• Virgin Entertainment will close two stores (Chicago and Salt Lake City) and open a store at the Hollywood Bowl. (Billboard.biz)

• Warner Music Group cut 15 positions in the U.K. as a part of its "ongoing transformation." (Hollywood Reporter)

• Newsweek has an article on celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. The article looks at the impact Hilton can have even -- though he is not a music blogger per se. "When Perez Hilton talks music," says the title, "people listen." It says he hopes to start a record label and launch a "Perez Hilton"-braded tour. (Newsweek)

• A profile of San Francisco-based indie label Six Degrees Records. Said co-founder Bob Duskis: "We said to ourselves that we could piss and moan about how the business was changing, or we could look ahead to new opportunities, embrace them and try to be one step ahead." (San Francisco Chronicle)

• The Independent has an (often unbearably long) article on The Minpins and how they are at the forefront of a changing, decentralized, Internet-heavy music industry. Looks like the band doesn't use MySpace much -- they've got only 307 friends and 4,634 profile views. (The Independent)

• Indie musicians like Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie) and James Mercer (The Shin) talk about the mainstreaming of indie rock. (Denver Post)

• The Wall Street Journal's Jason Fry has a lengthy write-up on Yahoo! Music's new Gracenote-powered music lyric service --- and he's got a beef with it. Because the lyrics cannot be copied and pasted (into the MP3's metadata, for example), Fry is all but writing off the new business. "When an interesting new service arrives hamstrung, positions get hardened in the undeclared war between the music industry and its customers." Easy. It's too early to predict a file-sharing-like dust-up between industry and consumers. (Wall Street Journal)