Rufus Wainwright’s debut opera Prima Donna is to premiere next July in Manchester.

The story of a fading Parisian opera singer and sung in French, Wainwright’s opera is being produced in partnership with Opera North – and will be performed five times from July 10.

Manchester International Director Alex Poots comments on Wainwright’s commission, “Rufus Wainwright has an exceptional gift for melody and clearly has a deep affinity with opera. We’re delighted to be working with him as he moves into this new form”.

Prima Donna tickets are available from October 10 at www.mif.co.uk. Source: Uncut.

To celebrate their 50th Anniversary Motown are releasing a 50 track album this December and we can vote for the tracks we’d like included. Vote now at Poll the People.

Hat Tip: Kerry McCarthy.

Pink Floyd keyboard player and founder member Richard Wright has died, aged 65, from cancer. Source: The BBC.

I spent a great part of my formative years listening to Pink Floyd, particularly, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here and Animals, I even went, for me at that time a rare visit to London to see a rare performance of the Wall. I still play these albums 30 plus years later and there are not many albums I can say that about..

Ani DiFranco is one of the greatest, if not the greatest songwriter alive today, here lyrics read like poems.

Red Letter Year is her latest which will be released here on the 29th September. In the meantime you can listen to the album at imeem.

Click the play buttons to listen.

The Boston Phoenix’s interactive feature 50 States selects the newspapers best, band, solo artist and current act for every US state, the last selection being the best highlighting music you might well be unaware of.

Hat Tip: Very Short List.

With the demise of Pandora the free music recommendation and internet radio service – at least for those of us outside the USA – I’d not found a comparable site (I know I could use a proxy and mask my IP address but I can’t be assed). However now we have the Deezer music on demand service, that is free and legal to use with over 2.5 million songs, from how I remember Pandora I actually think Deezer is better.

Hat Tip: A Blog from the backroom.

“I never bought that Home Taping Is Killing Music shit in the 1980s that the record companies tried to lay on us. In fact I printed on the front of my fourth album that Capitalism is Killing Music. And that’s what’s happening now. The powerful start-ups are blithely following the consumers argument that they don’t have to pay.”

“When they download free music, the average punter is really thinking that they don’t want to give money to a multinational corp anymore?”

“If you can put an artist into that frame – if someone writes a song you can’t live without, you’re gonna want that people to do more of that. They’re going to go back to that person, and go – ‘I want them to do that to me again!’”

“Without financial support artists won’t be able to do that. We do need to educate our audiences about that but we need to do that at the business end, not the end. ”

“We rely on recorded music to spread the word. MySpace didn’t build itself on live concerts, did it? Bebo didn’t sell a community of people who are going to live gigs. Live gigs is part of what we do. To me it’s very important.”

“But a) not everybody can do it, and b) without recordings to go ahead of you, and spread the word, you end up never getting to that stage that all of us crave – where we give up our fucking day jobs that we fucking hate.”

“And by cutting the legs off from the next generation of musicians, you are condemning them to never really give up their day job. What will happen is that the music that will be wildly popular will be the stuff that is coming from the corporations. It will be Hannah Montana. Which I can assure you was focus-grouped to death.”

Taken from an interview with Andrew Orlowski for The Register.