Carole King isn’t done with music – not yet anyway.

The 71-year-old singer-songwriter known for such hits as (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman and You’ve Got a Friend was awarded a top prize for popular music at a concert Tuesday. 

She received the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song at the Library of Congress in the US and will be honoured by President Barack Obama at the White House.

Carole said it was a tremendous honour to be recognised at such an historic place with a place in history that she never would have expected. Carole is the first woman to receive the Gershwin Prize. Previous recipients include Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon.

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American singer Prince has signed a new deal with Kobalt Music Group to market and distribute his future work without giving up control over his rights, the company said on Monday.

NEW YORK – The CW network is bringing a popular radio music series to television and is going heavy on escapist fare in its new programming for next season.

As part of a three-year deal, the iHeartRadio Music Festival will air exclusively on the network and stream on CWTV.com following the broadcasts, the CW said Thursday. Other iHeartRadio events, including a Jingle Ball holiday concert, are coming to CW as part of the agreement with Clear Channel Media and Entertainment.

The music festival will be held in September in Las Vegas by Clear Channel.

Elsewhere on the 2014-15 schedule, CW’s young-skewing audience will find a mix of fantasy and fashion.

Five new dramas are planned, including a spinoff of “The Vampire Diaries” titled “The Originals,” starring Joseph Morgan, Daniel Gillies and Claire Holt as starter members of the vampire clan.

Sat in a hotel lobby amidst a music conference in Aarhus around 4am is a great way to argue, and a terrible way to debate. I am trying to convey that good music would exist even if the music industry didn’t, and that there is no correlation between the music industry and good music.

Meanwhile Telegraph critic Neil McCormick is candidly putting forward that Blood On The Tracks is the greatest singer-songwriter album, if not just of the Seventies but of all time. Both conversations fall flat mainly because I wasn’t as delicate as I needed be, and Neil’s case was too solid for any credible cross examination to be made so late into the night.

Setting the captaincy of Bob Dylan’s opus to one side, there’s a problem that needs addressing now. The industry is fast returning to a model whereby music is no more than a marketing device. A model where Blood On The Tracks would be sold as a soundtrack to advertising campaigns rather than as a double sided LP. A scenario in which hardline, passionate people are injecting equity into a world where traditional revenues are evaporating, especially for the artists.

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Brand sponsorship for festivals, tours and music venues keeps growing in the United States, and is projected to reach $1.28 billion in 2013, according to marketing analytics firm IEG Research. Music continues to capture an increasing share of dollars from marketers post-recession, posting a 5.4% increase from $1.22 billion in 2012 and a 15.5% increase from $1.17 billion in 2009.

Part of that increase comes from music’s rising appeal among consumer packaged-goods marketers, with Procter & Gamble’s CoverGirl, Unilever’s Fruttare ice cream bars and Kraft Mondelez’s Oreo all sponsoring major tours and festivals this year, with other portfolio brands at the CPG giants starting to dip their toes in music programs. Other category wars like credit cards, automotive and smartphones have helped pour further dividends into the event, touring and festival space. Top sponsorship categories in terms of share of spend include media and publishing (8.9%), beer (7.3%), financial services (5.3%), spirits (5.2%), telecom (5.2%), automotive (3.6%), hotel and resort (3.2%), soft drinks (3.2%) and insurance (2.8%).

On the brand side, Anheuser-Busch is the top-spending company of all music festivals at $335.5 million. Pepsi ranks a close second with $325.1 million. Coca-Cola finishes third with $236.8 million, followed by Miller Coors ($197.1 million), Time Warner ($147.2 million) and Ford Motor ($138.2 million).

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Coachella and Lollapalooza are sold out. Bonnaroo’s nearly there, too. But eager fans need only be patient: Wait a few years and chances are you’ll have a star-studded music festival of your own within driving distance.

New music festivals are popping up more quickly than you can count in the U.S. As the summer festival season gets under way this week with the sprawling Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival down in the desert in Indio, California, some of the most successful promoters in the scene are looking ahead to next year and beyond when they’ll launch new ventures in untapped markets.

“I do think that there’s really plenty of opportunities for people to create some great festival experiences,’’ said Ashley Capps, a co-founder of the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee. “In fact, I think in many ways the audience in America is just now starting to fully embrace festival culture.’’

After a disastrous run when festivals disappeared more quickly than the family farm in the late 1990s, a small group of concert promoters established beachheads – the four mega giants Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza in Chicago and Austin City Limits Festival in Texas. Each of those has survived a decade or more and continues to gain in popularity.

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Paul McCartney is adding to his busy summer with top billing at the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival, which will take root in San Francisco’s sprawling Golden Gate Park from August 9 – 11. For his first time at OSL, the former Beatle will be joined by festival staples Red Hot Chili Peppers, Phoenix, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and a resurgent Nine Inch Nails, among many others.

Macca recently announced a series of U.S. dates on his “Out There” tour and he’ll be stopping at Bonnaroo in June. He’s no stranger to festivals, however, having headlined Coachella in 2009.

The legendary artist’s visit to Fog City will be a family affair: his son James McCartney is also on the bill.

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Twitter has indeed launched music.twitter.com, but for the time being it’s “invite-only.” According to AllThingsD, it will initially only be available to a select handful of “influencers” before its launch next week. At press time, a rep for Twitter had not responded to Billboard.biz’s request for comment or confirmation.

Yesterday, Ryan Seacrest tweeted briefly about the app, and we’re likely to see other celebs talking about it in the coming days. One of the tweets said the app “shows what artists are trending, also has up and coming artists.”

As of Friday, the site consisted only of a simple sign-in page that displays the popular #music hashtag. Signing in prompts the user to authorize “Trending Music Web,” which according to the description is the web version of the trending music app. The app authorization permissions include “read” and “write” permissions, suggesting that the application will contain the ability to survey user listening habits and post them, perhaps automatically, to Twitter. A feature such as this would be akin to listening services like Soundtracking, which provide users with easy ways to share what they are listening to to friends and their networks.

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USA TODAY’s Green Tech series explores how green-tech innovations are changing everything from vacations to war-making.

Music festivals are a free-for-all. Fans can dress up in anything — loincloths, body paint, ponchos, pasties, the sky’s the limit. Dancing with abandon is encouraged. Moshing, crowd-surfing? Of course.

Just don’t litter.

If Lollapalooza founder and Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell catches someone littering, beware. “I’ll go over to that person and tell them to pick it up and say, ‘This isn’t your house,’ ” says Farrell. ” ‘You’re a guest here.’ “

With the support of artists and attendees, sustainable efforts have taken center stage at music festivals.

“Greening any event has become the expectation rather than the exception,” says Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com, a website that reports on sustainability efforts in business. “Even at Woodstock, there was a wave of environmental consciousness. From the pictures, it looks like a battlefield, so they didn’t quite succeed, but Woodstock set the stage for all that was to follow.”

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Long a mainstay in Europe, music festivals are now the most robust sector of the U.S. touring market, with fans embracing the immersive experience and opportunity for music discovery and the industry tapping into massive audiences and proven artist-development platforms. While festivals on U.S. shores number in the thousands and cover a wide expanse of genres, demographics and concepts, these four rock festivals are leading the charge in terms of influence, revenue and the highest levels of fan experience. The common theme: focus on the fan, creative programming and, most important, the site rules.

Unlike Bonnaroo, Coachella wasn’t an instant success out of the gate. In fact, the festival lost so much money the first year–about $800,000–that it would’ve likely been a footnote in music history without the patience and support of a cadre of agents, managers and media that believed the concept had legs and cut Goldenvoice slack in terms of timely payments. “We didn’t even think we would do the festival again,” Tollett recalled in a 2012 Billboard cover story. “Losing that sort of money, who’d want to do that again?”

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