Apple Computer Inc. said Monday it introduced a new version of its successful iPod digital music player, boasting extended battery life.

Apple (AAPL: Research, Estimates) said the new model iPod has up to 12 hours of battery life, compared with eight hours on the previous models.

Poor battery performance in some iPods has drawn criticism in spite of otherwise rave reviews for the breakthrough music player.

The 20-gigabyte model, which can hold about 5,000 songs, has a list price of $299, while the 40-gigabyte model costs $399, nearly a $100 price reduction for each model.

Apple, best known for its Macintosh computer, has found huge success in digital music, selling more than 3 million iPods and taking a 50 percent share of the digital music player market. The iPod has been one of the main engines of growth for the company.

Apple’s iTunes online music service is the most popular legal download site, claiming 70 percent of all songs bought online.

Source CNN.com.

Faced with slow amphitheater business this summer, House of Blues has partnered with Ticketmaster and AOL to offer $20 tickets to more than 80 concerts at 17 venues throughout the United States. The promotion includes $20 tickets without per-ticket service charges, as well as some two-for-one reserved seats and four-for-three lawn seat offers.

Concerts featuring Jessica Simpson, Linkin Park, the Cure, Ozomatli, Josh Groban, George Benson and Linda Ronstadt are among those included in the promotion, as are Ozzfest and the Maybelline New York Chicks With Attitude tours.

While the House of Blues Web site says details of each offer will be posted there tomorrow (July 19), the Ticketmaster site already has offers in place for various shows at venues in Ohio, Colorado, California, Washington, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and Texas. The promotion is set to end Sunday.

Here is the list of venues included in the House of Blues discounted tickets offer:

Blossom Music Center – Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio
Coors Amphitheatre – Englewood, Col.
Coors Amphitheatre – Chula Vista, Calif.
Greek Theatre (in association with Nederlander Concerts) – Los Angeles
Gorge Amphitheatre – George, Wash.
HiFi Buys Amphitheatre – Atlanta
Marymoor Park – Redmond, Wash.
Paramount’s Carowinds – Charlotte, N.C.
Paramount King’s Dominion – Doswell, Va.
Paramount King’s Island – Kings Mills, Ohio
Paramount Redwood Amphitheatre – Santa Clara, Calif.
Paramount Theatre – Denver
Red Rocks Amphitheatre – Morrison, Col.
Amphitheatre at Regency Park – Cary, N.C.
Scene Pavilion – Cleveland
Smirnoff Music Center – Dallas
Universal Amphitheatre – Universal City, Calif.

Source billboard.com.

Paul Weller will release his eighth album, Studio 150, in September. The covers album will be the former Jam frontman’s first release as part of a new worldwide deal with V2 Records.

Among the twelve tracks are Weller’s takes on folk-rock staples like Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” and Tim Hardin’s “Don’t Make Promises,” along with some R&B and disco-era gems including Sister Sledge’s “Thinking of You” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Bottle.”

The album is Weller’s first since 2002’s Illumination and continues a prolific recording clip since he broke up his second band, the Style Council, in 1989 and released his self-titled solo debut in 1992.

Weller said that his interpretation of the Seventies R&B nugget “Wishing on a Star” (originally recorded by Rose Royce) is his favorite track on the record. “I was listening to the radio one morning,” he said, “when I heard the song and suddenly it made perfect sense.”

Source rollingstone.com.

The Wu-Tang Clan reunited Saturday in San Bernardino, California, for an eighty-minute performance that was recorded for a live album, due September 28th, and a DVD due October 12th.

The show marked the first appearance of all ten Wu-Tang members together in a decade, three thousand miles from their native New York. Prior to taking the stage with Method Man, Ghostface, Raekwon, Cappadonna, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, GZA, Inspectah Deck, U God, and Masta Killa, a hyped-up RZA spoke backstage about what it meant to have the crew back together, if only for one night.

“Everybody being so busy and so occupied that to end up here it’s a good thing,” he said. “Wu-Tang went to Europe last month, but ODB’s on parole, so he couldn’t go. Meth has a TV show, couldn’t go, wanted to go. But here it is now, there are no obstacles.”

Gathered to headline Rock the Bells — an eight-hour hip-hop festival that also featured Redman and Dilated Peoples — Wu-Tang took the stage of the National Orange Show Event Center at 11:15 p.m. before a capacity audience of 8,000, who’d started chanting Wu-Tang the moment Redman left the stage.

With the ten members bouncing back and forth between harmonious raps and solo leads, Wu-Tang drew on all four group albums, including such signature songs as “Triumph” and a sing-along version of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing to F’ Wit,” as well as the MCs’ solo material.

As for the question of whether this show, and the group’s recent successful tour of Europe, might lead to the first Wu-Tang album since 2001’s Iron Flag, RZA seemed hopeful. “I’m gonna let time tell,” he said, “but I’m pretty sure the rush we get from tonight is gonna lead us to wanting to continue this.”

Source rollingstone.com.

R.E.M. will release their thirteenth album in October, just before the presidential election. And Michael Stipe wouldn’t have it any other way.

“For better or worse, the current state of the world has had a profound impact on the way I’m writing,” says the singer, who is in the midst of finishing up the record in Miami with guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills. “But this isn’t a downer of a record. Even the most depressing R.E.M. song is going to have a glimmer of hope in it. That’s just me, I can’t help myself. But there’s some stuff on here that’s pretty hard-core, and fairly political.”

The political tracks include a fleshed-out version of the Internet-only release “Final Straw,” which was written prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and “I’m Gonna DJ,” about the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle, but the Iraqi war served as the creative impetus for much of the new material.

“At this time, as an American, I feel like the angriest pacifist in the world, and I don’t think I’m alone in that,” says Stipe. “It’s not an easy time to live through.

R.E.M. dabble in more than just politics, as Stipe characterizes “Leaving New York” as a love song and “Wanderlust” as a pop song. “There’s been a lot of pop music in 2004 that’s really seductive, and you don’t have to think all that much about it,” he says. “I’m all for that.”

The album — produced by Pat McCarthy, who handled 1998’s Up and 2001’s Reveal — features the debut of R.E.M.’s new full-time drummer, former Ministry basher Bill Rieflin.

“Peter brought him in,” says Stipe. “He thought he could pull us in a different direction, and [Rieflin] really responds to the singer, which is great.”

The band has yet to plot tour plans for the fall, but Stipe promises that either he or the band will continue to work with political organizations like MoveOn.org up until the election “in some capacity.” In the meantime, he’s looking forward to the reaction that fans will have to the group’s new-found anger.

“It may be the most chaotic bunch of songs we’ve ever thrown together,” he says. “They’re going to surprise our fans and shock others.”

Source rollingstone.com.

The Foo Fighters are building a studio in Los Angeles to record their next RCA project, frontman Dave Grohl tells Billboard. The group recorded its past several albums in Grohl’s basement in Virginia.

“I think it’s going to be a two-record set,” he says. “It’s going to be 10 acoustic songs and then 10 tracks that are just koo-koo, really heavy.” He adds that the Foos already have a lot of acoustic material that the band has never recorded.

As for his previously announced work on the upcoming Nine Inch Nails album, Grohl says NIN leader Trent Reznor called to ask if he would play, and they went into Sound City Studio in Van Nuys, Calif., the next day. “It sounds incredible,” Grohl says of the NIN material. “It is [Trent’s] first [studio] album in five years. I looked at him and said, ‘What have you been doing?'”

Source billboard.com.

The historic 1985 Live Aid concert will finally be released on DVD in the fall. Earlier this year, the Band Aid Trust agreed to auction the global rights for the concerts for the first time, after pirated copies were found for sale on the Internet.

Warner Vision International won the bidding and has set a Nov. 10 release date for a four-disc DVD package. The iconic Live Aid, held at London’s Wembley and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, raised more than $70 million for famine relief in Africa.

Among the acts that performed were a reunited Led Zeppelin, U2, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Neil Young and Queen. The DVDs will feature a documentary, “Food, Trucks & Rock’n’Roll,” plus performances from related Live Aid events around the world.

“Twenty years ago they not only played ‘real good for free,’ they took an issue that was nowhere on the agenda of the political world and placed it at the very top,” says concert organizer Bob Geldof. “By buying the Live Aid DVD, that day continues far off into some distant but hopefully better future for all those people in whose name those great artists played.”

Source billboard.com.

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Singer/songwriter Elliott Smith’s final album, “From a Basement on the Hill,” will be released Oct. 19 via Epitaph’s Anti- imprint. Smith committed suicide last October; the material he had been working on was posthumously overseen by members of his family, as well as longtime collaborator Rob Schnapf and musician Joanna Bolme.

The 15-track album features drumming by the Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd on opener “Coast to Coast,” while Quasi’s Sam Coomes plays bass and sings on “Pretty (Ugly Before),” which was issued in August 2003 as a single by Suicide Squeeze Records. The cut “A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity To Be Free” will appear first on MoveOn.org’s “Future Soundtrack for America” compilation, which hits stores Aug. 10.

Other song titles suggest Smith may have been contemplating suicide and revisiting his frequent themes of addiction, including “Strung Out Again,” “Shooting Star,” “Memory Lane” and “Last Hour.”

It is believed Smith had tracked more than 30 songs during work on the project, for which he’d reached an agreement with DreamWorks to release on an independent label of his choosing. But it’s unclear how many songs were complete, or if they will ever see the light of day. “He was always editing and working,” DreamWorks A&R executive Luke Wood told Billboard last year. “He always had a large cycle of songs that he was making better, and sometimes that cycle took years.”

Here is the track list for “From a Basement on the Hill”:

“Coast to Coast”
“Let’s Get Lost”
“Pretty (Ugly Before)”
“Don’t Go Down”
“Strung Out Again”
“Fond Farewell”
“King’s Crossing”
“Ostriches & Chirping”
“Twilight”
“A Passing Feeling”
“Last Hour”
“Shooting Star”
“Memory Lane”
“Little One”
“A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity To Be Free”

Source billboard.com.

Elvis Costello & the Imposters have been added to the Austin City Limits Music Festival lineup. Costello, a Grammy winner and Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame inductee, joins The Neville Brothers, Henry Butler, and Chris Robinson & The New Earth Mud as the latest artists to be confirmed for the September Festival.

These artists add to the more than 130 other performers confirmed for
the Festival including The Pixies, Sheryl Crow, Ben Harper & the
Innocent Criminals, Trey Anastasio, Jack Johnson, Big Head Todd & the
Monsters, Calexico, Franz Ferdinand, Dashboard Confessional, Wilco, Los Lonely Boys and many others.

More than 200,000 music lovers are expected to converge on Austin, TX,
Sept. 17-19, for the third annual Austin City Limits Music Festival, one of the nation’s most anticipated music events. Set in downtown Austin’s beautiful Zilker Park, the ACL Music Festival is a larger than life extension of the television program and returns bigger and better in 2004, with eight stages, more than 130 music performances, a vibrant artist village, the unique tastes of local food vendors and much more.

Pianist Brad Mehldau’s next album, “Live in Tokyo,” will arrive Aug. 31 via Nonesuch. The set features covers of Nick Drake’s “Things Behind the Sun” and “River Man,” Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android,” Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Dream” and the George Gershwin standards “Someone To Watch Over Me” and “How Long Has This Been Going On?”

Mehldau will end a short break from the road July 26 in La Roque, France, with a North American tour due to kick off Sept. 28 at New York’s Village Vanguard. The artist already has a handful of shows scheduled in 2005 with the John Scofield Trio.

Source billboard.com.