To the Philly District Attorney’s office, I’m grateful for your commitment to justice. I understand that many people of color across the country don’t have that luxury and I plan to use my platform to shine a light on those issues. | | | | Meek Mill: Free and clear.
(Al Pereira/Archive Photos) | | | | | | “To the Philly District Attorney’s office, I’m grateful for your commitment to justice. I understand that many people of color across the country don’t have that luxury and I plan to use my platform to shine a light on those issues.”
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| | rantnrave:// The music biz has been zigging away from free streaming and toward paid streaming in recent years, but SPOTIFY just zagged back. The company's first major announcement since going public is a significant upgrade to its mobile app for free users. Counterintuitive? Sneaky and smart? Risky? All of the above? Spotify's justification: 60 percent of paid users started as free users, so an enhanced free experience is the best way to hook future subscribers. Also, it will peel at least some music fans away from piracy. Insta-analysis A: The newly public company has to show user growth to its new investors. Insta-analysis B: And it has to do whatever it can to box out APPLE MUSIC from passing it in subscriber numbers. Insta-analysis C: Not to mention YOUTUBE. There's no question, any way you look at it, Spotify just made itself significantly more attractive to music fans who don’t want to pay a monthly fee. Spotify is taking a decidedly opposite tack from YouTube, which has openly talked about degrading its experience for free users to entice them to subscribe. "It’s not good for any company to make the user experience worse," Spotify's global head of creator services, TROY CARTER, tells MUSIC BUSINESS WORLDWIDE. "We want our users to be satisfied and delighted, and if they want to upgrade to a better version, we’ll give them the ability and the incentive to do that." Insta-analysis D: "5 reasons to switch from Spotify Premium to its new free tier (and 5 reasons not to)." Game on... Context for the previous item: The industry is kind of booming right now... Even freer than Spotify today: MEEK MILL. He spent five months in prison on a parole violation for a conviction that the Philadelphia DA's office said should be vacated because of credibility issues with the officer who arrested him. It seems, in retrospect, to have been as wrong and unfair as a prison sentence could be. It also seemed that way in real time. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed, and the rapper promptly left prison to take a seat next to GOV. TOM WOLF at a PHILADELPHIA 76ERS playoff game and to tweet about his freedom with the exact sense of justice, humility and perspective that it would have been nice for JUDGE GENECE E. BRINKLEY to have displayed somewhere along the way... BOB DOROUGH, who died Monday at 94, was an accomplished jazz singer, pianist and composer who worked with the likes of MILES DAVIS, BLOSSOM DEARIE and HOAGY CARMICHAEL. But he'll live forever in the hearts of smart, accomplished children who know how to connect words and phrase and clauses (or how many sides a triangle has) as the generous genius who wrote and/or performed a good chunk of the SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK! catalog. Which is to say, he's the guy who wrote the most magic numbers of all. RIP... RIP also WARGAMES and LOST IN AMERICA composer ARTHUR B. RUBINSTEIN. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Ahead of Friday’s intra-Korean summit, the South put an end to its pop music assault at the border. But the country’s catchy music is a potent psychological weapon. | | |
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| From Taylor Swift to Lorde and Sia via Drake, bad dancing in pop is seeing something of a resurgence. Tracing the history of the wonky elbows & dad moves, Annie Lord asks why it's happening now. | | |
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| Thanks to the success of Spotify, big stars from Ed Sheeran to Fleetwood Mac are cashing in, while even artists in niche genres such as Danish cloud rap are flourishing, sometimes without record labels. Is this unexpected revival here to stay? | | |
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| "I'm bullish about where the overall music industry could potentially go." | | |
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| The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered that rapper Meek Mill be immediately released from prison on bail, ending a controversial five-month incarceration marked by celebrity support, conflict with a judge, and questions about the validity of his decade-old arrest. | | |
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| It ends with Lil Pump and starts with memes. Sorry about that. | | |
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| The global recorded music market grew by 8.1% in 2017, its third consecutive year of growth. Streaming remains the main driver of recovering revenues and, for the first time, has become the single largest revenue source with 176 million users of paid streaming services contributing to year-on-year streaming growth of 41.1%. | | |
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| Bob Dorough, the musician best known for writing and performing some of the most beloved "Schoolhouse Rock songs," has died at 94. For anyone who grew up learning grammar and multiplication tables by listening to songs like "Conjunction Junction" or "Three Is a Magic Number," it's like a light in our childhood playrooms has gone out. | | |
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| A special celebration of one of the most important eras in dance music | | |
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| JC Chasez's soulful croons carried the weight of the majority of *NSYNC’s singles. To put it simply, he had the range. | | |
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| Satan and rap music have had a complex relationship since the early '90s, with the biblical figure still seen as taboo by rappers, critics and fans today. | | |
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| Background music has been the poor relation to music for consumers. Spotify-backed Soundtrack Your Brand is changing that. | | |
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| Giles Martin produced The Beatles' LOVE album and Cirque du Soleil show, oversaw production of the concert for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in addition to working with many significant musicians. He tells some supremely entertaining stories and proves he is well equipped to serve Sonos as its Head of Sound Experience. | | |
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| With his debut album 'Mr. Jukebox,' the Nashville honky-tonk lifer makes sad songs cool again. | | |
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| Williams v. Gaye (a.k.a. "Blurred Lines") emphasizes for many legal experts the absence of a consistent doctrine for identifying infringement. Not only do the two circuits—the Ninth and the Second—that adjudicate most copyright cases follow somewhat different formulae for identifying infringement, but they also create internal splits that contradict their own precedents. | | |
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| After Danny Fields discovered the Ramones, he spent the next five years managing and photographing the band. | | |
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| Drake took New Orleans’ homegrown brand of hip-hop and used it to get to the top of the charts. We talked to the creators of the style to see what they thought. | | |
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| Ty Segall tells me about how he became a prolific DIY rock solo musician. And we go over his high school theater career with a fine-toothed comb. | | |
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| “Ridin’ the Rails,” from 1974, features Johnny Cash telling stories and singing songs about the glory days of the American railroad, complete with historical reënactments and period costumes. | | |
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| The game-changing hip-hop duo's first in-person joint interview in years. | | |
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