Loading music [on an iPod] is a whole process, and so, when faced with an active choice, I found myself listening to full albums front to back. Unlike my phone, I didn’t feel the need to bounce from song to podcast to YouTube video to NBA highlights on Twitter. | | | | Nubya Garcia at the End of the Road festival, Salisbury, England, Aug. 31, 2019.
(Burak Cingi/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Loading music [on an iPod] is a whole process, and so, when faced with an active choice, I found myself listening to full albums front to back. Unlike my phone, I didn’t feel the need to bounce from song to podcast to YouTube video to NBA highlights on Twitter.”
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| | rantnrave:// Pod casting: This week I learned there's an underground market for refurbished and customized IPODs with super-sized hard drives, prolonged battery life and, apparently coming soon, Bluetooth compatibility. In case you want to party like its 2004. Or slow down the speed of your music consumption (that's the most tempting feature for me; "it felt refreshing," GQ's JACK MOORE writes of his experiment in separating his music from his phone, "to focus on one thing at a time again—to have a sense of containment"). Or stop contributing to the streaming music economy and its much-debated economics. Buying digital albums from ITUNES, assuming that's how you'd acquire new music for your iPod, is generally more friendly to artists' wallets than streaming their songs repeatedly, although the burgeoning market of record-company alternatives—let's call them non-record-company record companies, or NRCRCs—is trying its best to change that math. AWAL tells MUSIC ALLY it now has "hundreds" of artists (how many hundreds, it won't say) pulling in more than $100k a year from streaming, and "dozens" making more than $1m annually, which sounds like a lot until you realize AWAL has 40,000 artist and writer clients, and then, actually, it still sounds like a lot. Would those numbers go up if AWAL sent souped-up iPods to all of its clients' fans and told them to do all their listening that way? Asking for a musician friend... Your favorite non-indie indie artist, TAYLOR SWIFT, sent autographed copies of her FOLKLORE CD to indie stores around the US this week and requested they sell them at standard retail prices and only to local customers, and I wish the government could be that efficient at propping up the music retail economy... In Toronto, the municipal government is doing its part by offering a total of $1.7 million in property tax relief to live music venues... Singing (or playing your wind or brass instrument) a little quieter can help prevent the spread of Covid-19, according to a not-yet-peer-reviewed UK study. If you must sing loud, though, it would be helpful if you could at least call out fascists while doing so... Breaking a monthlong silence on who shot her in both feet in a car in Los Angeles, MEGAN THEE STALLION on Thursday said it was TORY LANEZ. The LA district attorney's office is investigating, and Lanez hadn't responded publicly as of Thursday night... Damn this was a good "STAR-SPANGLED BANNER"... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from NUBYA GARCIA, SECRET MACHINES, MALUMA (surprise!), BULLY, BRIGHT EYES, NAS, MULATTO, VIC MENSA, LECRAE, TIM MCGRAW, the KILLERS, TROYE SIVAN, ERASURE, MATMOS, VEX RUFFIN, JOHN BEASLEY, INCANTATION, AGES, L.A. WITCH, the FRONT BOTTOMS, SNEAKS, NO JOY, SUSO SAIZ & SUZANNE KRAFT, J. ZUNZ, BLACKBEAR, DUCKWRTH, AWICH, ITZY, REY PILA, TEXICANA MAMAS, TUCKER BEATHARD, JOSH TURNER, H.C. MCENTIRE, the OLD 97's, CIDNY BULLENS, the MAVERICKS, MANDY BARNETT, the LEMON TWIGS, FRUIT BATS (covering SMASHING PUMPKINS' "SIAMESE DREAM" album), BENT ARCANA, DECLAN MCKENNA, KATE BOLLINGER, DENT MAY, CUT COPY, GUIDED BY VOICES and JEFFERSON STARSHIP... And a new PHARRELL WILLIAMS/JAY-Z single that soundtracks a Pharrell-curated special edition of TIME magazine. And here's the sheet music. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| Steve Moir, Michael Ostin and Brian Postelle have quietly been helping label execs, attorneys, agents and creatives of all backgrounds climb the corporate ladder for years - here’s how. | | |
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| Musicians say touring was poorly paid and stressful. Can the chaos caused by the pandemic also be a moment of change? | | |
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| The video is a smash, but it’s the song that put it on top. | | |
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| Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s explicit anthem “WAP” is the most talked-about song of the year. But it’s not unprecedented. | | |
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| Fed up with streaming? You're not alone. And these days, there's a whole micro-economy of custom iPod options, whether you want a 2 terabyte hard drive or built-in Bluetooth. | | |
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| Tyler, the Creator, and Kenya Barris both grew up in the same suburban area of Los Angeles. As an independent rapper and hip-hop agitator, Tyler has spent a decade creating music that pushes boundaries and buttons. As a writer, director and producer behind shows like and the movie Barris has won accolades from audiences and critics alike. | | |
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| Toyin's story is an important one, especially as we observe and discuss systemic racial issues in society and the music industry. In this interview, we not only get an answer to the question "Who is Toyin Agbetu?," we find out why his voice is more important now than ever before. | | |
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| The duo's new album, "The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form." was made with the help of 99 collaborators, including artists such as Yo La Tengo, Oneohtrix Point Never, and clipping., who were all given one instruction: The music must be 99 bpm. | | |
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| I was looking for Mary Lane because I owed her twenty dollars: ten for the CD, and another ten to apologize for the year it took me to get the first ten to her. | | |
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| Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has painted a picture where only the artists who constantly churn out content can survive a fulltime career in music. Streaming has changed the way we not only listen to music but how we interact with the artists who create it. | | |
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| Sonstream and Resonate aim to provide better return for streams and a more sustainable system. | | |
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| "Blinding Lights" has proven to be the right song at the right time for total 2020 radio omnipresence. | | |
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| The pop music icon talks about her upcoming album “Disco” and her journey back to the dancefloor, and we premiere a BTS video from her latest video. | | |
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| Lessons from Bang Si-hyuk's comments at Big Hit's Corporate Briefing last week. | | |
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| The Patrick Swayze, Jennifer Grey–starring movie was just an indie that no one believed in—until a song came along that lifted it to legendary status. | | |
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| It was the late director Alan Parker’s most enduring hit, capturing what it was to be young and ambitious in the hot, gritty New York of 1980. The cast and crew reflect on the acting, fighting, flirting and fallout. | | |
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| Asy Saavedra (Chaos Chaos) talks creating the "Trover Saves The Universe" soundtrack. | | |
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| Compassionate, innovative projects helmed by Ani DiFranco, Wayne Kramer, David Jassy and others use music to help prisoners restore the humanity that incarceration strips away. | | |
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| Two new bands, one from Morocco and one from Tunisia, are mixing jazz, funk, and rock with centuries-old ritual music with roots in the trans-Saharan slave trade. It rocks, but what does it mean for the tradition? Afropop talks with both bands about the divergent ways that they negotiate innovation and conservation. | | |
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| | | | | | | From "Source," out today on Concord Jazz. |
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| © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group |
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