Okay, Elrond. (Photo: TMZ)

When last we left the story of Sean Parker and Alexandra Lenas's elaborate wedding plans, the Napster founder and former Facebook president was insisting that, despite reports, it was not a theme wedding and there would be "nothing medieval about it."

Rather, the outfits created by Lord of the Rings costume designer Ngila Dickson would be "based on modern suits and dresses with some elements of victorian flair and whimsy."

But he didn't say anything about the backdrop!

Today, TMZ says it has details and pics of the venue, which is in a forest in Big Sur, California. The gossip site reports that Mr. Parker is spending--brace yourself--$8.6 million on decorations and backdrop alone.

And maybe they're not going medieval, but the whole thing sure looks Lord of the Rings meets A Midsummer Night's Dream, with maybe a dash of Neil Gaiman.

TMZ reports:

To realize his vision ... we're told Sean hired a landscaping company to build fake ruins, waterfalls, bridges, ponds and a gated cottage in the resort's surrounding forest -- where he'll say "I do" in a ceremony fit for a king ... or Hobbit.

All the guests will enter through a $600,000 gate, dance on a $350,000 floor, and they better stop and smell the roses ... because Parker's dropping more than $1,000,000 on plants and flowers!

Once the wedding is complete the backdrop will vanish entirely like fog in the sun, leaving only a fairy ring. And by fairy ring, we mean torn-up grass and a bunch of roses mouldering in a California dumpster.

Copacetic! (Photo: Spotify)

Today, at a press conference that culminated in a Frank Ocean performance and an unexpected onstage love-in by Sean Parker and Lars Ulrich, Spotify debuted a number of new features, revolving around discovery.

CEO Daniel Ek entered to "Rock the Casbah," the Clash bouncing off the exposed brick walls. Despite it not even being noon, several attendees already had beers in their hands.

"At Spotify, we think of ourselves as punks, the type that are against the establishment," Mr. Ek informed the crowd. "We're really punks because we're restless and we really hate it when people tell us this is just the way it is."

Lest you assume that means Spotify wants to undermine the poor, beleaguered music biz any further, Mr. Ek rattled off a few stats. The company pays out 70 percent of all the money it takes in to rights holders, and they've thus far paid out half a billion dollars. The amount paid out, he added, has doubled over the last nine months.

The company now has more than 5 million paying customers, and 20 million active users. One million of those paid subscribers are in the U.S. "We're growing, but we're growing in a way that benefits the whole system," he said.

The batch of updates introduced today is meant to help users discover new tunes, rather than just listening to whatever pops into their head at the moment. Open Spotify, and you'll now land on a "Discover" screen. Suggestions aren't just based on whatever you recently listened to, either, Mr. Ek said. For example: Spotify would know that Kris Kross topped the charts in Sweden when he was a kid, and so "Jump" might pop up.

See something you like? Add it to another new feature, your "Collection." No more playlists that're just albums, in other words.

Also added: A new "follow" section, so you can subscribe to "anyone in the music graph" whose tastes interest you, whether that be your hipper-than-thou neighbor down the hall or your BFF. Mr. Eck demonstrated by following Shakira and Barack Obama. Any playlist they share, you can share with your social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr) or just with your Spotify followers.

This sounds like a pretty attractive proposition for artists and the labels who're trying to their names out there. Another new feature that's likely to have record execs perking up their ears: Artists will be able to deliver new music straight to their followers. As soon as a single drops, they get a ping. That'll make it easier to begin the long climb to the top of the pops.

Then we got another surprise: The Metallica catalog is now available on Spotify. To mark the occasion, out came Napster founder Sean Parker, followed by Lars Ulrich, of the famously Napster-hating Metallica. They hugged.

So what convinced The Man Who Killed Napster to sign onto Spotify, a company backed by Mr. Parker? Turns out now that he's got tweens, Mr. Ulrich is beginning to understand there's an entire generation raised on streaming media. And hey, the product was easy to use.

The pair made a big deal of how they're now pals, and really they had more in common the whole time than they realized. Metallica, a band that'd gone to a lot of trouble to protect its music, felt the control being ripped away, and that just turned the whole dynamic into a street fight. "If you fuck with us, we'll fuck with you," Mr. Ulrich explained his reasoning.

For a moment, Sean Parker looked a little tense, sitting there in his cardigan. Lars Ulrich might be basically a rich, middle-aged dad at this point, but he still looks like he'd hit you over the head with a beer bottle under the right circumstances.

Then Frank Ocean came out and performed "Pyramids." Guys: We know the music business is your business, but maybe cool it a little on the celebrity shock and awe. Remember how that worked out for Airtime?

(Photo: flickr.com/christmas-on-mars)

Tech's golden party boy, who was once portrayed by a mugging Justin Timberlake, has hit a wall with his new startup, Airtime. Sean Parker, (in)famous for cofounding Napster, serving as the first president of Facebook and as a Spotify board member, opened up to AllThingsD about the struggles the video chat service has experienced since its star-studded launch in June.

Of course, Mr. Parker was quick to obscure genuine vulnerability with the self-aggrandizing rhetoric of Startupland. “Running a start-up is like eating glass,” he told AllThingsD. “You just start to like the taste of your own blood.” (Perpetuating the notion that startups are only run by masochists is an easy way to lend your endeavor the sheen of nobility and forget--for a moment--that we're talking about a service that's basically Chatroulette 2.0.)

AllThingsD also reports that Shawn Fanning, Mr. Parker's Napster cofounder, will soon take a backseat role at the company. Eric Feng, who was brought on after firing Airtime's initial product team to gut the infrastructure and rebuild it from scratch in time for launch, will also be moving on.

Mr. Feng and Mr. Fanning are two key Airtime execs, and their upcoming departures represent a huge blow for a highly hyped company that's only managed to net 10,000 monthly active users. The company's embarrassingly gaudy launch event stands in stark contrast to the barebones startup it's become three months down the line. But Airtime is betting on a host of new features it will roll out soon, like a "Reactions" option, which lets people record their reactions to YouTube videos to be played alongside them.

Still, Mr. Parker assures readers (and investors like Kleiner Perkins, which shelled out $33 million) that everything's going just fine. "We are iterating on our approach," he said, which is often just a fancy way of saying, "Please let a better idea strike us ASAP."

Olivia Munn and Snoop Dogg, Airtiming.

Expectations were starting to flag as a scrum of reporters stood in a milk-white waiting room waiting for Airtime to fix a few last-minute bugs. "Sean is freaking out," we overheard one Airtimer confide. (Or was it Shawn?) But media were ushered in just after 10:30, and when latenight talk show host Jimmy Fallon ran onstage to rock music to introduce us all to the "live social video platform," we knew we were in for a show. "Tell me how you guys met," Mr. Fallon asked Airtime cofounders Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker. The audience's terrible, frenzied applause was just getting started.

A-listers including Martha Stewart and Julie Louis-Dreyfus were reportedly on board to pimp the app, so Betabeat figured we'd be privvy to the kind of celebrity tongue twisting—"live social video platform," "real-time web social media video chatroom"—that often accompanies a tech endorsement. But we were wrong. The demo, which also featured Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, Ed Helms, Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys and Jim Carrey, was all about the app. And it looks good.

Sean Parker's presentation was the only wonky bit. For all his dissing of Turntable.fm, Mr. Parker's intro was all about simultaneous Internet-ing. "Where are all the synchronous apps?" he asked at one point. Airtime satisfies two needs, as Mr. Parker sees it. One, the need to make the Internet more like the real world. And two, the need to make the Internet more serendipitous as social networks increasingly lock us into the same virtual rooms as all our friends. "The social network is basically constraining who you interact with and what you say," Mr. Parker said. "There's a part of me that feels somewhat bored by this." Betabeat felt a shiver as we pictured what happens when Mr. Parker gets bored.

The app, as demonstrated by the celebrity guests, requires no download—just a webcam and authentication through Facebook. Once in, users can two-way video chat with a friend or a stranger who shares the same interests, as determined by "likes" on Facebook. Oddly, the video is the same size for both people, so you're looking at your own blown-out face parallel to the person you're talking to. "I can't stop looking at myself!" Jim Carrey said.

Airtime is also integrated with YouTube, so users can search for a video within the app and watch it together. Mr. Parker always stays on the phone after he tells his fiance to watch a video, he said, because he wants to witness her reaction. With Airtime, it's as if you and the other person are sitting next to each other and watching YouTube videos together. If the person you're calling isn't there—Ms. Keys and Mr. Dogg did not answer on the first ring—it's possible to record a video message.

The second aspect of Airtime, which enables users to video chat with strangers a la Chatroulette, reminded this reporter of something else: Napster. When I was 13, I used to make friends in Napster chat rooms the way other people made friends in AOL chat rooms. We'd a/s/l, trade music and talk about punk rock and angsty teenager things. If I made a really good friend, we'd escalate to AIM. I am now friends with one of my Napster friends on Facebook. The Internet!

Mr. Parker and co. did not demo the serendipitous aspect of Airtime, but it was touched on in a video shown at the end of the event. A girl chats with another girl, learns to like street art, tabs over to a guy juggling, trades him in for a guy leaning over his guitar.

How will Airtime avoid being inundated with penises, the downfall of Chatroulette? It's connected to your identity on Facebook, discouraging creepers from flashing their junk. Airtime will be policing that shit, Mr. Parker warned, with a slide that listed Airtime's five most important priorities: safety, safety, safety, safety, and "no penises," which quickly resolved to say "safety," again. We'll just say for the record that there is no way that people won't be getting naked on Airtime. But it will also serve people who want to talk to their friends really well.

Airtime's staging demo, built for the event, started hiccuping just as Joel McHale of "Community" took the stage. Mr. McHale and Ms. Munn bantered as an increasingly agitated Mr. Parker apologized for having not slept. "Nice hoodie, very original," Mr. McHale told the Airtime tech fiddling with the display computer. Meanwhile, outside the room, the site had been live for an hour and some publications had already released embargoed reviews.

For all the hiccups, Airtime looked fun, well-designed and easy to use. (So easy to use that it's impressive that the event lasted as long as it did.) It's perfect for the Facebook crowd. If it works smoothly, it's hard to see how it could fail, even if the Chatroulette aspect doesn't take off. As for Mr. Parker's goal of re-humanizing the Internet, the jury's still out on that one.