Spotify... used to see itself as the go-to platform providing 'music for every mood and moment'—not just a music streaming service but one that knows your taste better than you know it yourself. That changed in February 2019, when Spotify announced its acquisitions of Gimlet and Anchor. | | | | 2020 mood: Starcrawler's Arrow de Wilde at the Garage, London, June 20, 2018.
(Lorne Thomson/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Spotify... used to see itself as the go-to platform providing 'music for every mood and moment'—not just a music streaming service but one that knows your taste better than you know it yourself. That changed in February 2019, when Spotify announced its acquisitions of Gimlet and Anchor.”
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| | rantnrave:// I grew up on various flavors of classic rock and pop and I was perfectly happy with that, and then I had my brain blown inside out when I discovered college radio. In my coastal elite hometown, that meant WZBC and WMBR with their relatively powerful signals and seemingly giant libraries full of every possible guitar noise. But also WERS and WHRB and my eventual alma mater, WMFO, each of them another world, another planet of possible musics. They all live in my heart and inform my tastes to this day, each a reminder that there's always a new a library of noises waiting around the corner if you just leave the dial alone and let the DJ play it for you. JEFF BREEZE arrived in Boston long after I left and held down the DJ chair of WMBR's local music show, PIPELINE, for 17 years. I never met him and I'm reasonably sure I never heard his show, but he still feels like a part of me because cities and communities remember, and they connect. Breeze was beloved in the Boston rock scene. He was open-minded and generous. "i'm almost certain," SPEEDY ORTIZ's SADIE DUPUIS tweeted on Tuesday, "he was the first person to invite speedy ortiz to play on air." But also: "whenever a band he knew i liked did a pipeline set he'd email me a link. & when it was a band he GUESSED i'd like, he'd send that too." That's the radio dial I'll always remember. That's how you share your love of music, and how music is discovered. Your favorite streaming service would like to think it can do that but it cannot. Breeze was also a member of the BOSTON TYPEWRITER ORCHESTRA, which is exactly the kind of band you'd expect a bunch of people from MIT to start, and though I don't know if any of the BTOs actually went to MIT, that's where WMBR is based, which is close enough for me. I didn't get into MIT myself. I just listened to the radio station. RIP sir... OK, maybe your favorite streaming service *can* sort of do that if it tries hard enough, or if it lucks upon the right formula at the right time. Luck is often, of course, the product of a lot of effort, and this, from the New York Times' BEN DANDRIDGE-LEMCO, is an interesting read about HYPERPOP, a SPOTIFY playlist that sprung from the work of Spotify data guru GLENN MCDONALD and a team of curators led by LIZZIE SZABO who were inspired by the unlikely rise of 100 GECS. It's helping to make mini-stars in a genre that the Spotify team is kind of discovering and making up at the same time. When I hit play on hyperpop—which is loaded with lowercase artist names and song titles, which I apologize for the format of this newsletter steamrolling over—it immediately serves me CHARLI XCX and PC MUSIC's HANNAH DIAMOND, which is Spotify being Spotify by finding the songs I already know in the playlist and playing them back to me, but then it moves on to the helium-voiced pop of QT and the twee industrial glitch of NÖMAK & ARAATAN and the teenage fever dream of BLADEE & ECCO2K and I feel like I've stumbled upon a distant corner of SOUNDCLOUD that a bunch of teens around the world invented and uploaded en masse last night, which Dandridge-Lemco's piece confirms is sort of true. One of these people will probably produce either MADONNA's or DRAKE's next album, and then we'll have to reconsider... In less organic, more lucrative corners of Spotify, where music is being abandoned for podcasts, where podcasts are getting shorter (sound familiar?), and where your lean-back audio experience appears to be turning into "songs, news, ads, songs, news, ads"—your ad-free subscription be damned—there are a number of reasons why the phrase "Spotify podcasts" should concern almost any musician whose livelihood involves Spotify and why the phrase "podcast playlists" should concern, if not confuse, everybody else. LIZ PELLY, writing for the BAFFLER, distills them into the smartest and scariest 5,000 words you've read about Spotify's current obsession. There's a different kind of curation going on here that, Pelly suggests, could cost artists money while costing listeners something much deeper and darker. Today's must-read... Taking into account nine DOOBIE BROTHERS, seven NINE INCH NAILS and a couple other band rosters inscribed on new plaques, 29 individuals were inducted into the ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME Saturday. Twenty-eight of them are men. This doesn't sit well with my friend COURTNEY E. SMITH, whose work you might have read in this space, and it shouldn't sit well with anybody. It compounds, and possibly worsens (horrifying thought: it's possible it doesn't in fact worsen it), a longstanding, infuriating imbalance. RINGO STARR's solo career is in the Hall of Fame. CAROLE KING's is not. Smith offers a quick, reasonable, do-able, fix: Nominate only women next year. To make it easier, she suggests six inductees, and it's a very very good list, helpfully subtitled "Are You F***ing Kidding Me, She/They Haven’t Been Inducted or Even Nominated Yet???" (Bonus suggestion: Nominate only women again the year after that)... For the first time since January 2017, there are no POST MALONE songs in the BILLBOARD HOT 100. Wow, as he said for 44 of those weeks. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| The media is learning what musicians already know: Spotify only works for the stars. | | |
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| More than 20 years after "MMMBop," the teen idols' impassioned following is splintering over issues like Black Lives Matter, guns, and COVID. | | |
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| These road warriors were planning on a huge year. Seven months into the pandemic, they’re struggling to get by, dealing with crippling mental health issues, and contemplating new careers. | | |
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| Billboard spoke with Smokey Robinson, Dionne Warwick, Booker T. Jones and other legendary acts who faced extreme racism to bring their music to the American South in the 1950s and ’60s. | | |
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| Here’s who I’d like to see from a list of women that should be titled: Are You F***ing Kidding Me, She/They Haven’t Been Inducted or Even Nominated Yet??? | | |
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| The microgenre -- fueled by teen upstarts like osquinn and glaive, and more established names like 100 gecs and A.G. Cook -- has a modest but dedicated following, and many different kinds of sounds. | | |
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| Chris Stapleton continues to buck country orthodoxy on his new album, "Starting Over." | | |
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| Legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott's is being paid $1.7m by the UK government. | | |
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| Selena Quintanilla Perez ushered in the Golden Age of Tejano music in Texas with a meteoric rise up the charts and into the hearts of her fans. Her fans saw her as more than just a pop star--she was family. Selena was about to take her fame and her family to the world stage when a tangled web of deceit, betrayal, and jealousy would result in her untimely death at 23. | | |
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| Artificial intelligence is being used to create new songs seemingly performed by Frank Sinatra and other dead stars. ‘Deepfakes’ are cute tricks -- but they could change pop for ever. | | |
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| Superstars and music execs are celebrating the Biden/Harris win -- but they’re also keeping a close eye on how proposed tax plans could affect the current copyright acquisition frenzy. | | |
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| A conversation about her unique route to the top of the charts - and what’s next. | | |
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| We tend to have no idea how music is made. For nearly seven years, one series has supplied some answers. | | |
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| The biggest so-called disco records of 2020, from Dua Lipa to Kylie, have all been made by white pop stars. Stephanie Phillips speaks to Solange producer Kindness, Jamz Supernova and the Studio 54 label and asks why the genre continues to be whitewashed. | | |
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| Paper asked eight openly LGBTQ+ artists to share their favorite queer moments in dance music history and the importance of representation. | | |
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| Spotify introduces Discovery Mode, a tool that allows labels, artists, and marketing teams to influence its mysterious streaming algorithm. | | |
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| A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge upholds Jamie Spears' role as conservator of his daughter's estate, but didn't close the door on ousting him in the future. | | |
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| There never seems to be a shortage of new music documentaries to watch on streaming services, be feature-length films or multi-part docu-series. | | |
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| The work of Scott Grooves has eluded mainstream recognition-and that’s just the way he likes it. | | |
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| The worst insult in the English punks' vocabulary is "poser." These are working-class kids who resent it when the middle classes ape their style. | | |
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| | | | | | | From the Beninese girl group's self-titled debut, out now on Born Bad. |
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