The magazine will be closed immediately, NYT confirms. A meeting with the staff was held at 2PM; it's not known how many employees will lose their jobs. In a memo obtained by Gawker, Vibe Media Group CEO Steve Aaron said the company struggled to find new investors to help it restructure its "huge debt," but there were no takers. The absence of Vibe will leave only one large-circ magazine covering hip hop, The Source, which hasn't been free of trouble either. That magazine has emerged from bankruptcy with a new owner last year.

Radio & Records, a major music industry trade publication founded in 1973, and Performing Songwriter, a Nashville-based magazine established in 1993, are closing, their owners announced Wednesday (June 3). Both covered a wide variety of musical genres, including country, and attributed the closures to the current economic climate. R&R, headquartered in Los Angeles, was acquired in 2006 by VNU, a company that also owned the predominant music trade magazine, Billboard, as well as the Hollywood Reporter and ACNielsen. VNU changed its name to the Nielsen Company in 2007.

Writing on the Plan B messageboard, publisher Frances Morgan said: "We've come to the decision to close Plan B Magazine after the June issue after a lot of deliberation.

"The current economic climate, combined with the situation of the music industry - to which, whether we like it or not, the fortunes of a commercial monthly music mag are inextricably linked - has made it ever harder for us to continue producing the magazine the way we want to.

"To keep going, we'd need to make cuts in staff, content, size, frequency, print quality - and we're not prepared to do that. We're still above water, we're making some beautiful magazines, and we are quitting while we're ahead."

“We went as far as we could in a difficult environment,” said an Alpha Media spokeswoman, Nora Haynes.

About 30 people will leave the company as a result of the magazine's closing, she said.

Alpha also is combining its magazine Maxim with Maxim.com, which means a few staff changes and, potentially, more layoffs. Joe Levy, the editor in chief of Blender, will become editor in chief of the combined Maxim and Maxim.com; Jay Woodruff, formerly editor in chief of Maxim Digital, will become chief content officer of the operation.

Blender has been publishing since 2001, featuring music reviews, recurring features like "greatest songs ever," and articles on Ludacris and Radiohead. It is aimed at young men and its covers have tended to feature female singers, like Fergie and Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls, in come-hither poses.

• New reviews of Jazz albums.
• The Jazz.com Jazz Blog.
• Interviews with leading figures in the jazz world, including Billy Taylor, Manfred Eicher, Ron Carter, Maria Schneider, Stefon Harris and others.
• Visual Jazz galleries featuring the work of the greatest jazz photographers and artists, including Ray Avery, Herb Snitzer, Michael Symonds, Jos Knaepen and Suzanne Cerny.
• Lewis Porter's Encyclopedia of Jazz Musicians with more than 1,400 entries on currently active jazz performers.
• The Song of the Day and A Jazz Classic Re-visited .

Obama Girl has found a new friend in Herb Scannell, whose online video startup Next New Networks has acquired BarelyPolitical.com, the site behind the viral-video hit.

BarelyPolitical was founded in June by Ben Relles and quickly rose to prominence thanks to the 2008 presidential election sendup, "I Got a Crush on Obama," which has been viewed millions of times and featured on news shows on networks from ABC to al-Jazeera. The site followed up with other politically focused music videos.

"Having BarelyPolitical as part of the group is kind of a feather in the cap," said Scannell, the CEO and co-founder of Next, which runs 14 other niche channels. "We're excited about this as a pretty big slice in the world of micronetworks."

Enter Movies Rock, a custom publishing supplement that will be mailed to about 16 million subscribers of 14 Conde Nast magazines -- such as Vanity Fair, Vogue and GQ -- beginning Nov. 1. Concocted by Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter as a counterpart to an earlier Conde Nast advertorial effort, Fashion Rocks (which, as its title suggests, encompasses haute couture and rock stardom), Movies Rock functions as eye candy for the coffee table and a kind of behind-the-music and behind-the-scenes compendium for iPod listeners and cineastes alike.

Edited by Mitch Glazer, a successful freelance writer turned movie scribe ("Scrooged," "The Recruit"), the glossy annual is intended as a reflection of what's hot in popular culture.

"This year going into next, you've got 'La Vie en Rose,' 'Sweeney Todd,' 'El Cantante,' 'I'm Not There,' 'August Rush,' 'Once' -- it's definitely of the moment," Glazer said, naming a number of high-profile music-driven films. "So Graydon's idea was to do a 13th issue of Vanity Fair devoted to the place where movies and music meet."

Bill Murray, extravagantly kitted out in a rhinestone-studded jumpsuit and shiny pompadour, poses as Elvis on the cover. Inside, familiar Vanity Fair photographers -- Mark Seliger, Jean Baptiste Mondino and Bruce Weber -- have snapped a who's who of musicians and actors who somehow straddle the movie-music divide: Kanye West, Nelly, Billy Bob Thornton, Eve, Freddie Highmore, Chris Brown and Zooey Deschanel among them.

While many industry observers speculated that Radiohead might go off-label for its seventh album, it was presumed the band would at least rely on Apple's iTunes or United Kingdom-based online music store 7digital for distribution. Few suspected the band members had the ambition (or the server capacity) to put an album out on their own. The final decision was apparently made just a few weeks ago, and, when informed of the news on Sunday, several record executives admitted that, despite the rumors, they were stunned. "This feels like yet another death knell," emailed an A&R executive at a major European label. "If the best band in the world doesn't want a part of us, I'm not sure what's left for this business."

Labels can still be influential and profitable by focusing on younger acts that need their muscle to get radio play and placement in record stores — but only if the music itself remains a saleable commodity. "That's the interesting part of all this," says a producer who works primarily with American rap artists. "Radiohead is the best band in the world; if you can pay whatever you want for music by the best band in the world, why would you pay $13 dollars or $.99 cents for music by somebody less talented? Once you open that door and start giving music away legally, I'm not sure there's any going back."

A landmark audience of viewers from around the world has united at www.LiveEarth.MSN.com to experience the excitement of today's Live Earth concerts and to confront the threat of global warming. As of 3:00 p.m. EDT, MSN had received a total of more than 10 million video streams and has the most simultaneous viewers of any online concert ever.

Viewers worldwide have already watched the Live Earth concerts via the live webcast, and the LiveEarth.MSN.com audience will only increase. On-demand footage of all performances, along with artist interviews, backstage footage, easy searching capabilities for specific songs, artists and more, will be available from all eight official concerts at LiveEarth.MSN.com for the next several weeks.

"History is being made today," said Joanne Bradford, corporate vice president and chief media officer of MSN. "Millions of people around the world have joined together to fight the climate crisis. The over 10 million streams MSN has delivered so far today represent a milestone in live Internet broadcasting. We expect to see an even greater number of streams after the concerts are over as people return to watch their favorite performances or enjoy them for the first time if they missed the concerts live."

The future of MTV's signature music video show, Total Request Live, looks precarious, illustrating the Viacom network's struggles to stay relevant in an increasingly Web-based media landscape.

Speculation inside MTV and at the major music labels has been mounting that TRL, a daily afternoon show that has been experiencing declining ratings, will soon be canceled or scaled back to two days a week. The newest fuel for the rumor mill: the fact that much of the staff at TRL's studio at New York City's Times Square was laid off late Tuesday, including members of the wardrobe, makeup and technical staff.

Viacom is preparing to cut 250 jobs at its MTV Networks division, the latest action in what MTVN chairman and CEO Judy McGrath characterized as a "fine-tuning" of operations.

This morning, in a memo to MTVN staff, McGrath said that in order to compete in an accelerating digital universe, the company must "refine [its] business and organizational models as well."

The memo, which was leaked to the press almost immediately after it hit MTVN staffers' in-boxes at 6:17 a.m., confirmed that cuts will come across the five business units: Music and Logo; Kids and Family; Entertainment; International; and Sales and Strategic Services.

The cuts are expected to have a considerable impact among the cable networks, including the flagship channel, as well as Spike TV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. The dollars Viacom saves as a result of the staff reduction will be funneled into furthering MTVN's digital expansion, a category that has been a source of particular tumult.

CBS will launch a digital record label in January, signing artists with the goal of breaking them via television show placement, iTunes and the Eye web's broadband channel.

CBS Records will be launched primarily utilizing the existing infrastructure of CBS Entertainment and CBS Interactive. It will operate as a newly created unit within the entertainment division based in Los Angeles. The label will debut with three artists -- Boston rock act Senor Happy; Will Dailey, a John Mayer-ish singer-songwriter, also from Boston; and P.J. Olsson, an established indie-rock artist -- and is looking to sign another five acts in the first year.

Larry Jenkins, head of his own management company, L J Entertainment, and a former publicity and marketing exec at Capitol Records and Columbia Records, will consult for CBS Records during the primary launch phase, identifying talent and assisting with A&R administration. He will be working with Nancy Tellem, president of CBS Paramount Network Television Entertainment Group, under whose aegis CBS Records will fall.

Universal Music, the world's largest music company, is backing a start-up that will allow consumers to download songs for free. It will rely on advertising for its revenues, offering a different business model from that of Apple Computer's popular iTunes music store.

The move reflects music companies' willingness to experiment as they try to capture some profit from the boom in digital distribution still dominated by illegal file-sharing networks.

The service, SpiralFrog, represents a departure from Apple's 99 cents-a-song business model and other legal download services which charge a subscription fee by being completely free. It is due to start up in December.

The decision to also put out an online-only album, "Lunafied," which includes Luna's versions of songs by the Velvet Underground, the Talking Heads and others that were originally recorded for soundtracks or as bonus songs, illustrates the way that Web outlets can generate sales for interesting albums considered too obscure to win shelf space at regular retail outlets. Without the costs associated with printing and shipping CD's, such online-only releases need not sell many copies to make a profit.

"This is the first time we've done this, but it won't be the last," said David Dorn, Rhino's senior vice president of new media strategy.

Luna, a moody band influenced by the Velvet Underground, is beloved by indie-rock aficionados, but its most popular album, "Bewitched," sold just 86,000 copies in the United States, according to SoundScan. The band was dropped from Elektra, a division of Warner.

The band initially suggested putting out a two-disc set, with one disc devoted to hits and the other devoted to covers, according to frontman Dean Wareham, who now performs with his wife in the duo Dean & Britta. "But they sent it upstairs to the people who analyze how they're going to make money," he said. And because online consumers tend to buy music by the song, collectors buy only the tracks they do not already own.

Sometime in the next week, Start Mobile will launch a service that lets customers download what founder John Doffing calls M60s - 60-second original compositions by emerging musicians created specifically for mobile phones. The hundreds of songs at startmobile.net will range in style from hip-hop and reggae to experimental jazz and electronica.

Ringtones continue to be big business in the US. At up to $3 for a 20-second song, they account for 10 percent of the music industry's revenue, according to Roger Entner of Ovum, a consulting company with offices in Boston.

Mr. Doffing hasn't yet settled on a fee structure for the M60s. He says they will be free for the first 60 days following the site's launch. After that, he envisions a monthly subscription service that will buy a set number of songs and let users switch out ringtones to "curate the content" of their phones. It's an apt metaphor for a company originally founded as a way to turn cellphones into mini-mobile art galleries. Start Mobile was formed in December to make original artwork by emerging and underground artists available as phone "wallpaper." The artists earn a percentage of each sale, as will musicians.

But analysts are mixed on whether it can do what Apple's competitors so far have not: Create a serious threat to the Cupertino company's successful iTunes online music and video store. And further, Amazon might be looking to create a portable digital music player to challenge the iPod, which dominates the U.S. market.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Amazon executives are in "advanced" talks with four record label giants. The paper said the Seattle-based company is exploring the possibility of launching its own Amazon portable digital music player and subscription service offering discounted rates.

"We never comment on rumors and speculation," said Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith. Apple did not respond to requests for a comment.

It's not the first time Amazon has been rumored to be getting into digital music. In August, reports pointed toward a possible September launch of a similar service, after two years of sporadic negotiations with music executives.