This was just posted on Billboard.com:
The 2011 Billboard Music Awards will air on ABC live from the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on May 22, in partnership with the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. The announcement was made today by Richard D. Beckman, CEO of Prometheus Global Media, which owns Billboard. The live broadcast will be co-executive produced by Mr. Beckman and Don Mischer of Don Mischer Productions. "This show marks the first of several broadcast platforms we plan to build around the Billboard franchise," Beckman said. "We have an incredible network partner and with Don Mischer, one of the finest producers in the world. We look forward to entertaining music fans with Billboard's own rendition of a televised celebration of music."...
Unless you're an obsessive fan of Kicks Like a Mule's 1992 rave hit the Bouncer – and let's face it, that leaves about three of you – then chances are you won't recognise the man sat sprawled across a big brown leather couch in his Ladbroke Grove offices. If, however, you are a fan of innovative new music, then you probably should. For this is Richard Russell, the boss of XL Recordings, a label that has bucked the trend for gloomy music industry stories over the past decade by breaking a stream of commercially successful yet critically drooled-over artists.
The Prodigy, Dizzee Rascal and MIA have all made music on XL, showcasing exactly what the label does best – taking innovative music into the mainstream. Whether it is Dizzee's success opening the doors for the current grime/pop success of Tinie Tempah et al, or Vampire Weekend heralding the indie scene's recent obsession with Afropop, XL likes to break new artists and build the foundation blocks of an emerging scene as it does so. ...
Shortly after christmas, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof opened an account on Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblog service that, like Twitter, allows users to share short messages of up to 140 characters. Kristof began testing what topics would be censored. He found out quickly. One of his first messages was "Can we talk about Falun Gong?" — a reference to the spiritual movement banned by Beijing. Within an hour of his first post, Kristof's account was canceled.
At first glance it would seem that China's new Internet is a lot like its old Internet. Overseas sites that are deemed sensitive — including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, among thousands of others — are blocked, part of a network of control sometimes called the Great Firewall of China. Inside the wall, Chinese search engines won't, for example, link to content to do with the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo or Tibetan independence; also, domestic Internet companies are required to delete any material that the authorities find objectionable. Even as China's Netizens have rushed to embrace Web 2.0, an Internet in which users are more closely and quickly linked by social-networking services, microblogs and free video hosting, those rules have still applied. ...