2008 Predictions: MUSIC

The music industry. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. You must be careful - so here's my predictions for what 2008 will hold for the world of music ...

Oprah will disappoint the studio audience at the taping of her 23rd season premiere by ONLY giving each of them a free digital download of Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.”

The Eagles enjoyed phenomenal success in 2007 with the reunion album “Long Road Out of Eden”, available exclusively at Wal-Mart. The 2008 follow-up “One Last Flight, One Last Fight” won’t do quite as well after a misguided decision to only sell it at Baby Gap.

Ryan Adams will release five full-length CD’s: a solo acoustic disc, a folk-pop effort with his band "the Cardinals", a hard-rocking collection featuring members of well-known NYC noise-rock groups, a 30-track novelty hiphop album, and the all-instrumental soundtrack to a new experimental film by Ethan Hawke. Then January will end, and he’ll decide what to do with the rest of the year.

1980s female hiphop music will enjoy a major comeback, spearheaded in part by critical acclaim for the new album “Salt n’ Pepa’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Frustrated with Neil Young’s reluctance to tour, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash will recruit a replacement with the hope of appealing to a younger, wider audience. Subsequently, the least-successful tour of 2008 will be “Crosby, Stills, Nash … and Usher.”

Paul McCartney will spend much of his fortune developing a functioning time machine. He will then transport a mob of screaming teenage Beatlemaniacs from 1964 to the present to beat Heather Mills to death with her prosthetic leg.

Eddie Vedder will endorse a radical left-wing third party candidate for president. You won’t read about it anywhere, because no one cares.

50 Cent will release “Kenny G Unit”, an attempt to crack the smooth jazz market. He’ll then be assassinated by a drive-by shooter later in the year while Jazzercising in Central Park with David Sanborn.

In December 2006, Dallas Cowboys QB Tony Romo played his career-worst game when country music sensation then-girlfriend Carrie Underwood was in attendance. In December 2007, Romo had an even WORSE performance with pop starlet girlfriend Jessica Simpson cheering him on. By December 2008, Tony Romo will have become celibate, devoting all free time to his new restaurant chain “Tony Romo’s: Yet Another Place for Ribs.”

CD sales will continue to plummet in 2008; the year’s biggest hit will be Daughtry’s 2-disc set “Daughtry 2: A Double Dose of Daughtry” with 712 copies sold. In second: Paul Simon’s musical tribute to Shakespeare, “Wherefore Art Garfunkel, Romeo?”

Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers will regret having spent the bulk of 2008 sitting by the phone waiting for Sting to call again.