Virgin Records Blog

Man we were laughing out asses off yesterday. Got to see a rough cut of the new Korn video for "Twisted Transistor". It's brilliant.

As you may have read already on the net, the guys are being portrayed by super-star rappers: Lil Jon fronts for Jonathan Davis, Snoop Dogg stands in for guitarist Munky, Xzibit portrays bassist Fieldy and David Banner sits in for drummer David Silveria.

Davis says the idea for the video came from being frustrated that rock videos don't get as much air play as they used to. We have a feeling this will change when the final edit is delivered later this month.

The video is directed by legend Dave Meyers (who also directed Missy Elliott's award-winning videos).

Korn's new record "See You on the Other Side" drops December 6th.

We announced an industry first recently - we're pretty proud of it. We worked with the folks at SanDisk to embedd content onto retail flash memory. They have dubbed the product the "Gruvi".

The Gruvi is a secure storage format (called TrustedFlash), so DRM rules traverse down the physical layer. This means authentication travels with the card itself, allowing it to be easily transported between your computer, phone, PDA, etc. All without using up a device-transfer count in your DRM profile. It's pretty cool actually. Plus having the content resident on the media already allows for much higher sound quality.

Read more about it on the Information Week Website.

We're just now finalizing the RSS spec for Virgin artist websites. We expect to have it up in the next few weeks. You'll then be able to subscribe directly to your favorite artist news feeds via RSS. We'll let you know more when it's up. Should be handy for everyone.

We're pretty stoked about Dwele's new release "Some Kinda...". It's in stores now. In case you don't know Dwele, he's one of our New Soul artists and resident genius. He writes, sings, plays a variety of instruments. He's even a fine artist. His first album "Subject" sold over 100,000 copies, so he must be doing something right.

Check out his vibe and sounds on his website: http://www.dwele.net

Stay tuned for more on Dwele. He's pretty great. The album just hit #1 on iTunes R&B charts!

I don't know about you, but I'm a huge Outkast fan. Every since I heard "Elevators" in 1997, I've found Big Boi and Andre pretty compelling. You've probably heard "Hey Yeah" about a billion times by now and still find yourself singing along in the chorus.

Well we struck a deal with Big Boi last year to start a new imprint called "Purple Ribbon". The JV is starting to yield results. "Big Boi presents... Got Purp Vol. 2" is a collection of songs from B's Atlanta cronies Killer Mike, Scar, Konkrete, Sleepy Brown, and others.

We put up a little preview jukebox last week. It's pretty sweet. Feel free to go take a listen. We're all about "Me, My Baby and My Cadillac".

Here's an amazing thing. Virgin Records' 2-dimensional powerhouse Gorillaz are slated to perform their Demon Days record LIVE in Manchester U.K. ! They pulled off a similar stunt at the Brit awards a few years ago. Using a combination of motion capture and realtime computer image rendering, the results were pretty amazing.

Read more about it on Anova.

Big doings on 5th Ave. We announced the Korn deal today.


In case you haven't heard, Virgin Records is proud to announce that Nu-Metal innovators Korn are joining our little family. Despite whatever media chatter you may have read, the really cool thing about this, well, A NEW KORN RECORD is coming out soon!

Beyond that? Record biz insiders are all abuzz about certain revenue aspects of the agreement - namely sharing in money generated from touring, merchandise sales and other ventures. It really is the model for all future deals in the industry and portends great things for both Korn and Virgin. You can read about it all over the web if you want to know more.

"Twisted Transistor" is the first single, and it fucking rocks. Check it out HERE on iTunes.