Armin van Buuren has been named as the world’s number one DJ in the annual DJ Mag Top 100 awards.

The list, which was officially unveiled last night at Ministry of Sound in London, (having been available in certain corners of cyberspace since the beginning of this week) threw up little surprises in terms of personnel with the usual suspects of Tiësto and Paul van Dyk taking the second and third spots respectively.

As you can see from the list below (after the jump), the chart is a bastion of trance, with the top 10 in particular featuring Above & Beyond (#4), Ferry Corsten (#6) and Markus Schulz (#8).

Electro house also made a good account of itself with David Guetta (#5), Deadmau5 (#11) and Axwell (#20) among the highest placed artists.

Richie Hawtin (#15), Dubfire (#30) and Ricardo Villalobos (#36) were among the few ‘underground’ house and techno DJs that featured.

Although heavily criticised for being little more than a popularity contest, the chart in some ways, could be viewed as accurate as it represents the number of people who would have gone to see the featured DJs over the course of the year.

MySpace has announced that its MyAds program is now available to the public. MySpace Music is aggressively pursuing bands and individual artists to participate in the new advertising program. Bands will be able to create their own banner ads and then specifically target which MySpace users will see the ads based on the users’ listed interests.

So far there are roughly 1100 categories of interests, ranging from hip-hop to rock to tattooing. There is a $25 minimum per campaign with advertisers bidding against one another for top placement in categories.

For the past three months the service has been available in private beta to a small pool of MySpace users. It was made available to large brands last year. Links in ads will be able to go to non-MySpace pages in addition to MySpace pages, an addition that was not in the original beta test.

Users of the service will receive similar analytics that large advertisers receive, which include hour-by-hour traffic figures. Uploaded ads will be screened for content before being posted to the site.

From Futuremusic.com

Police in Italy are looking into reports that the Naples mafia plans to carry out its threat to kill the author of the best-selling book “Gomorra,” which has been made into a hit movie about mafia brutality, by Christmas.

Roberto Saviano, 29, has lived in hiding with 24-hour police protection for the past two years since the “Camorra,” as the mob in his hometown is known, decided to punish him for the huge success of his book, which is based on his own investigations.

It has sold 1.2 million copies in Italy and been translated into 42 languages. Now that it has hit the big screen and is a candidate for the Oscars, the mafia is even angrier and wants Saviano and his bodyguards killed as soon as possible.

“We’ve launched in inquiry to verify the truth behind this news,” Franco Roberto, a coordinator of the local anti-mafia squad for Naples, told Reuters.

Italian papers said the Naples mob’s notorious Casalesi clan — in the news recently over the murder of six Africans, which sparked riots by other immigrants — had moved the threat into the “operative” phase and wanted Saviano dead by Christmas.

The source of the tip-off was a “supergrass” related to the jailed Camorra godfather Francesco Schiavone, aka “Sandokan.”

The Camorra has its finger in every pie in Naples and the surrounding areas, from the protection racket to drugs and even waste disposal, as Saviano’s book documents in great detail.

With his shaved head, dark close-cropped beard, piercing eyes and black T-shirt, Saviano has become a symbol of the fight against organized crime for a new generation of Italians.

Read more On Reuter

Did life imitate art when David Duchovny, who plays a sex-mad writer on the hit US TV show “Californication”, seek treatment for sex addiction?

Or was it case of art imitating life for the “X-Files” actor — regarded as one of the hottest men in Hollywood and whose off-screen romances have long been a talking point.

Duchovny’s announcement on Thursday that he was voluntarily going into rehab for sex addiction after years of denying he had a problem, threw a spotlight on a disorder that few celebrities, and even fewer ordinary men and women, admit to.

Often likened to alcoholism, drug addiction or gambling, sex addiction is a form of compulsive behavior which is sending growing numbers of people into therapy but which is not formally recognized as a “diagnosable disorder” by the American Psychiatric Association.

“The concept of sexual addiction is a controversial one and that’s because it is difficult to define,” said Dr. Steve Eichel, an addiction specialist who works in Delaware.

“There are a lot of people who are critical of the concept because we live in a society that tends to over medicalize and which makes every behavior, which deviates from the norm, an addiction or a disorder,” Eichel said.

Sexual health experts estimate that about 3-5 percent of Americans have the disorder, including women.

According to the Mayo Clinic, symptoms range from rampant promiscuity to spending hours looking at pornography and using sex to escape from problems such as depression or stress. It is often accompanied by secrecy and shame, and sufferers have difficulties with emotional intimacy.

Read more on Reuters

The end of September marked another star-studded ceremony at the 11th edition of the DJ Awards, Ibiza.

Some of dance music’s biggest hitters were in attendance to see who had scooped what at Lenny Ibizarre’s prestigious event. Tiesto, Armin van Buuren, Richie Hawtin, Steve Lawler, David Guetta, Adam Beyer, Sasha and Jazzanova all took home one of the unique Kryptonite awards for their contributions to electronic dance’s various forms.

Mark Knight and Funkagenda nabbed Best Ibiza Track for their killer cover of ‘Man With the Red Face’, while Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos clinched the award for Best Ibiza Set at Cocoon, Amnesia.

Deadmau5 grabbed the award for the Electro House DJ, while M-nus man Richie Hawtin was handed Best Techno DJ. For the full winners details, read More