Hugh Grant joins cast of 'Cloud Atlas' adaptation (AP)

LONDON – Hugh Grant has joined the screen adaptation of centuries-spanning novel "Cloud Atlas," which starts filming this week.

Producers Grant Hill and Stefan Arndt said Tuesday that Grant would appear alongside previously announced stars Halle Berry, Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon.

The movie is based on David Mitchell's 2004 novel charting the progress of a single soul over many years and several continents, from the 19th century South Pacific to a post-apocalyptic future.

It has three directors — "Matrix" trilogy creators the Wachowski Brothers and "Run Lola Run" director Tom Tykwer.

The cast also includes British actors Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent and Jim Sturgess, China's Zhou Xun and Korean actress Doona Bae.

Filming will take place in Scotland, Spain and Germany.

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Rumours cloud build-up to Monaco royal wedding (AFP)

MONACO (AFP) – The flags are out, the fireworks are primed and the dress is under wraps, but it took an ugly rumour of a threatened split to catapult the Monaco royal wedding onto the front pages Wednesday.

Prince Albert II is due to marry statuesque South African swimming champion Charlene Wittstock on Friday in a festival of princely pomp, hoping to save his realm by finally providing it with a legitimate heir.

Reports that Wittstock might be getting cold feet sent shockwaves through the principality, despite fierce denials from the palace and family friends.

"I just spoke to her assistant and whatever the story is, it's not true. I called her and asked if everything is okay, and they said everything is fine," said Ryk Neethling, a fellow South African Olympic swimmer.

"These rumours have no other goal than to severely damage the reputation of the monarch and thereby that of Miss Wittstock and severely undermine this happy event," said the palace, which is banking on a wedding tourist boom.

Albert, 53, has had children with two other women but if he cannot produce a legitimate heir the Grimaldi clan will be forced to cede Monaco to France and lose a territory they have held since 1297.

All appeared to be going to plan. Charlene's blonde locks, high cheekbones and impressively broad shoulders have graced the covers of magazines and celebrity guests are converging on the Mediterranean enclave.

The wedding was never going to compete with Britain's marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton -- now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge -- and the Monaco brand was looking due for a rejuvenating shot in the arm.

But the celebrity press gives, and the press takes away. On Tuesday, reports surfaced of a royal falling out. Charlene, it was said, had learned a dark secret about her stocky, balding partner and flown the coop.

The 33-year-old was reported by L'Express magazine's website and a slew of blogs and Twitter postings to have sought a one-way ticket home to South Africa, only to be intercepted in Nice and returned to her gilded cage.

"Albert and Charlene, a marriage in danger," screamed the headline, above a breathless description of the alleged race to the airport laced with heavy but vague insinuations about the nature of the secret:

"Charlene Wittstock had learned a few hours earlier that the private life of the man she was about to marry, who publicly acknowledged in 2005 a child from an adulterous relationship, was not as exemplary as she had imagined."

An outraged palace firmly denied the tale, the royal couple made a sudden inspection visit to the wedding site to be photographed arm-in-arm and their lawyer announced that he intended to sue for defamation.

The couple's media advisor and the commentator on the wedding for French state television, Stephane Bern, also attempted to deny the rumour, but not without adding to the speculation by citing rumours of another love child.

"A woman could easily pretend that she's pregnant by a prince," he told Le Parisien. "You can't do a DNA test to check three days before a wedding!"

The world's press was abuzz on Wednesday with the story -- and, as some cynics noted, also with advance publicity for the event -- and lawyer Thierry Lacoste had suddenly abandoned his threat of legal action.

Lacoste said he had dropped the case when L'Express agreed to withdraw the article, but it was nevertheless still available on the site, unchanged apart from a brief footnote to acknowledge the princely denial.

L'Express told AFP it had not received any writ and stood by the article.

Meanwhile, other media had joined in dropping hints about the supposed secret, and raking over the details of the prince's previous liaisons -- including his siring of illegitimate children with at least two women.

The Monaco royal clan has an unlucky matrimonial history.

Albert's mother, US film star Grace Kelly -- turned Princess Grace on her marriage to Rainier III -- died in a car crash in 1982. Her daughter Caroline lost her second husband Stephano Casiraghi in a 1990 motorboat accident.

The other royal sister, Princess Stephanie, has also been unlucky in love, in the words of Wednesday's edition of Le Parisien "marrying almost as often as she falls in love" and finding herself betrayed by her bodyguard lover.

The clan's latest experiment in matrimony will begin with a civil ceremony on Friday, followed by a concert by electropop veteran Jean-Michel Jarre, then on Saturday by a Catholic religious ceremony and grand ball.

Assuming the bride hasn't already fled.

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eMusic aims to launch cloud this year (Reuters)

NASHVILLE (Billboard) – Subscription-based download store eMusic is planning to follow its competitors into the cloud in the second half of the year.

The company is "hoping by Q4 of this year" to launch the cloud-based service, CEO Adam Klein told Billboard.biz. The service will allow its customers to stream the songs they already own to multiple devices, he said.

If that model sounds familiar, it's because eMusic is taking the same approach as Apple, Amazon and Google. In the last three months, all three companies have launched cloud-based services that store users' music files and allow for playback on many Internet-connected devices. It's a model that emphasizes both ownership and access. "We think they're doing exactly the right thing," says Klein.

Another approach is to give consumers access to a large collection of songs. This is the business model of Rhapsody, Radio, MOG, Napster, Spotify and Sony's Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity. And as Billboard.biz has reported, Hewlett-Packard is in negotiations with rights holders to launch this type of access-based service. While most allow consumers to purchase downloads, these are primarily streaming services that emphasize access over ownership.

Both the access and ownership approaches to cloud-based services allow users to stream their music collections from a variety of Internet-connected devices. Amazon's Cloud Drive, for example, can be accessed through either the browser-based Cloud Player or its Amazon MP3 app for Android devices. Google's Music Beta similarly allows users to stream songs from a browser or Android app. Spotify, which has yet to launch in the U.S., has a hybrid model that combines its large catalog of songs with a user's locally stored music.

EMusic's plans to launch a streaming service have been in the news for nearly a year and a half. "We have a bunch of things in store for 2010 that will allow us to grow again and that includes streaming," then-CEO Danny Stein told Reuters in January 2010.

But in terms of subscriber count, eMusic has not grown. The introduction of a cloud service could help the company add to a subscriber count that has stagnated for the last four years (although the company claims to have increased average revenue per user by 22 percent in the last six months). Klein told Billboard.biz the company plans to add subscribers in the second half of the year. It recently spent four months on consumer research and plans to put that knowledge to use in upcoming consumer outreach programs.

Before the move into the cloud, eMusic will add streaming features to its existing store. In late July, eMusic will introduce what CEO Adam Klein called "elements of streaming for the purposes of previewing (songs) in a much more comprehensive way."

(Editing by Chris Michaud)

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Apple nears cloud music service with label deals (Reuters)

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Apple Inc is close to launching an online music storage and streaming service after reaching deals with three of the four major labels and is expected to wrap up the fourth in a few days, according to several people familiar the plans.

The iPhone and iPad maker completed work on the new service a while back, according to two people, and will beat Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc in the bid to launch a comprehensive 'cloud' music service. The iTunes cloud-based service will offer users the ability to buy, store and stream favorite songs and albums wherever they have an Internet connection on any device.

Warner Music Group Corp was the first to reach a cloud deal with Apple more than two weeks ago and was followed by EMI Group and Sony Corp's Sony Music Entertainment more recently, according to three people with knowledge of the talks. Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, the largest music company in the world, is "within days of putting pen to paper on the new cloud service," said a fourth person.

Spokespeople for Apple and the labels all declined to comment.

The big technology companies are vying to be leaders in new ways for fans to access songs and videos. As the sales of physical media such CDs and DVDs fall rapidly, the tech giants are betting they can sell media subscriptions, software and innovative devices linked to these services.

While Amazon is the leading e-reader maker, Apple and Google are competing on mobile platforms for smartphones and tablet devices.

Apple has discussed plans for a cloud-based iTunes service on and off over the last year with the labels. It stepped up negotiations recently, according to these people. It is now expected that Apple will likely be in a position to announce its cloud music plans in time for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 6.

Steve Jobs, Apple's founder, has in the past unveiled products, including the iPhone 4, at the WWDC.

There is a chance the new music service could be ready to launch by June 6, but it would also need deals with song publishers. Apple has opened talks with some publishers, according to two people.

Amazon and Google launched music locker services in the past few weeks without new licensing agreements, leading to threats of legal action from some music companies. At the time, Amazon argued its Cloud Drive service does not need licenses and said uploaded music belongs to the users, something the labels dispute.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; additional reporting from Poornima Gupta in San Francisco; editing by Andre Grenon)

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Google to stream music with new cloud services (Appolicious)

Google made some big announcements at its I/O conference in San Francisco today -- most notably, that it’s now gunning for iTunes.

The tech giant rolled out its Music Beta service, an iTunes-like bit of software that works from the Internet-based cloud rather than your computer’s hard drive. Much like Amazon’s music-streaming service, Google Music allows users to upload their songs to the cloud and then stream them anywhere, on computers or Android-based smartphones and tablets.

That will keep hard drives free while allowing users to set up playlists on any device and have it stream to the cloud, and they still get the option of specifying certain artists, albums, tracks or playlists that will be downloaded to their devices for offline play.

First Amazon, and now Google -- both huge companies are taking shots at Apple’s mobile and music supremacy, with not a lot going on over at the Apple camp. Dollars to donuts, that’s about to change.

We’ve been hearing that Apple is working on a cloud-based music service of its own, building a big server farm to accommodate the storage space and other considerations, but that it was hung up on licensing considerations. With Google clearing that hurdle, I’d wager that Apple can’t be far behind, especially because the company’s media business has been a huge part of its success during the last decade. The popularity of the iPod and the ease of use of iTunes led to the iPhone and then the iPad -- and Apple isn’t looking to hand off that torch to anybody, least of all Google, anytime soon.

So it seems like a fair bet to assume Apple will be announcing, in some capacity, its own streaming digital locker service for music (and other media, perhaps) when its Worldwide Developers Conference rolls around in early June. Apple’s preview graphic on its website says the event will preview the “future of iOS and Mac OS X,” and that will likely concern a lot of how media works with Apple’s powerhouse devices, seeing as a new iPhone and iOS rollout isn’t expected until September.

Google’s new services are a pretty good indicator of the things Apple will be setting as its baseline with its cloud service. Streaming to iOS devices is a given, and the combination online-offline setups seems like a solid choice as well. But Apple will definitely be coming to the party looking for ways to one-up the competition, because that’s really what it is best at doing. And all this competition suggests some very cool services and features coming to the mobile market.

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