• Hawthorne Heights has signed to Wind-Up Records.

• The relationship between the major labels and Apple is still antagonistic and intense, regardless, Apple has the upper hand. “Whether the industry likes it or not, the iTunes chart showing the most popular songs in America is a major influencer of how kids today discover and communicate with their friends what kind of music they like,” said Charlie Walk, the former president of Epic Records, a unit of Sony Music. “It’s a very powerful thing right now in American pop culture and immediately validates a hit song.”

• After one deep breath, Jennifer Hudson returned to the spotlight Sunday with a flawless performance of the national anthem before the Super Bowl. When she returned to her dressing room, she anxiously asked pre-game show producer Rickey Minor “How did I do?”

“I told her ‘Touchdown!'” Minor told The Associated Press after the performance.

Minor insisted that Hudson and Faith Hill, who sang “America the Beautiful” before the national anthem, use the tracks the NFL requires them to submit a week before the game. “That’s the right way to do it,” Minor said. “There’s too many variables to go live. I would never recommend any artist go live because the slightest glitch would devastate the performance.”

Is there something wrong with this story? I’m more confused with the fact Hudson asking ‘How did I do?”. Maybe she was referring to if her lip movements matched with her voice. I understand that we are living in superficial times and that lip-synching in many instances is required from a production standpoint to ensure quality for broadcast. I just hope that Hudson and her management team were aware before taking the gig that lip synching is frowned upon for obvious reasons, hence, expect the negative press.

• Eminem’s new single ‘Crack Bottle’ can be heard here. We are not feeling this and looking at other comments, it seems most are on the same page. Our advice to Skittles is to keep on writing…

• “In the old days, double-platinum meant something,” said Avery Lipman, co-president of Universal Republic Records. “Now we don’t have a unified chart, and it’s all Swiss cheese because we don’t just look at album sales.” Flobots were Universal Republic’s No. 1 new artist of 2008 — and they were the third- best-selling new alternative artist industrywide that year, according to Lipman. They’ve moved more than 300,000 copies of their self-produced, full-length debut, “Fight With Tools”, sold 1.5 million tracks digitally, and had impressive numbers at the merchandise booth.