Blog Posts by Daniel Kreps

Aretha Franklin, who abruptly canceled six months worth of tour dates in November and then underwent a "highly successful" surgery rumored to be pancreatic cancer-related, gave an update to fans through Jet magazine, insisting that her health problems are so 2010. "I am not going to even deal with that," Franklin said. "I don't have to talk about my health with anybody other than my doctors. The problem has been resolved." This is a woman who takes doctor-patient confidentiality very seriously.

Franklin refused to confirm or deny whether she is in fact dealing with pancreatic cancer -- one of the deadliest forms of the disease -- but thankfully her ordeal hasn't affected her ability to speak in the third person. "I am not one to do a lot of talking about my personal health or business. There are a lot of people who will talk about anything, as long as there is somebody listening. But I am not one of those people. That's not Aretha," said Aretha.

The Queen of Soul did provide some

Now that Kanye West has (supposedly) completed work on collaborative album with Jay-Z called "Watch the Throne," the rapper appears to be making plans for the rest of his 2011. Unfortunately, those plans might include producing Justin Bieber's next album. That's the word from Bieber's manager "Scooter" Braun, who revealed in a webchat with fans that the teenage crooner was in discussions to get West to provide songs for the boy wonder's next album. "[Bieber] and Kanye had a call... about a song they're trying to work on together. Kanye wants to produce a bunch of new songs for his new album," Braun told Bieber Nation (via Consequence of Sound).

Kanye's bromance with Bieber has been well reported, and West has used a minimum of 100 tweets to reiterate his love for Bieb's "Runaway Love." In fact, Kanye loved the song so much he recruited Raekwon for an amazing Wu-Tang-flavored remix of the hit song.

So there you have it. Instead of another "Glow in the Dark"-esque tour for Amp favorite

The Beatles stand to make a lot of money from their long-overdue partnership with iTunes, thanks mostly to a "groundbreaking" deal that finds the Fab Four being paid directly from Apple's digital music service, Billboard reports. Not to get too immersed in numbers because we're awful at math, but the Beatles get roughly 18 to 22.5 cents per download, or 25 percent of the retail revenue on iTunes (more than the reported 12 percent most artists get), in royalties, and that money is going directly to Apple Corps and their publisher Sony/ATV, as opposed to straight to EMI, the Beatles' longtime label, who would usually then dole out the royalty cash.

This report isn't that much of a surprise. The Beatles are the greatest band of all time, and their digital catalog was perhaps the only hope a service like Amazon MP3 had of maybe usurping iTunes' dominance in the digital marketplace. In short, it was going to take a lot more than the standard royalty deal to convince Apple Corps and the

Day two of the preliminary hearings against Dr. Conrad Murray, the physician charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson, continued yesterday in Los Angeles. Much of the testimony simply confirmed previous accounts of the night Jackson died of a sedative overdose -- allegations like Murray paused CPR efforts in order to hide the vials of Propofol before paramedics arrived. Some new information was aired in court, however. Paramedic Richard Senneff told prosecutors that Murray didn't reveal to the ambulance crew that he had administered Propofol to Jackson prior to the singer's cardiac arrest. By the time the paramedics arrived, all evidence of Propofol, vials and IV bags were hidden by Murray and Jackson's bodyguard, Senneff said, adding that Jackson himself looked more like a "hospice patient" than the King of Pop.

Jackson bodyguard Alberto Alvarez testified that when he walked into Jackson's bedroom and saw the star lying in bed unconscious with his eyes

Even behind bars, poor T.I. just cannot manage to keep himself out of trouble, even when he does something, umm, touching. Last weekend, T.I.'s wife, Tameka "Tiny" Cottle, came to the Arkansas prison the rapper will call home for the remaining months of his jail sentence. What started as your run-of-the-mill visit during regular hours soon became "frisky" as, in front of guards and other inmates, and in the immortal words of TMZ, "Tiny made like Michael Jackson ... and beat it."

Guards, threatened by the prospect of seeing T.I.'s "King Uncaged" so up close and personal, immediately reprimanded the rapper and sent him to a more secure "Special Housing Unit." While this sort of behavior might be legal in movies ("Natural Born Killers" comes to mind), according to prison rules, couples are allowed to kiss and embrace are the beginning and end of their visits, but hands must be in full view of the guards at all times. Tiny most certainly broke that rule.

If one of the music industry's New Year's Resolutions was to sell more albums in 2011, it's perhaps fortunate that the bar is now lower than ever. For the fourth straight year, CD sales in the U.S. dropped by 20 percent, and music sales in general fell 12.8 percent compared to the already-not-good 2009 totals. That's according to Nielsen SoundScan's year-end sales roundup, which has become an almost annual buzz kill/reminder of just how bad things are in the music biz.

How bad is it? To begin with, the 326.2 million albums sold in 2010 was the lowest total since Nielsen SoundScan began keeping tabs on sales in 1991. Only 13 albums managed to attain million-selling platinum distinction, compared to the 22 platinum albums that earned it in 2009, which in itself was a paltry total compared to the glory days of compact disc megasales -- remember when 'N Sync debuted with 2.42 million sold in a single week? (The year was 2000.) Eminem's "Recovery" was the past year's top-selling album with

Some rappers get the biopic treatment, some rappers get a street named after them, and some rappers even get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Lil Wayne, however, has been bestowed with a much more nefarious honor.

Police in Newark, New Jersey, recently confiscated 500 bricks of black tar heroin in a bust, and the branding on the drugs gave them quite a surprise. As Death and Taxes points out, like any good marketing agency, drug dealers often brand their product with a catchy and enticing moniker to score name-brand recognition on the streets. So when police made the bust in Newark, they found themselves in possession of 500 bricks of "Lil Wayne," which had a street value of, to paraphrase Weezy, a quarter of "a milli."

Thankfully for Wayne, merely being the inspiration behind a stash of heroin is not a violation of his parole. If it were, Lady Gaga would probably be in trouble too: Last April, Syracuse police found 400 bags of heroin emblazoned with the name "Lady Gaga"

A contest held by the tourism board of Great Britain's idyllic Suffolk County to name the area's greatest icon loudly backfired when heavy metal enthusiasts in the area voted for Cradle of Filth's frontman Dani Filth to take home the honor. Because, with its 60 miles of breathtaking coastline and reputation as being the birth place of actors Ralph Fiennes and Bob Hoskins, who else could better exemplify the history of Suffolk County than the lead singer of a death metal band who once released songs called "Lord Abortion" and "Tortured Soul Asylum"?

Although Filth received over 13,000 votes in the Suffolk Icons contest, more than six times his closest competitor, the tourist board left the Marilyn Manson-esque singer off their list of 20 finalists, adding that Filth was omitted because he "lacked the required credentials to act as representative iconic images of Suffolk." Instead, we're left with such stalwarts of Suffolk iconography like "Fish and Chips on Aldeburgh Beach," "Racing at