Former Intern Vs Diddy's Bad Boy Entertainment

Though Salaam agreed to be classified as an unpaid intern or trainee, her lawyer says a worker has the "right to make a claim for unpaid wages" and that when an interns receives no wages "the primary recipient of the benefits should be the intern — not the company." more on this story

Luke Bryan Crashes The Top Of Album Chart With No. 1 Debut

(Radio.com) Luke Bryan is having a pretty good year. Mere months after his last No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, the country star is back in the saddle again. His new LP, Crash My Party, has the week's biggest album sales, selling just under 528,000 copies in its first week, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan.

The success of Crash My Party gives it the third-best sales week of 2013, narrowly missing out on second place. Jay Z's Magna Carta… Holy Grail sold just over 528,000 copies in its first week, while The 20/20 Experience, the comeback album by Justin Timberlake, reigns supreme with first-week sales of 968,000.

Bryan's No. 1 not only caps off a big week for him, but also for country music. According to Billboard, his sales are the largest for a male country artist since Tim McGraw hit the top in November 2004 with Live Like You're Dying, which sold 766,000 copies. He's also the only country artist not named Swift to sell over a half million in one week since 2008.

Perhaps fans are drawn to the word 'party.' Before Crash My Party's release, Bryan scored his first No. 1 in March with Spring Break… Here to Party. The compilation album, which combines Bryan's four spring break-themed EPs, sold 150,000 in its initial week out.

Crash My Party is one of two new albums to debut inside the top 10. The other, K. Michelle's Rebellious Soul, is the No. 2 album this week. The R&B singer's debut release sold 72,000 its first week out. more on this story

Katy Perry's Roar Sets Sales Record For The Year

Katy Perry's new single "Roar" is living up to its name after becoming the biggest selling digital song of the year and breaking two personal records for the pop star.

"Roar," the lead single from Perry's forthcoming album, sold 557,024 downloads during its first week of release, which gives the song the biggest sales week of 2013 for a digital track.

Perry even topped herself with the new song. "Roar" gave her the biggest Digital Song sales week of her career to date, surpassing "Firework" with 509K for the week ending 12/26/10.

"Roar" was also the biggest Digital Song debut of Perry's career to date, surpassing her previous record for "Part Of Me" with 411K for the week ending 02/12/12.

Perry will be giving her live debut performance of "Roar" during the MTV VMAs this Sunday (August 25), which will be broadcast from Brooklyn, NY beginning at 9:00pm ET/PT.

Perry's forthcoming album, "Prism," is scheduled to be released in North America on October 22nd by Capitol Records. more on this story

Drake To Perform at MTV VMAs

(Radio.com) Drake is the latest artist added to the lineup of performers at this year's MTV VMAs. MTV announced that Drake will perform his VMA nominated single "Started From the Bottom," marking the first time he will sing the track live on television.

Drake's music video for "Started From the Bottom" is also up for two VMAs this year including Best Direction and Best Hip Hop Video. In other Drake news, his forthcoming album Nothing Was the Same, has been pushed back a week and is scheduled to drop on Sept. 24, a week later than originally planned.

A new round of presenters has also been announce for Sunday which includes Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jared Leto, Kevin Hart, Emeli Sande and A$AP Rocky.

Drake tweeted, " Excited to announce I'll be performing at the 2013 @MTV VMA's!!! #Brooklyn #OVO #Started #NeedAKawsTrophy". more on this story

Chris Young Released From Hospital and Rejoins Brad Paisley Tour

(Radio.com) Last Tuesday (Aug. 13), while en route to a concert in Montana, country star Chris Young was rushed to a Denver hospital after a small cut on his leg turned into a dangerous bacterial infection. He's been released from the hospital and will return to the road today (Aug. 22).

According to a release from his team, Young began to go into septic shock and was immediately started on medications to stop the infection from spreading.

An emergency surgery was scheduled for the next day where doctors removed the infection from his leg. Throughout his ordeal, Young kept fans up to date on his condition from his hospital bed.

Currently home under his physician's care, his doctor advised Young to take a week off before he returns to the stage. Today, he will rejoin Brad Paisley's Beat This Summer Tour, something he no doubt is grateful for.

"I want to thank all of my fans for their thoughts and prayers," Young said in a statement. "I received amazing care from Dr. Suarez, Dr. Gill and Dr. Canfield and all the I.C.U. nurses who literally saved my life. I'm happy to be home and can't wait to get back out on the road." more on this story

Aretha Franklin Feeling Better and Ready To Work

(Radio.com) After suffering from an undisclosed illness, Aretha Franklin says she is feeling "85 percent better" and ready to work on new music. Franklin has kept mum about her recent health problems, which have caused her to cancel numerous shows and appearances, including a luncheon this Saturday (Aug. 24) in Chicago where she was slated to receive an award from Major League Baseball for her civil rights work. However, in an interview with the Associated Press that ran on Tuesday (Aug. 20), Franklin noted that her condition is improving.

"My treatments are going very well," she said. "My last CAT scan, my doctor at the CAT scan and everyone who sees this says that this is miraculous, absolutely miraculous."

She also gave some insight into her unknown illness, explaining that it is very common among women and partly related to a previous, also undisclosed, health issue from three years ago.

The Queen of Soul chalks up her improved health to eating right and taking better care of herself, which has led to a decline in her blood pressure. She also says her faith has helped her.

"I was talking to Smokey Robinson, my oldest best friend Smokey, talking about the fact that some doctors are not very well acquainted with faith healing," she explained. "And Smokey said, 'Well, they just don't know who your healer is.'" more on this story

Charli XCX To Tour UK With Paramore And Postpones US Dates

(Radio.com) American Charli XCX fans will have to wait just a little longer to see the singer on this side of the Atlantic again. The singer, famous for writing Icona Pop's breakout hit "I Love It" as well as her own highly-praised solo debut, True Romance, took to her social networks to apologize as well as explain why her previously scheduled U.S. fall tour has been postponed — she's touring her native England with the band Paramore.

"I always feel so welcome in the USA and all of you guys have always been so cool and amazing to play too… So I am really so sad that I'm letting you down like this," she wrote on her Facebook page. "But this is a big opportunity for me, one that people around me won't let me decline. I am seriously so sorry to everyone I have let down, and I really do hope that you will be able to make the rescheduled dates (I'm figuring them out right now) and that you will enjoy the new music that is coming very very very soon."

On her Twitter page, Charli XCX added that the U.S. dates are being moved to cover the months of October and November. "At the end of the day, I've always said, when it comes to pop music for me, if it's good, I like it," the singer told Radio.com during a recent interview while dismissing the concept of musical "guilty pleasures."

"I know that sounds like a really obvious statement, but there is a lot of really terrible pop music, but there's also a lot of amazing pop music," she said. "Some that doesn't even get recognized as pop music, but it is. As long as it's emotional and passionate, I like it."

Read Charli XCX's full statement about the U.S. tour cancellation here.

Kellie Pickler Releases New Song Little Bit Gypsy

(Radio.com) Kellie Pickler takes no prisoners on her latest single "Little Bit Gypsy." Released this week, (Aug. 20) on the track she warns a boy that she won't be tied down anytime soon. "A white picket fence don't feel like home/ Don't want a rock, I need a rolling stone/ If you want to hold me baby just set me free," she sings.

The gritty electric guitar fused track showcases Pickler at her best. Co-written by her husband, Kyle Jacobs, along with Tammi Kidd Hutton and Fred Wilhelm, the track embodies plenty of pedal steel, and with a drum beat that you can't but help to tap your feet along to, Pickler continues to assert her staying power in the country genre.

In an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this year, Pickler said she is setting out to please herself on her next release, likely due out later this year. "I've made records where I'm trying to make everybody else happy and say what other people want me to say. That was miserable," Pickler said. "If you go in and you're honest, people will either like you or not. You can't please them all, so you might as well be happy with it yourself. It's your face on the cover. You can't change who you are to please other people."

Pickler went on to define her forthcoming fourth studio album as being "Kellie country" which will include stories about her real life accompanied by fiddle and steel. more on this story

The National's Matt Berninger Boardwalk Empire Song Released

(Radio.com) The notorious Nucky Thompson returns to his bootlegging ways on September 8 for Season 4 of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. On September 3, ABKCO records will release Boardwalk Empire Volume 2, featuring a grip of contemporary artists singing songs written darn near a century ago.

The show, set in prohibition-era Atlantic City, has previously featured music from the 1890s to 1920s performed by Regina Spektor, Louden Wainwright III, Catherine Russell and more who all appeared on the show's first soundtrack, the Grammy-winning Boardwalk Empire Volume 1.

The National's singer Matt Berninger is one of many who lent his baritone voice for one of the songs off the forthcoming Boardwalk Empire Volume 2, singing the 1924 standard "I'll See You In My Dreams," originally written by Isham Jones.

Listen to Berninger's lilting take on the tune, featuring the NYC jazz ensemble Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks here.

Thompson Square To Perform on Fox News This Friday

Thompson Square will be performing live tomorrow morning on Fox News Channel where they will be a featured guest on the network's popular morning show.

The Thompson Square performance will be part of the Fox & Friends All-American Concert series which has been taking place every Friday this summer.

The country duo will be performing and will be interviewed on the show beginning at 8AM/ET tomorrow, Friday, August 23rd, 2013. If you are in the New York City area, find out how you can see the free performance live here.

Ellie Goulding Talks Halcyon Days

(Radio.com) Summer is waning, but for Ellie Goulding it seems like it could go on forever. The 26-year-old singer left her native UK and traveled to North America as the opening act for much of Bruno Mars' Moonshine Jungle tour. Of course that's when she wasn't playing to capacity crowds at the world's most prestigious music festivals, including Chicago's Lollapalooza.

We caught up with Goulding to talk about the expanded reissue of her 2012 album, Halcyon, as Halcyon Days, now bolstered with 10 additional new songs and set for release next Tuesday, August 27.

"It's a little happier than everything I've done before," Goulding said of the new songs featured on Halcyon Days. "It's kind of the more uplifting songs. It embraces my love of electronic music a bit more. I've got collaborations on there with DJ Fresh, Greg Kurstin, Nate Ruess from fun.

"Basically, after my album came out, it's been a weird time for me," she continued. "I feel like now I'm so much deeper into Halcyon that I just wanted to expand it. I wanted it to last longer, because I'm not done with this record yet. For anyone else, it might be a time to move on and make another record, but I don't think it's the end yet."

The new clutch of songs was led by the single "Burn," which has the distinction of being Goulding's first No.1 song in her home country of Great Britain.

"'Burn' I wrote with Ryan Tedder, and I love it. It's something different for me," she enthused. "It has a different rhythm, it's a different kind of vibe and I really enjoy performing it and singing it. I did a Vine video where I got all of my fans to do their own interpretation of 'Burn' and what the song meant to them. Then I did my own video featuring lots of kids wanting to be in a music video, and then (multiply) them by like a thousand. We did it on an airstrip. It was just a bunch of us having fun, and that's kind of what I wanted to do."

With much of Halcyon Days heavily steeped in sounds of electronic dance music, Goulding isn't afraid of how the new songs will go over in with her American audience, who might not be as versed in the pulsating sounds of dubstep or house. more.

Tegan and Sara Say 'You Can Be Pop And You Can Be Real And Good'

(Radio.com) When Tegan and Sara released their first album, Under Feet Like Ours, in 1999, pop was Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. Fourteen years later and the twins Quin have broadened their sound, so much so that their seventh album Heartthrob meets 21st century pop at its frontier. But Tegan and Sara is a different, some would say smarter, kind of pop music. "I feel like now you can be pop and you can be real and good," Tegan recently told Radio.com.

The change in tides became clear when the duo released Heartthrob back in February, which debuted at No. 3 selling 49,000 copies in its opening week, according to Billboard. It sold almost two times more than their previous album, 2009′s Sainthood, which debuted all the way at No. 21.

Of course, the chart success is nice, but it hasn't fazed the duo too much. It hasn't even convinced them that pop is what they want to be doing for the rest of their career.

"Who knows what will be happening in two years," Tegan said. "If we'll still be on this course or doing something weird and avant-garde again."

Along with their recent success, the duo talked about touring with their pals in fun., the importance of having artistic freedom and being Macklemore's "two little gay friends."

Radio.com: You're currently on tour with fun. What's it like touring with them?

Tegan: They're horrible. It's a terrible mistake for us. [Laughs]

Sara: We love fun., they're the nicest guys. It does help that we're friends. If you don't know each other or you've never spent time with each other, there's that kind of awkward getting to know each other sort of like summer camp kind of nervousness or something and I didn't go into this tour feeling that way at all. That's really nice. They have a wonderful energy around their band. The audience is really open. We're really enjoying our sets every night supporting them and we feel like both musically and politically that there's a really good parallel between our bands.

Radio.com: You have referred to both your music and fun.'s as "intelligent pop." How would you define this new genre?

Tegan: I think that in the '80s there was lots of throwaway pop music, but there was a lot of really intelligent pop music. A lot of political bands that were popular. U2 was one of them. Obviously the definition of pop has changed back and forth and back and forth and we ping-pong. When we first put out our first record, pop was Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears and now, that's still pop but you can also be pop and be Rihanna, or be fun. or be Tegan and Sara so I just think it's been a super interesting year, a couple of years actually, on radio. Read the rest of the interview here.

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