All That Remains Drummer to Sit Out on ‘Rockstar’ Mayhem Tour

All That Remains drummer Jason Costa has suffered a broken hand and will not be joining the band on the Rockstar Mayhem Festival Tour.

Poison The Well Post Full Album Stream

Poison The Well’s new album, The Tropic Rot, is streaming on MySpace.

Death By Stereo Posts Video

Death By Stereo has posted the video for “Welcome To The Party.”

The Pirate Bay To Be Sold, Go Legit

In a somewhat surprising turn of events, massively popular torrent tracking site The Pirate Bay has announced it is in the midst of being acquired by software company Global Gaming Factory X for approximately $7.8 million. The new owner allegedly plans to re-launch as a legal, content provider-friendly portal.

This follows a rather public and dramatic trial that found the site guilty of assisting copyright infringement to the tune of $3.5 million, and being summed to Dutch court through a process server over Twitter (which has to be a first). Interestingly, and though we have reports to the contrary, the official Pirate Bay blog maintains its acrimonious, defiant tone with a promise of continued no-holds-barred file swapping:

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That’s the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And – you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That’s awesome and will take the heat of us.

Meanwhile, GGFX CEO Hans Pandeya is singing a different tune:

“We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.”

“The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary,” said Pandeya.

The move is scheduled to be finalized in August. As our pals at Idolator point out, the timing of these events and the site’s future plans to compensate copyright holders takes place on an interesting stage, given their current legal messes and notoriously indignant and unwavering attitude. While most piracy cases, even the more heated ones, shut down sites rather quickly, The Pirate Bay always managed to outlive its peers, and with a “devil may care” attitude and flamboyant flair for rhetoric. It has been interesting waiting to see when its story would come to an end, and it now appears at least the end of a chapter nears.

Pandora Adds Roadblocks For Indie Bands

Until recently, music recommendation/internet radio service Pandora accepted music from independent artists at no cost, in any form, even home-burned CD’s. Hypebot now reports submitting your own music has a few extra steps, and some costs.

In part because of a deal to display album cover art via Amazon.com’s servers, submissions must now be available as a physical CD for sale on Amazon, and include cover art and a UPC code to even be considered for airplay.

Compliance with the new rules will cost artists in several ways. According to its FAQ page, to get play on Pandora you now need:

* CD of your music
* A unique UPC code for that CD
* Your CD to be available through Amazon (must be a physical CD, not just MP3s for download)
* The legal rights to your music
* MP3 files for two of the songs from your CD
* Free Pandora account, based on a valid email address, which can be associated with your music

In addition to the costs of designing art and packaging a CD, Pandora suggests indie artists join the “Amazon Advantage Program” to comply with these rules. Membership costs $29.95 per year plus 55% of the list price of every CD sold. Established artists and labels already comply with Pandora’s new rules.

Hypebot gripes that these rules are unfair to new artists trying to gain exposure though Pandora, but really, should you be clogging up someone’s playlist with a song you recorded an hour ago and aren’t ready to sell?

Download New Alice In Chains Now!

Alice In Chains has posted a download for “A Looking In View,” a new song from their long-awaited album Black Gives Way To Blue. On first listen, we’re very impressed. The vocals sound almost exactly the same as they did before. That’s not a slag against new vocalist William DuVall, either. Jerry Cantrell was behind half of the vocals before, so the fifth harmony dynamic they had is intact. The song itself is long, slow and heavy, and honestly, as good as anything we could have expected. Black Gives Way To Blue will be out in September. Let us know what you think of it!

Clutch, Wino, Revolution Mother Tour

Tour dates for Clutch’s upcoming tour with Wino and Revolution Mother have been released.

Skeletonwitch Announce New Album Title

Skeletonwitch has announced Breathing the Fire as the title of their upcoming release, due October 13.

Drummer Parts Ways With Every Time I Die

Drummer Mike Novak has parted ways with Every Time I Die as a result of “personal conflicts.”

Metallica To Film Concert For DVD

Metallica will be filming its July 7 concert in France for a French-only DVD release on October 19.