Kiwis expected to stay with low-return Spotify

Kiwis in the music business are not about to follow international music star Thom Yorke and yank their music from streaming site Spotify, but there is support for the Radiohead singer. Yorke, who also has solo side projects, this week pulled his solo music from the site, posting on Twitter that he was “standing up for our fellow musicians”

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Phoenix declare Bankrupt!

Success doesn’t seem to have clouded French band Phoenix’s minds. While their 2009 album was titled Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, tipping their hat to the famous composer, they named the follow-up simply Bankrupt! The title of the band’s fifth album, out tomorrow, is a nod to the beauty of failure, guitarist Christian Mazzalai says.

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Shuttle Tragedy

Simulated launch, real deathNASA officials had one word for the simulated launch of the space shuttle at Cape Canaveral last week: “Super!” Then disaster struck. For reasons yet to be explained, five Rockwell International technicians removed an access panel and entered a rear section of the orbiter above the engine.

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African Immigrants in Italy: Slave Labor for the Mafia

Xenophobes in homogenous European countries often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don’t live by the country’s infamous omert code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard.

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