LONDON - EMI Recorded Music announced plans yesterday for the biggest European music download initiative by a record company in Europe to date. The company will make available for sale online over 140,000 tracks from over 3,000 EMI artists.

  As well as upping the amount of tracks available, EMI’s new program gives consumers more flexibility over how and when they can access its music, enabling them to:

• Burn music onto CD-R
• Copy tracks to portable players
• Purchase singles online as soon as the songs are serviced to radio and in advance of their commercial release on CD

 Already more than 20 music retail websites from six different European countries are gearing up to start selling EMI’s new downloads and will go live at varying times over the coming weeks.

  Read more…

NEW YORK (UPDATED) - Jewel case packages of “Look Sharp!” are on sale in the United States where, by mistake, the cover booklet was inserted reverse-side-up and the now-classic Mikael Jansson photographic image of Marie and Per lounging against a black limo – along with their “autographs” – shows through as the cover art.

  A spokesperson at EMI knew of no intentional change to the cover, and the number of units affected is unknown. The catalog number is CDP-7-91098-2.

NEW YORK (UPDATED) - Without any fanfare – and at retail stores at least, totally overwhelmed by the hype surrounding the release of Madonna’s new album – “The Ballad Hits” was finally released in the United States today.

  This release marks the return of Roxette to the EMI family of labels in the US, after a many years of separation. During that period, Roxette released “The Greatest Hits” on the Edel America label, just before that company went out-of-business two years ago.
  According to The Daily Roxette’s correspondents, only a handful of copies of “The Ballad Hits” could be found at Virgin Megastore in New York City’s Times Square (where Roxette performed just a few years ago), and not with the new releases in the front of the store, but in the bin with previous Roxette albums. In the Miami area, the CD is nowhere to be found. Many stores there have not even heard about the release.

  Capitol does not intend to release “A Thing About You” as a radio single to promote the album. A sticker on the CD package reads “15 of the International duo’s biggest love songs including the #1 smash It Must Have Been Love.”

  Thomas Evensson and Jackie_Radiorox contributed to this article.

STOCKHOLM - Peter Danowsky, legal counselor for the Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen, has now replied to Marie Fredriksson’s claim against the paper.

  The tabloid, writes the counselor, has not written that Marie is a criminal, or blameworthy. “Nor defamed, abusively treated or [subjected her to] any other outrageous treatment.”

  “Expressen doesn’t seem to have read my summons especially carefully,” Leif Silbersky, Marie’s lawyer, says to the competing newspaper Aftonbladet. “The grounds for my demands are that persons in Marie’s vicinity experienced Marie as untruthful,” Silbersky continues. “Marie got scared as well, and thought the doctors were deceiving her, while at the same time giving the truth to the media.”

  Silbersky also points out that Sjöberg [Expressen’s Editor-in-Chief] at first claimed that Expressen’s information was correct, and then suddenly turned around and admitted that it was wrong publishing it.

• Aftonbladet’s story (In Swedish)

COPENHAGEN - Chat transcript from Jubii. While the questions have been translated from Swedish and Danish, Per’s replies are in his original English.




  Per: good afternoon!

Guest 32 asks: Gessle, is it correct that a new Roxette album will be released in 2004?

  Per: Well, we don’t know do we? It might happen!

Havstrym 75 asks: Hello Per, how is Marie?

  Per: Hello there. She’s much much much better now. She’s busy writing songs and dancing

Guest 12 asks: Will there be a GT-tour next summer? (have to plan my vacation anyway =)/ love you!

  Per: Good thinking! There just might be a tour next year, yes. It all depends on whether we can get Micke Syd to lose 10 kilos.

Guest 47 asks: What is your favorite acoustic guitar?

  Per: I have several but I bought a Martin from 1968 the other month and it’s kicking azz

Casper . Foldager asks: Is it really Per Gessle live?

  Per: It’s really me. You have to trust the media.

• Jubii’s site (Various languages)

Read more…

MELBOURNE/STOCKHOLM (UPDATED) - EMI Australia claims that “The Pop Hits” will be released in Australia on April 21. According to Li Eriksson at Capitol Records Sweden, “The Pop Hits” will also be released in the UK, “in June”.

  EMI Australia will be releasing the “The Pop Hits” CD in two formats - the standard CD, and the CD with the Limited Edition EP. We have no further details on the UK release yet.

  There’s also, as previously reported, a US release date set for “The Ballad Hits” and it’s April 22.

  Thomas Evensson contributed to this article.

COPENHAGEN - Per Gessle was on the sports news this evening.

  Having spent the entire day in Denmark doing promotion (such as interviews with different newspapers like EkstraBladet and BT), Per met with a Danish former (almost) Formula 1 driver (he was in an accident and became paralysed from the waist down). They drove around in some high-performance car, and the segment was shown on Danish TV2.

SYDNEY - Marie recently sent another message directly to the fans…

Dear Marie Davis and all my fans,

  How can I thank you enough for your kind thoughts and wonderful care during my illness. I want you to know that I know that all your prayers have helped me a lot and given me a lot of strength. I’m feeling so much better every day. Slowly, I’m starting to write music again. Allthough the rest of this year will be a resting year, I’m sure I’ll see you all very soon again.

  From the bottom of my heart, a sincere thanks to all of you.

— Marie Fredriksson

EDITOR’S NOTE: The message was sent to Australian fan Marie Davis via Roxette’s manager Marie Dimberg as a thank you for the prayer chain she started when Marie got ill. Hundreds of people signed the chain to show support by praying or sending positive energy to Marie every day.

COPENHAGEN - Tomorrow, Tuesday, you have the opportunity to chat live with Per Gessle himself!
Enter http://live.jubii.dk/ and you can chat with Per beginning at 5 pm local time.

  You must log in 15 minutes before the chat begins! As has been the case previously with such an event, you can expect a combination of Danish/Swedish and English.

NEW YORK - It was 14 years ago this week that Roxette’s rise to international stardom became official — that was the week that “The Look” hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.


  Already household names in their native Sweden, Per Gessle and Marie Fredriksson were unknown in much of the rest of the world. In February 1989, an exchange student asked radio station KDWB in Minneapolis to play a CD he’d bought in Sweden. One of the tracks, “The Look,” scored big with listeners and, to make a long story short, about two months later the song was the top song in America.


  Nearly a decade and a half later, Roxette has enough hit material for two greatest hits packages — “The Ballad Hits” and “The Pop Hits”.

RIO DE JANEIRO - Success stories are coming out of Brazil where EMI is reporting that “The Pop Hits” turned gold in only two days and that “The Ballad Hits” is now ’double golden.’ Our best information is that gold means 50,000 copies sold.


(LoneGunman contributed to this article.)

• EMI Brazil (In Portugese)