LONDON (AP) ― Legitimate music downloads still aren’t growing quickly enough.A report published Monday by the recording industry’s main lobby group showed that digital revenue has grown 8 percent over the past year to about $5.2 billion ― a solid figure for some industries, but not one where overall receipts have fallen by nearly two-thirds amid a shift toward online ― and in many cases illegal ― music downloads.“The 8 percent figure should be much higher,’’ said Frances Moore, the chief executi

Jan. 24, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) ― Since its beginnings in the 1970s, rap music has transformed from an underground, street-based sound to a definitive part of pop culture, transcending race and becoming one of the strongest ― and most prolific ― voices of today’s generation. But at the Grammy Awards, rap has had a long-lasting losing streak in the top categories.The hip-hop sound ― first recognized at the 1989 Grammys ― has seen numerous prestigious nominations over the years, and rap acts have either led or tied

Jan. 24, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) ― The Smithsonian American Art Museum is holding its first major exhibit exploring the art and evolution of video games.The unusual exhibit opens March 16 and will be on view in Washington through Sept. 30.“The Art of Video Games’’ will focus on the graphics, technology and storytelling of some of the best games for systems ranging from Atari to the PlayStation 3. It will include 80 video games that were selected with help from the public, which voted online last year.The museum

Jan. 19, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) ― Photographs by the wife of imprisoned 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo will be shown at Columbia University next month.Beijing artist Liu Xia has been under house arrest since shortly after her husband was awarded the peace prize. Her photos were smuggled out of China just before she was placed under house arrest.Liu’s works are censored in China. The series of 25 photos depict lifelike dolls in various settings. One shows her husband holding a doll. In another, a tied-up

Jan. 19, 2012

LONDON (AFP) ― Britain’s greatest living artist, David Hockney, has swapped the Californian sunshine for the landscape of his native Yorkshire for a blockbuster exhibition which goes on show this week.Hockney has portrayed country lanes and hedgerows in a riot of colour that leaps off the wall at the Royal Academy of Arts, a short walk from Piccadilly Circus in London.In the show, “A Bigger Picture,” Hockney and his team also show the countryside shifting through the seasons on a giant bank of v

Jan. 18, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) ― Opera superstar Placido Domingo is getting ready to conduct 35 New York City schoolchildren who are studying music five days a week under a program inspired by Venezuela’s acclaimed youth orchestra program, El Sistema.Domingo will conduct the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders from Public School 129 in Harlem and Public School 152 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, at a fundraiser Wednesday for their after-school music program, called Harmony.The children will play Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus

Jan. 18, 2012

LOS ANGELES ― Everywhere you look, people are going about their lives to the tunes of their own personal soundtrack. They sweat through “YMCA” at the gym, pound out programming code to Rammstein’s brutal beats and nurse broken hearts with a mournful Bach cello concerto.In the last few decades, technology has transformed music from a social gathering experience to an intensely solitary one in which donning a pair of headphones in public is equivalent to shouting, “Leave me alone!”But in a move th

Jan. 18, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) ― Producers of Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’’ have fired back in their legal fight with one-time director Julie Taymor, claiming the woman who they once called a visionary later failed to fulfill her legal obligations, wrote a “disjointed’’ and “hallucinogenic’’ musical, and refused to collaborate on changes when the $75 million show was in trouble.In a countersuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Taymor and her company

Jan. 18, 2012

DENTON, Texas (AP) ― Arnold Greissle-Schoenberg can still picture his grandfather, composer Arnold Schoenberg, raising his finger to command attention.“Whenever Schoenberg wanted to say something he would raise his finger and everybody would fall silent and then he would have his say,’’ said Greissle-Schoenberg, whose childhood memories include watching his grandfather holding court with other musical luminaries.The 88-year-old grandson of the famous 20th century composer remembers a side of Sch

Jan. 17, 2012

PARIS (AP) ― American tourists fill the galleries of the Louvre Museum, yet American art is surprisingly scarce.Paris’ premier museum and three U.S. art institutions are seeking to change that with an exhibit tracing the birth of American landscape painting and its influences.“As soon as I arrived at the Louvre, I noticed that American art was not displayed at the level it merits,’’ said Louvre director Henri Loyrette.Even the exhibit’s English-French melange of a name breaks tradition: It’s cal

Jan. 16, 2012