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Briefly News and Comment: Emusic and Napster and TVT and MP3

By James Woster Staff Writer

plus: DMX. Brian Wilson tribute. Blaming Eminem for existing. Whiskeytown's last, finally released. Previously unreleased Nat.

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Online music company Emusic.com sued Napster for copyright infringement and unfair competition on Wednesday (3/7), Wired.com reported. But Emusic also requested that Napster reinstate users whose accounts it had terminated for trading songs from Emusic, and that's just cheesy.

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Record label TVT won its copyright infringement lawsuit against online music company MP3.com on Tuesday (3/6), CNet reported.

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Rapper DMX, who was due to be released from New York state's Erie County Correctional Facility on Tuesday (3/6), learned on Tuesday that he would be held for three more days due to bad behavior, at which point he allegedly assaulted a corrections officer, MTV.com reported. He was reportedly arraigned for felony assault, and reportedly denied the assault.

DMX was jailed for driving without a license, which he pleaded down a from drug possession charge.

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Madison Square Garden will hold the "All Star Tribute to Brian Wilson" on March 29, a show that TNT will air in June. Featured in the lineup are Elton John, Paul Simon and Heart, among others.

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Here's the lead paragraph from an NME.com story:

A 13-year-old girl "infatuated" with EMINEM hanged herself in her bedroom after been [sic] sent home from school for drinking alcohol, an inquest has heard.

One might then expect some sort of link between the rapper's music and the deceased to follow, right? Here's the next paragraph:

However, while recording a verdict of suicide in Winchester today (March 7), Central Hampshire Coroner Grahame Short went some way towards freeing the rapper of any blame for the death saying he did not know how much she had been influenced by Eminem.

"What the f---?" thinks the reader.

Next paragraph:

According to www.ananova.com, Kayleigh Davies was found by her father Martin (who had described his daughter as "infatuated" by Eminem), on December 20 last year. She was hanging from a belt attached to a cupboard in her room.

Ananova is, according to ananova.com, "best known for creating the world's first virtual newscaster," and Ananova is her name, and she's a computer-generated, green-haired woman, and her fans write in to ask her things like, "As a shoe fetishist, I wonder what kind of shoes you wear?"

Reading on, one realizes that Eminem could not be less relevant to this girl's suicide, and in the last paragraph, one learns that a 17-year-old boy killed himself last September and quoted lyrics to Eminem's "Rock Bottom" in the suicide note.

Another reminder that one should always be skeptical when reading British journalism.

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Lost Highway Records will release Whiskeytown's "Pneumonia," the band's last album, on April 22. Short version: the album has been in limbo since the Universal/Polygram merger. Whiskeytown's Ryan Adams [ tickets ] told LiveDaily that the defunct band will not regroup to promote the album.

Ryan Adams has his own record due this summer, according to Lost Highway's website, and Lucinda Williams [ tickets ] is set to release her Lost Highway debut in late May. Robert Earl Keen's label debut is due in late June.

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Capitol Records will release "Night Lights," a Nat King Cole [ tickets ] album containing 12 unreleased tracks, on June 5. Here's the track listing, according to a press release: