2017 With nearly 2.9 billion views, "See You Again" by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth breaks the record for most-viewed video on YouTube, overtaking "Gangnam Style" by PSY. In August, it is overtaken by "Despacito."
1989 The Monkees get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. At the ceremony, all four Monkees reunite for the first time - Mike Nesmith was a holdout on their reunion tour.
1985 Playboy publishes nude photos of Madonna taken before she was famous.More
1985 Tina Turner stars opposite Mel Gibson in the post-apocalyptic action flick Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Turner sings two hit songs for the movie: "One Of The Living" and "We Don't Need Another Hero."More
1936 Billie Holiday becomes the first major artist to record the classic song "Summertime," which was featured in the musical Porgy and Bess a year earlier.
2016 Aerosmith lead guitarist Joe Perry suffers a cardiac arrest while performing with Alice Cooper and Johnny Depp, fellow members of the supergroup The Hollywood Vampires, in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. The 65 year old is rushed to Coney Island hospital, where's he's listed in stable condition.
2015 The documentary Amy is released. The film, directed by Asif Kapadia, chronicles the short life of British singer Amy Winehouse. Hard-living Winehouse won five Grammy awards for her 2006 album Back To Black. She died at the age of 27 from alcohol poisoning in 2011.
2012 Frank Ocean releases his highly acclaimed debut album, Channel Orange, which goes on to win the Grammy for Best Urban Contemporary Album. Standout tracks include "Lost" and "Thinkin About You."
2012 Slash, who left Guns N' Roses in 1996, gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Charlie Sheen, who is master of ceremonies at the event, comments, "It seems quite fitting that Slash is getting a star on the very street Axl Rose will one day be sleeping on."
2010 Roger Waters makes a surprise appearance at a benefit concert in Oxfordshire, England when he joins his onetime Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour for a four-song set, marking the first time since Live 8 in 2005 that they have shared the stage. Gilmour reciprocates by joining Waters for a performance of The Wall on May 12, 2011 in London.
2009 Robert Plant is officially a Commander of the British Empire after being bestowed with the title by Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace.
2009 Shakira releases the electro-pop album She Wolf. The singer was in a bad mood when the disco-influenced title track roared out of her consciousness: "The image of the she wolf just came to my head, and when I least expected it I was howling and panting."
2008 VH1's Rock Honors pays tribute to The Who.
2007 Bad Religion release their fourteenth full-length studio album, New Maps of Hell.
2004 American Idol winner Fantasia's "I Believe" debuts at #1 but drops out of the Top 10 two weeks later. She shows staying power, though, with a million-selling debut album and a lead role in the Broadway production of The Color Purple.
2000 Coldplay release their debut album, Parachutes, in their native UK (it isn't issued in America until November 7). Featuring the singles "Yellow" and "Trouble," it becomes a global smash.
2000 A much-ballyhooed Supremes "reunion" tour, "Return To Love," which features only Diana Ross from the original group, is canceled after initial ticket sales don't match expectations.
1999 Significant Other by Limp Bizkit supplants Millennium by Backstreet Boys at #1 on the US albums chart. The nu metal vs. boy band battles continue unabated on MTV's Total Request Live, as videos from the albums battle it out on the countdown.
1998 Bauhaus, who broke up in 1983, begin their Resurrection tour with a show at The Palladium in Los Angeles.
1997 Wanda Day, drummer for 4 Non Blondes, dies of a drug overdose.
By simply tapping an app button on an iPhone, music fans can finally get an answer to the timeless question, "What's that song?" Shazam's free smartphone app is the first music recognition service of its kind - using a phone's microphone to listen to any song being played publicly - like in a restaurant, at a friend's house, or on TV - and identify it. And it actually works.
The technology is called Acoustic Fingerprinting, an algorithmic process of generating a map of any given audio as a unique file, storing it, and then associating it with other metadata, such as lyrics or album covers. Gracenote and CDDB use a similar process to gather data about songs and then return display results; this is how iTunes grabs album covers from the Internet automatically when you insert a CD. Using Shazam's new app, when a user "tags" a song using their phone's microphone, the software looks for a match and then returns a link with the artist's name, track name, and a direct link to download the song on iTunes. Shazam had been a paid service in the UK, where a user would call a shortcode number and the "answering service" would listen to 30 seconds of audio and then return an SMS with the song's info, for a small fee. Now that anyone with an iPhone can "tag" a song, the Shazam database grows exponentially, eventually with over 1 million songs tagged each week. Competition emerges from companies like MusixMatch and Soundhound. Shazam technology changes how artists get discovered by fans and music industry scouts. The company can see in real-time what songs people are "Shazaming," and predict which songs will race to the top of the charts, before they are even released to radio. Among the most-Shazamed songs early on: "Somebody That I Used To Know" by Gotye and "Greyhound" by Swedish House Mafia.
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