Jane's Addiction [ tickets ], which reunited in April for two California performances, will embark on a full-scale reunion tour in August, guitarist Dave Navarro told Sonicnet.com. The group--frontman Perry Farrell, Navarro, drummer Stephen Perkins and bassist Martyn LeNoble (Porno for Pyros)--will headline the Farrell-organized Jubilee festival, for which no other acts have been named. Twenty to 30 dates are expected, according to the report.

Also, the group reportedly has one-off performances planned at radio festivals in New York and Los Angeles on June 22 and 23, respectively.

Rapper Shyne (a.k.a. Jamal Barrow) was sentenced to 10 years in prison for firing a gun in a Manhattan nightclub and wounding three people, CourtTV.com reported. The incident, which occurred in December 1999, also resulted in the arrest of Sean "Puffy" Combs on charges of gun possession and bribery; Combs was later acquitted.

Staind [ tickets ] guitarist Mike Mushok told liveDaily that his band will join the Stone Temple Pilots on the Family Values tour late this summer. The remainder of the Family Values line-up is still up in the air, he said.

From a press release:

"SFX, the world's largest producer and marketer of live entertainment [Note: this is true, and SFX keeps growing and growing, which is why we're mentioning this], announced today it has acquired the various music business interests of Herman Schueremans, a leading concert promoter in Belgium ..."

Thursday's Los Angeles Times gives record executives the chance to respond to complaints artists have made--in and out of court--about the recording industry:

Pop music, executives say, is a high-risk, low-margin business in which more than 90% of the CDs released each year flop--at great expense to the companies, not the artists.

It's an industry, the executives say, in which even unknown acts are treated like royalty, receiving millions of dollars in advances per project as their labels struggle to transform them into global stars. ...

* Only one of 10 acts ever turns a profit.

* It costs about $2 to manufacture and distribute a CD, but marketing costs can run from $3 per hit CD to more than $10 for failed projects.

* Successful acts thwart the existing contract system by refusing to deliver follow-up albums until they extract additional advances.

The Compaq Center in San Jose, Calif., will host a concert to benefit earthquake victims in El Salvador and India, Billboard.com reported. The July 29 concert will feature Lauryn Hill, Marc Anthony, and Luther Vandross.

Launch Media has filed a countersuit against the major record labels that recently sued the company for allegedly lacking the proper licenses to place copyrighted music online, TheStandard.com reported. Click here to read the article.

Capitol Records' website is streaming all of Radiohead's "Amnesiac." We mention this because the label did that last year with the band's "Kid A," and apparently found it worth its while.

Westword.com--the online version of Denver's alternative weekly--features a cover story on the future of the city's hip-hop scene since the death of local DJ and promoter Mix Master Mike Brown. In an interview prior to his death, Brown claimed that the state of Colorado, and specifically the Denver Police Department, wants hip-hop to go away, and to support that claim, he cited the existence of "the list":

The Denver Police Department had compiled a list of individuals for whom off-duty Denver cops were no longer allowed to work; the list also included venues that were off limits. Mix Master Mike was on that list, Brown said, and that was proof that Denver was trying to kill off hip-hop. Few, if any, clubs were willing to run the risk of attracting a thousand patrons without off-duty law enforcement on hand.

From a press release:

On May 30, 2001, the California Labor Commission declared the management agreement between Jewel Kilcher, the singer/songwriter/author/actor (popularly known as "Jewel"), and Inga Vainshtein, her former manager, to be void and "unenforceable for all purposes.''

... the Labor Commission ruled that Ms. Vainshtein, who served as Jewel's manager from 1993 until early 1998, violated the California Talent Agencies Act by illegally booking and attempting to book engagements for Jewel, without being a licensed booking agent, in violation of the California Talent Agencies Act ...

How it's supposed to be is this way:

A Manager Can't Book The Gig.

A manager advises a client on her career. An agent goes into the room with the producer/promoter/whatever and says, "We want this much money," and works out the deal. (An agent can give advice, of course, but that's because no one really knows what a manager is supposed to do--like, have you ever been in a meeting run by a "consultant" and come away without the first clue as to what a "consultant" does? Like that.)

However, here in City of Dreams, Calif., the line between agent and manager is blurred almost to the point of being erased. And while people grumble about it on occasion, not much has been done to restore the line.

But:

If more artists use this ploy to get out of their contracts--and maybe this has been done before and we've just never heard about it--it's entirely possible that managers, for fear of losing a client, may stop booking gigs and go back to just giving advice.

(Like this woman we heard talking on her cell phone at our local grocery store: "No ... no ... because I don't want you to show your ass, not on this shoot.")