DETROIT - WXYZ, a television station in Detroit, USA has teamed up with a local furniture store to offer up a $5,000 shopping spree (and bragging rights) in its annual "Art Van Cruisin' Idol" competition to the contestant who performs the best rendition of Roxette's "The Look."  Ten lucky finalists were selected to record their version of Per and Marie's first US number one, and the four singers who receive the most votes will compete for viewers' votes during a televised broadcast that will air across North America on Aug. 21st.  Check out some, uh, interesting interpretations of the Rox classic.

Thanks to Jen Verwey for tracking this fantastic story down!

LONDON - EMI Music, Roxette's record company since the very beginning, has made a good financial result after years of severe problems. The year 2008 was the first full year under the ownership of private equity group Terra Firma. Terra Firma's harsh cost-cutting program led to axing a third of EMI's workforce, but was also financially successful. EMI Music posted earnings of £163 million (183 million Euros) which more than tripled the earnings compared to the previous year.

The total sales went up 4%, thanks to EMI's biggest-selling artists Coldplay, Lily Allen and Katy Perry.

The Swedish group Scotts was very successful on a popular Swedish TV-show called "Dansbandskampen" fall of 2008. The group ended up in second place of the competition. This spring they participated in "Melodifestivalen" (Swedish outtakes for the Eurovision Song Contest). Scotts' first album "På vårt sätt" went  #1 on the Swedish album chart the first week of 2009. On the album they have included a cover of "It Must Have Been Love".

Taken from http://www.zeigeist.eu/:

"During the past years, we have put more and more love into Zeigeist, fed her like the Queen she have been. At the end of the day, she has demanded all love within us. We have our personal reasons to kill her.

The release of our next single/EP, "Neverending Love," a cover of Roxette's first single, our first cover, will be moved to tomorrow (5th Feb). The EP also contains "Chasing your shadow all around the world" and a remix of "Humanitarianism" by the Twelves. With this EP, we call it a day. This is the end of Zeigeist. The Queen is dead.

So we raise our glasses, make a toast, a toast in your honor, and tell you this: The search continues. We're going to find out about the Never. Ending. Love.

With thanks to all our fans

ZEIGEIST"

The tracklist: 

1. Neverending Love
2. Chasing Your Shadows All Around the World
3. Humanitarianism (The Twelves Remix)

STOCKHOLM - Swedish newspaper Musikindustrin reports that EMI boss Roffe Nygren sadly has passed away.

Rolf Nygren, one of Sweden's legendary record company bosses, passed away last Monday. Roffe, who was 68 years old, was hired by EMI back in 1966. At first he was a sales assistant, but later became the manager for the sub-label Music For Pleasure. He was CEO of EMI Finland between 1973 and '75.
Between 1976 and 1998 Nygren was the CEO of EMI Sweden. From 1987 he was also the Scandinavian manager. During Roffe's era EMI became the leading company for Swedish music with artists such as Gyllene Tider, Ulf Lundell and Roxette. Roffe was also the chairman of Swedish ifpi for many years.

Per Gessle: "It was Roffe who tied Gyllene Tider to EMI 1979. Along the way he's been a great supporter and inspiration to our common Roxette successes. A journey we all thought impossible. He was a "hitpicker" with perfect aim and always a creative idea bouncer. He was also a very dear friend of mine and my family's. We miss him enormously."

Marie Dimberg: "To me Rolf was a strong personality with a great curiosity and love for the music. A safe, equal, engaged, low prestigious and a very encouraging boss who always gave freedom under responsibility. He was a positive pessimist with a large and warm heart. Rolf was my door opener to the music business and an always present mentor and my mainstay.
Life will be very empty without him."

The staff of The Daily Roxette offers our sympathy.

Few talk about the "Swedish musical wonder" anymore, which was strongly connected to successful Swedish artists, but Swedish music is still popular outside of Sweden. Swedish songwriters still hold the fort.
"Sweden is a small country, but Swedish music is big abroad. The foreign proceeds are a receipt showing that Swedish songwriters are of high international class" says Margita Ljungberg, senior adviser at STIM.
"I'm happy that ABBA does so well! " Per Gessle comments to The Daily Roxette.

The most played songs by Swedish composers outside of Sweden 2007:

1. Listen To Your Heart
Per Gessle/Mats MP Persson
2. Dancing Queen
Benny Andersson/Björn Ulvaeus (Buma/Stemra)/Stig Anderson
3. Since U Been Gone
Max Martin/Lukasz Gottwald (Ascap)
4. Hung Up
Madonna (Ascap)/Benny Andersson/Björn Ulvaeus (Buma/Stemra), Stuart
Price (BMI)
5. Who Knew
Max Martin/Lukasz Gottwald (Ascap)
6. Behind These Hazel Eyes
Max Martin/Lukasz Gottwald (Ascap)/Kelly Clarkson (Ascap)
7. It Must Have Been Love
Per Gessle
8. Mamma Mia
Benny Andersson/Björn Ulvaeus (Buma/Stemra)/Stig Anderson
9. Gimme Gimme Gimme
Benny Andersson/Björn Ulvaeus (Buma/Stemra)
10. The One
Max Martin/Brian Littrell (Ascap)

Up to 2,000 jobs at EMI – more than one in three of the workforce – are at risk under a radical restructuring of the music group drawn up by private-equity boss Guy Hands. Thousands of artists will also go from EMI’s 14,000-strong roster. Little is known which artists will have to go at this point.

Robbie Williams is refusing to release his next album until he knows what kind of service an artist of his magnitude could expect from his record company. Williams' manager says that EMI's new CEO, said Guy Hands, is behaving like a plantation owner. Coldplay is also considering leaving EMI while Radiohead and Paul McCartney have already left.

As revealed earlier this year, iTunes became one of the first online stores selling music published by EMI without copy-protection. EMI artists include Roxette, Per Gessle, Marie Fredriksson and Son of a Plumber (links open iTunes Store). Many albums and singles by them are now available as "iTunes Plus." This means that the songs can be burned and copied without restrictions after purchase. The songs also have a better bit rate. Individual songs cost a bit more (in Europe 1.29 Euros instead of 0.99 Euros), but full albums are available for the same price as the protected ones.

The DRM-free releases include the new Per Gessle single, "En händig man/Vet du vad jag egentligen vill?" To get the songs in iTunes Plus format, view an album or a single In iTunes Store and click the iTunes Plus link to see the list of DRM-free songs.

LONDON (Updated) - Wall Street Journal reports that EMI Group will today announce that it will start selling music on Apple's iTunes Store without copy-protection. EMI, the world's third largest music label, will be the first major record company to ditch digital rights management (DRM) from its catalog. The announcement is scheduled to be made in a press conference featuring the Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs.

EMI Group had reportedly attempted to sell DRM-free music in the past but met resistance from online music stores who demanded "insurance" payments to guard against potential increase in piracy and lost sales.

It was already reported earlier this year that EMI will remove copy-protection from its CDs.

Update: EMI has published a press release stating that they and Apple will indeed start to sell DRM-free music on iTunes Store. The DRM-free tracks will have twice the quality compared to the ones with copy-protection, but they will cost €0.30 (or $0.30) more. Old iTunes users will be able to "upgrade" their existing songs to the better quality by paying just the price difference. EMI's DRM-free songs and music videos will be available on iTunes in May. EMI is planning to expand the programme to variety of digital music stores "within the coming weeks."

According to Dutch NVPI, EMI Music stops using copy protection technology on the CDs the company releases. Copy protection, or Digital Rights Management (DRM) as these technologies are also called, have caused a lot of anger among the people who have bought their records legally but are unable to listen to them in the player of their choice. To prevent illegal copying of music, the protected CDs have limitations on the types of players they can be played in. As a side effect, many protected CDs don't work in car stereos.

Now it seems that EMI has realized that the price of adding DRM to the products is too high comparing to its benefits to the company. Recently one of the biggest developers of DRM solutions, MacroVision, stopped the sales of its TotalPlay system. TotalPlay, previously called CDS or Cactus, was used on Roxette's "Ballad Hits."

Boing Boing has an English translation of the article. DRM technologies were not included in the latest European Roxette releases "The Hits," "The RoxBox" and the "One Wish" single, as well as Marie's "Min bäste vän" album.