If someone uses name-calling to bully you on social media—and even if a lot of people jump on board with it—that doesn't have to defeat you. It can strengthen you instead. | | | | Yo! Bum Rush the Sky: Public Enemy's Flavor Flav high above the stage in Chicago, January 1991.
(Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “If someone uses name-calling to bully you on social media—and even if a lot of people jump on board with it—that doesn't have to defeat you. It can strengthen you instead.”
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| | rantnrave:// Remember ye olden days, when pop charts relied on self-reporting by record stores and radio stations and were notoriously inaccurate and open to manipulation? After a quarter-century of relative reliability thanks to SOUNDSCAN and BDS, could we be heading back to those days? That question comes to mind while considering a provocative investigation by Norwegian business newspaper DAGENS NÆRINGSLIV into TIDAL's streaming data. The paper, using data that it says came from a TIDAL hard drive, says the service inflated the streaming numbers of BEYONCÉ's LEMONADE and KANYE WEST's THE LIFE OF PABLO by several hundred million plays in 2016. Tidal says it's the newspaper that did the falsifying, acquiring stolen data and then manipulating it as part of a "smear campaign." So it's a he-said, she-said story for now. But it plays on long-standing suspicions about Tidal's numbers, and serves as a reminder that while streaming companies can track every microsecond of user activity, we're relying on them to report that activity correctly—which, historically speaking, the music business doesn't have a great reputation for doing. There's no cost to services for over- or under-reporting; they pay royalties based on the number of subscribers, not on their activity. It would come at a cost, however, to other artists. Dagens Næringsliv, whose report reached English speakers thanks to some translating by MUSIC BUSINESS WORLDWIDE, claims Beyoncé and West, whose albums were both Tidal exclusives at the time, made millions of dollars in undeserved royalties—which would have come entirely at the expense of other Tidal artists. The other big question, should the report turn out to be true, would be: Why? Surely Bey and Ye don't need the money. But might it help persuade them to stay exclusive with Tidal? Might it help sell the service to other artists? Or to the industry itself? Stay tuned... "I feel like I'm too busy writing history to read it," Kanye West once actually said, and I can hardly think of a better explanation for Kanye's rough couple of weeks of verbal warfare. Is there a worse candidate for making history than someone who is willfully ignorant about it? Do I even have to ask? But there's so much I, and everybody else alive, does want to ask of a man who has a history of saying provocative and funny and thoughtful and smart and not-so-smart and, oh, creative things. MusicSET: "Kanye West Says Stuff"... Singer, songwriter, guitarist and MusicREDEF reader JOHN MAYER is surprise-dropping a single today co-written and co-produced by the great NO I.D. (which technically means we're still talking about Kanye and JAY-Z, by the way)... The RECORDING ACADEMY has named 13 women and three men to its Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, including SHERYL CROW, ANDRA DAY, COMMON, CAM and, perhaps most notably, USC social scientist STACY L. SMITH. Smith's report early this year on the lack of female representation on the charts and at the GRAMMY AWARDS opened a wound that the Academy infamously failed to close. Glad to hear she'll be in the room... 33 1/3 BOOKS coming to SPOTIFY... LIZ PHAIR and her EXILE IN GUYVILLE co-producer BRAD WOOD talk to SONG EXPLODER about the magic powers of unamplified guitars (for writing) and cheap amps (for recording). Less is—and always was—more. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | ain't nothin' goin' on but the rent |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv spills jaw-dropping revelations. Its central accusation: ‘Beyoncé’s and Kanye West’s listener numbers on TIDAL have been manipulated to the tune of several hundred million false plays… which has generated massive royalty payouts at the expense of other artists.’ | | |
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 | HipHopDX |
| "The Beat" host discusses his rap references and how Trump has provided more opportunity to use them. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| A collective fights bias in the performing arts with a Code of Conduct that goes beyond sexual harassment and gender to flexibly target bias of all sorts while promoting respect. | | |
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 | Mixmag |
| Proving that a passion for dance music can be hereditary. | | |
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 | REDEF |
| Whether talking about George W. Bush, Steve Jobs, slavery or—his favorite subject—himself, Kanye West flips culture, and sometimes reality, upside-down and inside-out every time he opens his mouth. And he's been opening it ever since he was a young "College Dropout." | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| After the Dixie Chicks' made critical comments about George W. Bush, the country music industry all but vaporized them from the radio. For Kanye West, the situation is different - he aligned himself with a radically divisive President - but could the consequences be similar? | | |
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 | Forbes |
| The era of music downloads only lasted four years, and it coincided with the industry's worst revenue period in decades. Downloads will fade away, and the music industry won't miss them. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| Power Trip, Slaegt, and Oozing Wound discuss how thrash has moved on from mid-2000s nostalgia to become a whole new kind of killing machine. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| On his second album, the hip-hop star’s carefree anthems make way for desperate meditations on the fruits of his success. | | |
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 | Atlas Obscura |
| The “shipwrecked Mozart” who wowed Victorian audiences, including the Queen herself. | | |
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| | | i love you, you pay my rent |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| The singer may have healed some old wounds. But her new tour shows she's still eager to fight. | | |
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 | Refinery29 |
| The Grammys have invited Stacy L. Smith, Michele Anthony, and Sheryl Crow to join their Inclusivity and Diversity Task Force after that "step up" comment. | | |
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 | MetalSucks |
| The notoriously racist, homophobic, and xenophobic song has been omitted from an upcoming reissue. | | |
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| Noisey |
| From Dutch outlaw country to Albanian hard rock to whatever Moldova are doing, here's an exhaustive guide to everything you'll hear from Lisbon this week. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| Despite a new wave of #MeToo accounts about R. Kelly, the music industry’s powers that be continue to support the controversial singer. After a decade of protests, can anything bring him down? | | |
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| The Daily Beast |
| The Daily Beast has obtained a copy of a lawsuit filed by a Jane Doe against singer Chris Brown and members of his entourage. And the details are shocking. | | |
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 | GQ |
| A quarter century since Pavement's iconic record "Slanted and Enchanted," Stephen Malkmus is still making music that matters—and his excellent (and very wry) new album "Sparkle Hard" proves that brutal honesty is the secret to a long songwriting career. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| An expanded 25th anniversary reissue of Liz Phair classic double-album debut tells the full story of her artistic emergence. | | |
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 | Radio Survivor |
| The documentary “How Radio Isn’t Done” sheds light on Don Joyce's life and his work in recontextualizing the never-ending flow of media messages that flood everyday life. Director Ryan Worsley joins to talk about Joyce, his hyper-focused artistic process and what she learned creating this affectionate and honest portrait of an iconoclastic figure and broadcasting legend. | | |
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 | Garage Magazine |
| The legendary post-punk band are playing The Kitchen’s Spring Gala, so Garage caught up with the guitarist Pat Place and drummer Dee Pop to assess the state of Tetras. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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