Shakespeare may have written King Lear during the plague, but Dolly Parton funded a covid vaccine, dropped a Christmas album and a Christmas special. | | | | Is there anything she can't do? No, there is not. Dolly Parton working the phones in "9 to 5" (1980).
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Shakespeare may have written King Lear during the plague, but Dolly Parton funded a covid vaccine, dropped a Christmas album and a Christmas special.”
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| | rantnrave:// Department of unintended consequences, part 1: Is SPOTIFY's Autoplay feature, which plays music it thinks is similar to what you've been listening to after it's done playing the songs in your queue, secretly turning 20th century indie-rock obscurities into 21st century indie-rock hits? Stereogum's NATE ROGERS chronicles the journey of a GALAXIE 500's "STRANGE" from long-overlooked album track to most popular Galaxie 500 song in Spotify—"by a significant margin"—and of PAVEMENT's "HARNESS YOUR HOPES" from three-decade-old b-side to digital crossover success story. Not only is the latter more popular in Spotify than Pavement staples like "RANGE LIFE" and "CUT YOUR HAIR," it's also turned into a go-to Pavement track on other platforms including APPLE MUSIC and TIKTOK, which is where things start to get a little eerie. Is Autoplay somehow sharing its secret discoveries with Spotify's competitors, or is this just how cultural momentum works? They're both good vintage indie-rock songs, for what it's worth. Whether you read all this as good or bad news may depend on whether you're thrilled for an old song to be discovered by a new generation, or worried at the prospect of artificial intelligence asserting programming power over our future, picking winners and losers for reasons that aren't clear to us non-artificial intelligences. Did Autoplay latch onto "Strange" because it was the most conventional song it could find in the Galaxie 500 oeuvre (drummer DAMON KRUKOWSKI, who has a parallel career as a musicologist and digital thinker, makes that case), or did Autoplay's design point it toward an '80s rock song that would sound good to current rock ears? Tastes change, and there's no reason a band's most popular song in 1989 should automatically be its most popular song three decades later. But whose taste are we talking about—that of music fans, or that of a few lines of code?... Department of unintended consequences, part 2: Music and tech strategist BAS GRASMAYER games out how digital music promotion might change if digital services ever switch over to user-centric royalties, as many artists, including Krukowski, have been pushing for. One potential side effect: Artists would be incentivized to get their fans to turn off that Autoplay feature, lest they move on to other artists. The ideal fan in a user-centric world, Grasmayer suggests, is a fan who listens to one artist and one artist only... No, DOLLY PARTON was not the primary financial backer of MODERNA's potential Covid-19 vaccine. But the million bucks she did donate was "critical" in the early days of vaccine development at VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER. I detect no untruths in this tweet ("EOTY" = Entertainer of the Year at the CMA AWARDS)... Though this admirable and honorable playlist leans toward dad-rock (and dad-pop and dad-hop and dad&B), POTUS #44 remains the only POTUS—ever?—who's demonstrated an ear for current pop music. But he loses a quarter point this week for a less-than-nuanced take on hip-hop... One of the reasons—besides MJ—that THRILLER sounds as good as any album ever made is that engineer BRUCE SWEDIEN recorded the rhythm track for each song on a dedicated two-inch analog tape, then locked the tapes away and didn't play them again until he was ready for his final mix. You can thank him for all those drum transients you can still, therefore, hear 38 years later. Also: layers and layers of stereo tracks. The innovative jazz and pop recording engineer, who worked side by side with QUINCY JONES for decades, died Monday at 86... RIP also ANDREW WHITE and ERIC HALL. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| Spotify appears to have the capacity to create “hits” without even realizing it. | | |
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| “People don’t party like that anymore. Can you imagine the release you’d have to sign? No lawyer would ever allow that to happen.” | | |
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| Slowed and reverb and lo-fi hip-hop share some distinct similarities, with both subgenres birthing their own subcultures online, and becoming the soundtrack to Generation Z. | | |
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| Music, while performing and growing strongly, still underperforms commercially compared to other content genres on the platform. | | |
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| Swedien worked alongside producer Quincy Jones on Michael Jackson's first three history-making solo albums: "Off the Wall," "Thriller" and "Bad." | | |
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| Bruce Swedien has been the engineer of choice for Michael Jackson and his producer Quincy Jones, among many others. In a rare interview, he lays bare the techniques behind some of the superstar's biggest hits. | | |
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| The new documentary “Collective” reveals how the Romanian government conned its people, lined its pockets, ignored safety warnings, and led to dozens of preventable deaths. | | |
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| We spoke to Loud Records founder and CEO Steve Rifkind about his fondest memories of the label's heydey, as well as the artists and records that defined it's dominant run. | | |
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| In an industry where "going to work" often means going to a nightclub or festival, expectations regarding professional behavior in the dance music space can vary greatly from other more traditional job environments. | | |
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| The rise and fall of the provocative rapper Tekashi69 is chronicled in this Hulu documentary. | | |
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| How the visionary’s legacy thrives 20 years after his passing. | | |
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| Introducing ALPU (average listening-share per user) as a potential key metric. | | |
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| "You have this cookie-cutter image of what a lawyer looks like, and I’m not that person." | | |
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| The leader of Big Thief performs five songs from a camper in Joshua Tree for our Tiny Desk quarantine series. | | |
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| Veteran engineers on the tracks that were incredibly tough to crack. | | |
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| Even Russian piano virtuoso and legend Anton Rubinstein gave up on one of the uber-challenging pieces on our list. | | |
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| The new platform from US-based VEVA Sound aims to make the process of audio collaboration between parties simpler and easier to organize. VEVA Collect also ensures that every songwriter, musician, producer, engineer, etc. is properly and accurately credited – and paid. | | |
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| YouTube claims to be the world's biggest jukebox -- and now it wants to wring more ad dollars from the platform's music fans. | | |
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| The composer and cornetist explains how the latest album with his Exploding Star Orchestra is an escape from earthbound thinking. | | |
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| Payne Lindsey and Jake Brennan explore the “really horrible, brutal crime” of two murdered Grateful Dead fans in “Dead and Gone” podcast. | | |
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| | | | | Dolly Parton and Miranda Lambert |
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