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)

Daniel Zimmerman, the administrator of roxette.org services, reporte a couple of weeks ago that roxette.org might face its end due to financial constraints. In his new message to the Roxette Mailing List, he says:

  “It’s going to cost around $100 a month just to pay for server space and bandwidth to keep the web hosting operation running.” He also says that only having the mailing list at roxette.org and shutting down all other services would be easier and cheaper for now, but probably not for long.

  To be able to have roxette.org in the future, Dan has arranged two different mechanisms for donating money to roxette.org:

• Amazon Honor System
• 
  oxette.org+hosting+fund&no_shipping=1”>PayPal (preferable for U.S. users)

Read more…

COLOGNE - At EMI Electrola in Germany, Roxette gets respect. Based on their popularity and ability to generate sales, Roxette has an important part on their artist roster. The record label even built an artist-specific site for Roxette during the promotional period for “Room Service,” and they’ve just updated it to reflect the look and feel of the upcoming album.

  There are new wallpapers with the raspberry heart motif.

  Additionally, in a newsletter sent out today to subscribers, EMI informed Roxette fans that beginning Monday, October 14th, visitors to the T-Online website will be able to listen to the new songs featured on “The Ballad Hits” – even “before they are will be played on the radio.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: EMI Germany has sent out another newsletter today, telling that the T-Online special will start on October 15th, instead of 14th, as they announced in their previous newsletter.

• Roxette.de
• T-Online

Daniel Zimmerman, the administrator of roxette.org website and the listmaster of the Roxette Mailing List, sent an alarming message to the list. Having a site online can be expensive, and it seems roxette.org’s costs are rising. Dan says he now has four choices:

1. I can continue to run roxette.org out of my own pocket, and pay ridiculous amounts of money.

2. I can shut roxette.org down, including all mailing lists and web sites.

3. I can collect money from individuals who host their websites on roxette.org [to defray costs].

4. If I’m incredibly lucky, somebody…has connections with a colocation provider and can get me a good deal (all that’s required is space for one minitower).

Add your comments to this article if you have any ideas. There are dozens of sites hosted at roxette.org and if it goes offline, so will all of those sites.

• Roxette.org

The Covers Project is an interesting concept of collecting a database of cover songs and then building “chains” of them. As their introduction says, a “cover chain is a set of songs in which each song is a cover of a song by the band who covered the preceding song.”

  There are no Roxette songs found yet, but I added Per’s Ramones cover “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” to the database. Every few hours the system builds new chains starting from each of the artist in the database. Currently, the longest chain is 40 songs.

  Update: It seems that the algorithm creating the chains had a bug and mixed up the band making the original song and the band covering it. Now it’s fixed. Unfortunately this also means that Per’s cover chain shortened from 30 to 1…

• The Covers Project
• Per Gessle’s cover chain