EXCLUSIVE : Gunpowder & Sky , co-founded and run by former MTV chief Van Toffler, is laying down more tracks in the music podcast space with a pair of documentary series for Audible. The company is launching Lighters in the Sky , a series about epic concerts, and Shelved , about lost albums for the Amazon-owned audio service. It comes after the studio signed a multi-project development and production deal last year that has seen it produce a number of projects for Audible’s Words + Music franchise including with artists such as Smokey Robinson, Alanis Morissette, St. Vincent and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. Lighters in the Sky comes from author Corbin Reiff, who wrote Total F*cking Godhead: The Biography of Chris Cornell and it is based on his book Lighters in the Sky: The All-Time Greatest Concerts, 1960-2016. The series is a deep dive through decades of epic gigs, often including interviews with the participants. It will reveal lost details …
Deadline’s Top 10 New Shows Of 2016 – Part I
This year set a record for the number of scripted series on TV, but as Part 1 of our Top 10 New Shows of 2016 list makes HD-clear to both supporters and skeptics of this small-screen surge, the true name of the game in this Peak TV era is quality, not quantity. Deadline’s annual list reveals freshmen series from a variety of platforms that were nothing if not of the highest of the former. Of course, for all the great new shows, there were a cavalry of veterans across broadcast, cable and the streaming services that saw some of their strongest seasons yet. FX ’s extraordinary The Americans is just getting better as the Cold War heats up on the Emmy-nominated spy drama. Refreshingly, Amazon’s Transparent , Starz’s Power , CBS’ Blue Bloods , Netflix’s House Of Cards and the CW’s grittier-than-ever Arrow were also in top form in 2016. So to were Audience’s Kingdom, harder hitting, figuratively and literally, than ever; AMC’s Halt And Catch Fire; NBC ’s The …
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Burna Boy to Play Hollywood Bowl in October, Announces Special Guests
When Nigerian Afro-Fusion star Burna Boy headlines the Hollywood Bowl for the first time on October 8th, he’ll be joined by three supporting acts: American R&B singers Queen Naija and UMI, as well as Donavan’s Sound Club, who is slated to perform DJ sets at Sacramento’s Lost in Riddim Festival alongside Burna before he takes on the Bowl. “I’m extremely excited to come back to one of my favorite cities in the world to play at the legendary Hollywood Bowl,” Burna Boy says. “This all started off as a wild dream, especially coming from where I’m from.” Burna’s Hollywood Bowl show is a part of his Space Drift Arena Tour, also hitting the O2 in London on August 27th. Tickets for all of Burna’s upcoming appearances are available for purchase now . This year, Burna released one single, “ Kilometre. ” He’s also been featured on tracks by Justin Bieber and Sia, as well as collaborated with Latin pop singer Becky G. He accepted the BET Award for Best International Act in …
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WarnerMedia Launches House Of Max Brand Studio, Expanding Ad Offerings
The ad sales unit of WarnerMedia has launched a new brand studio , House of Max . The venture follows the launch of HBO Max with Ads in June. The lower-priced, ad-supported tier of the streaming service featured 35 initial advertisers and came after the debut of ad-free HBO Max in May 2020. The AVOD version of HBO Max competes with a number of “ad-lite” subscription services in the market. In the subscription game, major players range from well-established entities like Hulu and Paramount+ (an expansion of the six-year-old CBS All Access), and relative newcomers like Peacock and Discovery+. Other streaming outlets and media companies have rolled out brand studios as they manage through a reordering of the TV landscape. Roku’s debuted earlier this year and Hulu’s in 2020 . While linear viewing still exists at great scale, ratings are dropping and the push toward streaming has been accompanied by advertiser interest in the kind of targeting capabilities only …
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OWN Teams With HGTV For Robert Hartwell Home Renovation Series From Drew & Jonathan Scott On Discovery+
Discovery+ is expanding its unscripted programming fare. Discovery today unveiled a slate of five new shows, produced by OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network , ordered straight-to-series for the streaming service. They include Taking Back The House (working title) starring Robert Hartwell , from Property Brothers stars Drew and Jonathan Scott, co-produced by OWN and sibling HGTV in its first-ever partnership. Taking Back the House will chronicle Broadway Collective founder Hartwell’s room-by-room renovation of an 1820 colonial house he recently purchased. Hartwell will executive produce alongside the Scott brothers. Taking Back the House (wt) will premiere exclusively on discovery+ in 2022. Also ordered straight-to-series are The Great Soul Food Cookoff , a cooking competition series from Chopped producer Good Egg Entertainment; food truck competition series Burger Truck Brawl, from Guy Fieri’s Knuckle Sandwich Productions and Lando Entertainment set for …
Louisville Rapper EST Gee Tops Breakthrough 25 Chart
EST Gee has been approaching the hip-hop limelight for months, and now, it seems, he’s bathing in it. The Louisville native takes Number One on Rolling Stone’s Breakthrough 25 chart , which ranks the fastest-rising up-and-coming artists of the month on streaming. EST Gee had a breakout moment with the release of his mixtape I Still Don’t Feel Nun in December, then kept growing his streams from there. In March, he reached the Top 100 Songs Chart for the first time thanks to a feature on Lil Baby’s “Real as It Gets,” and also made his Artists 500 debut. But July is when things really started to heat up: His July 21st album Bigger Than Life or Death reached Number Nine on the Rolling Stone Top 200 Albums Chart. It spawned two RS 100 hits — “5500 Degrees,” featuring Lil Baby, 42 Dugg and Rylo Rodriguez, and “Lick Back,” featuring Future and Young Thug — and helped him reach the top 40 of the Artists 500 Chart. All told, EST Gee saw nearly 40 million more on-demand …
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Bob Daisley on His Years With Ozzy Osbourne, Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and Dio
Rolling Stone interview series Unknown Legends features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their complete stories, giving an up-close look at life on music’s A list. This edition features bassist Bob Daisley. Ozzy Osbourne has worked with many bass players throughout the course of his long solo career, but he undeniably did his best work with Bob Daisley. Not only was the bassist-lyricist part of the original Blizzard of Ozz band, where he co-wrote classics like “Crazy Train” and “Mr. Crowley,” but he was brought back into the fold again and again throughout the Eighties and Nineties to help craft tunes like “Shot in the Dark,” “No More Tears,” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” Daisley and the singer haven’t spoken in nearly 25 years thanks to some messy …
A 54-Minute Conversation With Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen doesn’t do a lot of interviews, so when he called Rolling Stone recently, we decided to ask him not only about his new album, High Hopes , but about everything from his future touring plans to the status of the River box set and his long-awaited memoir to his thoughts on a Springsteen Bootleg Series. We’ve posted parts of this interview in recent weeks, but here is the complete 54-minute conversation. Listen to 15 insanely great Bruce Springsteen songs you’ve never heard You said that this album started as something else and morphed into this project. Tell me how it all came together. The best way to describe this album would be to say it’s a bit of an anomaly, but not that much. I don’t really work completely linearly like a lot of people do. You have to imagine that at the end of the tour, or when I’m home, I go into a studio and I’m surrounded by paintings that are sort of half-finished. There’s something wrong with this one that I couldn’t …
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Jeff Tweedy Launches Substack Newsletter ‘Starship Casual’
Jeff Tweedy , like many of your favorite writers, is launching a Substack . On Wednesday, the Wilco unveiled Starship Casual , a paid newsletter where he will talk about his favorite music, dole out advice, tell stories from his lengthy career, and share unreleased music. “I always have way more music recorded than I could ever put out and I can’t wait to share a ton of stuff you’ve never heard,” Tweedy wrote in his introductory post . “Basically it’s Jeff Tweedy (me) digging a little deeper into the types of connections one can make with strangers when one shuts off a few of the filters neurotic worry brings and lets shit fly.” Starship Casual is Tweedy’s latest endeavor in the written word, following his recent memoirs How to Write One Song and Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) . “I know I’ve shared a lot — been pretty prolific for a scary long time now. But a couple of things happened this past year (which I’ll get to in a sec) that have me craving a bit more of a …
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Kuruthi Trailer Launched: Prithviraj-Roshan Mathew Starrer Promises To Be An Engaging Thriller!
Amazon Prime Video today unveiled the gripping trailer of Prithviraj Sukumaran's Malayalam crime-thriller Kuruthi which releases on August 11 on the first day of Onam. Directed by Manu Warrier, written by Anish Pallyal and produced by Supriya Menon under the banner of Prithviraj Productions, the Amazon Original Movie boasts of an incredibly stellar cast, with Prithviraj Sukumaran in the lead along with Roshan Mathew, Murali Gopy, Shine Tom Chacko, Srindaa, Mamukkoya, Manikandan Rajan, Navas Vallikkunnu, Sagar Surya and Naslen in pivotal roles. The fast-paced trailer takes us through the verdant background of Eratupetta in Kerala into the life of Ibrahim, who leads a lonely life in the mountains trying hard to leave behind bitter memories of the past that haunt him till day. On a fateful night, an injured cop barges into his house with a prisoner and seeks refuge. When a powerful enemy burning with vengeance follows them into his house, Ibrahim is …