Diddy to Launch New Cable Music Network

Sean 'Diddy' Combs attends the 43rd NAACP Image Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

Christopher Polk/Getty Images for NAACP Image Awards

Sean "Diddy" Combs announced today that he has partnered with Comcast to launch Revolt, a new cable music network. According to Combs, Revolt is "the first channel created entirely from the ground up in this new era of social media. We're building this platform for artists to reach an extraordinary number of people in a completely different way. Revolt will be live, like all great moments in television history." The channel is expected to debut sometime in 2013.

Combs has teamed with MTV veteran Andy Schuon in programming the network, which will focus on music videos, live performances and pop culture programming. As of yet, it's unclear exactly how the network's social media component will work, but Combs stresses that communication between viewers and artists will be crucial to the network.

Photos: Random Notes
"The opportunity to create a home for music, artists and fans to communicate in an authentic way is truly unique," he said in a statement. "Revolt will celebrate and recreate the platform that helped launch my career, and give the world a new way to experience music on television."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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