There isn’t really one specific rule book to follow anymore about how to release and promote an album. | | | | The Sam & Dave horn section circa late 1960s or early 1970s.
(Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “There isn’t really one specific rule book to follow anymore about how to release and promote an album.”
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| | rantnrave:// Happy New Year! Wishing you a 2019 filled with beautiful—or delirious or soothing or challenging or ugly if that's your thing—music. The most beautiful sounds I heard as my 2018 drew to a close came at a screening of BARRY JENKINS' impressionistic, angry, sad, romantic IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK. NICHOLAS BRITELL's score is full of soft, slow cello and bass chords that underscore the movie's central love theme and jarring brass accents that help to color in the awful circumstances in which that love takes place. It's masterful scoring, and stands on its own as a great late-2018 American album. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by mentioning that the movie doesn't take place anywhere near Beale Street. I got a lot closer on my first work day of 2019 thanks to this 50-year-old French TV documentary on the Memphis music scene of 1969 (h/t @RASPBERRYJONES). Watching *those* brass accents being created inside STAX STUDIOS is something else altogether, and my goal for 2019 is to experience a moment like that for at least 10 minutes every day... I may be able to grab at least a couple such minutes from NATALIE WEINER's promising year-long 1959 PROJECT, now in its third day. She's chronicling the year in jazz—the year 1959, that is—in real time 60 years later... This should be required viewing for every employee of RCA RECORDS and SONY MUSIC, especially those near the top of the org charts (9 pm ET/PT today, tomorrow and Saturday on LIFETIME)... MITCH GLAZIER is the new chairman and CEO of the RIAA... CHILDISH GAMBINO, TAME IMPALA and ARIANA GRANDE are your 2019 COACHELLA headliners and all.three.days.look.fantastic. I mean, this is the Saturday undercard, in small part: SOLANGE, APHEX TWIN, J BALVIN, FOUR TET, CHRISTINE & THE QUEENS. Come on... There will be two WOODSTOCK 2019s. You may want to book your room now... $5,000 a ticket to see the GRAMMYS with two influential Democratic congressmen.. Among the compositions that entered the public domain in the great 1923 copyright dump of Jan. 1, 2019 are "TIN ROOF BLUES," "NOBODY KNOWS YOU WHEN YOU'RE DOWN AND OUT" and "MEXICALI ROSE." Subsequent recordings of those and other 1923 compositions remain under copyright protection (for the most part anyway; it's complicated). What lost that protection, after 95 years, were the compositions themselves. Which is to say, you no longer need to get in touch with HARRY FOX if you want to cover any of them. Next Jan. 1 will free up 1924's "RHAPSODY IN BLUE," "FASCINATING RHYTHM," "SEE SEE RIDER" and "KING PORTER STOMP"... RIP DARYL DRAGON, NORMAN GIMBEL, HONEY LANTREE, PEGI YOUNG, RAY SAWYER, MIKE "BEARD GUY" TAYLOR, DEAN FORD and DAVID CAVANAGH. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | love will keep us together |
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 | Longreads |
| Inside music journalism post-2008 recession, and how media consumption in the 21st century offers a road map for the continuation of the once-robust medium. | | |
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 | Variety |
| While the December stock market fluctuations have made everyone take a deep breath, 2018 was another boom year for the music business. A recovery that many of us could not have hoped for in our wildest dreams during the desolate years of the late 2000s continues to take hold, thanks almost entirely to streaming. | | |
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 | The Verge |
| 2018 felt like the first year where innovations in the world of music streaming will meaningfully affect its future. | | |
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 | The Outline |
| What an album-of-the-year mega-spreadsheet tells us about music trends in 2018. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| "With streaming sort of throwing a wrench into everything, there isn't really one specific rule book to follow anymore about how to release and promote an album." | | |
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 | Complex |
| Filmmaker and journalist dream hampton talks about getting R. Kelly survivors to tell their stories in new Lifetime docuseries ‘Surviving R. Kelly.’ | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| Inspired by a popular South Korean series, Fox’s new weekly show pits costumed vocalists against one another and is somehow both extremely self-aware and still not nearly self-aware enough. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| The Latin trap star’s long-awaited debut offers new lessons in genre erosion. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| From Lauryn Hill to 'Cameron Post' to Tara Westover, 2018 repeatedly asked the question, What does it mean to teach a person to surrender? | | |
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 | Carni Klirs |
| This is my fanzine, an obsessive documentation of a band I love, told through their own data. It’s my contribution to that legacy of precious ephemera, the printed matter that gets collected and obsessed over, or perhaps perused briefly then tossed in the bin. | | |
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 | SPIN |
| I began by using YouTube deliberately to fill a gap in Spotify’s collection, but the site’s eerily insightful recommendations soon took over, thrusting me toward music I may never have encountered without them. | | |
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 | Pandaily |
| In episode 33 of TechBuzz China, co-hosts Ying-Ying Lu and Rui Ma talk about Tencent Music, which finally completed its $1.2 billion IPO after a two-month delay due to market volatility. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| Composers of color have long had to compete with dead white men for space on the concert stage. A new project, spearheaded by Rachel Barton Pine, seeks to correct that for the next generation. | | |
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 | Afropunk |
| Syreeta's soul classic inspired this writer to question everything about their identity, even the artist in the mirror. | | |
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 | Getintothis |
| Kitchenware records (home of Prefab Sprout and The Daintees) literally started on the desk of the manager of HMV Newcastle, Snow Patrol worked in the Belfast store, Shed Seven in York. But let’s not allow facts to interfere with straight forward music snobbery of the very worst kind, shall we? | | |
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 | Time |
| “You Don’t Own Me” was, at the time, a complete surprise. | | |
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 | Touré Show |
| Susannah was the love of Prince’s life. Nothing Compares 2 U is about her. If I Was Your Girlfriend is about her. She talks all about the relationship and the story behind “Starfish and Coffee”—which was a song based on a story from her childhood. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| As two prominent Indian streaming services -- Saavn and JioMusic -- join forces and relaunch as one, Spotify faces an even bigger challenge as it readies to launch in the world's second-most populous country. | | |
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| Vulture |
| Calling yourself or anyone else a “1.0” is part of a totally geeky, era-based ranking system that Phish fans have developed over the years, one that’s based on the three overall eras Phish has been together between their two breakups. It also translates to when you attended your first show. | | |
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 | The Independent |
| In an era when men thought women should only sing in bands, there was incredulity that she could master the kit. | | |
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 | SoundCloud |
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| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group |
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