Excellent Online

San Francisco's premier indie nightclub, POPSCENE, will celebrate its 5th anniversary Thursday, August 31 at 330 Ritch Street in San Francisco, featuring American Recording artists PALOALTO performing live. To celebrate, Excellent Online is giving away 3 sets of passes to the event. Do you remember the first time? Tell us about your first time at Popscene in 100 words or less. Our three favorite answers will get passes to the party. Send in your response no later than Tuesday, August 29 to

Astralwerks has added Manchester trio DOVES to their roster. Stateside fans will be pleased to know that a U.S. version of "Lost Souls" with bonus tracks will be released by Astralwerks/Heavenly on October 3.

     Picture the scene: someone you know has been going through an unsettling, bizarre, and rather heightened little patch in his life. Which means that in order to try and help stave off his pains he -- yes -- feels compelled to sift through his large record collection. The problem is that he only seems to go after the same handful of albums each and every time. And he rarely returns to them when times are good.

     Is it possible to hurt an album's feelings?

Just a quick note of confirmation: REMY ZERO has snagged the support slot for the forthcoming North American TRAVIS tour.

There's finally a North American release date for the acclaimed debut album from BADLY DRAWN BOY. "The Hour of the Bewilderbeast" will finally see its stateside hour of glory on Oct. 3 through XL Recordings/Beggars Group.

COLDPLAY have signed in North America to Nettwerk Distribution. That's the good news. The bad news is that the band's critically lauded album "Parachutes" won't be released until early November at the earliest. You want more good news? The band is planning a stateside tour in early 2001.

A Federal Appeals Court has just granted a stay of execution for NAPSTER, pending the outcome of the upcoming trial. We'll keep you informed as events progress! For the time being, file share away!

Effective 4 p.m. PST this Friday, NAPSTER is no more. The controversial music-sharing giant has been stopped in its tracks by a federal judge who moments ago granted the RIAA's injunction to close the Napster server pending the outcome of the RIAA lawsuit against the company. Early reports on the web indicate that designers of similar music-sharing networks OpenNap, Gnutella, and others are already preparing for a huge influx of new users by week's end. Napster will be making a last-ditch effort to appeal the injunction on Thursday.

Today is Judgement Day for NAPSTER and possibly the future of file-sharing software on the Web, as the RIAA suit against the popular music-sharing site makes it way to a federal judge. The RIAA has filed for an injunction to shut Napster down until the court renders a final decision - a judgement on the injunction could happen later today - we'll try to keep you informed of any breaking news.

There's finally a Stateside release date for the ELECTRONIC album that came out overseas last year. "Twisted Tenderness" will appear September 12 in North American record shoppes, thanks to a new distribution deal with Koch Records (who also inherited the back catalog of the late & great Velvel Records.) Don't expect any US promotional activities, though - guitarist Johnny Marr is busy with new band The Healers, while vocalist Bernard Sumner is (we can hope) working on that oft-rumoured, oft-delayed New Order comeback record.