Per Gessle will perform his cover of the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” on the April 20th installment of the Swedish television program “Bingolotto.” The song is Per’s contribution to the Ramones CD tribute album “The Song Ramones the Same” - due out on April 15th. The show is broadcast on TV4.

NEW YORK - EMI will ax 1,800 staffers worldwide — nearly 20% of its work force — has cast off a quarter of its 1,600 artists, and will take more than $340 million in charges in an aggressive bid to return the stumbling British music group to fighting form.

  The drastic cost-cutting actions, announced last Wednesday by EMI Recorded Music chief Alain Levy at a conference for investors in London, are the culmination of a worldwide evaluation of EMI’s operations initiated when he took over the company six months ago.

  Levy said half of the 1,800 job cuts have already happened or will happen by the end of the month, while the other half will be completed by the end of September. Roughly 400 of the layoffs will come from the U.S. operation, where EMI has languished in last place among the five majors and its key labels, Capitol and Virgin, have struggled to generate new hits for the better part of a decade.

  Levy said almost half the planned $140 million in annual cost savings will come from the North America region because salaries and operating overhead are far higher here than in other territories.

  “This is not just a cost-cutting exercise,” Levy said at the conference, also attended by chairman Eric Nicoli and EMI division chiefs from around the globe. “This is reshaping EMI for the future and positioning it for growth with a much lower cost base.”

— This article by Justin Oppelaar and Erich Boehm.

BONN - It took some time, but it’s online now: The TDR-supported demos-from-fans project known as “Fanism!”

  The idea, born here in The Daily Roxette’s “SmallTalk” section, was that fans wanted to record their own demo versions of Rox-songs as a very special tribute to Per and Marie. Bands like Gladstone, Kix and Melancholodic communicated via the pages of TDR. The result is a collection of 14 songs from Roxers all around the world!

  While the project was originally intended to be released on CD, the high cost of distribution made the musicians decide to create a website instead where all of the songs are available for high-quality download.

  The readers of TDR suggested names for the project and after a comment from Per, “Fanism” was chosen. Besides the songs and pictures of all of the artists, there is an opportunity to give a feedback by signing the Fanism online-guestbook. We invite you to take a look at www.fanism.org and listen to songs like “Here Comes the Weekend”,
“Sommartider” and “First Girl on the Moon.”

• “Fanism” site