Tour Spins From Web

A summer concert tour featuring Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos will be sponsored by the Web site MP3.com , which features the technology that allows web surfers to download CD-quality music .

The tour will begin Aug.18 in Fort Lauderdale , Fla . The 26 -city tour includes a Sept.1 date at Jones Beach.

Tuesday's deal won't allow fans to download songs by Morissette and Amos . It will use a different technology that allows for listening only, but Morissette will offer a live version of an as-yet unselected , unreleased track for downloading on MP3.com to promote the tour.

"The potential here is enormous . We've got to seize the opportunity ," Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com , said in a statement . The recording industry has blamed MP3 technology for increased song piracy because it allows for music to be easily transferred . But the industry has been looking for ways to incorporate the Internet into its regular business.

"What I'm hoping more than anything here is that it's going to let other artists , other managers and record companies know that this is something they shouldn't fear" , said Scott Welch of Atlas/Third Rail, Morissette's management company , " All of us are in uncharted territory ."

MP3.com uses the site to market the artist on the condition that one song be made available for free download . Artists set the price for the rest and split the revenue with MP3.com

There is a second article online at the USA Today web site about the tour with Tori and Alanis, which concentrates on the promotion by MP3.COM. An interesting article.

Read the USA Today Article In The Dent's Archives.

Rocktropolis AllStar Daily News

• Alanis will be closing all the concerts, but they still stress that this is a co-headlining tour. Both singers will perform full concerts sets with their own production, lights & stage design.
• Fans will get 2 full concerts plus a third opening act every night. The opening act will be a MP3.com artist, someone who has made their songs available online at MP3.com.

Sonicnet Music News Of The World

• MP3.com is promoting the Tori/Alanis tour and both artists are part of a special deal with MP3.com and will have a joint web site called alanisandtori.com.
• This joint web site will contain special tracks from both artists in some kind of a streaming format. (You would think that MP3 would be the format, but the exact format has not been specified yet.) These songs will be posted in the next few weeks. They are using a streaming format to cut back on unauthorized copying. (You can listen to the tracks but not download them.) Morissette's song will be a live track or a B-side. Amos' song will be an unreleased track, possibly taken from the double CD she plans to release in the fall. By streaming the site will be able to bypass a Warner Music Group policy of forbidding downloads longer than 30 seconds.
• The joint web site will also feature concert webcasts, interviews, chats, and tour photos.
• "Amos' manager, Arthur Spivak, said he spoke with the singer about the MP3.com promotion on Tuesday. He said the online venture is exciting for Amos, who is in England working on the double album and who has a dedicated, tech-savvy fanbase."

There is an article online at the USA Today web site and in the printed edition about the upcoming tour with Tori and Alanis. The article focuses on the fact that the controversial web site MP3.COM is promoting the concert and working out some kind of deal with Alanis and perhap's Tori's camp as well.

Read the USA Today Article In The Dent's Archives.

Atlantic web site

Read the article and see the photos/cover.

The special Spring 1999 double issue of Life Magazine features the best magazine photography of the year. The cover of the June 25, 1998 issue of Rolling Stone with Tori on the cover was one of the runners up for the photography awards, which are called "The Elsie's." The winning cover was the infamous Lewinsky/Clinton hug from Time Magazine. They include a fairly large photo of the cover, but it is not as large as the original RS cover. There was a small article about it which you can read below:

Cover Runner up
David LaChapelle
"Tori Amos: Her secret garden"
Rolling Stone
June 25 1998

David LaChapelle shoots celebrities in the way he sees them - and his vision is vivid indeed. He has depicted Leonardo DiCaprio as a leather - clad porn star and Pamela Anderson Lee bursting naked from an egg. For his first Rolling Stone cover, LaChapelle posed singer-songwriter Tori Amos in a London park. The faux fireflies were assembled on-site, despite a drenching rain. "For me," says the 36-year-old photographyer, "Tori is like a wood nymph. She's so pale and translucent. I thought of her running in the woods and lighting up the way."

Off Her Box (by Paul Rees)
Tori Amos likes to present herself inside a large box. Which is odd.

It remains impossible not to think of Kate Bush in the same breath as Tori Amos. Equally striking performers, they share the same sense of having dropped in from another world and possess voices that can do alarming things in their upper register. Like Bush, one can't help but focus exclusively on Amos in her videos, regardless of whatever bizarre and baffling settings her various directors have frequently chosen to surround her with. A significant difference between the two -- as this compilation of her 16 promos to date emphasises -- is that Amos hasn't been gifted a video that resonates as strongly or complements her music as well as Bush's Cloudbusting.

She's come closest with the videos for Caught A Light Sneeze, a stark vignette about a kidnapped woman attempting to escape her captor, and Raspberry Swirl, which looks like something David Lynch might have dreamt up. Invariably, though, Amos is best served by the most basic of her videos. Those for Silent All Theses Years and Winter -- two of her finest songs -- are minimal affairs, setting her against plain white backdrops and largely allowing the music to speak for itself. By contrast, the dark emotive sweep of Past The Mission is saddled with a video which was seemingly conceived as an excuse to tromp off to a Mediterranean location for a week.

Where some of Amos's lyrics can appear to have been written primarily with shock value in mind, many of the more off-kilter images here serve no detectable purpose besides being clever for clever's sake -- Chocolate Girl's Bunuel-does-The Wizard Of Oz being a case in point. At least Amos is game for a laugh, often drenching herself in freezing water for the sake of "art" and, in the Talula video, petting a large python and several rats. Psychologists could no doubt have a field day pondering the number of times Tori Amos has been filmed encased in a box, but otherwise there's very little coherence to The Complete Videos. Ultimately, it's the sight of Amos sat astride a piano and her songs that leave by far the greatest impression, which rather defeats the object. ** (out of 5)