Category: News

’Tis the season for Dean Martin — the one month of the year when he’s ubiquitous once again, haunting tinseled malls and cocktail-party playlists, a ghost of Christmas past whose voice can make even the balmiest West Coast day feel like a marshmallow world in the winter. Of the 10 most-played Dino tracks on Spotify right now, seven are holiday novelties — jovial corn for popping. “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” is No. 1, with 351 million streams, presumably racked up largely between Black Friday and New Year’s Day.

It’s a strange state of affairs for an artist who was once a year-round fixture of the entertainment landscape — a genial omnipresence whose breezy, boozy, hardly-workin’ charm came across on every platform he touched, from stage to screen to radio to records, in comedy and drama and celebrity roasts.

Read more at latimes.com

“I’m very pleased about this partnership,” Ronstadt said. “It feels like home”

Following deals with the Beach Boys and David Crosby, Linda Ronstadt is the latest artist to sell her catalog to Irving Azoff’s new company Iconic Artists Group.

Although Ronstadt is one of the best-selling artists of all time, the fact that she’s not a songwriter makes her deal different from the Beach Boys, who sold a controlling interest in their intellectual property, and from David Crosby, whose deal contained his publishing rights. Instead, Iconic has acquired Ronstadt’s assets, in a sale that includes name and likeness to promote the masters.

Read the full story at RollingStone.com

Twin sisters Casey and Timolin Cole were born into a life of unusual luxury in Hancock Park to a father nicknamed “King” whose success was so great that the historic Capitol Records building not far away in Hollywood was nicknamed “The House That Nat Built.”

Caretakers of legendary singer-bandleader-pianist Nat “King” Cole’s legacy and estate through their King Cole Productions, for decades they have helped maintain and advance their dad’s uniquely American story. It’s one that began with his youth as a precocious Chicago teenage jazz pianist and ended, in 1965, with his death from lung cancer at age 45, an icon whose crossover success and remarkable musicality changed 20th century American culture.

Read the full story at latimes.com

Irving Azoff wants to preserve artists’ legacy in the age of music streaming—and his own.

The music industry completist has run several companies, including a concert promoter and a record label, and has managed some of the biggest artists of many generations…

Read the full story at wsj.com

“Feel Flows: The Sunflower and Surf’s Up Sessions, 1969-1971” explores a time of experimentation and reinvention for the band.

The quintessential American rock band of the ’60s, whose sun-kissed harmonies and string of girls-cars-and-surf hits
soundtracked the myth of California as paradise, had lost its lock on the charts. Brian Wilson, its leader, was
withdrawn and unstable after an attempt at a super-ambitious album, “Smile,” collapsed in 1967. Facing irrelevance,
the band even considered changing its name, to simply Beach.

“When you put out a record and it’s not successful like you’re used to, you start questioning yourself,” the vocalist Mike
Love said recently. “Are you doing things right? What do we need to change?”

Read the full story at nytimes.com