Author: JD
Empire exclusive first look: Mariah Carey hits the studio…in a bodysuit! The pop star duets with Jussie Smollett’s Jamal in season 3 of the Fox series
Empire Posted September 7 2016 — 9:00 AM EDT IT’S FINALLY HAPPENING!!!! After years of rumors, Mariah Carey is set to guest-star on Empire. Good friend (and Precious director) Lee Daniels has been teasing a Carey cameo since the first season and decided enough was enough. “I said, ‘It’s time to put Mariah on the show because I am going to be a liar to the world and to her,’” says the show’s co-creator and EP with a laugh. Carey will portray Kitty, a singer brought in by Cookie (Taraji P. Henson) to duet with Jamal (Jussie Smollett). The Lyon matriarch thinks working with a star as big as Kitty will help her son deal with his PTSD and stage fright after being shot near the end of last season. “She’s the one that sees everybody’s always telling Jamal what to do,” says Smollett. “From Lucious to Cookie to the media to his fans. Kitty is a person who’s a much bigger star than Jamal and she’s there to kind of be like, ‘Stop. He’s human.’”
Apple Unveils iPhone 7: No Headphone Jack, New Wireless Tech, Better Cameras and Water Resistance
All within a phone that looks remarkably similar to the one you’re probably holding right now. Apple is doing away with the headphone jack on its new iPhone. The tech giant revealed its latest mobile device, the iPhone 7, during its annual product event in San Francisco on Wednesday. As was expected, the new phone is missing one standard feature: the headphone jack. Instead, owners of the new iPhone will need to connect over the lightning connector, the same port where the iPhone’s charger plugs in. “Some people have asked why we would remove the analog headphone jack from the iPhone,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s svp of worldwide marketing. “It comes down to one word — courage. The courage to move on.” Apple has moved on before — from floppy discs, CDs, to name two technologies the company was among the first to delete from its memory bank. The world was slow to adapt to those hardware pivots, and that will likely be the same here. Schiller added that there was simply no room for the outdated jack. “Our smartphones are packed with technologies, and we all want more,” he said. “Maintaining an ancient, single-purpose connector doesn’t make sense… that space is at a premium.” Tim Cook Touts New Apple Music Subscriber Count, Welcomes Mario to iOS Apple has also introduced a new set of ear buds, called AirPods, that connect wirelessly. “We believe in a wireless future,” cooed Chief Design Officer Jony Ive in a video for the device, which contains the company’s first wireless chip, the W1, plus dual optical sensors, two microphones, an antenna and five-hour battery life. A new line of wireless Beats headphones, titled Beats X (or “Beatsx,” as no one will bother typing), that will use the same W1 chip as the AirPods. The real announcement here, really, is a new wireless connection technology — the one contained in that W1 chip — that may help usher out the now-ubiquitous and ever-sensitive Bluetooth. An arguably more practical — at least for those whom Apple’s ear buds cause physical pain — upgrade to the device’s audio was also announced: it’s “external” speaker count has doubled to two, and can play audio from the device itself twice as loud. Now you’ll need two coffee mugs for amplification, but it will be much clearer and louder. Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the new iPhone on stage, reminding the audience that Apple has sold more than 1 billion iPhones since the device was first introduced in 2007. The new iteration will be available to purchase Sept. 17. Apple is calling the iPhone 7 a major design change from previous devices (but it’s not). The iPhone 7 also comes with a new camera that Apple is calling “the best camera we’ve ever made.” The iPhone 7 Plus, much like those speakers, also doubles down in this area, with two megapixel cameras, one wide angle and one telephoto, that creates a zoom feature built into the iPhone. Apple Event Kicks Off With Tim Cook ‘Carpool Karaoke’ Sing-Along The announcement came during an announcement-heavy presentation from Apple executives that kicked off with Cook riding shotgun with James Corden for Carpool Karaoke, a spin-off series that will be premiering on the company’s streaming service “early next year.” And, at the top of the presentation, legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto announced that Mario would be coming to iOS, on the heels of Pokemon Go. The company also updated the audience on Apple Music, which now has 17 million subscribers, and introduced a “swim-proof” Apple Watch, the Series 2, along with updates to the company’s already-cozy partnerships with both Hermés and Nike. “We are just getting started,” said Tim Cook at one point from the stage. They aren’t — but they are still trying to act like it.
Kanye West Asks for “Multiracial Women Only” in Yeezy Season 4 Casting Call
While nothing official has been announced yet, Kanye West is expected to present his new YEEZY Season 4 collection in New York City this week. Today Kanye took to Twitter to announce that auditions to participate in the Yeezy Season 4 fashion show will be held tomorrow in NYC. They are open to “multiracial women only.” https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/772166483023687680/photo/1 YEEZY Season 4 is set to be unveiled on September 7, on the first day of New York Fashion Week. As you can imagine the Twitter world is not very excited about Kanye’s use of the term “multiracial,” even though nobody is actually clear what he means exactly by that. Once again West has managed to create controversy with one of his statements.
Frank Ocean’s Album Is the Straw that Broke Universal Music’s Back (and It May Get Him Sued)
In the end, Frank Ocean won, and walked away with his freedom and his money. Calculating those who lost, however, is a much more complicated equation. Frank Ocean’s four-year sabbatical from the public eye following his 2012 album Channel Orange ended emphatically and dramatically last week with back-to-back releases: the visual album Endless, released as an Apple Music video stream via Def Jam/Universal Music Group; and the 17-song album Blond, released as an Apple exclusive a day later on Ocean’s own label, Boys Don’t Cry, without Def Jam’s — or Universal’s — involvement. After an interminable wait (in music industry standards, at least), Ocean fulfilled his contractual obligations, sources tell Billboard, and increased his potential profit share from 14 percent to 70 percent of total revenues from Blond within a 24-hour period, seemingly pulling a fast one on the biggest music company in the world in the process. Def Jam and its parent Universal, stuck with an overshadowed visual album that isn’t for sale, and cut out of any revenue from the “proper” album that’s headed to the top of the charts on the strength of 225,000 to 250,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Aug. 25, were left with what amounts to a very long music video and without one of their marquee artists. UMG chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge reacted swiftly by informing the heads of his labels that Universal was done with streaming exclusives on one platform and on a global basis, which has been at the center of the streaming services’ arms race in the last 18 months, though it remains unconfirmed whether or not Grainge’s policy change was a direct result of Ocean’s strategy behind Blond. But regardless, the damage was done. Now, the question is, how did Ocean win this battle? Did he? And what does it mean for the other labels, streaming services and the industry at large? In July, Billboard reported that Def Jam had spent as much as $2 million on recording costs for Ocean’s album, at the time thought to be called Boys Don’t Cry. Now it appears that Ocean, perhaps through an advance via his new deal with Apple (though one source suggests a separate, private benefactor), paid that amount back to Def Jam, absolving him of any recoupable claims from Def Jam/UMG and essentially buying Ocean his own recordings back. Ocean delivered Endless instead, fulfilling his deal and severing his contractual ties to the major. But to release another full-length, fully-realized album outside the label’s purview just 24-hours later is controversial, to say the least, and a source tells Billboard that while UMG hasn’t taken any legal action against Ocean or his team — yet — the label group may have grounds to do so. For one, many record contracts are based on minimum-delivery clauses, meaning that if Ocean’s deal was just for two albums, he typically would have had to deliver them within a set time frame, and at a label-acceptable level of quality, in order to fulfill his contract. In addition, most recording contracts stipulate that a window of time during which an artist can’t release music on any other label, so as not to compete with the current project — in this case, DefJam’s Endless. By delivering Blond within just 24 hours, it raises the question of whether Universal even knew it was coming — and what they could have done about it regardless. The messy rollout is Def Jam’s third this year, following Rihanna’s leaked Anti release via Tidal and Kanye West’s extended-streaming/eventual U-turn of a strategy for The Life of Pablo. But while both were rocky debuts, those two LPs at least went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200; with Ocean, Def Jam won’t even have that consolation. That makes Grainge’s umbrage understandable, and paints Def Jam as a clear loser in the situation, with the company’s bottom line taking a tangible hit. But it doesn’t necessarily represent a coup for Apple Music, either, as the ire of the industry — and the biggest label in the world — turns toward the house that Jobs built. (Def Jam and Apple Music did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) Spotify, one of the industry’s favorite punching bags over the past few years due to its free tier and the low royalty payments that it generates, has long eschewed exclusives as bad for artists and bad for fans. And privately, many executives at major labels have agreed with that position, saying that, in addition to fostering piracy, the strategy segments off an artist’s fan base into the smaller pools of Apple Music (15 million subscribers) and Tidal (estimated to have 4 million subscribers) rather than allowing the broader paid on-demand streaming subscriber base (68 million people worldwide, according to the IFPI) to tune in. To that end, UMG insiders critical of exclusives vocally muse that such artists as Ariana Grande and U2 would have seen much more significant debuts. But whether the heads of Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group — Doug Morris and Stephen Cooper, respectively — follow Grainge’s lead in shutting down exclusives is a matter of debate. The fact remains that artists from every major label — Drake (through Cash Money’s distribution deal with UMG), Rihanna and West for Universal; Beyonce, Future and DJ Khaled for Sony; Blake Shelton and PartyNextDoor for Warner — have succeeded using exclusive or windowed releases. But some label execs have expressed concern that despite chart successes, those albums failed to reach the maximum revenue potential by being sequestered on a single service. It’s also worked for independent artists before Ocean — Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book became the first-ever streaming-only release to reach the Billboard 200 albums chart, debuting at No. 8 as an Apple Music exclusive in May. With Ocean almost certainly set to hit No. 1 this week via his digital-only release (in addition to streaming on Apple Music, it’s for sale in the iTunes Store), it raises the question of how important a record label is at all in 2016, as services offer marketing and advance money that a label would otherwise provide. And if terrestrial radio remains the final frontier that separates successful artists from superstars, well, a company like Apple has a digital version of that, too, with its Beats 1 Radio stations. At the beginning of 2016, increased competition and revenue in the streaming space seemed like it would, finally, be the one thing that brought the record industry back from the brink. Now, it looks like it could be the one thing that finally brings it down for good. Additional reporting by Shirley Halperin and Ed Christman.
