Music Industry

The Recording Academy has set Feb. 8 as the date for the 51st Annual Grammy Awards, to be held once again at Staples Center in Los Angeles. The Grammys have been telecast live from Staples Center since 2000, except in 2003, when the awards were held in New York. The academy said the eligibility period for the Grammys will be Oct. 1, 2007, to Sept. 30, 2008, meaning some of the year's blockbuster releases will be recognized a year late, as October and November tend to be two of the music industry's busiest months.

The first week of December has been circled for the grand opening of the Grammy Museum in downtown Los Angeles. Rock and blues historian Bob Santelli has been named executive director of the four-story, 30,000-square-foot interactive exhibit space. Instead of jamming its relatively limited floor space with guitars and memorabilia, the museum is conceived as a hub for lectures, live music and traveling exhibits, the first of which will be a survey of political music entitled "Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom."

She did it her way, with boots that were made for walking, when Nancy Sinatra followed in her famous father's footsteps by becoming a singer. Now, just as the late Frank Sinatra did, she's striding down another similar path -- activism for fellow musicians. On Wednesday, she headlined a House subcommittee hearing, urging lawmakers to force broadcast radio stations to pay royalties to performers and record companies when the stations air their songs.

The Grammy Foundation's annual Starry Night benefit dinner will honor longtime Beatles producer George Martin on July 12 at USC. Slated to perform are Burt Bacharach, Jeff Beck, Natalie Cole, Dave Grusin, Tom Jones and Michael McDonald, among others. The dinner and concert will benefit the Grammy Foundation, which provides programs for future generations of music professionals and helps preserve the nation's musical heritage. In addition, Martin will lead a multimedia presentation on "The Making of Sgt. Pepper" at the campus on July 11. For ticket information on both events, go to www. grammyfoundation.

Coldplay has become the first British act in more than a decade to reach the top of Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart with "Viva La Vida," the first single from the group's new album. The single logged 246,000 digital copies sold, which pushed it into the No. 1 slot, according to Billboard. The album, "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," was released Tuesday and is also expected to top the national album chart when those figures are finalized next week. The Spice Girls' "Wannabe" was the last single from a British group to hit No. 1, in early 1997.

As music business headlines go, the one that arrived this week was a golden oldie, a half-forgotten tune from happier days: A new album soared to the top of the charts, selling more than 1 million copies in a single week. It was the first time in 39 months that any album performed that feat, and across the industry the numbers were met with shock and delight.

Howard Brandy, 79, a longtime entertainment publicist who got his start in pop music and eventually moved on to high-profile film campaigns, died Monday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after what his family said was a long illness. Brandy worked to promote many films, including "The Last Emperor," all of the "Police Academy" movies, "Young Frankenstein," "Quest for Fire" and "My Favorite Year." He also handled the Academy Award campaigns for such movies as Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown" and Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's "All About My Mother," which won an Oscar for best foreign film of 1999.

Talk about a peculiar way of celebrating a worldwide smash hit. In 2006, Downtown Records was just a scrappy indie start-up label with a skeletal staff of four working out of the chief executive's downtown Manhattan apartment. Enter hip-hop-rock-soul duo Gnarls Barkley, whose work was Downtown's first release. Inside of a few months, the group's infectious single "Crazy" had become the feel-good hit of summer, hitting No. 1 in the U.K.

When the doorbell rings at Monti Olson's Glendale home in the middle of the night, it can mean only one thing: Jeff Bowers, his partner in Original Recordings Group, has brought new album artwork for him to inspect. "I'll come out in my pajamas and look it over," Olson said. "He drives home, and I'll go back to bed." Olson's doorbell is chiming more frequently these days. Since starting vinyl-only label ORG in December 2006 in Olson's kitchen, the label is bursting at the seams.

Artists including Neil Young and Bob Dylan have made no secret of their distaste for digital sound. But Grammy-winning producer T Bone Burnett believes he's found a way to affordably give listeners an experience akin to hearing studio master tapes. Since last fall, Burnett, the mastermind behind such roots-oriented releases as the "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack, has been working with a team of engineers on a high-fidelity audio system called Code.