With all of the Beats by Dre and Apple news this week, here’s a look back to 2003 when Dr. Dre and Steve Jobs had a chat about the launch of iTunes. [Al Lindstrom]

“The Immigrant is totally based on something that happened to me at LA Opera,” director James Gray said May 8 at a Landmark Theater on Pico screening of his Marion Cotillard/Joaquin Phoenix-starring film, in a Q&A with  LA Opera President/CEO Christopher Koelsch. “I was watching Puccini’s Il Trittico [directed by William Friedkin in 2008] and…

Welcome to the new age … where Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” is no longer on the Billboard Hot 100. The song drops off the chart after a record-setting 87 weeks on the survey. Until this year, Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” had held the Hot 100’s longevity mark since tallying 76 weeks in 2008-09. Mraz’s song now…

Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs was awarded an honorary doctorate from Howard University on Saturday morning during a ceremony where the hip-hop mogul delivered the commencement address. “Ain’t no homecoming like a Howard homecoming,” Combs told the crowd, according to Billboard. Combs had attended Howard as a business major for two years before dropping out in…

ome of the best content to be found about startups is locked in books. An entrepreneur asked me yesterday for a 140 character recommendation of one book for founders. Reducing my list to just one and condensing an argument for why founders ought to read it in just 117 characters was just too great a challenge for…

  Dr. Dre was seen in a video released by Tyrese stating that he is “the first billionaire in Hip Hop” last night (May 8) during what appears to be a celebration of Apple’s rumored acquisition of Beats Electronics. While the Financial Times reported that Apple would acquire the company for $3.2 billion, neither electronics…

Nashville-based United Record Pressing, the world’s busiest vinyl pressing company, responsible for Jack White’s recent world-breaking vinyl extravaganza, recently announced they are expanding their plant this year with 16 new presses, doubling up their capacity. In an interview with Billboard, Jay Millar, the plant’s director of marketing, discusses the expansion while also breaking a lot…

This third installment is aimed at musicians who have a basic understanding of SEO, access to their hosting and content management system (e.g. WordPress, Drupal), and don’t mind getting their hands dirty with a little bit of code. If you’re new to this series on search engine optimization (SEO), you may want to check out An…

They truly are marching to the beat of their own drum. It’s as though anything Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre touches turns to gold: The dynamic duo marked epic-level success when they introduced Eminem to the music world 15 years ago, and their lucrative Beats by Dre business reached blockbuster heights following reports that Apple…

Music-identification app Shazam has added on-demand streaming service Deezer as a partner, enabling Deezer account holders in four countries to listen to full-length songs immediately upon identifying them with Shazam’s mobile app. The deal also replaces an existing integration of Spotify in Shazam’s app, where Spotify has been removed as an option to stream a…