It's business as usual, but with diminishing returns, on I'm With You – the result, perhaps, of sticking with the producer Rick Rubin for six albums.

Warner Music Group Corp., the world's third-largest recording company with such artists as Eric Clapton, Michael Buble and Paramore, is being sold for about €3.3 billion (£2bn) as a global decline in CD sales weighs down the industry.

Intertwined, interchangeable even, Parliament and Funkadelic, the flamboyant funk outfits led by the crazy, visionary genius George Clinton, mixed soul, rock, psychedelia, satire and black power and made some of the most memorable and most sampled records of the 1970s and early '80s. They also played spectacular live shows, and influenced a range of musicians from Prince and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to rap acts like Ice-T and Public Enemy.

The bass guitarist Paul Gray was a founder member of Slipknot, one of the scariest-looking, most brutal sounding bands to come out of the US in recent years.

Bono's back injury means that U2 has been replaced by the far less comforting letters "TBC" on the Glastonbury website. Speculation on an act to fill this sudden hole at the top of Friday night's bill has fixed on the Rolling Stones.

When Lily Allen stepped up to collect her third Ivor Novello award of the night earlier this week, few would have recognised the chiselled features of her Californian collaborator, who stood beside her at the podium. While the famously feisty songstress from Hammersmith is a household name, Greg Kurstin is the pop industry's best kept secret.

There was considerable bemusement among Radiohead fans when Thom Yorke this week appeared on stage in Los Angeles with a new live supergroup starring Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was, everyone agreed, the least likely alliance in rock music.