March U2 Reading

‘So I bought a £5 acoustic guitar from a junk-shop down Dublin quays and I started learning chords and collecting songs. There was a guy in school who had a bit of a band going. He had an electric guitar and the school gave him a room to practise in; there was a bass player and a drummer and the sound was amazing to me. I just loved it.

I don’t know what it was like objectively, four teenage schoolkids struggling to play a song, probably, but the sound of drums and guitar and bass felt primal to me. I started to see that not only did this make me feel good but you got a bit of attention if you did it, too. You could meet girls and these people were considered cool. I suppose that was when I really made my decision that this was what I wanted to do….’

This month starts our book club. We have selected U2 by U2

U2 by U2 is the first book to take a look at the career of U2 through the eyes of the band members themselves. Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton and manager Paul McGuiness take turns sharing details from the band’s meager beginnings up to the end of the How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb tour,

The highlight of this book is the photos. Designed like an oversized, multicolored and completely overblown magazine, the photos leap from the page. Some of them are familiar, like the iconic Anton Corbjin black and whites, while others are private snapshots that provide a deeper look into these people than they are willing to share with their own words.

The book is divided by each U2 album. This gets repetitive considering each album recoding process was basically the same thing. The band was under prepared and struggling, then songs began to fall into their lap. Lets start reading and sharing your comments on our forum.

Watch a video introduction to U2 by U2

U2 arrives to Ottawa museum

U2 3DTake a seat in the IMAX theatre, put on your glasses and get ready to see Bono and the boys in 3-D.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization will re-open its IMAX Theatre Monday after two months of renovations that will allow it to present 3-D films for the first time. The opening films will be U2 3D and Sharks 3D, a documentary filmed in 2005.

The makeover to the 20-year-old theatre includes a new projector,

3-D screen, a new sound system and seats equipped with cup-holders. The renovations will allow the museum to present 3-D IMAX films and traditional-format IMAX films, says theatre manager Sarah Mitchell.

U2 3D, a feature-length film released in 2008, was filmed during a 2006 concert in Buenos Aires during the band’s Vertigo tour.

The musical documentary “U2 3D,” which stitches together three performances by this Irish rock band during a recent tour of South America, is not merely a technical landmark — shot entirely in digital 3D — but also an aesthetic one, in that it’s the first Imax movie that deserves to be called a work of art.

The person most responsible for the film’s vision, Catherine Owens — one of the movie’s two directors, who is also in charge of production design for the band’s live shows — has brazenly ignored the usual stipulations about making a 3-D film.

She favors quick edits and slow dissolves rather than long takes and hard cuts. Throughout, she layers the screen with multiple planes of information: long shots and medium shots of the musicians, images of the crowd, close-up details of graphics from the big screen that the band performs in front of that make the designs abstract and merge them with the performers.

The result is not a confusing mishmash of images but a musical/experimental work that visually simulates the sensation of thinking. The very idea of self-contained screen geography is thrillingly reconceived.

The style of the film dovetails with the international, humanistic vision that U2 has presented in songs and public statements for more than 20 years. When the band performs its hit “One,” the lyrics take on new meaning.

Artificial Horizon coming very soon

Atifical Horizon U2

 Direct E-mail to the fans

Artificial Horizon is no longer on the horizon…. it’s here!The limited-edition CD, produced for our 2010 U2.com subscribers, has arrived in the warehouse and is now being shipped. How long will it take to get to you? Depends where in the world you are but we’re told ‘between 7 and 21 business days’.

Thanks for your patience.We asked Ralph Moore, Editor At Large of Mixmag, the world’s biggest selling dance magazine, to take an early listen to the new collection.He loved it - here’s some highlights of his review: ‘world beat flavour takes the song to totally different place.’(Elevation (Influx Mix) ); ‘crashing drums and jet-propelled synth’ (Get On Your Boots (Fish Out Of Water Mix); ‘makes U2 sound like another band entirely’ (City Of Blinding Lights (Hot Chip Remix).

Read Ralph’s full take on Artificial Horizon here and if you can’t wait a moment longer take a listen to excerpts of all 13 tracks in the Audio Player embedded in the storyBest wishes

The U2.Com Team

U2 loses “Worst Album”

NME AWARDS 2010 This is one of the times that Bono and the boys can be quite happy they did not win the award. It seems that the bands record “ No Line on the Horizon” was up for the “Worst Album” award at the  Shockwaves NME Awards in London this week. Luckily for them, they lost to tween group the Jonas Brothers for their record “Lines, Vines and Trying Times”.

Other nominees included Green Day’s “21st Century Breakdown”, Lady GaGa’s “The Fame”, and “Humbug” by Arctic Monkeys. At least U2 weren’t nominated for “Worst Band”, which the Jonas Brothers also took home.

It’s funny to see records like “No Line”, “21st Century Breakdown”, and “The Fame” receive some positive recognition for their content (all three were Grammy nominated, with Green Day and GaGa’s records taking home wins), and then they get nominated for “Worst Album”! But clearly, they weren’t as bad as the Jonas Brothers!  Do you agree?

U2 Earns a Whopping $108M

So U2TOURFANS FILE PHOTO 2009 If money makes the world go round, then U2’s latest tour, which is dubbed “360 Degrees,” proves this saying true.

The veteran act leads Billboard’s 2010 Money Makers list, earning more than $108 million in 2009.

Bruce Springsteen is second with $57 million and Madonna follows with $47 million. AC/DC and Britney Spears round out the top 5 with $43 and $38 million, respectively.

Just in case if you wanted to know how BillBoard determains the leaders of the money train, here is what they had to say.

Billboard compiles the list from monies earned through tours, CD and digital sales, publishing royalties and more. In compiling these rankings, the editors used proprietary data from the Billboard Boxscore archives (concert grosses), Nielsen SoundScan (sales of physical albums, digital albums and digital tracks), Nielsen BDS (tethered downloads, on-demand streams and noninteractive streaming at Rhapsody, Napster, AOL and Yahoo) and Nielsen RingScan (master ringtone sales), and then applied the corresponding mechanical rates and estimates where necessary for each category to determine the industry’s top-earning artists.

The ranking covers the one-year period from the first week of 2009 (which ended Jan. 4) through the last tracking week of the calendar year ended Jan. 3. It combines an artist’s estimated take from those products with box-office results from concert performances that took place during the calendar year.

U2TOURFANS U2 File Photo 2009 Sales data tallies all available titles for each artist during the tracking period. Artists receive 100% credit for sales of a title if credited as the lead artist or as an equally billed lead artist.

In calculating an artist’s share of revenue from recorded-music sales, Billboard used a royalty rate of 20% for superstars and 16% for newer artists, minus producer fees and the usual packaging and free-goods deductions for CDs.

An artist’s take of revenue from on-demand streams was calculated based on the average wholesale rate paid to labels, while revenue from non-interactive streams was based on SoundExchange’s rate settlement with webcasters. An artist’s share of revenue from tethered downloads was calculated on an average-per-download basis. In instances when the artist is a songwriter, Billboard estimated the share of songs written by the artist.

U2TOURFANS 2009 File Photo CD mechanical royalties for artist/songwriters were calculated by assuming the standard royalty rates. For digital downloads for track, album and ringtone sales, Billboard used the current statutory rates, assuming 12 tracks per album. Billboard also subtracted a 10% manager’s fee for each revenue category. For touring revenue, we credited each artist with 34% of gross tour receipts, after the promoter’s fee, the artist manager’s fee and other costs are subtracted.

Our figures do not include revenue from merchandise sales, sponsorships, synchronization deals and songwriter performance royalties. The data used in this report was compiled and calculated by Billboard Research manager Gordon Murray, senior Billboard correspondent Ed Christman, Nielsen Music special projects manager Deborah Schwartz and Boxscore chart manager Bob Allen.

U2's Weekly Wrapup

U2TOURFANS Looking for Followers !

U2TOURFANS As we get ready to launch our tour season we back here in our cold offices have been thinking about contests that we can hold for our followers, we would never dare call you fans, unless it was in reference to the band of course. Thinking about concests we have come up with a couple of ideas. Of course there not fully baked nor would the boss let us throw them out to you like this, however we can say its going to be tied to Facebook, Youtube and Twitter and our iPhone Application. Refer your friends to sign up to any or all of the three media choices and you could be a winner of a super cool item(s).

U2 weekly wrap up starts now this has been an interesting week. Take a look at the stories you followed. We have our guest writter program kicking off again, as well as a feature writer, if you would like to be a guest writer let us know. Oh before we forget. Remember we asked for your best U2TOURFANS photo. Its not too late to get in on this. Send it to us via Facebook.

U2’s Bono makes diva demands

U2’s BonoDiva alert: U2 front man Bono dined with bandmate Edge at Butter on Tuesday night, and another person dining there says he had more than a few demands.

“He wanted Perrier, which they didn’t have, so a waiter actually ran across the street to a store and bought him a bottle,” says a patron at the next table.

That wasn’t all. Bono needed his food prepared specially. “He demanded that his salad be chopped,” says the spy. “And he made sure it was when it arrived.”

U2 fans stayed out of the Fray

U2 Guitarist’s Plans Don’t Find Green

U2’s The Edge

MALIBU, Calif. — The house that the U2 guitarist longs to build here would have a copper roof, fashioned to resemble fluttering leaves. Boulders that dot the property would be left in place and assigned charming names like Dinosaur Vertebrae and Cistern. The dirt dug up to build would be reused, when possible.

U2 Producer Steve Lillywhite

Steve LillywhiteWe’ve seen a few big names bandied about for the role of next Simon Cowell, including Tommy Mottola, Guy Oseary, Jimmy Iovine, and, most notably, Howard Stern. But seeing as American Idol appears no closer to actually naming a successor, a new contender has thrown his hat in the ring: Steve Lillywhite, the 55-year-old British producer most closely associated with U2, released a YouTube video last week stating his case, and has followed it up today with an interview with Idol Tracker. For the record, Lillywhite — who has also produced the Pogues, She & Him, 30 Seconds to Mars, Guster, Jason Mraz, the one Chris Cornell solo album not everyone hated, most of the big Dave Matthews Band albums plus one that was never released, and a Rolling Stones album from 1986 — is dead serious.

OneRepublic to open for U2 in Munich

OneRepublicThe Universal Music Group newsletter featured OneRepublic outlining the tour schedule for the group and what did we find deep within that newsletter ? Yes, OneRepublic will be the support act opening for U2 on September 15, 2010 in Munich. The details not fully outlined within the newsletter, stand by as we collect more info. Its seems that the boys plan to mix up the tour just a bit with couple of different supporting acts. For those of you keeping track at home here is what we have for opening acts so far.

Remember Dallas ?

OneRepublic to open for U2 in Munich

OneRepublic Opening Act for U2  The Universal Music Group newsletter featured OneRepublic outlining the tour schedule for the group and what did we find deep within that newsletter ? Yes, OneRepublic will be the support act opening for U2 on September 15, 2010 in Munich. The details not fully outlined within the newsletter, stand by as we collect more info. Its seems that the boys plan to mix up the tour just a bit with couple of different supporting acts. For those of you keeping track at home here is what we have for opening acts so far.

• Lenny Kravitz:
• The Fray:
• Interpol:
• OneRepublic 

Translated from: Ebenfalls am 05. März erscheint die Deluxe Version des Albums „Waking Up“ inklusive sechs bisher unveröffentlichten Bonustracks. Aber es warten noch weitere Highlights auf die deutschen Fans von OneRepublic: Ab dem 24. April ist die Band auf großer Deutschland-Tour und wird außerdem – wie soeben bestätigt – am 15. September als Support von U2 in München dabei sein!