More Music Business News: Troubles At EMI, Comcast Helps LN TM Merge, Pirate Bay, The Oprah Effect, New Music Seminar L.A. & More

• EMI Death Watch: $4 Billion In Debt, No New Signings, No Marketing $, How Long Can Guy Hands Last? Will Warners Buy? A great compendium of EMI stories from The Daily Swarm and will WMG finally buy EMI? (MediaMemo)
• Comcast is working with Ticketmaster and Live Nation to help salvage their merger now under U.S. antitrust scrutiny. (Bloomberg)
• Pirate Bay moves to decentralized DHT protocol, kills tracker - The Pirate Bay announced today that it was killing its popular BitTorrent tracker, relying instead on the truly decentralized DHT protocol to handle file location and downloading. For TPB, it's all about removing centralized points of control. (ars)
• Report: Despite Economy, Entertainment Subscriptions Hold Up. (DMW)
• The Oprah Effect impacts music sales - Chatshow host tunes in with CD picks. (Variety)
• New Web Services Turn Ticket Buying Into a Social Occasion (NY Times)
• Hastings Entertainment, Inc. (Nasdaq: HAST), the entertainment retailer, reported results for the three and nine months ended October 31, 2009. Net loss was approximately $3.4 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2009 compared to net loss of approximately $3.7 million, or $0.36 per diluted share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2008.
  
• The New Music Seminar is coming to L.A. on Feb. 2.  Get our tickets and stay tuned for a great list of panelists and more.
  
• Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive (Wired)
  
• Pop Is Dead: How Radiohead shed their skin and changed the music industry. (StereoSubversion)