BMG Rights Management

BMG is an international group of music companies focused on the management of music publishing, recording rights and music distribution. The company operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of the international media conglomerate Bertelsmann, its name being the legacy of the former BMG, which was sold to Sony Music Entertainment in 2008. The company was established in 2008 as a joint venture between Bertelsmann and the global private equity firm KKR. A sequential acquisition programme of music catalogues (e.g. the Hal David, Mute or Sanctuary catalogues), music publishers (e.g. Cherry Lane, Chrysalis or Bug Music) and record labels (e.g. Infectious Records Vagrant Records or Rise Records) coupled with an important number of international signings has made BMG the world's fourth biggest music rights company in terms of revenue.

In March 2013, Bertelsmann took over BMG by acquiring KKR’s shares, making BMG a fully owned subsidiary of the Bertelsmann group and underlining Bertelsmann’s long-term interest in the music business. The company's head office is in Berlin, and it operates regional offices in New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Munich, Stockholm, Hilversum, and Beijing. BMG is the youngest major international company in the music industry.

Beatboxing

Beatboxing (also beat boxing or b-boxing) is a form of vocal percussion primarily involving the art of mimicking drum beats using one's mouth, lips, tongue, and voice. It may also involve vocal imitation of turntablism, and other musical instruments. Beatboxing today is connected with hip-hop culture, often referred to as "the fifth element" of hip-hop, although it is not limited to hip-hop music. The term "beatboxing" is sometimes used to refer to vocal percussion in general.

History

Prehistory

Techniques similar to beatboxing have been present in many American musical genres since the 19th century, such as early rural music, both black and white, religious songs, blues, ragtime, vaudeville, and hokum. Few examples are the Appalachian technique of eefing and the blues song Bye bye bird written and performed by the harmonica player Alex or Aleck Miller aka Sonny Boy Williamson II.

Additional influences may perhaps include forms of African traditional music, in which performers utilize their bodies (e.g., by clapping or stomping) as percussion instruments and produce sounds with their mouths by breathing loudly in and out, a technique used in beatboxing today.

Battle

Generally, a battle "is a conceptual component in the hierarchy of combat in warfare between two or more armed forces, or combatants. A war sometimes consists of many battles. Battles generally are well defined in duration, area, and force commitment.

Wars and military campaigns are guided by strategy, whereas battles take place on a level of planning and execution known as operational mobility. German strategist Carl von Clausewitz stated that "the employment of battles ... to achieve the object of war" was the essence of strategy.

Etymology

The definition of a battle cannot be arrived at solely through the names of historical battles, many of which are misnomers. The word battle is a loanword in English from the Old French bataille, first attested in 1297, from Late Latin battualia, meaning "exercise of soldiers and gladiators in fighting and fencing", from Late Latin (taken from Germanic) battuere "beat", from which the English word battery is also derived via Middle English batri, and comes from the staged battles in the Colosseum in Rome that may have numbered 10,000 individuals.

Katie Melua

Ketevan "Katie" Melua (/ˈmɛluː.ə/; Georgian: ქეთევან "ქეთი" მელუა IPA: [kʰɛtʰɛvɑn mɛluɑ], born 16 September 1984) is a Georgian-British singer, songwriter and musician. She moved to Northern Ireland at the age of eight and then to England at fourteen. Melua is signed to the small Dramatico record label, under the management of composer Mike Batt, and made her musical debut in 2003. In 2006, she was the United Kingdom's best-selling female artist and Europe's highest selling European female artist.

In November 2003, at the age of nineteen, Melua released her first album, Call Off the Search, which reached the top of the United Kingdom album charts and sold 1.8 million copies in its first five months of release. Her second album, Piece by Piece, was released in September 2005 and to date has gone platinum four times. Melua released her third studio album Pictures in October 2007.

According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2008, Melua had a fortune of £18 million, making her the seventh richest British musician under thirty. It was reported in 2009 that she may have lost millions as a result of the global economic downturn.As of May 2011, Melua could have a £12m fortune and she came second in the under 30 rich list.

BeamNG.drive

BeamNG.drive is a vehicle simulation game which is being developed and published by the startup company BeamNG for Microsoft Windows. BeamNG.drive features unique soft-body physics.

Development

In late May 2012, BeamNG released a video on YouTube titled "Revolutionary soft-body physics in CryEngine3". Originally, BeamNG was to be based on the CryEngine3 rendering engine, but the implementation to the driving game filled it with bugs, leading development to be rolled over to the Torque 3D engine. BeamNG.drive relies heavily on coding in Lua. BeamNG.drive uses packets of local data using the Lua network system while the game is operating in order to complete the complex physics equations during game-play.

BeamNG started its website, beamng.com in August 2012 to begin rolling out news of their development of the simulator. Also with the release of the website came a public forum and a developer's blog. The community has grown exponentially to about 104,000 Members with about 15,000 Active Members since the start of the website (as of July 2015).