At one point, a fan requested new material. "I can't remember [how to play] any of my new songs because they've been done for a fucking year," Apple replied. "Not her fault!" said Brion.

Unfortunately, we at www.elviscostello.com find ourselves unable to recommend this lovely item to you as the price appears to be either a misprint or a satire.

All our attempts to have this number revised have been fruitless but rather than detain you with tedious arguments about morality, panache and book-keeping - when there are really bigger fish to filet these days - we are taking the following unusual step.

If you should really want to buy something special for your loved one at this time of seasonal giving, we can whole-heartedly recommend, "Ambassador Of Jazz" - a cute little imitation suitcase, covered in travel stickers and embossed with the name "Satchmo" but more importantly containing TEN re-mastered albums by one of the most beautiful and loving revolutionaries who ever lived - Louis Armstrong.

The box should be available for under one hundred and fifty American dollars and includes a number of other tricks and treats. Frankly, the music is vastly superior.

If on the other hand you should still want to hear and view the component parts of the above mentioned elaborate hoax, then those items will be available separately at a more affordable price in the New Year, assuming that you have not already obtained them by more unconventional means.

"A piece of music is a valuable form of art. If you want the person to respect it and value it, it's got to cost them not a huge sum of money but a significant sum of money."

In 2008, 1,500 releases broke the "obscurity line" (sold over 10,000 albums).

Out of [those], 227 artists broke the "obscurity line" for the first time ever.

Out of the 227 first-timers, 14 artists did it own their own; approximately 106 were signed to a major; the rest were signed to indies.

Tommy Boy is more than a record company; we don't consider ourselves a record company anymore, we're much more than that. Now we're sort of a strategic artists positioning company, and our job is to take an artist from where they are in revenues to a much higher number. If we work with Artist A that's making half a million dollars a year, our goal is we take them to a million in year one, two million in year two, and three or four in year three. That's our goal. And then we take a percentage of that revenue. And we're talking about dollars, not record sales, because we may decide to give the records away, and we may only make about 10% of our money from the music and master use or 20% and the rest of it will come from touring and merch, publishing and possibly sync and other things. We'e not concerned with where the money comes from as long as it comes.

Tommy Boy is known for building brands, from Queen Latifah and Ru Paul, to De La Soul and Afrika Bambaataa, Naughty by Nature, House of Pain, so many household names now that you know. When you mention the name, you can see them; like Digital Underground, when you close your eyes, an image of who they are comes up. Coolio ... they all became significant brands, and that's what we did. Tommy Boy is itself as a significant brand. We're not just a record company. Our business always was building brands. How we used to make money was selling records; but we don't see it as the way we can make money now. It's one of the streams of revenue that we can make money from, but it's no longer the most significant or even the second most significant way we'll be making money. We can no longer be limited in how we see artists to the music domain. It's more than the music. We have to work with the artist's positioning.