U2 have inked a 12-year deal with Live Nation, the concert promoters who recently signed a groundbreaking touring and recording contract with Madonna.

The contract, signed for an undisclosed fee, will cover the Irish rockers’ merchandising, digital and branding rights, with the band continuing to release records through Universal.

“We’ve been dating for over 20 years now,” singer Bono told BBC News. “It’s about time we tied the knot.”

“U2 has created some of the greatest rock music of all time,” added Live NationMichael Cohl. “It has long been our intention to consolidate and extend our relationship.”

chairman

Madonna signed a groundbreaking $120m (£60m) ‘360 degree deal’ with Live Nation

last year - a contract that combined her recording, publishing and touring revenues.

R & B singers and rappers are musical codependents. The former sing the hooks that stick in your head, the latter serve up the urban street cred that’s an essential hip-hop selling point.And Mary J. Blige and Jay-Z have needed each other from the get-go. As far back as 1996, she sang the chorus on “Can’t Knock The Hustle,” the very first song on his now-revered first album, Reasonable Doubt.

So it’s a wonder that the two leaders in their respective fields have taken this long to embark on the collaborative “Heart of the City” tour that brought them to the Wachovia Center on Sunday for a seamless two and a half hour show packed with hits from both sides of the hip-hop soul coin.

Leona Lewis is set to become the first British woman to top the hard-to-crack US charts for 20 years.

Not since Kim Wilde had everyone rocking to You Keep Me Hangin’ On has a Brit woman enjoyed such commercial success Stateside.

Lewis has risen from a receptionist role in Hackney, via winning talent show The X Factor, to become one of the hottest musical properties around today.

Industry sources say that Lewis’s first US single Bleeding Love, has stopped Madonna in her tracks and bumped R&B singer Usher off the top of the Billboard Hot 100 after a surge in download sales. Of course, it didn’t hurt when TV Queen ? and one of America’s most powerful women ? Oprah Winfrey endorsed the song on nationwide television.

The new Hot 100 will be revealed today ? and Lewis is hotly-tipped to be at the top of it.

Many of Leona’s new download-buying fans are unaware that she shot to fame after winning The X Factor in 2006, and she has Simon Cowell, her savvy manager, to thank for that.

Tough-talking Simon whisked her off to America and negotiated a $5 million album contract with the music mogul Clive Davis, who signed Whitney Houston. She was sent to record with top US producers and a slick video designed for MTV was filmed for Bleeding Love.

The 22-year-old was soon appearing in US entertainment ‘ones to watch’ lists, and her breakthrough came this month with television appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Winfrey?s nationwide chatshow.

After earning a standing ovation, Oprah turned to Lewis and said: ‘You?re the real-deal girl. Talk about a star is born.’ And cue an instant surge in download and mobile phone track sales.

Amy Winehouse has sold 1.5 million copies of her Back to Black album in the states but, despite her five recent Grammy award wins, has not yet topped the singles chart.

Forget the traditional radio premiere: R.E.M.’s new album, “Accelerate,” is set to debut on the social networking application iLike.

The roll-out, the first of its kind for a major act, will allow fans to stream and share “Accelerate” in its entirety beginning March 24, a week ahead of the album’s April 1 U.S. release date.

“It was one of those ideas that was presented to us and it seemed like a good one so we ran for it,” R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe told Billboard.com.

He also noted that the way people embrace music “has certainly changed in the last 5 or 10 years. I think you can either go with it or sit back and watch it happen, and I would rather be out on the field than in the bleachers.”

Accompanied by an exclusive video of the band talking about the album, the iLike launch will make the 11-song set freely available to anyone using iLike.com, Facebook, iTunes or any of the other social networks and sites that offer an iLike application for their platforms.

The iLike premiere of “Accelerate” is R.E.M.’s latest example of using direct-to-listener online initiatives to present their music. The band recently launched a Web site of raw footage and invited visitors to edit their own video for the album’s first single, “Supernatural Superserious.” The trio has also been doling out downloadable glimpses of the new material one day at a time via Ninetynights.com.

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