A lot of big artists and their people are always on YouTube trying to find beats. That’s the new way to [produce]. | | | | Minutewoman: Tierra Whack in the Mojave tent at Coachella, April 12, 2019.
(Rich Fury/Getty Images) | | | | | | “A lot of big artists and their people are always on YouTube trying to find beats. That’s the new way to [produce].”
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| | rantnrave:// Is it written in the Bible or the US Constitution that a pop songs chart must contain 100 entries and a top albums chart have 200? That, I swear, was the first question that popped into my head after reading that ROLLING STONE has decided to challenge BILLBOARD as the keeper of music's most sacred spreadsheets. Why is the 197th most popular album in the country at any given moment important enough to register a chart placement? Why isn't the 201st most popular album important enough? Why do we need to know about twice as many albums as songs, when there are obviously way more songs in the world than there are albums and when no one under 50 who doesn't write for a music website ever listens to albums anyway? Why not 500 songs and 100 albums? Who decided the rules, and why is Rolling Stone going along with them? What kind of chart revolution is this? The legacy consumer magazine and its data partner, ALPHA DATA (formerly BUZZANGLE MUSIC), say they will do three other basic things differently than the legacy trade magazine and its partner, NIELSEN MUSIC: They'll have more streaming information (what does that mean, exactly?), they'll be more transparent about their metrics (but what are those metrics?) and they'll update daily instead of weekly. That last one I can get behind, though I wonder if the top slot becomes less prestigious when there are 365 of them in a given year instead of 52. What say you, dear artists, labels, publicists and managers? There's no question that in a world of ever-changing consumption patterns, with consumers jumping freely around differing platforms like SPOTIFY, TIKTOK, SNAPCHAT, YOUTUBE and the CD racks at WALMART, and with the very of streaming an "album" having become an entirely theoretical concept, it's become increasingly hard to definitely track consumption and popularity, and increasingly impossible to make all interested parties happy. Can Rolling Stone and Alpha solve that? And even if they do, can they convince anyone that they've done so? Can they explain why the industry should trust a consumer magazine over a trade magazine? Will anyone care? Have I already devoted too many sentences to this? As far as I can tell, I've already devoted 17 or 18 more sentences to this than Rolling Stone has. As of Tuesday night, Rolling Stone hadn't bothered to mention this anywhere on its own site or social media, as far as I could tell. Billboard had. For that is one of the things trade mags do. In the interest of transparency and all... The song Nashville doesn't want is the #1 song in the US for a fifth straight week, this time edging out the singer Nashville would most love to have back. Oh the layers of country karma on this week's chart. From INSTAGRAM to the NFL draft to YOUTUBE to the BILLBOARD MUSIC AWARDS, TAYLOR SWIFT did everything a pop star could do to launch an album with a #1 single—except come up with a song as good as "OLD TOWN ROAD." Is it too early—it's still in the 50s at night in New York—to declare LIL NAS X's unlikely smash the song of the summer? Will CMT find a way to honor him in next month's CMT MUSIC AWARDS, the next awards show on the country calendar?... LOGIC is f***ing angry that he has to clear his samples, and he certainly doesn't want to pay LOU REED's people just to sample that A TRIBE CALLED QUEST song, and/or maybe he's just having a bad week. This is a useful conversation to have every once in a while. This might not be the ideal way to start it... RIP PEKKA AIRAKSINEN, DOMINIQUE LAWALRÉE and BERNIE DALTON. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| The person who sued Cambridge Analytica, David Carroll, starts asking the same questions about the Chinese-owned lip-syncing app. | | |
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| Chicago-based Numero Group turned into the industry's ultimate tastemaker by rediscovering lost soul, indie and other overlooked classics. | | |
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| Frustrated over a lack of sources about women rock musicians, a Smith College grad student decided to go to the sources themselves. Five years later, Tanya Pearson-writer, musician, archivist-has amassed a world-class archive of digital interviews and transcripts and is the director of the Women of Rock Oral History Project, housed at Smith College. | | |
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| The indie boom is long over, but Vampire Weekend have prevailed as the era’s most imaginative and transcendent group. | | |
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| Music Business Association’s Annual Artist Workshops begin Sunday 5/5 at the MusicBiz 2019 Conference. But many of these music services seem to be lacking “artist services” for the independents -- and we have questions about that. | | |
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| One of India’s leading record labels has won a high court battle over the use of its repertoire online in a case that has potentially big repercussions for Spotify and Warner Music. | | |
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| The story of how Lil Nas X’s unstoppable chart-topper came together is just as unlikely as the song itself. | | |
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| Linda Perry is one of the only women considered a go-to producer in the music industry. After finding success with her band 4 Non Blondes and their ubiquitous single, "What's Up?" (1992) Perry went on to write and produce for other artists.She’s worked with Alicia Keys, Gwen Stefani, Celine Dion, Adele, James Blunt, Britney Spears. And reinvented the careers of Pink and Christina Aguilera. | | |
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| Eva Hendricks has bars. Two years ago, when Hendricks' band Charly Bliss came out blasting with their debut album, "Guppy," it was easy to miss some of those bars. They got lost in the frantic sugar rush of the band's ragged, fired-up power pop. But when you got used to those hooks, these beautifully crafted lyrical gems were sitting there, waiting for you. | | |
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| On the internet, bygone cultural figures like Su, the frontwoman of ’80s punk band the Suburban Lawns, can become cult icons, especially when their mystery remains unsolvable. | | |
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| Making music under Stalin was a dangerous undertaking -- it could end with applause or in a prison camp. In the brutal grip of World War II, Shostakovich composed a symphony so powerful, it was smuggled halfway around the world in order to be played. | | |
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| Feature.fm President David Porter on why 'sponsored songs' will be big business for streaming | | |
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| A Mount Pleasant gallery has an unconventional exhibition on the legendary D.C. punk band. | | |
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| Back in 2013, SPIN published an exhaustive history of the relationship between rap and country music. | | |
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| People on the video sharing app have huge followings, but make a fraction of what they could on Instagram or YouTube. Why are they loyal? | | |
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| One of the most precious events in a year is the sudden discovery of a musician or performer that one knew nothing about, who raises some brand new questions, or who approaches composition in a way you just haven’t heard before. Rachel Taylor Brown’s eerie, passionate, outraged, and very original songs were, in this way, among my most treasured discoveries of 2018. | | |
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| Last Thursday (May 2), fans of "The Good Fight"-the darkly funny Trump-era spinoff of "The Good Wife," created by the married showrunners Robert and Michelle King, which is currently airing, barely, on the locked-garden streaming site called CBS All Access-were faced with something unusual. | | |
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| As the Miami City Commission prepares to decide Ultra Music Festival's fate once more, we are sharing a few open letters to the Commissioners. | | |
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| Singer-songwriter Jim Allen's style has been compared to Johnny Cash and Tom Waits. Get to know him in our new interview. | | |
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| The rapper-producer also reveals what he learned from his attempted-murder trial and how Quincy Jones helped shape his worldview. | | |
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| | | | | | | A stunning and vulnerable song and video. |
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