Canadian producer Pierre Cossette, father of Grammy Awards, dies at 85

Google/AP News

Pierre Cossette, the Canadian father of the modern Grammy Awards show, has died at a Montreal hospital. He was 85.

His death was announced in Santa Monica, Calif., late Friday by the Recording Academy. Academy president and CEO Neil Portnow paid glowing tribute to Cossette.

"It is with a heavy heart that we say goodbye to our dear friend and father of the Grammy Awards, Pierre Cossette," he said.

The Valleyfield, Que., native was an accomplished television and theatre producer who also managed some of American pop music's most influential early bands.

But he's best known as the visionary who guided the Grammy Awards from its early days as a stuffy, unsuccessful production to the widescreen industry institution it's become.

In its early years, the Grammy show was an hour-long compilation of recorded performances, and it was not a commercial success.

Brian Eno exhibit in Long Beach invites viewers to see the music

Los Angeles Times

Eight time zones ahead of Los Angeles, Brian Eno's cellphone is ringing. He's cycling along the Thames River towpath, savoring the shank of a summer afternoon. "Could you call back in an hour?" he asks politely.

The appointed moment arrives and Eno is ready to chat, having come to a temporary halt in the tranquillity of his London home. Like his fellow harried humanoids, the British multimedia artist intimates that he's constantly trying to carve out a few minutes of quiet, contemplative space for himself within the manic, tech-driven modern world.



Of course, Eno, 61, has been a pioneer of that world and a proponent of new artistic technologies for decades: first as a keyboardist for the definitiveglam-rock ensemble Roxy Music; then as the producer of countless albums by U2, the Talking Heads, Coldplay and other sonically promiscuous bands; and in his prolific audio-visual collaborations, ranging from the Microsoft Windows six-second start-up jingle to the sound design for the Spore(2008_video_game) video game to the soundtrack for Peter Jackson's upcoming feature film adaptation of Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones." Eno's seemingly inexhaustible list of projects and artistic partners has earned him a reputation as a kind of creative perpetual-motion machine. But he confesses that he, too, struggles to keep the 24-7 pace from overwhelming him.

iTunes Sells 24% of All U.S. Music

PC World

Apple's iTunes Music Store now sells 25 percent of all music sales in the U.S., and 69 percent of the entire US digital music market. Relative newcomer AmazonMP3 sells just 8 percent of all U.S. digital music downloads.

Market research company The NPD Group reports that while CDs remain the most popular format for paid music purchases, digital music sales are making up an ever-greater share of US music sales. (See also "Apple iTunes: How to Organize and Manage Your Music Collection.")

CDs comprised 65 percent of all music sold in the first half of 2009 compared to paid digital downloads, which comprised 35 percent of music sales. By comparison, paid digital music downloads comprised just 20 percent of sales in 2007 -- growing to 30 percent of the music market last year.

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