"With its signature groovy percussion, autotune-heavy vocals, and catchy hooks, Afrobeats is finding audiences far beyond Nigeria’s shores. Stars perform at global music festivals, and American musicians sampling their work have introduced African artists to an ever widening audience" - Quartz begins its introduction of Afrobeats. "Much of Afrobeats’ growing appeal is driven by Nigeria’s vast diaspora, but beyond that, social media, YouTube, and global streaming sites like Spotify are ensuring that it’s easier than ever to discover—and become a fan of—Nigerian music".

A lovely little article in the Guardian about Yugoslavian pop music in the 1980s when it got closest to the trends of the western world: "Yugoslavian musicians defied the limitations of technology to make superb electro-pop in an apparent socialist utopia... Yugoslavian disco, post-punk and electronic music thrived in the 1970s and 1980s – yet was mostly forgotten until recent efforts by hobby archivists and specialist record labels".

WordTips has a great feature - Singers Vocabularies. They counted the words used by 100 modern stars and the 100 greatest singers of all time and added up the number of unique words they used per 1,000 and used the formula for the feature. What they found is that the star with the biggest vocabulary overall is legend Patti Smith, who uses 217 unique words per 1,000 - she used 2,669 different words across a total word count of 12,291. The modern singer with the biggest vocabulary is Billie Eilish who uses 169 per 1,000. Legend Luther Vandross and modern star Trey Songz are tied with 66 for the smallest vocabulary. The song with the most unique words is Lou Reed’s 'The Murder Mystery', recorded by The Velvet Underground, with 639 words.

Music writer Ted Gioia tries to see into the future, here are some of his predictions:

Record labels will gradually lose both the ability and desire to develop new artists. They will focus increasingly on their old catalog and archival materials.

More new artists will get their big break from web platforms... So I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole new platform emerges during the next decade—an interface that makes it fun and exciting for music fans to hear new music.

Listeners will have favorite new songs, but not know (or care) about the name of the artist.

Musician incomes will continue to shrink, but some young musicians will still earn large sums of money by being influencers.

Dead musicians will start showing up everywhere—via holograms, biopics, deepfake vocals, and other technology-driven interfaces.

Get ready for A-Pop from Africa, I-Pop from India or Indonesia, and a whole host of competing sounds and styles from Latin America, China, Eastern Europe, etc.

Pitchfork is continuing to celebrate its 25th birthday, the latest b-day cake being a selection of favourite albums by some of Pitchfork's own favourite musicians. Some interesting choices: ANOHNI chose 'Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Power in the Blood' ("Buffy is one of the people I am relying on to help me understand how to move forward as an artist and as a human being"), Bun B chose Radiohead’s 'OK Computer' ("when life starts moving too fast, 'OK Computer' is still there to help slow it down for me"), Daniel Kessler from Interpol chose Aphex Twin’s 'Richard D. James Album' ("pushed music to where it had never ventured before"), Thundercat chose Slipknot’s 'Slipknot' ("awesomeness"), Timbaland chose OutKast’s 'SpeakerBoxxx/The Love Below' ("groundbreaking").

Ted Gioia looks back at the case of Peter Buffett, son of legendary investor Warren Buffett who had given his son some shares in Berkshire Hathaway, and at age 19 Peter wanted to raise money so he could prepare at leisure for a music career. To cover expenses, he sold his entire stock holdings for $123,000 - shares that would now be worth $275 million. “It was understood that I should expect nothing more” he later wrote in his memoir 'Life is What You Make It'.

To commemorate Pitchfork’s 25th anniversary, the music site has gathered 25 microgenres, great and small, that help illuminate music’s evolution over the past two and a half decades - since the start of Pitchfork. There's freak-folk, chillwave, lo-fi study beats, crabcore, shitgaze, night bus, and plenty other marvelous small ideas. Check 'em all out.

Song Exploder podcast shared a "very different and special episode of the show" - about John Lennon song 'God'. Song Exploder have never tried making a posthumous episode before, because hearing directly from the artist is at the heart of the show. However, with all the John Lennon interview archives, plus all the isolated tracks from the recordings, and the original demo, it turned out a legitimate, different and special episode of the show.

Late Tom Petty's quote that today's country music is nothing more than “bad rock with a fiddle” was the inspiration for Medium's blog entry of the best country rock songs. It includes some Rolling Stones, Metallica, Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Presley, and some context.

Pitchfork is celebrating its 25th birthday with a selection of 200 most important artists who have made the biggest impact across Pitchfork’s lifetime so far. The list features "The Icons" as well as "The Essentials", listed alphabetically, from Aaliyah to Wilco.