There are easily 2 billion people in the world who can afford to pay for some level of music, yet Spotify and Apple Music combined have only around 100 million subs globally. There’s a huge gap there and we both have to grow by a significant amount in order to get to the numbers that we should be at. | | | | Florence and the Machine's Florence Welch in Neuhausen, Germany, June 19, 2015.
(Thomas Niedermueller/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “There are easily 2 billion people in the world who can afford to pay for some level of music, yet Spotify and Apple Music combined have only around 100 million subs globally. There’s a huge gap there and we both have to grow by a significant amount in order to get to the numbers that we should be at.”
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| | rantnrave:// God I love TRACEY THORN's voice (I also love that the second track on her new album is "AIR" and the third is "GUITAR")... SPOTIFY's public listing appears to be set for the week of April 2, for anyone who thinks that particular internet venture might make money one day, or who likes a good bet. Two things to ponder between now and then (I assume people who are smarter than I have many more things to ponder; I'll leave all those pesky financial and business-model questions to them). Question #1: Is this payola (playola, if you will)? Or, more to the point, does it inevitably lead to institutionalized payola somewhere down the road? Every half-decent music mentor will tell you to never, ever pay someone to review or screen your music, or anything along those lines. But it's so easy to pay someone these days, and there are tangible, measurable benefits if the person you pay helps get your song on a playlist or two or 30. So what happens when those paid reviewers and playlist-pluggers gain a new level of self-awareness and figure out a way to prevent you, or anybody, from getting on a playlist if you don't pay up? What happens when their services become a requirement rather than an option? What happens when they put the "ola" in playola? Do you stop trusting those playlists? Do you stop trusting all playlists? Do you stop listening to them? Do you seek out a service that promises professional programming that can't be bought? Does such a service exist? Or am I living in the 20th century and you couldn't give a damn? Question #2: Why is Spotify asking you and me to fix and expand its metadata? Why is that our job? OK, actually I'm into this just-launched metadata crowdsourcing project. An addictive waste of time. I just told Spotify a thing or two about Tracey Thorn... Is there room, and a need, for a search engine for music? Meet QWANT, a French site currently in beta (and currently defaulting to French language search results)... There have been three bombings in 10 days in AUSTIN, TEXAS—two on Monday—all from packages delivered to people's homes. Austin police have asked residents not to open unexpected or suspicious packages. Please be careful, SXSW attendees... RIP CRAIG MACK and VENTURES guitarist NOKIE EDWARDS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Artists are desperate to be on your favorite playlists. | | |
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| Looking back at the golden era of rap writing. | | |
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| He became a rock legend by embracing the past. Now, the last guitar hero is trying to figure out how to live in the future. | | |
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| Fun? No thanks. The cut-throat music business? Love it. Painstaking perfectionism? If only. Welcome to the world of Lawrence: the pop star that fame forgot. | | |
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| The Metropolitan Opera fired James Levine on Monday evening, ending its association with a conductor who defined the company for more than four decades after an investigation found what the Met called credible evidence that Mr. Levine had engaged in “sexually abusive and harassing conduct.” | | |
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| The Metropolitan Opera's self-exoneration raises a lot of questions about its role in furnishing the power that Levine abused. | | |
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| History tends to remember some innovations over others - and The Ronettes, in particular, have been remembered as pop singers, with their rock and roll sensibilities railroaded out of their image. | | |
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| Music often acts as a Canary In A Coal Mine. As goes the music industry, oftentimes so, too, does every other industry. Could the way consumers have abandoned the concept of ownership around music presage the end of ownership generally? | | |
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| For years, when artists have complained that they're not earning enough money off their recordings these days, people with little knowledge of the situation have snapped back that they should shut up because they're all earning massive amounts from touring instead now. For the most part, that's not true. | | |
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| “Nine feminist bangers” is how Tracey Thorn has described the contents of her latest solo album, Record. But then, Thorn’s songs have been feminist all along: “This is pretty much me doing that thing I do,” she admitted on the phone with me on Thursday. | | |
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| The app, popular with teens, banned search on tags like #proana and #mutilation after BuzzFeed asked why you could search for them on its platform. | | |
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| History and hefty ticket prices suggest fans have every reason to be cautious of goodbye shows. | | |
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| Jackson Griffith shares some of his experiences working for the chain during the heyday of record retailing. "It was a great ride while it lasted." | | |
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| Ibeyi performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded November 15, 2017. | | |
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| He was supposed to be the Bon Iver of Italy, but in 2013 he and his music disappeared without a trace. I tracked him down in Berlin five years later to find out why. | | |
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| The stereotype of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” is pervasive in music. The music business often fosters an environment where addiction is the norm, but many artists and industry professionals who are in recovery have successfully stayed in the industry. We talk to a few of those people about their experiences, advice for those who are struggling, and resources like MusiCares. | | |
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| For a long time now I’ve thought there is something missing from Spotify. Namely the ability for content creators, rights holders, record labels, publishers and more to reach their fans via advertising to Spotify’s audience of 159 million monthly active users. | | |
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| The Berlin-based duo unveiled its new album, “Dimensional People,” using state-of-the-art software to pinpoint sounds in three-dimensional space. | | |
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| Artists like Four Tet, The Flaming Lips, and Franz Ferdinand select hidden gems and beloved tracks for perfect after-hours listening. | | |
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| Part true crime, part history rewrite, the first season of Tyler Mahan Coe’s podcast untangles the knots of legend and lore that have jumbled around country music. | | |
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