Sonisphere Festival

The Sonisphere Festival is a touring rock music festival which takes place across Europe between June and August. The festival is owned by John Jackson and Kilimanjaro Live. It is jointly promoted by K2 and Kilimanjaro Live. It has hosted heavy metal bands such as Iron Maiden, Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Slayer, Judas Priest and Megadeth.

Event history

The idea for Sonisphere was first conceived by John Jackson in the late 90s. John chose the name Sonisphere, from a combination of Sonic and Sphere. In 2008 Stuart Galbraith had formed business partnership with AEG Live called Kilimanjaro Live. John Jackson approached Stuart Galbraith with the idea of a Pan-World touring festival which fit in with plans Kilimanjaro Live had to launch a UK festival. John Jackson is the Creator and Director of Sonisphere and Galbriath the Producer.

The first run of festivals ran throughout the summer of 2009 at six venues, returning in 2010 and 2011 with 11 venues.

Plans for future festivals consist of increasing the number of festivals, making the event global rather than local to Europe, expanding the UK event into a 3-day festival, and increasing the UK capacity from 40,000 to 60,000 attendees.

The Prodigy

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The Prodigy is an English electronic music group from Braintree, Essex, formed by Liam Howlett in 1990. The current members include Liam Howlett (keyboardist and composer), Keith Flint (dancer and vocalist) and Maxim (MC and vocalist). Leeroy Thornhill (dancer and occasional live keyboardist) was a member of the band from 1990 to 2000, as was a female dancer and vocalist called Sharky who left the group during their early period.

Along with The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, The Crystal Method and other acts, The Prodigy have been credited as pioneers of the big beat genre, which achieved mainstream popularity in the 1990s and 2000s. They have sold over 25 million records worldwide. The group has won numerous music awards throughout their career, including two Brit Awards—winning Best British Dance Act twice, three MTV Video Music Awards, two Kerrang! Awards, five MTV Europe Music Awards, and have twice been nominated for Grammy Awards.

Babymetal

Babymetal (stylized as BABYMETAL) is a Japanese metal idol band. Their line-up consists of Suzuka Nakamoto as "Su-metal", Yui Mizuno as "Yuimetal", and Moa Kikuchi as "Moametal". The concept of the group is a fusion of the metal and idol genres. The three teenage girls and their band are managed by the Amuse talent agency. They released their debut album of the same name in February 2014.

History

Beginnings

The group was initially formed in 2010 as a subunit of the female idol group Sakura Gakuin, aiming to realize a "fusion of metal and idol [music]". Kobametal (Babymetal's producer) says that he had been envisioning the creation of such a group since 2009. None of the three members knew what metal music was before the inception of the band.

Babymetal's first live appearance was on November 28, 2010, at Sakura Gakuin's first solo concert. Their first song, "Doki Doki Morning", was originally released in April 2011 on the Sakura Gakuin album Sakura Gakuin 2010nendo: Message. The band shot a music video for the song and in October 2011 released it as a DVD single intended for limited (live-venues-only) distribution. Having been uploaded to YouTube that same month, by the end of 2012 the video totaled over 1 million views. Also, in July 2011 at a Sakura Gakuin concert Babymetal premiered a second song, "Ijime, Dame, Zettai" ("No More Bullying"), but it would only be released as a single much later, in 2013.

Television special

A television special is a television program which temporarily interrupts programming normally scheduled for a given time slot. Sometimes, however, the term is given to a telecast of a theatrical film, such as The Wizard of Oz, which is not part of a regular television anthology series such as NBC Saturday Night at the Movies (1961–1978).

The term originally applied especially to major dramatized presentations of an hour or two which were broadcast during times normally occupied by episodes of one or more weekly television series, thus replacing the series for that specific week. In the 1960s, multi-part specials, over several days in a week, or on the same day for several weeks, evolved from this format, though these were more commonly called miniseries. The term "TV special" formerly applied more to dramas or musicals presented live or on videotape (such as Peter Pan) than to filmed presentations especially made for television, which were (and still are) designated as made-for-TV movies.

Linkin Park

Linkin Park is an American rock band from Agoura Hills, California. Formed in 1996, the band rose to international fame with their debut album Hybrid Theory (2000), which was certified diamond by the RIAA in 2005 and multi-platinum in several other countries. Their following studio album Meteora continued the band's success, topping the Billboard 200 album chart in 2003, and was followed by extensive touring and charity work around the world. In 2003, MTV2 named Linkin Park the sixth-greatest band of the music video era and the third-best of the new millennium.Billboard ranked Linkin Park No. 19 on the Best Artists of the Decade chart. In 2012, the band was voted as the greatest artist of the 2000s in a Bracket Madness poll on VH1. In 2014, the band was declared as the Biggest Rock Band in the World Right Now by Kerrang!.

Having adapted nu metal and rap metal to a radio-friendly yet densely layered style in Hybrid Theory and Meteora, the band explored other genres in their next studio album, Minutes to Midnight (2007). The album topped the Billboard charts and had the third-best debut week of any album that year. The band continued to explore a wider variation of musical types in their fourth album, A Thousand Suns (2010), layering their music with more electronic sounds and beats. Their fifth album, Living Things (2012), combines musical elements from all of their previous records. Their sixth and most recent album, The Hunting Party (2014), returned to a heavier rock sound. The band has collaborated with several other artists, most notably with rapper Jay Z in their mashup EP Collision Course, and many others on the remix albums Reanimation and Recharged. Linkin Park has sold over 68 million albums worldwide and has won two Grammy Awards.