SÖDERHAMN - Snippets of some of the new songs are now available on gessle.com. The remastered and extended version of "The World According to Gessle" will be released May 14.

STOCKHOLM - EMI Caroline has released a few Gyllene Tider albums in the US – "Gyllene Tider," "Moderna Tider," "Puls" and "GT25!." But it has also released Per Gessle's "Mazarin" and the compilation "Hjärtats trakt." All albums can be found on iTunes USA.

On November 13, "Finn5fel!" and "En händig man" will be released as well.

According to Per this seems to have worked out great for other non-American acts so EMI thinks there's an audience for Gyllene Tider and Gessle in the States. "Amazingly enough, if you ask me, but it's fun nevertheless," Per says.

Naturally we're talking digital releases only.

Caroline Distribution, EMI’s U.S. independent distribution company, was founded in 1983 as a unit of Virgin Records. It has become one of the U.S. music industry’s largest third-party distribution companies for the independent music sector.

Per is publishing official "En händig man" tour videos on YouTube. So far, two videos have been released: first one from the Halmstad premiere and the second one from the Linköping concert. The videos are 1-2 minutes long and consist of clips from backstage, soundcheck and live concert.

STOCKHOLM (Updated) - Roxette was once again nominated for a Rockbjörnen award in Aftonbladet's annual ceremony, in the Swedish Group of the Year category. Unfortunately, Bodies Without Organs (BWO) took the award this year. During the previous years, Roxette has already received six Rock Bears.

SÖDERHAMN (UPDATED) - After almost a week of downtime, Roxette.se and sister sites are back online. The sites are still not at full capacity and the forum is still down, but webmaster David J. Elfström Lilja promises that it also will be online this weekend.

  Transmit/Receive’s web server array went berzerk last Saturday and it has taken them a week to restore all data lost. Customers affected include Lena Philipsson, Mauro Scocco, Orup and Peter Jöback.

  Update: The forum is now up.

• Rox.se

  The website of the International Roxette Fanclub, Roxette.nl, dormant since last spring (see related story on the Features page), was hacked yesterday by a Turkish group that call themselves Ayyildiz VIP Team. At presstime, the site has 31 instances of embedded code that redirects the user from the Netherlands site to a static image that displays the flag of Turkey along with a political message.

  Due to time zone differences, neither members of the fanclub team or a representative of the hacker group were available for immediate comment at presstime.



EDITOR’S NOTE: Since this story was published early this morning, the webmaster for the fanclub site seems to have regained control, as the URL is no longer being redirected to the Turkish site. But rather than redisplay the site that existed – containing promises that have not been kept – they instead seem to have chosen to make the site look as if it is still being hacked. — LEO

• Roxette.nl

STOCKHOLM - EMI is promoting the release of the Roxette Hits and RoxBox with a advertising campaign website built especially for this purpose.

  The site, which is expected to occupy the Roxette.com domain, contains music clips, screensavers, photos, and a video “trailer” (commercial) that ends with Per and Marie speaking to the camera during the bowling alley photo shoot. You can also hear a snippet of the second new song, “Reveal,” from the music player on the website.

  The site was designed by Flatmate, a creative agency that EMI Music Sweden is using to create all of their artist-related campaign sites. It is co-branded with Telia, the Swedish telephone company, as they have a service that offers digital downloads.

• EMI’s Roxette Hits website

PHILADELPHIA - Two Roxette songs have earned a place on iTunes new listing of hot songs, dubbed “iTunes Essentials.”

  The iTunes Essentials listing picks 75 songs from each calendar, dividing them into three different categories: The Basics, Next Step and Deep Cuts. The Basics are representative of the biggest hits of the year, the Next Step category are listings of songs that you might not have heard before and Deep Cuts are sort of lost gems – hit songs that you somehow missed.

  Roxette’s “Joyride” earned a place as the #1 Deep Cuts track from 1991, while “The Look” placed #5 in 1989’s Next Step field.

  Somehow, “It Must Have Been Love,” the #2 track of 1990 according to Billboard, missed out in the listing of songs from that year.

  Of course, Roxette fans almost certainly have these “essential” tracks in their libraries, but if you’d don’t, they can be downloaded from the iTunes service.

  The top download track there from Roxette is “Listen to Your Heart.”

STOCKHOLM - The web design company Famestudios, owned in part by Per Gessle along with Bonnier, “IT-Guru” Christer Sturmark, and ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, has fired their project managers and programmers. The reason is, according to the company’s CEO, Ludvig Werner, an isolation of core business.


 “We won’t manage the web productions ourselves anymore but outsource it to other companies. We will focus entirely on digital events,” says Ludvig Werner to Dagens Media, a trade publication.


 In this area of digital events, Famestudios offers, among other things, consultative services for interactive events that can be connected to physical events.


 Famestudios earned a modest 1.5 million Swedish crowns last year, while they, at the same time, lost 6 million.


 Among their clients are the record companies behind Roxette and ABBA, whose official sites are designed by Famestudios.

• Dagens Media’s article (In Swedish)
• Famestudios
• Roxette’s Official website

LOS ANGELES - According to a Reuters report yesterday, EMI has taken further steps to allow for registered downloading of its artists’ music from the Internet. In addition to the service offered by PressPlay that we reported about earlier this year, nine contracts have been signed with service providers, which will allow access to music online.

• Full story (As published on Yahoo UK)