When it comes to the distribution of digital entertainment, the planet has only two superpowers. One, of course, is Apple. The other is Amazon.com, which made headlines in the tech world on March 29 with two new Web-based services. Amazon Cloud Drive is a "personal disk drive in the cloud" that lets you store up to 5 gigabytes of photos, music, documents and other files, with the option to pay for more capacity. And Amazon Cloud Player is ...

Hearing his favorite classics mangled by a dance band, many a music lover has longed to take out after the guilty man, but most lovers of the classics do not know where to look. A 32-year-old Tin Pan Alleyite named Ted Mossman is their man.By setting classics to 4-4 jazz time and adding banal lyrics, Mossman has made more money rewriting masterpieces than the original composers did in writing them. His most successful swipe was Chopin's Polonaise in A Flat, which he turned into Till the ...

Randall Wentz works for the University of Wisconsin, vetting scholarship applications. He is a public employee, a union member. He makes $30,000 per year. We are sitting in a Madison, Wis., tavern with five of Randall's friends. All have 6-year-olds; they became friends through their children. All are public employees. Several are computer techies who make $60,000 a year. One is a middle school music teacher. These are educated, decent people, open and friendly in the Wisconsin way. They seem in equal parts flummoxed ...

Correction Appended: Nov. 19, 2009 Cheryl Blitman got a horrible shock when she opened her cell-phone bill. It was $170 higher than usual. Her phone company told her that her daughter had subscribed to 17 premium texting services. But Michelle, 15, was adamant; she had not. Eventually they figured out the source of the charges: FarmVille. FarmVille is the most popular game on Facebook--65 million unique monthly players and growing. It is also the furthest place imaginable from the ...

Diva Beyonce Knowles strutting her stuff in the conservative Middle East?Al Arabiya reported that organizers, seeking to avoid a similar fate for Beyonce, decided to hold her concert hundreds of miles away from Cairo at a thinly populated Red Sea resort. Beyonce's world tour, which continues until next March, has already run afoul of conservative Islam. She postponed her October 25 concert in Malaysia after the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party called for the Kuala Lumpur show to be scrapped because it ...

The Internet's most popular search engine should get smarter about music, as Google updates the algorithms that power its searches this week, a company spokesman said."It wasn't really like going to the movies, it was more of going to a V.I.P. behind the scenes Michael Jackson concert," Gross said in his review. "There really is nothing to compare this to!" The film will show in 99 countries, and early reports from overseas territories show strong late show and early matinee ...

Often in the middle of the night, while his wife sleeps beside him, John Sheridan picks up his iPhone from the nightstand and shakes the device like it was a conductor's wand on fire. Sometimes he goes on like this for more than an hour at a time. There's a point to this midnight madness, though. By day, Sheridan is a 53-year-old real-estate agent in Florida. But by night, he's an iPhone musician. In the past few months, ...

British singer Leona Lewis was "understandably shaken" after a man attacked her during a book signing in central London Wednesday afternoon, a spokeswoman for her record label said. A 29-year-old man was arrested after he punched Lewis at the Waterstones bookstore in Piccadilly Circus at 4:36 p.m. (10:36 a.m. ET), according to a Scotland Yard statement. She was signing copies of her new autobiography "Dreams" when the "unprovoked attack" happened, said Sarah Weinstein Dennison of the RCA Music Group. "The ...

What was the craziest thing to happen to Britney Spears last week? She went to Target. Twice. She bought a CD. That was it. Sounds pretty boring for an international pop icon, but it's a great relief to those working to keep Britney Inc. in business. For much of 2007 and 2008, Spears was an unhinged superstar unraveling daily in front of a captivated global audience and voracious media scrum. There were hours of ...

For as long as humans have pounded drums and plucked strings, listening to music has affected people's sense of well-being, lifting their spirits and — as new research shows — calming their nerves. Literally. According to a study at Cleveland Clinic, music can slow the neuronal firings deep within the brain during surgery designed to treat Parkinson's patients. The seeds of this study were planted about two years ago, when a patient named Damir Janigro was being prepped ...