Howard Stern’s newest business: Auctioning a 22-year-old girl’s virginity! Going by the name Natalie Dylan for safety precautions, this girl is willing to auction her virginity on Sirius radio to pay for her college tuition. She has agreed to take a polygraph test and a gynecological exam to prove she is in fact a virgin.

I really have doubts about this after reading that the owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Nevada’s legal brothel, introduced her to Stern and is hosting the auction. Supposedly she knows Dennis Hof from the Bunny Ranch because her sister works there.

Her stepfather took out student loans in her name and she is unable to pay for her education at Sacramento State University. She is doing this to empower women around the world. Start yer bidding!

After being knocked to the ground by an attacker during Sunday night’s Oasis show in Toronto, Noel Gallagher has been advised to cancel tonight’s show. At least he got a doctor’s note…

From NME:

Following an incident during Oasis‘ performance at the Virgin Festival in Toronto, when Noel was attacked by a stage invader Oasis are regrettably being forced to announce that tonight’s show in London, Ontario cannot go ahead as planned.

Noel fell heavily on to his monitor speakers when he was pushed suddenly from behind by his attacker and suffered bruising to his ribs and hip. He was examined in a local hospital after the band’s performance and has been advised to rest. Unfortunately, despite resting up yesterday, the extent of his injuries mean he will not be able to perform tonight. The band are very keen to complete their Canadian tour and options for rescheduling the final London, Ontario show are currently being looked into. Ticket holders are asked to retain their tickets until a further announcement is made in a few days.

The highly touted boys from Brighton are back with their sophomore release, Konk, that hit stores earlier this week, but some are questioning whether the pre-release hype matches the merit. The Kook’s debut release Inside In/Inside Out was exceedingly well received, but reviews for Konk have been mixed. Betty Clarke of The Guardian gave the record 4 out 5 stars saying, “The woolliness of their debut has been replaced with a determined pop sound that dips into hard-edged rock,” but New Music Express was less than optimistic, and rather disappointed:

“What’s clear is that they’ve lost the songwriterly knack they originally wielded with abandon and replaced it with clichés and a foggy palimpsest of what they once had. We recommend they search high and low for that spark of brightness in time for album three.” NME.com

I haven’t picked up the record yet, but if the single is any indication it looks like I’m in store for a watered down version of Inside In/Inside Out. To be honest, when I first heard “Always Where I Need To Be” I thought I was still listening to The Kooks first album. Check out thise video below and decide for yourself.

The Kooks- “Always Where I Need To Be”

As mentioned last Friday, Coldplay has announced a June 17th release date for their fourth album, “Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends.” While writing that post, something clicked on in the back of my mind: this album has the potential to either keep Coldplay’s label EMI afloat for another year, or make necessary the eventual merger of EMI Music (including its subsidiaries like Capitol, Virgin, Astralwerks, Blue Note, Def Jux, Mute and Tooth & Nail) and Warner Music Group, who currently hold the 3rd and 4th place slots in “The Big Four.” Variety agrees that “Viva…” is shaping up to be something of a high-stakes venture. EMI’s certainly hoping that Coldplay’s X&Y wasn’t this:

I remember a time, not so long ago, when a record label depended on its solid roster to make the business float, not just a handful of high-profile superstar artists. Their top sellers would go quintuple-platinum, allowing for enough extra cash to take chances on smaller artists, grow them and support them until they break through, joining the ranks of the high-sellers (we used to call such a thing “artist development”). Britain-based EMI and its subsidiaries once boasted an amazing roster including the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and The Beach Boys. Now the label seems to be relying on one or two current chart busters, in this case Coldplay, and the repackaged back catalogs of their dusty dinosaurs.

Artist development on major labels is now a ting of the past (that’s what indie labels are for, right?); there’s no new EMI artist who comes close to replacing Radiohead, who left the label in 2007 after deciding that they no longer needed a record label. EMI can release Best of Radiohead (June 3rd), but no one stands a real chance at releasing another OK Computer….save Coldplay. It’s possible that Chris Martin and company can release an album with (almost) as much impact. But if Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends does any worse than 2005’s X&Y, I wouldn’t be surprised to see EMI/Warner Music rear its head in 2009/2010.

Until then, let’s look at what EMI will be releasing to keep its head above water, after the jump: (more…)

So granted, that video with the dude beating his wife or whatever was pretty corny, but TRJA did scan over 800k units of their first record, which even by today’s margins is no chump change, especially for a label like Virgin, whose roster reads like a dollar bin in a used record store. Nevertheless, in a blog post titled “Virgin Records, Soundwave, and our NEW record…” the band states:

Stay tuned for a series of important announcements regarding Virgin Records, the Soundwave cancellation, and our NEW record…

To our fans in Australia - an announcement has been making the rounds that we are not playing Soundwave in order to stay behind and make another record for VR - this information is highly inaccurate and something that we did not approve -the full story shortly. Don’t You Fake It.

Long Live The Alliance

-RJA-

Hints as to what this might mean are pretty much summed up elsewhere on their Myspace profile, where under label they list “none.” So the real question is who dumped who? The all-knowing wisdom of The Velvet Rope seems to to point to El Droppo, which is kind of sad until you remember….THEY ACTUALLY CALLED THEMSELVES THE RED JUMPSUIT APPARATUS!!111

Anyone who calls their band something like is srsly asking for it. But on the bright side, after selling 811,176 copies of their last record and touring on it for a couple years, each band member - after recouping costs for recording, promotion, tour support, etc - probably made literally tens of dollars, so I’m sure they won’t be hurting for a least a couple of days. Rock and Roll! The only job where your paycheck is really just a loan! In their downtime the members of TRJA are busy coming up with totally original concepts like this:

Actually…wait, didn’t that already happen?

Sir Richard Branson, billionaire owner of the Virgin Group, has taken one more step towards commercial space travel. Virgin Galactic, whose mission is “to fly passengers who are not professional astronauts to an altitude slightly over 100 kilometers (62 mi) and allow them to experience weightlessness for up to 6 minutes,” today introduced a model for the spacecraft at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The engine will be Canadian built, and seats upon “SpaceShipTwo” (great name) will cost about $200,000 apiece. Quite a deal for the budget traveler. Regardless, in the event of such a journey, I can say without hyperbole that there is only one man I would want sitting next to me on the ride up…