Kings of A&R

Calling All Girls: We always knew Spitzer was obsessed with the music business and he even went on record claiming radio sucked. KOAR posted an article on Spitzer back in October 2006 when he suggested J Lo couldn’t even hum her own tune. Truth is stranger than fiction. His secret relationship involved a female who had big aspirations for the music business. Ladies and gentlemen — meet Ashley Alexandra Dupré. We checked out her song ‘What We Want‘. I don’t know who produced this, but it’s dated club beats. It seems digital retailer, Amie Street, has convinced Ashley Dupre to suspend her myspace so that people can exclusively buy her music through them. More importantly, we have to feel sorry for the girl. Enough with drama!

New NIN Album Generates $1.6M First Week: The online release of the new Nine Inch Nails album “Ghosts I-IV” resulted in just under 800,000 transactions in its first week, totaling $1.6 million in revenue according to the band. NIN will not release traditional sales figures to SoundScan.

Music Industry Proposes a Piracy Surcharge on ISPs: The music biz is considering a file sharing surcharge that internet service providers would collect from users. I don’t know how realistic this is, but I suggest reading the full article that’s filled with different opinions on the topic.

Resigned: XM Satellite Radio’s chief creative officer, Lee Abrams, resigned from the company today in order to accept a position as Chief Innovation Officer for Tribune Company.

A Success Story That’s Not So: Shayan Italia is an Indian-born singer-songwriter and has developed himself with almost no help from a record company, raising £500,000 from a group of private investors to shoot a professional video. His Reflection reached No 1 on YouTube’s music video charts last week, with 190,000 plays in the first 24 hours of its placement online.

Italia owns his material, selling 1 per cent shares in the business that controls all his copyrights, plus any tour and other music-related income for £12,000 a time. Investors own 40 per cent of all Italia’s future music output. For all his talent, the big break is yet to come and there is not yet any return for the investors.

Times Online says “people get very excited about the death of the record company and about finding clever ways to ward off its demise”.

Other media companies who pretend to play record label like the one above will lose their shirts 99 percent of the time. If you want me to write a check for 500k, you better come out of the box with a song like ‘Welcome to the Jungle’.

Video Hogs Cause Congestion: There has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat comes from online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games. What kind of future awaits the internet? Read the full article here.

New Music: Check out the Nashville, Tennessee act SafetySuit. They recorded the album titled ‘Life Left to Go’ with producer Greg Archilla (Matchbox 20, Collective Soul, Buckcherry) . They just released the track “Someone Like You” on iTunes via Universal.