The whole music industry has been primed to just listen to people talking about the same s*** to different beats... There’s so much to talk about if you allow yourself to not get caught up in the status quo or trying to appease f***ing Mal and Rory, or rep the f***ing Joe Budden Podcast, when you’re trying to really experience the fullness that the world has to give. | | | | Summer festival season: Denzel Curry at Outside Lands, San Francisco, Aug. 11, 2019.
(FilmMagic/Getty Images) | | | | | | “The whole music industry has been primed to just listen to people talking about the same s*** to different beats... There’s so much to talk about if you allow yourself to not get caught up in the status quo or trying to appease f***ing Mal and Rory, or rep the f***ing Joe Budden Podcast, when you’re trying to really experience the fullness that the world has to give.”
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| | rantnrave:// When you say it's gonna happen now, well when exactly do you mean?, ROLLING STONE's ELIAS LEIGHT asks, in so many words, in a reported piece checking in on the music industry's progress two months after BLACKOUT TUESDAY. What he finds is "a deluge of newly created task forces and a torrent of press releases." Press releases, that is, trumpeting task forces which, after a certain amount of time, will "tell a company what is already painfully obvious," which is that action needs to be taken. But when exactly? Is it fair to expect "lasting change" to have already happened? Of course not. Lasting change, by definition, takes a great deal of time. That's what makes it lasting. Is it fair to expect tangible steps toward that lasting change to have already happened? It would be easy to say no to that question, too, as it's only been two months and there's a pandemic going on, but, as Leight notes, "these companies routinely pivot with remarkable speed when they need to, for example, sign a fast-moving TIKTOK hit." The music biz is swimming in pivots these days. As CHERIE HU dryly observes, the industry seems to be able to launch a new livestreaming platform every week in the middle of the pandemic. The best-selling album of 2020 was created from scratch in two months in that middle of the pandemic. MICROSOFT, if all goes according to to plan, will take less than two months in the middle of the same pandemic to buy the US operations of TikTok for tens of billions of dollars. Change, even massive, disruptive change, can happen in two months if the right incentives are in place. So far, in music's push to root out systemic racism, some promotions have been announced, some diversity officers have been hired and some task forces have been put in place. There have been a handful of longterm pledges that Leight doesn't mention, for example LIVE NATION's promise to greatly diversify its upper management and board by 2025. That's a long way off, though. "Make someone Black a chairman, a chairwoman," A&R exec and artist manager CHRIS ANOKUTE tells Leight "Give somebody Black a venture. We want to see proof that the change is happening." Because, as the unspoken subtext says, we've already waited too long. And you know what the next line after that is... Here's something that could have happened in two months but ended up taking more than two years: the decommissioning of GOOGLE PLAY MUSIC. The legacy subscription service will be gone for good by December, with all users migrated to YOUTUBE MUSIC, the company says... "Plaintiff in good conscience cannot allow his music to be used as a 'theme song' for a divisive, un-American campaign of ignorance and hate," declares NEIL YOUNG in a copyright infringement suit against PRESIDENT TRUMP's campaign for playing "ROCKIN' IN THE FREE WORLD" and "DEVIL'S SIDEWALK" at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., without, Young says, a public performance license. It could be a complicated case. ASCAP and BMI, which provide blanket performance licenses to venues, allow individual songwriters to opt out of any political use of their music. But, as the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER's ERIQ GARDNER notes, whether the government consent decrees under which the two performance rights operate allows for that has yet to be tested in court... A bonus message from Neil Young to the prez... Are the NBA's DETROIT PISTONS actually offering J. COLE a tryout? Does the person who operates the Pistons' Twitter feed have that authority? Can J. Cole hit these shots in a game situation? Then again, can any other musician hit those shots even in a Twitter situation?... The pandemic took a bite out of SONY MUSIC's Q2 revenues... RIP MICHAEL SMITH (who among many other things wrote this), FBG DUCK (at least the 11th rapper murdered in the US this year, and I don't blame hip-hop, Chicago or anything else except guns) and TONY COSTANZA (MACHINE HEAD's original drummer, who quit after playing exactly three shows but co-wrote a good chunk of the band's debut album). | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| In June, the music industry started to have serious conversations about racism - but proof of change is hard to find. | | |
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| It’s been a long, long time since Microsoft was at the center of any music-industry conversation. | | |
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| Forty years after the release of their star-making debut album, "Beauty and the Beat," the key players recall the forming of the band, becoming one of MTV's first stars, playing on "Saturday Night Live," and being told by Sting that they had hit No. 1. | | |
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| The divisive rap great on making an EP based off a tweet, not allowing Joe Budden to clown him, Virgil Abloh, and why he basically invented Genius. | | |
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| In recent days we have seen three major developments that, collectively, are a potential pivot point for social music. | | |
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| Popular D.C. club The Anthem displays a message of hope April 29. The live business and its music venues remain all but completely shut down through August. Since April we have been sounding the alarm that music venues like the 9:30 Club and The Anthem cannot survive the COVID-19 shutdown without federal assistance. | | |
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| Johnny Alf has always been revered by Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto, but his legacy remains obscure, even among Brazilians. | | |
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| Beneath the popular folk song, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” and beneath the railroad tracks that run through Western North Carolina, is a story of blood, greed, and obfuscation. As our nation reckons with systematic racial violence, the story of this song points to the unmarked graves of the hundreds of wrongfully convicted Black people who died building the tunnel. | | |
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| He was wistful, candid and contented as he recalled all the notes of a miraculous life. How four lads from Liverpool came together to change a great deal more than music. What it felt like to be blamed for the band’s demise. How behind fame, adulation and wealth exists a normality he jealously protects. And why the work of a lifetime is still far, far from finished. | | |
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| Paid livestreams from artists like BTS are netting millions of dollars, skyrocketing brand-new startups to the top of the music industry, and making labels and talent agencies scramble to adapt. Will they last? | | |
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| The San Diego Union-Tribune |
| From Beethoven, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan to Kendrick Lamar, Woody Guthrie and Janelle Monáe, music of protest endures. | | |
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| Their vocals and songwriting feature on some of the biggest hits, but black women are often not credited, leaving their solo careers stunted and causing them to lose out financially. | | |
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| The genre that once supplied us with groundbreaking revolutionary anthems seems, at passing glance, to be ignoring the weight of this moment. But not quite. | | |
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| Multi-instrumentalist and composer Angel Bat Dawid's emergence has been one of the most exciting things to happen on the Chicago creative music scene in recent years. Her release of The Oracle in 2019 was a monumental debut release and she has not looked back since. | | |
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| "I just like to make people feel confident and hot," Flo Milli tells Complex, celebrating the release of her excellent debut project, 'Ho, Why Is You Here?' | | |
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| Giovanni Cianci, music producer of "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" since 2017, has been let go from the company after a woman accused him of sexual misconduct in a 2010 incident, Variety has learned. | | |
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| The drummer was brought up in the Middle East - not realising that his father Miles was a spy sent to destabilise the region. But, he says, it was Miles’s claim that the Police were a psy-ops outfit that upset Sting. | | |
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| Rainald Goetz's 'Rave', the classic novel about the German techno scene in the 90s, has just been translated into English. As a similar illegal rave culture emerges in the wake of pandemic-induced club closures, we look at whether it still resonates today. | | |
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| Indoor plants need what your domestic life needs. | | |
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| I first found out about Mark Mothersbaugh at a young age when I watched "Yo Gabba Gabba!," where his segment was "Mark’s Magic Pictures." I started listening to Devo in the fourth grade and learning more about them during this pandemic we’re in. I think that it made me see them as more than just musicians. It made me see them as people who had an important message and wanted to share it. | | |
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| | | | | Max Richter and Mari Samuelson |
| | Mood. From Max Richter's album "Voices," out now on Decca. |
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