Dave Matthews Band [ tickets ] was fined $15,000--a thousand dollars a minute--for breaking a 10:30 p.m. curfew during its July 11 performance at the University of Colorado in Boulder, the Rocky Mountain News reported.

Melissa Etheridge [ tickets ] is suffering from the flu, and has cancelled all of her scheduled public appearances through July 27, according to her official website. She is scheduled to open an acoustic tour on Aug. 6.

From GameSpyDaily.com's interview with a vice-president at iRock Interactive, which is releasing the video game Ozzy's Black Skies, based on the music of Ozzy Osbourne [ tickets ].

GameSpy: So where did the original idea for the game come from?

Robert Stevenson: ... We thought about how Ozzy is such a great character, and how his public persona is of this dark, demonic, necromantic wild man, so we came up with a couple game designs based around that. But the one that really stood out for us was this dragon-based combat game, which also made sense for Ozzy because Ozzy’s kind of magical and mystical, and on the Ultimate Sin album, there’s a shot of a dragon that has Ozzy’s face. ...

GameSpy: Speaking of the soundtrack, how did you decide which of Ozzy’s songs would be featured in the game?

Robert Stevenson: The real deal there was that we wanted to get songs from each phase of his career ... But what made this difficult was that different people own the rights to the songs, and then other people own the specific performances. It’s such a convoluted process that it was actually easier just to rerecord the song. So we had Ozzy do new versions of "Crazy Train," "Paranoid," and "War Pigs" with his current solo band, though we used the regular versions of his more recent songs. And, of course, there’s the new song, "Black Skies."

From Wired.com, re: online music:

Thanks to a host of new proprietary systems and security measures, consumers hoping for an easy music-listening experience are about to face a world where music files and services don't work together.

From Reuters:

American rocker Iggy Pop has astonished organizers of a forthcoming Scottish gig with a bizarre list of backstage demands, including seven dwarves, The New York Times and broccoli, according to a report.

However, the Daily Record reported on Tuesday that the former Stooges frontman only wanted the vegetable so he could throw it in the bin -- because he hates it. ...

The paper did not say why Pop wanted the dwarves.

Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos will undergo "a corrective back procedure" later this month, and has left the band's tour. Daxx Nielsen of Harmony Riley will fill in until he returns.

From the Chicago Sun-Times, on Sunday's (7/15) Warped tour stop near Chicago:

''These kids are coming to buy the lifestyle and be part of the lifestyle,'' tour producer Kevin Lyman proudly boasted. ''They come in now with a couple of hundred bucks to buy all of their back-to-school clothes.''

To that end, Warped was arrayed at the Tweeter Center in such a way that it was impossible to travel between the four primary stages and see the bands without getting trapped in a sprawling mess of a shopping mall hawking the wares of the many sponsors. ...

The very layout of Warped made it clear that the music was secondary to the hyping, and it was literally impossible to turn around without being confronted by some company's hyperbolic sales pitch.

For a sugary chocolate drink--''Same great taste!''