers:

MTV2 general manager Dave Cohn tells Seattle Weekly, "People kept complaining about the lack of videos, but they were watching the nonmusic programming in greater and greater numbers." So, are the Cribs and TRL aficionados and the record store clerks and Radiohead-crazy urbanites one and the same? Well, as Cohn says, the median viewer age jumps from 20 years old for the original to an ancient 24 years old for its offspring.

Rhino Records' Handmade imprint has a suggestion box on its website in which one can place suggestions on which out-of-print albums Rhino should reissue. Rhino has "Archivists" who consider these requests.

On June 22, Rhino's webmaster sent out a missive regarding this process, and the "ugly and unacceptable turn of events" that the process has taken:

A Particularly Fervent Collector of the works of A Particular Singer decided to post information from the private correspondence he had exchanged with An Archivist who was investigating the possibility of this release in a public messageboard on a website which discussed That Particular Singer's work. This posting includes the Archivist's name and other private contact information. As a result, this Archivist suddenly began receiving a clogging amount of e-mails and telephone calls from people who also sought the release of That Particular Singer's out of print album. And, even more bizarrely, many different people at Rhino Records, our Corporate Benefactor, simultaneously began to receive correspondence and telephone calls from many of these same Fervent Collectors.

The Archivists like Fervent Collectors. The Archivists ARE Fervent Collectors themselves. But The Archivists also believe the violation of privacy which resulted in the public posting of anyone's personal, private contact information, without first getting their permission, is completely unacceptable. Especially when this violation of privacy was done solely to try to provoke attention for A Particular Suggested Project.

The Archivists will not do anything that makes it appear that the violation of anyone's privacy is an effective bargaining tool. And if The Archivists have to abandon all consideration of A Particular Suggested Project, or cancel any Project already in progress, in order to ensure their personal privacy and the privacy of their Archival Cousins at Rhino Records, Our Corporate Benefactor, they will absolutely do so.

And should that occur, there will be no brand new key that will re-ignite any of those candles in the rain. ["Brand New Key" and "Candles in the Rain" are albums from Melanie.]

Be enthusiastic.
Be persistent.
But be respectful.