Hard to believe this happening in our current digital music age, but in the last few days there has been a major victory for the concept album.

Pink Floyd, makers of many concept albums, has sued and won a major lawsuit against their former record label. EMI (Capitol here in America) was selling single digital tracks from those concept albums through on-line retailers, something the group didn’t like.

Today’s digital music consumer don’t usually purchase entire albums like “Dark Side of the Moon”, “Wish You Were Here’ or “The Wall” (that one is a double-album). EMI was selling single tracks off of those and other Pink Floyd albums much like they do with many of their other artists.

The band had signed a contract with the label, decades before the event of I-Tunes and mp3’s, giving them artistic control over their music. But EMI said that the artistic control only applied to physical copies of the albums: not digital sales. A few days ago, a judge disagreed.

Britain’s High Court ruled that the contract protected the artistic integrity of the album. And for good measure, the judge went on to rule in the band’s favor concerning a second issue concerning royalty payments. It is good to know that Pink Floyd fans sometimes grow up to be judges and lawyers.

The 82nd Academy Awards Ceremony is this weekend, and the musical history of winners in the category of Best Original Song is as mixed as any other category winner.

As with many other annual long-time award ceremonies (I’m looking at you, Grammys), rock music had a hard time getting noticed. “Town Without Pity” by Gene Pitney back in 1961 may be considered the first rumblings of Hollywood taking notice of the winds of cultural change. Of course it didn’t win.

The first successful breakthrough would have to be the theme to “Shaft” by Isaac Hayes in 1971. Of course, some critics claim that this was also the first disco song, and the next such song to win the Oscar would be a real honest-to-God disco song: “Last Dance” by Donna Summer in 1978, followed up by “Fame” in 1980.

The first real rock artist to win an award would have to be Bruce Springsteen for the theme to “Philadelphia” in 1993. In keeping with the twisted sense of Hollywood fair play, he was also up against another real rock artist for the same film that year: Neil Young.

Randy Newman counts as a real artist, and one with a rock sensibility, and he is up for two awards this year, both from the same film: “The Princess and the Frog”. And since Randy Newman currently holds the record for the most performances at the ceremonies (7), he is a cinch to add a least one more appearance this weekend to his lead.

Now that March is almost here, you can practically hear the sound of the thaw in in the land of new album releases.

Tom Petty just announced his latest release “Mojo”, his first studio album with The Heartbreakers in 8 years. He says the sound of the album reminds him of early Allman Brothers: “very blues-based” he claims. And he and the boys will launch a major tour to support the album, including coming to Buffalo with Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Buffalo’s Goo Goo Dolls finished their latest album a few months ago, and are putting the finishing touches on “Something for the Rest of Us” before it comes out this spring. Coldplay also is just about finished with their next album, once again produced by Brian Eno. It looks to be coming out later this year.

Ray Davies is currently working on a new album of Kinks Klassics with Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi. He has also told newspapers that his brother Dave is beginning to recover from his 2004 stroke, and may be up for another go at a Kinks recording.

And John Mellencamp finished his new album “No Better Than This” last summer while on tour with Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson, but it looks like he will delay that project until he finally releases his long-delayed career-spanning box set. The four-disc set, “On The Rural Route 7609″, was planned to come out last year, but Mellencamp keeps tinkering with it. It is now planned for June of this year.

All in all, a lot of good music is coming our way in the next few months.

Reruns are common on television and “reboots” are common with movies, so I guess it should be expected with music as well now.

A couple of major “reissue” compact disc projects are coming this month to a store near you: one is the massively successful “Supernatural” release that Santana first released a decade ago. The original compact disc sold over 25 million copies and spent 12 weeks at the number one position. Santana would go on to win 9 Grammy awards for it, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year.

Now Sony is releasing a “Legacy” 2-CD edition of this album, with a second disc of material recorded for the original album, but rejected at the time as well as remixes and live recordings.

Another major project is the so-called “new” Jimi Hendrix album “Valleys of Neptune”. This album contains 12 unreleased studio tracks, including the often-bootlegged title track. The majority of these recordings came after Hendrix left his group “The Experience” and began working with Buddy Miles in a group called the “Band of Gypsies”. This album also launches the reissuing of the entire Jimi Hendrix catalogue, now owned worldwide by Sony Music.

Fans of course will want to hear everything by these two guitarists, but sometimes there are reasons why the original recordings weren’t released.

Watching The Who’s recent half-time performance at the Super Bowl made me miss John Entwistle and Keith Moon all the more.

As great a songwriter and guitarist as Pete Townshend (still) is, there is no way to replace the irreplaceable. Entwistle was a bass player who didn’t play his instrument like a bass player: he played his instrument like a lead guitar. And he was also a top-notch song writer, and in most other bands would have been the main songwriter (something George Harrison must have identified with).

Keith Moon wasn’t just a great drummer: he was a force of nature. The four members of the (original) Who were more than the sum of their parts, and together they qualified as one of the foundations of British Invasion.

But the Super Bowl half-time performance, locked into a brief 12-minute countdown, wasn’t helped by the edited versions of the short selection of songs. It was also interesting to notice that 3 of those songs they played also appear as T.V. theme songs on the network that carried the game.

Still it was nice to see Pete and Roger dancing around the stage, not singing “I hope I die before I get old” from their early hit My Generation…another one of those songs they didn’t play.

No sooner had the Grammys wrapped up last Sunday, and then we get the nominations for the Oscars.

Is it just me, or do these once-respected Awards Shows all want to become the People’s Choice Awards Show? In reviewing the Grammy Winners from earlier this week, it appeared that the winners just happened to be the highest selling artists of the year. So, in essence, it is the People’s Choice Award. And, really, if the people give you most of their entertainment dollar, isn’t that better than some award?

The reason is obvious: ratings for the awards show. The thinking goes that the more popular musicians bring more viewers to the broadcast, which increases the ratings. And you can’t blame them for thinking that: because this year’s telecast was the highest for a Grammy broadcast since 2004.

You may be aware that the Motion Picture Academy changed the rules this year to have 10 nominations in the best picture category, instead of the usual 5 nominations. The reasoning for this, according to industry insiders, is to allow more “art house pictures” to gain recognition. And by “art house pictures”, they mean any film that cost less to make than “Avatar”.

And speaking of “Avatar”, director James Cameron just picked up his own version of the People’s Choice Award, by making more money in history than any other film, including his own “Titanic”. Because of that, perhaps “Avatar” is the film to beat this year for Best Picture Oscar.

The Grammy Awards, which happens this weekend, has been going on for awhile (since 1958), and has always tried to be hipper than they are, bless their hearts.

For example, the year the Beatles took over America, and by extension the whole pop world, the song that took home the Record of the Year trophy was “The Girl From Ipanema”; the Song of the Year was “Hello, Dolly!” In fairness, though, the Fab Four did receive a Grammy for Best Performance by a Pop Group. After that year, the group that runs the Grammys decided, and not for the last time, to try and catch up with musical trends. In other words, to become relevant.

The Grammys did a fair job of keeping up with the hurly-burly that was the late sixties music scene, but began to stumble when disco started to sell a lot of records in the seventies. What else can explain A Taste of Honey winning the Best New Artist award in 1978 for their one (and only) hit “Boogie Oogie Oogie”. And then of course who can forget the Grammy Award winner for Best New Artist in 1990: Milli Vanilli, a duo that could not be bothered to use their own voices on their songs. But then again, they never claimed to have sung the songs that bore their name.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has taken a more aggressive approach since then, and one way they have dealt with the whole “staying relevant” thing, is to hand out awards for about any category they can think of. This has helped open up the whole awards thing, and deflected criticism about which musician is an “artist”, and which musician is a “performer” (although either one involves a certain amount of talent).

So congratulations to all the contestants.

Not Conan The Barbarian, either (which, by the way, the movie industry is remaking as we speak).

Now that the Conan-slash-Jay incident is finally resolved, perhaps we can take a more rational look at what prompted this P.R. nightmare. Just so you know, this will be the first year that N.B.C. has ever lost money: it will be in the hole about $100 million dollars, mainly because of Olympic production costs. Exactly one decade ago, the network made well over a billion dollars. That’s quite a drop, but N.B.C. is not alone: all the broadcast over-the-air networks are in the same boat. That’s because they are competing with cable channels that not only use the same business model they do (advertising), but also have an additional revenue stream with cable subscribers.

And speaking of cable competition, this year N.B.C.’s total share of prime-time audience will be about 5%.

So a lot of impetus of this recent late-night show swapping was brought about by a need to control costs while remaining competitive. And, according to N.B.C., they were happy with the ratings and profit from the prime-time Jay Leno show, but it was their affiliates that weren’t. Something else cable channels don’t have to worry about. And if the network bigwigs are to be believed, the not-so-distant future model of the big four networks will resemble the cable channel model.

Then the broadcast network affiliates will really have something to worry about.

This area of the country is blessed in the amount and depth of talent displayed by local musicians. In our ongoing effort to support and nurture the local music scene here in Western New York, we are glad to see the return of the weekly free “Lake Local Music Series“, and the debut of a new weekly local music performance showcase called “The Buffalo Shuffle”.

Every Friday night beginning at 6 pm at Nietzsche’s, 248 Allen Street, you can see some of the best musicians in the area perform for free, with no cover charge. The “Lake Local Music Series” has been a long-standing tradition here at 107.7 The Lake, and we are glad that this has been able to continue, thanks to the generous support of the local community.

And now a new weekly tradition begins  Mondays beginning at 8pm at The Tralf Music Hall 622 Main Street, with “The Buffalo Shuffle”. This showcase has a regular local music house band (Doug Yeomans, Mick Hayes, Pete Holquin, Jim Ehinger, Steve Sadoff, and Al Monti), with a special guest local musician every week. Although not free, a portion of the small cover charge goes to benefit the Blues Society of Western New York.

We hope you will support these local musicians, and the venues that make these events possible.

It was right about this point at the beginning of the last decade that record company executives thought their future was never ending. They had just shattered all the previous one-week sales records, with ‘Nysyc’s “No Strings Attached” compact disc, selling an astounding 2.4 million units in one week. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for starters, one year after that milestone, the first iPod was launched. And by the time record company executives started thinking “Houston, we have a problem”, they decided to blame the customer (always a bad idea). The record labels began to sue music lovers in an ill-fated attempt to stop music piracy. After years of bad publicity, suing over 35,000 fans (one a 12-year old girl and another a grandmother who didn’t happen to even have a computer), the record industry finally retired that policy.

In case you’re wondering, the number of albums that were released in 2009 that finally sold as many as ‘Nysyc did in that one week, totals exactly two. The percentage of record buyers buying music online at the beginning of the decade amounted to 2.2% of all sales. Today that figure stands at about 30%.