Selena Gomez to host MTV Europe Music Awards 2011 (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. teen actress and singer Selena Gomez will host this year's MTV Europe Music Awards in Belfast on November 6, the music channel said on Monday.

The 19-year-old, who is dating another teenage sensation the 17-year-old Canadian pop star Justin Bieber, will aim to find time to tweet and provide commentary for mtvema.com website as well as her regular hosting duties.

Gomez follows the likes of Justin Timberlake, Eva Longoria, Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg in hosting one of pop music's biggest nights outside the United States.

Although held in a different European city each year, the MTV EMAs tend to be dominated by U.S. acts.

This year, Lady Gaga leads the list of nominations with six, followed by two other U.S. acts -- Katy Perry and Bruno Mars. Bieber has been shortlisted in three categories.

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Spotify, SoundHound combine forces in apps – but only in Europe (Appolicious)

A couple of big-name mobile apps are joining forces to make finding and listening to music a lot easier – at least in Europe.

SoundHound, which provides mobile apps that use a device’s microphone to “listen” to songs playing nearby, then uses an Internet connection to identify them, has teamed up with Spotify to provide new services through both companies. Spotify is the European on-demand music streaming service that recently crossed the ocean to the U.S. after much waiting. It allows users to find and play pretty much any song they want to – it has a catalogue of more than 15 million tracks – in either an ad-supported version or for a monthly fee.

Both services provide some pretty useful mobile apps, and both appear on both Google’s Android operating system and on Apple’s iOS platform. The combination of the two opens up the ability for mobile users to use SoundHound to discover information about songs, then immediately launch Spotify to play them. It adds even more cool features to SoundHound, which recently added lyric tracking to its bag of app tricks.

That’s not a bad deal, considering that SoundHound could formerly bring users to the tracks they either searched for using the service (you can type in searches by band, song and album) or identified by sound, but only made them available for purchase. The partnership with Spotify, instead, makes it possible to listen to the song immediately, with no purchase required.

According to SoundHound’s press release, Spotify integration will be available to both free and paid SoundHound users, although you will need to be a Spotify Premium user, which runs about $7.99 a month. That removes the ads from Spotify and gives you unlimited access to the service, which can also play the music you have on your computer as part of your playlists designed in Spotify.

The only trouble with the whole partnership as it stands is that it’s exclusive to Europe. You’ll need to be a premium subscriber to Spotify in Europe to take full advantage of the link-ups with SoundHound, and the press release doesn’t say anything about the features possibly bridging the Atlantic.

It seems kind of doubtful that the SoundHound/Spotify partnership won’t reach to the U.S., though. It’s possible the two companies will use Europe as a testing ground, where Spotify is incredibly popular, to see if users start to gravitate toward the new features before spreading them to new markets. But it does seem that SoundHound will gain a lot more usefulness with Spotify’s help, and Spotify will become even cooler with the addition of SoundHound song-searching.

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Top Europe reggae festival opens, Marley family stars (Reuters)

MADRID (Reuters) – Europe's largest reggae festival Rototom Sunsplash opens its gates on Thursday in the Spanish resort of Benicassim, where over 200,000 fans are expected over 10 days of Jamaican-inspired music headlined by leading members of the Bob Marley dynasty.

This year's 18th Sunsplash pays homage to the legendary reggae musician on the 30th anniversary of his death with concerts by his wife Rita, backing singer in Bob Marley & The Wailers, and the most famous of his children including Ziggy and Stephen.

Stephen Marley will open the festival on the main stage, where Ska pioneers Toots and the Maytals and Jamaican dancehall star Mr. Vegas are also expected to play on the first night.

Over 300 bands and DJs playing reggae genres from roots to rocksteady and ragga to dub will be performing on six stages during a festival which mixes reggae music with social forums as well as African and Caribbean arts and culture.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Iran's Shirin Ebadi will attend Rototom's social forum, which also hosts Tobin Tax campaigner Bernard Cassen and environmental activist Vandana Shiva.

"We've got people participating from over 100 different countries, this makes us a truly global festival with a global philosopy of tolerance behind it," festival director Filippo Giunta told Reuters.

"This year we can do it knowing that the local community approves and knowing that the public are going to come. We had 160,000 last year, we are expecting over 200,000 this year," Giunta said.

Rototom Sunplash decided to move to Spain from northern Italy in 2010, after what Giunta said was a clash between the festival's ideals and the ideas of some politicians in the country.

"They accused us of promoting the use of marijuana just because of the relationship of reggae and the Rastafarian religion, which considers it to be a holy plant," Giunta said.

Rototom is a non-profit collective which donates the income from Sunsplash to charities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, attracting speakers and activists from non-government organisations as well as reggae acts from the famous to the obscure.

"We've been to great reggae festivals in France but this has the biggest line-up," said 28-year-old Mariajo, from Madrid.

"I'm going for classics like Toots and the Maytals and (reggae poet) Linton Kwesi Johnson, but I don't think we'll stay for the full 10 days. That's a lot of reggae!"

(Editing by Mike Collett-White)

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