Recording Industry

Los Angeles alternative-music icon Jane's Addiction will re-form for a one-off performance Wednesday night at El Rey Theatre as part of the inaugural NME Awards USA ceremony. It will be the first time all four original members -- Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro, Eric Avery and Stephen Perkins -- have shared a stage since 1991. The band will receive the Godlike Genius Award for its contribution to pop music at the event, which was designed to boost the profile of the UK music magazine among U.S.

Millionaire Steve Bing is getting into the music business. Looking to expand the holdings of his Shangri-La Entertainment -- the feature film production company behind Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones documentary "Shine a Light," among other projects -- Bing has recruited one of the music industry's heavy hitters, Jeff Ayeroff, to guide his new Santa Monica-based boutique record label, Shangri-La Music, to success.

The executives behind a new music service called Qtrax wanted to get the industry talking. They did -- for the wrong reasons. Brilliant Technologies Corp., the publicly traded parent company of Qtrax, said Sunday that it had opened the first Napster-like network to feature free music from the four major record labels with their permission.

When you're not inclined to give away your product for free, make your customers believe that they're getting something for nothing. That's the thinking behind some of the offerings music fans may see this year as the recording industry scrambles to offset losses from plunging CD sales and find new sources of revenue when many people simply download music for free.

A late-year burst of holiday good cheer made pop tenor Josh Groban's "Noel" to the biggest-selling album of 2007, with nearly 3.7 million copies in the three months since it was released. It also made Groban the year's top-selling recording artist, with a total of 4.8 million albums sold during the year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. He bested the No. 2 finisher, Hannah Montana, by nearly 1 million albums. "Noel" topped the soundtrack to "High School Musical 2," which sold just shy of 3 million copies, and the Eagles' first studio album in 28 years, "Long Road Out of Eden," which has sold 2.6 million copies.

U.S. consumers shied away from compact discs and digital video discs last year, and sales of Internet downloads failed to make up the difference. Album sales fell 15% to 500.5 million units, market researcher Nielsen SoundScan reported Thursday. In 2006, total sales fell 4.9%. The figures underscore the industry's failure to combat music piracy with a campaign of lawsuits and threats. Although digital album sales rose 53% to 50 million units, they represented only 10% of the total.

Much of the most-prized music these days is housed in big rooms, whether it's the massive Staples Center or its still-large baby brother Nokia Theatre, but there was a time in the late '60s and early '70s when the best music was frequently showcased in small rooms -- the rootsy Ash Grove on Melrose, the honky-tonkish Palomino on Lankershim and, above all, the folk-oriented Troubadour on Santa Monica.

Sony Music must pay the founder of a small record company $5 million for failing to put his company's logo on reissues of Meat Loaf's "Bat Out of Hell" album, a federal appeals court ruled. Steve Popovich, 65, who started Cleveland International Records in 1977 and soon afterward signed the singer named Marvin Lee Aday, persuaded Epic Records to release the wildly successful album. Epic was owned at the time by CBS. Sony, which bought out CBS Records, paid $6.

Pop star Madonna has dropped her long-term music label Warner Bros. and signed a multi-album, touring and merchandising global partnership with Live Nation Inc., the concert touring company said Tuesday. Los Angeles-based Live Nation said the deal would include making Madonna a shareholder of the company, though financial terms were not released in the statement.

A woman facing a $222,000 music-sharing verdict asked a judge Monday to overturn it. Jurors in a case that six record companies brought against Jammie Thomas found that she violated the companies' copyrights by offering 24 songs over the Kazaa file-sharing network. They ordered Thomas, a mother of two who makes $36,000 a year, to pay the companies $222,000. In a motion filed Monday, Thomas' attorney, Brian Toder, did not argue that she hadn't violated the copyrights.