10 October

Pick a Day

10 OCTOBER

In Music History

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2011 Lana Del Rey releases her first single, "Video Games," a song inspired by two fractured relationships.

2010 R&B/soul singer Solomon Burke dies on an airplane at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport. Though the cause of death was not known, the singer had long struggled with his weight and his health, and his doctor suspected he had a pulmonary embolism.

2009 Pop singer Stephen Gately (of Boyzone), age 33, dies of a congenital heart defect in Majorca, Spain.

2007 Art Todd (half of the singing duo Art and Dotty Todd) dies of congestive heart failure in Honolulu, Hawaii, at age 93. Known for the '50s hits "Broken Wings" and "Chanson D'Amour."

2006 Sting releases Songs From the Labyrinth, an album of 16th-century lute songs.

2006 21-year-old Lily Allen, who has gained fame in her native England, plays for the first time in the United States, performing at the Hiro Ballroom in New York City.

2002 Six months after Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes is killed in a car accident, TLC release their fourth album, 3D, which she worked on before her death.

2001 Under pressure to change their name because of letter attacks using anthrax germs, the metal band Anthrax issues a press release explaining they will not. "In light of current events, we are changing the name of the band to something more friendly, 'Basket Full Of Puppies,'" they state. "Actually, just the fact that we are making jokes about our name sucks."More

1999 Las Vegas' Grand Hotel holds an auction of several hundred thousand dollars' worth of Elvis memorabilia, including the King's wristwatch, cigar box, and his 1956 Lincoln Continental.

1998 The deadly force of Hurricane Georges not only knocks out telephone, water, and electricity services in Puerto Rico, it also bumps the Hot Latin Tracks chart from Billboard Magazine. For the first time in its 10-year history, the chart is not published because of damage to Broadcast Data Systems monitors caused by the storm, which hit the island late in September.

1997 Jimmy Osmond, who is the youngest of the singing Osmond family, welcomes his second child, Zachary, who is the 50th grandchild of George and Olive Osmond, the parents of the nine Osmond siblings.

1997 Davy Jones sings "Daydream Believer" to Melissa Joan Hart on the Sabrina, the Teenage Witch episode "Dante's Inferno."

1995 Peter Frampton releases Frampton Comes Alive II. The album is the sequel to his 1975 smash Frampton Comes Alive - the best-selling live album in history.

1992 Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash gets married for the first time, tying the knot with actress Renee Suran in Marina Del Rey, California. They divorce in 1997; Slash gets married again in 2001.

1986 The film True Stories, directed by and starring David Byrne, is released in theaters. The soundtrack serves as Talking Heads' seventh album.

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Radiohead Let Fans Choose Price Of New Album

2007

Radiohead takes an innovative approach with the release of their seventh studio album, In Rainbows, by offering it as a pay-what-you-want download. Most people pay nothing for the download, but the album still fares well - better, in fact, than the previous Hail to the Thief album - through pre-sales for "discbox" editions.


Music fans are beginning to move away from physical media such as CDs and near-obsolete cassettes in favor of digital downloads that put the tunes straight onto their (OK?) computers as strings of code. MP3 players have replaced the Sony Discman as the portable player of choice, and record stores around the world are closing their doors for good (Tower Records shuttered in 2006). When Radiohead decides, after their six-album contract with EMI ends, to release their next album digitally and with no set price before the official release date, industry officials fear that it could be the nail in the coffin for physical album sales. It's bad enough that fans are downloading music for free illegally via sites like Napster; now the artists themselves are giving it away. Surely, In Rainbows will be a commercial failure. Not quite. While many fans pay nothing for the digital album, Radiohead's Thom Yorke confirms that before the physical album release in December 2007, sales of In Rainbows will have topped the total sales of their previous album, Hail To The Thief. The discbox, which contains two CDs, two vinyl albums, a lyric booklet and custom artwork, sells roughly 100,000 copies. On December 29, 2007, In Rainbows is released in physical form in the US. It immediately hits the top of the Billboard 200, indicating that rather than hindering physical album sales, digital media can actually be an effective means of sales promotion. And once again, Radiohead finds success by going against the grain.

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