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Day in Pop Report for 12/05/2014


Coldplay Working On 'Final' Album
Coldplay frontman Chris Martin says in a new interview that the group is working on their seventh studio album and he says the band is approaching it as their final album.

Martin made the revelation during an interview with BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe where they were discussing the band's song "Magic," off their current album Ghost Stories, being named "hottest record of the year."

He had this to say about the new album, "It's our seventh thing, and the way we look at it, it's like the last Harry Potter book or something like that. Not to say that there might not be another thing one day, but this is the completion of something."

He went on to explain why they view the new album, tentatively titled A Head Full of Dreams, as their last. He said, "I have to think of it as the final thing we're doing. Otherwise we wouldn't put everything into it."

While the band did not tour in support of Ghost Stories, Martin told Lowe that he expects the band to hit the road in support of the forthcoming album. You can stream the full interview here.

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Ex-Cake Drummer Appealing Child Molestation Prison Sentence
Former Cake drummer Pete McNeal's attorney says that they plan to appeal the 15 years to life sentence that McNeal received for his conviction on child molestation charges, according to Ultimate Classic Rock.

McNeal received the lengthy prison sentence after he was convicted of "one count of oral copulation of a child 10 years old or younger" during a Thanksgiving party in 2009. The victim was a 3-year-old girl, according to the Los Angeles Times

In addition to the sentence to a California state prison, McNeal was also ordered to register as a sex offender. His lawyer issued the following statement following the sentencing:

"Half a dozen friends and family of Peter Ivan McNeal, having known him collectively for over 100 years, spoke on his behalf at his sentencing. His family stated with vehemence: 'We stand strong with Peter, accompanied by our extended family and swath of intelligent friends across the country and abroad, who, along with our legal counsel, will take our fight against this gross failure of justice to a higher court. We will do so until the time that Peter is free and his name is cleared.'"

Read the UCR report for more details here.

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Lil Wayne Angry About 'Carter V' Delay
(Radio.com) Lil Wayne is currently in the midst of tweeting several messages in a row, detailing a schism between him and his longtime label Cash Money and its head, Birdman.

The issue is Wayne's long-awaited Tha Carter V, which Wayne accuses the label of holding back from release for unspecified reasons. In the four-tweet rant, the rapper called himself a "prisoner," and that his creativity has met the same fate. As such, he wants off the label--"but unfortunately it ain't that easy," he added

He named Birdman--aka Baby--in particular of delaying the record's release, saying he and the label "refuse" to release it. "To all my fans, I want u to know that my album won't and hasn't been released bekuz Baby & Cash Money Rec. refuse to release it.- Lil Wayne WEEZY F (@LilTunechi) December 04, 2014"

He followed that with "This is not my fault. I am truly and deeply sorry to all my fans but most of all to myself and my family for putting us in this situation.- Lil Wayne WEEZY F (@LilTunechi) December 04, 2014."

Then came "I want off this label and nothing to do with these people but unfortunately it ain't that easy- Lil Wayne WEEZY F (@LilTunechi) December 04, 2014"

Read his final tweet and more here.

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Madonna Feels 'Violated' By Music Leaks
Madonna has spoken out publicly after she returned home from a trip to Malawi and discovered that two songs from her forthcoming album leaked last week.

The Material Girl took to her Instagram account, saying that she feels "violated as a human and an artist" over the leaking of the songs -- "Rebel Heart" and "Wash All Over Me".

She posted a photo of a smashed iPod on Instagram along with the following message, "This broken ipod is a symbol of my broken heart! That my music has been stolen and leaked! I have been violated as a human and an artist! "

You can view the photo and the message here.

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Ariana Grande's My Everything Goes Platinum
Ariana Grande received an early Christmas present from the RIAA with news that he sophomore album, "My Everything", has been certified platinum in the U.S., according to her label Republic Records.

Fans can help her celebrate in select markets in the U.S. this month when she headlines the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball tour, which kicks off tonight in Los Angeles, CA at the Staples Center.

The holiday tour will also include stops in Rosemont (IL), St. Paul (MN), Philadelphia, New York City, and will conclude on December 15th in Washington, DC at the Verizon Center.

Grande will also be launching her very own headlining tour of North America in February. The pop star will kick off The Honeymoon Tour on February 25th in Kansas City, MO and wrap up the trek on April 14th in Seattle at KeyArena. Check out the tour dates here.

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John Legend and Common Stream Song From Martin Luther King Biopic
John Legend has released an online stream of the new song "Glory" which features Common and is included in the upcoming Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma.

The song was composed specifically for the historic drama which recounts the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches. Common stars in the film as James Bevel, who was one of the leaders of the three historic marches that lead to President Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

The film, which also stars David Oyelowo as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Tom Wilkinson as President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Tim Roth as Alabama Governor George Wallace, is set to open in select markets on Christmas.

You can stream the new John Legend and Common track for the film here.

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Lady Antebellum Announce New Year's Eve Charity Event
Country music stars Lady Antebellum have announced that they will be ringing in the New Year with a very special charity event at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

The group will be hosting their First Annual Cheers for Charity event at the Nashville venue on New Year's Eve to raise funds for their charity LadyAID, which benefits children's hospitals. The tickets are available here for $250 and will include dinner, drinks and dancing.

Hillary Scott had this to say about the event, "We really wanted to do something special and fun in Nashville before everyone revs up for their big New Year's Eve plans later that night.

"The opportunity to host an event here at home and play music for our Nashville friends to raise awareness for a cause we truly believe in gives us so much happiness. 'Cheers' to a great New Year's Eve in Nashville!"

According to the announcement, the Cheers For Charity event will precede Lady Antebellum's headlining performance in downtown Nashville. Fans across the U.S. will be able to watch portions of that concert live on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest, which begins at 8pm CST on the ABC television network.

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Erasure Reveal Surprise Support Acts For End Of Year Shows
Erasure's big year end shows at New York City's Terminal 5 just got bigger with the announcement of the supporting acts for December 30th and New Year's Eve concerts.

Both shows will kick off with a DJ set from DJ Alex English. The December 30th show will feature a support set from All Hail The Silence, featuring Grammy nominated electronic artist BT with English vocalist Christian Burns.

The New Year's Eve concert will feature a support set from New York City synth pop legends Book of Love. The rare performance will feature Susan Ottaviano and Ted Ottaviano performing as a duo for the very first time.

Erasure are currently on their The Violet Flame tour across Europe that will be concluding with two concerts at the Forum in London on December 14th and 15th. Check out the tour dates here.

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Mariah Carey Misses Notes On 'All I Want for Christmas Is You'
(Radio.com) Mariah Carey and her superhuman voice have become synonymous with the holidays ever since she gifted the world with "All I Want for Christmas Is You" back in 1994.

But listening to her live holiday performance for NBC suggests something might be up. The usual octave-defying singer missed more than a handful of high notes and even managed to skim all of the notes in the chorus during her performance Wednesday night (Dec. 3) at the tree-lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center in New York.

Carey had a very messy start to her holiday special. She was supposed to pre-record her annual rendition of her Christmas song, according to TMZ. The pop star apologized on Twitter before the performance even aired due to missing the pre-recorded show.

For further evidence, someone took the isolated vocals of the performance, check it out here.

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Dan + Shay Tap Canaan Smith For Where It All Began Tour
Rising country music star Canaan Smith has announced that he will be hitting the road early next year as the support act on country duo Dan + Shay's upcoming tour.

The North American Where It All Began Tour is scheduled to kick off on February 28th in Knoxville, Tennessee at Cotton Eyed Joe's and will hit major markets across the U.S. and Canada during the months of March and April

According to Smith's announcement additional dates for the tour are still to be announced. At press time the announced dates conclude on April 25th in 25 Chicago at Joe's On Weed Street.

Canaan Smith will be touring in support of his latest single "Love You Like That," which has topped SiriusXM's the Highway Hot 45 countdown. Check out the tour dates here.

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Chris Young Releases 'Lonely Eyes' Video
(Radio.com) Chris Young serenades a pretty woman green eyes in his new video for "Lonely Eyes." The song, which was written by Johnny Bulford, Jason Matthews and Laura Veltz, tells the tale of a girl entering a bar solo to be heckled by guys with cat calls and dirty jokes. Young, being the perfect gentleman that he is, waits until the girl sits next to him to make his move.

In the video, Young is shown with his guitar in hand performing the song as the girl looks on. 'I've spent my fair share of time at Losers (Bar & Grill) in Nashville,"� Young admitted in a press release earlier this year. 'As a songwriter I like to always be observing the world around me because you never know where you'll find inspiration, and I've seen moments like what I sing about in 'Lonely Eyes' go down all the time."�

While the subject matter and the setting did grab his attention, Young admitted that wasn't the only reason he chose to cut the song. 'I've always said the best song wins, and the soaring melody and smart lyrics of this song grabbed me from the first time I heard it."�

Watch the video here.

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South Park Poke Fun At Iggy Azalea and Music Star Holograms
(Radio.com) South Park has recently featured a storyline in which Lorde is in fact the alter-ego of 45-year-old Randy Marsh--and this week's episode of the show featured Marsh dealing with the reality of the modern music industry, taking on benefit concerts, holograms and much, much more.

'It's like everything these kids are into today is just rehashed s**t," says Marsh, indicting the tastes of modern youth. The episode then moves to a 'West African Gluten Crisis" benefit concert, with appearances from Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea, Lorde, Nicki Minaj and even a hologram of Michael Jackson.

When Randy is scared to perform live, his manager tells him, 'It's not about the music, it's about comments. You think what those people out there care what you sound like?"�

'That's not what my music is about," Randy/Lorde replies. "I'm not reducing myself to that. I just think our younger girl friends need something a little more positive as role models."�

Iggy Azalea chimes in: 'That's easy for you to say, you don't have a nice body." When Randy tries to reveal his true identity as Lorde, his manager replaces him with a Lorde hologram.

'You can't just replace artists with holograms. Who will create the content?" Randy cries.

Watch it here.

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ASAP Ferg and Cara Delevingne Stage Mock Walk-Off
(Radio.com) If you thought walk-offs were something that only happened in Zoolander, well, you're wrong. You are wonderfully, amazingly wrong. That's right, we have our first Instagram walk-off (or, at least, one of the first starring a musician), with A$AP Ferg competing with model Cara Delevingne.

This all stems from a recent Ferg lyric, which cleverly rhymes 'Now I'm on my gangsta lean like a dope fiend / My walk meaner than Cara Delevingne's."�

Delevingne then playfully asked Ferg to put up or shut up via Twitter. "I CHALLENGE YOU TO A WALK OFF @ASAPferg youtu.be/xodMFM5cejg- Cara Delevingne (@Caradelevingne) December 04, 2014"

And from there, things have truly gotten amazing. First Ferg posted a Zoolander gif. Then Delevingne responded with an Instagram. See it here.

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Paramore Inspired Lynn Gunn to Form PVRIS
(Radio.com) Lynn Gunn of PVRIS was in the seventh grade when she first saw Paramore live. "I saw them open up for Jimmy Eat World," Gunn--real name Lyndsey Gunnulfsen--tells Radio.com over the phone. "I just remember that night after watching them perform I was like, 'OK, that's what I want to do. I want to do that one day.' Ever since, I've been working towards it."

Gunn says it was seeing the power of Hayley Williams that immediately resonated with her. "You see someone else doing that up there and you're like, 'I could do that, she's just like me,'" Gunn says. "That was a realization point, because she was a young girl'just going up and completely killing it. I can do that if I want to."

Several years later, Gunn is now fronting her own band PVRIS (pronounced "Paris"), alongside Alex Babinski and Brian MacDonald, two musicians she met through the local music scene in Lowell, Mass. Banding together to "write really cool music," Gunn says the trio quickly became the Three Musketeers.

Last month, PVRIS released their debut album White Noise. At first listen, it is easy to hear the Paramore influence. But diving into the lyrics, this is where PVRIS set themselves apart.

Gunn admits that being drawn to the paranormal is what influences the pictures she paints within her lyrics, the diction and the word choices. "The actual things behind the stories and behind the lyrics had a lot to do with�I hate saying depression, but there was a really rough patch in my head and really difficult time and I didn't know why," she confesses. "A lot of the ghosts that appeared in the record is a metaphor for that depression at that time in my head and all the things going on in it. It's mainly about that, and there's little things here and there about certain people."

Read more here.

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Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball Mashed Up With Kim Kardashian Meme
(Radio.com) Miley Cyrus' "Wrecking Ball" video dominated the conversation, meme-wise, in 2013. Kim Kardashian attempted to break the Internet with some very revealing photos in 2014.

So what happens when you mash the two together? Model Cara Delevingne's Instagram account showed off a Photostopped image in which Cyrus was found swinging on the "Wrecking Ball" video's namesake--except instead of the giant ball, it was replaced with an image of Kardashian from her Paper mag cover, particularly her face and the derriere that broke the Internet.

You can probably imagine what part of her anatomy makes up the wrecking ball. The photo's caption? "I Kim in like a wrecking ball," naturally. Read more here.

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Stephen Curry Responds To Drake Nickname In New Video
(Radio.com) Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry is currently on a hot streak, but he's still found time, off the court, to respond to a nickname bestowed upon him by Drake.

Back in July, Drake referred to the basketball player when he rapped "I been Steph Curry with the shot/Been cookin' with the sauce, chef, curry with the pot, boy" in his track "0 to 100/The Catch Up," even though he proved later he was not, in fact, Steph Curry with the shot.

The reference obviously stuck with Curry and he, along with his family, made their own kind of music video response to it. His wife Ayesha leads in the video, doing most of the cooking and rapping her own lyrics like "Put it in the freezer just to chill quick/ Oven 0 to 100, real quick/ What you cookin with?/ These is real mitts." She also reclaims Drake's title with the line "I'm the real chef Curry with the pot."

Curry meanwhile does his best Shmoney dance and checks on whatever Ayesha's cooking up with his daughter. Watch it here.

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Wil Wheaton Star Wars Commercials Surface Online
(Radio.com) Trolling Reddit yesterday former child actor and now-nerd leader Wil Wheaton to discover fans had unearthed not one but two 30-year-old Star Wars action figure commercials starring none other than himself.

Although he only had memories of being in one commercial, to the Star Wars fan's surprise, the 9-year-old Wheaton was featured in a second spot. Wheaton recalled much of the day's shoot in a post on his blog.

"On one of these two shoots, one of the ad agency people was a woman from New York, who wanted me to read one of my lines in a very specific way," he wrote. "She wasn't a director, and wasn't very good at communicating to 9 or 10 year-old me what she wanted, so she just started giving me line readings, and telling me to mimic her.

"It's amazing to me that I can clearly remember sitting in the backyard of this house in the valley where we were filming, this woman standing above me, holding the script, reading these lines for me. I can hear her telling me, 'That's better, but don't sound so nasal,' and realizing that not only did I know what nasal meant, but that she meant I was not supposed to mimic her voice, but just the line reading she gave me.

Read more and watch here.

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Singled Out: The Heirs' Alright Goodnight
Today LA-based indie-electro pop 5-piece The Heirs tell us about their new single "Alright Goodnight" from their forthcoming EP "Introducing The Heirs," which will be out early next year. Here is the story:

Throughout our (still occurring) childhood, we always knew we wanted to create something that could be recognized as "refreshing". We would stay up late every night studying albums and songs that we considered the greatest, old and new; from some of our biggest writing inspirations to new music that expanded on broader platforms of experimentation blending different genres to create unique sounds. We decided to create our own blend of everything we have loved since we were younger to new music that we love now, and make it sound authentic. Our writing process always starts with an idea. The first big idea was our band name, The Heirs.

It originally came from a dream and idea we shared together. Our main idea was to serve as a voice for those who feel as if their own voices aren't heard. We not only wanted our fan base, but everyone who finds out about us, to understand that as youths, we have just as much power over audiences as anyone else. We started out really young in this industry, so we experienced how everyone looked down on us just because of our ages. Now we are here to show everyone that we have just as much of a say.

We decided to write the basic idea of "Alright Goodnight" based around these ideas. A lot of people won't really realize that the lyrics are a bit heavier than they sound to be. The message is a bit more serious than the tone of the song, but those were our intentions. We wanted to make something different, something dancey, but also something that could speak for itself and say more than the usual pop songs of today.

After we finished writing the song we began mapping out sound ideas. Soon we met with our producer, Justin Stanley, and we collaborated and brainstormed for hours, creating and layering synth parts, drum patterns and vocal harmonies filling up the song and thickening each different segment throughout the track. We spent at least 12 hours making something that sounded, to us, sonically huge. Creating the song was probably one of the most fun times we have ever had in the studio. We experimented so much to lay the song down to how we were hearing in our heads when writing it. This song, along with our upcoming EP, Introducing The Heirs, is extremely important to us. We have written and worked hard on these songs to create something different and unexpected. We are so excited to share more and more of our new music with you soon. Music is everything to us and it always will be. We feel as though after years and years of trial and error, we have finally found our "refreshing" sound.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself here and learn more about the group and EP right here!

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