You’re the only one doing anything f***ing interesting nowadays. | | Shawn Mendes at the Staples Center, Los Angeles, July 5, 2019. (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images) | | | | “You’re the only one doing anything f***ing interesting nowadays.” |
| |
| rantnrave:// Good news #1: What may well be the best festival of this 50th anniversary WOODSTOCK summer is still happening on the anniversary weekend. It's happening in Cambridgeshire, England, and will feature the likes of THE COMET IS COMING, NUBYA GARCIA, MOSES BOYD, THEO PARRISH, GILLES PETERSON and A CERTAIN RATIO. Au courant, forward-thinking and exploratory jazz, techno, hip-hop, rock and more, played by a long weekend's worth of well curated 2019 talent in the English countryside for a ticket price of about US$200 for four days (tickets are still available). I can't think of a better way to honor the spirit of August 1969 than WE OUT HERE... Good news #2: The best chance for further tarnishing the actual Woodstock brand on the same weekend has been mercifully laid to rest. Taking a cue from its own artists, who had been lining up to back out of the fest over the past several days, WOODSTOCK 50 finally threw in the towel Wednesday. Dysfunctional in death as in life, festival founder MICHAEL LANG gave a postmortem interview with ROLLING STONE in which he said, and I quote, "I'm not a partner in Woodstock 50. They licensed it from Woodstock Ventures, where I am a partner." In BILLBOARD, meanwhile, JOEL ROSENMAN, one of Lang's partners in the original Woodstock, expressed his disappointment in Woodstock 50, "Michael Lang's company." Take it offline, guys, buy a couple of plane tickets to England and try again in 2069 if you're still feeling up to it... SPOTIFY's paid subscriber count is up to a sector-leaning 108 million, but that's less than the company expected. "We missed on subs," the company said in its Q2 earnings report... At PANDORA, subscription revenue is up but monthly listeners are down. Revenues and subscriber numbers were up at parent company SIRIUSXM... As a British judge formally began the process of liquidating PLEDGEMUSIC, the trade organization UK MUSIC asked for a government investigation into possible regulatory breaches by the failed crowdfunding platform. Pledge collapsed while reportedly owing as much as $3 million to artists who had used it for crowdfunding campaigns. Cofounder BENJI ROGERS says liquidation "was not the route that I personally wanted for PledgeMusic" but plans to save the company through the administration process fell through in the past week... RIP HAL PRINCE, JOSHUA WARREN and WALTER HOMBURGER. | | - Matty Karas, curator |
|
| Part corporate-surveillance engine, part democratic free-for-all, this is what it feels like when a video site takes over our listening lives. | |
|
Chinese stars are spinning off in their own orbit as politics gets in the way of profit. | |
|
She's a 17-year-old superstar who did it her way and doesn't care what you think — even if she still calls out for mom after a bad dream. | |
|
Jay Z, Jay Brown, and Desiree Perez have made sweeping changes at Roc Nation, but those changes were critical for the company's future. | |
|
From Tyler, the Creator to Lil Nas X, hip-hop has never had so many stars who identify as gay or bisexual. Is this a blip or a turning point? | |
|
Labels, artists use ads to stoke views. Don’t Badshah’s count? | |
|
Forget Lil Nas X. Yola is the 36-year-old Black, British woman is putting her own spin on country despite the long and historic struggles in the genre. | |
|
After two and a half decades, the acclaimed band ventures into a different sound on its ninth album, “The Center Won’t Hold” -- and moves onward without its longtime drummer. | |
|
The crux of the case is really about the production. | |
|
Seth Hurwitz was on a bike trip riding across Europe when news of his last ditch effort to save the long-suffering Woodstock 50 festival had leaked out. | |
| From 1995 to 2019 with a master of the turntable | |
|
A brief riff on Radiohead’s "In Rainbows" and Chance the Rapper’s "Coloring Book" and the possibility of real change within the record industry. | |
|
I'm not going to declare Lizzo the patron saint of big girls, as much as I want to. | |
|
It might come as no surprise that Bryan Ferry has recurring dreams, each one assigning the Roxy Music frontman a grim fate that manages to paint a picture not unlike those photographs taken of Jayne Mansfield's 1967 car crash site, and, in some respect, not unlike a scene from an M. Night Shyamalan film. | |
|
Eric Blackstead oversaw one of the most iconic rock albums of all time before dying alone and destitute in 2015. Now his friends want to scatter his ashes in Bethel, New York and keep his legacy alive. | |
|
Marke B. chronicles the history of the Cerwin-Vega soundsystem specially constructed for the 1974 film "Earthquake." | |
|
It’s no secret: Spotify’s earnings calls aren’t meant to be interesting. They’re an exercise in repeating key corporate messages. | |
|
When music writers are also music fans, they can walk a line between appreciative and intrusive. | |
|
From wellness tonics on tap to meditation inspired raves, we examine whether a new era of wellness-oriented clubbing is the death knell for the after-hours benders and stimulant- fuelled frolics. | |
|
The legendary songwriter and score composer talks about his new collaboration with Chance the Rapper, his involvement in the ‘Toy Story’ franchise, and advanced baseball stats. | |
| | | | Title song from album due Oct. 4 on Jagjaguwar. |
| | |
| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group | | |