I'm a woman who works in an industry that clumps all women together and treats us like we’re a 'genre.' A girl with a guitar is not just a human being standing on a stage—she is quite literally a girl with a guitar... who will be referred to as such on numerous occasions and asked millions of times what it 'feels like' to be herself. | | | | Lil Uzi Vert at Power 105.1's Powerhouse 2017 concert in Brooklyn, Oct. 26, 2017
(Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I'm a woman who works in an industry that clumps all women together and treats us like we’re a 'genre.' A girl with a guitar is not just a human being standing on a stage—she is quite literally a girl with a guitar... who will be referred to as such on numerous occasions and asked millions of times what it 'feels like' to be herself.”
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| | rantnrave:// Songwriters, session musicians, recording engineers, publishers, record companies and pretty much everyone who's ever set foot in a recording studio (or in front of a DIY producer's laptop, as the case may be) have been yelling at streaming services for years, demanding they add liner notes. A lot of fans want them, too, judging by the enthusiastic social media reaction to reports late last week that TIDAL actually has them. This isn't new, it turns out, but came to the attention of BILLBOARD and others when Tidal sent out a press release Friday saying basically, "Hey! Guess what we've got!" So now everyone knows. And it's welcome news. And it's very much a work in progress. Click on Tidal owner JAY-Z's current album, 4:44, and you can see a long page with track-by-track credits. But click on the same button on any individual track on that album and you get basically nothing; those clicks won't even tell you who the dude rapping is. And who is this "S. CARTER" person? Does Tidal really not know his first name? Click on S. Carter's wife's LEMONADE and it's basically the same deal, except good luck reading those credits, huge blocks of capital letters that appear to be cut-and-pasted from a word document. Anyone have a spare style guide? TAYLOR SWIFT's new single? Tidal can tell you who wrote it and which four publishing companies own pieces of it, but not who sings it, who plays on it or who produced it. And so on through the Tidal catalog of new and old music, with sometimes helpful, sometimes random, sometimes null results that will remind you of what you perhaps already knew: The labels who could/should be sending Tidal this info don't necessarily have it themselves, at least not in the kind of readable form that they could send to a dozen streaming companies expecting everything to show up in the right place. It takes an enormous amount of manual work to pull all this data together and organize it, and it's going to take 10 times that amount of work to do the one thing Tidal is hardly doing at all: linking all those names. Want to click around and see what else that "A. HOGAN" person who co-wrote KENDRICK LAMAR's "HUMBLE" might have written, or what GEOFF EMERICK might have engineered besides ABBEY ROAD? Good luck with that. Check back in in 2020, maybe. It's a noble cause, and Tidal deserves most of those hosannas it's getting. But it's a complicated cause, too, and one hopes labels and publishers are working as hard as Tidal to make it happen rather than simply asking for it. I wondered, clicking around Tidal over the weekend, if the service was answering the gimme-credit community's cries, calling its bluff, or both... BRAD PAISLEY speaks up and the CMA backs down... BIKINI KILL reunites... No, the fact that you are putting money in the pockets of morally compromised artists like CHRIS BROWN if you listen to their tracks on SPOTIFY or anywhere else does not pose a moral dilemma. If you don't want to reward them, don't play them. That's it. If your curiosity or your pop fandom or your professional interest requires you to listen to Chris Brown, then Chris Brown absolutely, unequivocally deserves to get paid... S. COMBS is now B. LOVE. Shoutout to the Tidal staffer who has go back into the system and change all those credits... If someone drops your name in a major pop hit without telling you, this is an appropriate, classy and awesome way to react. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Things are looking up for SoundCloud, who have weathered a tumultuous summer. They came out with an SOS funding round of $170M and a new CEO, Kerry Trainor, formerly of Vimeo. Now Trainor has announced the newest addition to the platform - increased playlist statistics for artists. | | |
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| Maybe you already know Loretta Lynn’s 1975 song about birth control, “The Pill,” was banned from radio upon release. But do you know why? The real answer is not what many would assume. | | |
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| Best Coast singer Cosentino weighs in on the raft of allegations of sexual assault and abuse in the music and movie industries. | | |
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| The content of his music isn't anywhere near political, but his shows inherently are. | | |
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| Do bands such as LCD Soundsystem ever split up - or is ‘quitting’ just the first stage of a long, tactical manoeuvre? | | |
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| Startups have a lot of room to disrupt the music industry with AI and voice recognition. | | |
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| I’m a Bobby Brown fan. I’m not sure I’m at stan levels, but I did shell out the money to buy the hardback copy of his autobiography (written with the assistance of Nick Chiles--it’s painfully obvious where Bobby either had help or didn’t write at all) and read it immediately in one sitting. | | |
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| I am deaf. But getting cochlear implants led me to explore more deeply what music meant to me. | | |
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| A big part of that fun was the fact that it was illegal. | | |
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| Brand new or 40 years old, a banger is a banger. | | |
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| Stars Ride, Lush and more. | | |
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| The Chicago-born pianist and composer will be remembered for his profound musical gifts as well as his organizational genius. | | |
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| It’s because of companies like Pandora that many in the industry are referring to this past summer as the “Summer of Streaming” -- and not necessarily in a positive light. | | |
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| “More people are gonna have to start speaking out” about sexual harassment in the industry, said country singer Meghan Linsey. | | |
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| As 2010 was drawing to a close, no one was quite sure if Demi Lovato would make it to 2011. By early November, while on tour with the Jonas Brothers, Lovato was self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, using Adderall and cocaine to keep her going, and drinking to numb the growing pain she felt inside. | | |
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| Bristol’s unofficial title as dubstep’s second city barely does its legacy justice. | | |
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| A conversation on the deep history of humans and music with Gary Tomlinson, author of A Million Years of Music. | | |
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| Fever Ray and Eminem have reignited pop’s obsession with the hotline. Will you accept the charges? | | |
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| Selena Quintanilla received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame Friday, and the timing might just be perfect as her legacy keeps growing. | | |
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| A Journal of Musical Things |
| Another list from current intern-in-residence, Dorothy Lee. We want to make this the definitive list of airborne concerts, so if you have anything to add, please do. Bascially, if you have anything that falls under the heading of "great gig in the sky," let us know. | | |
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| | | | | The Twilite Tone ft. Common, King Louie & Lil Herb |
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| © Copyright 2017, The REDEF Group |
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