"Having a deep-rooted love of music in the back pocket is to be able to pluck out something capable of soothing broken hearts, tortured minds or restless souls. It is an infinite source of reliability, profundity and surprise" - the Quietus writes, arguing this relationship has changed in this lockdown year. The places to discover new music have tumbled down to all but one - computer screen, and the curiosity itself has tumbled due to the claustrophobic year. However, tQ says, we need to accept, and through this acceptance that spark for music will return. It most certainly should - musically, it has been a great year, and the next might prove to be even better, if not even game-changing.

Jesy Nelson left the successful UK girl band Little Mix giving an honest reason - “The truth is recently being in the band has really taken a toll on my mental health. I find the constant pressure of being in a girl group and living up to expectations very hard”. NME praised her announcement saying she "achieved something hugely important. Backed by the unwavering support of her former bandmates, she and the group have set an important precedent where a person’s wellbeing comes ahead of keeping up appearances just to keep the cash flowing".

Big music companies are trying to make money on old hits, engineering them to become viral TikToks, Vice argues, suggesting we are going to see more of that. New York Times reporter wrote that some record companies have been paying influencers to feature music from their back catalog, also looking for that Fleetwood Mac effect.

The big news about Bob Dylan selling his entire songwriting catalog to Universal (for somewhere in between $300 and $400 million), got a fresh perspective in the Rolling Stone - why did Universal buy it? It seems the major music companies feel they need to take a stand against upstarts like Hipgnosis Songs and Primary Wave, which have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying songwriters' catalogs. This big spending spree is likely to continue as "music rights become one of the most reliable growth assets of the pandemic era".

The rise of streaming platforms and those looking to rip a little extra access is likely to become a new frontier in the cat and mouse game of (illegal) copying of music - Hollywood Reporter writes anticipating a new wave of "piracy wars". The subject of the latest and still developing battle is youtube-dl, a third-party software tool that enables its users to rip videos and songs from the Google-owned platform.

"For an independent artist with a dedicated audience, the [streaming] system doesn’t work. And neither does it work for loyal fans. If you are a dance fan, jazz fan, or metal fan, the artists you love and listen to are unlikely to see a penny of your subscription. Streaming is the future, but to deliver a rich and culturally diverse musical future, non-mainstream music needs to be able to keep its head above water... Now we’re asking the government to intervene and... grant musicians rights to income from streaming, so they can earn a percentage from every stream regardless of the system" - Nadine Shah, who had to move back to her parents, writes in the Guardian about a broken system.

"For decades, Dolly has been our contradictory savior. Authentic yet synthetic, tough yet haunted, brilliant yet aw-shucks, with a constructed, surgical femininity that somehow circles back into genderless and asexual. Wealthy enough to buy herself some taste, she always held on to a poor person’s idea of glamour and managed to make tacky classy" - Guardian reflects on Dolly Parton's $1million donation for Covid-19 research, the last in a long line - because she understands "that money is something you do rather than something you have".

Madonna did it, Ian Brown also, as well as MIA, Ice Cube, Wiz Khalifa, Deftones' Stephen Carpenter... Why? Guardian shortly tries to explain: "Music attracts mavericks and outsiders. The typical psychological profile of a conspiracy theorist – arrogant, stubborn, proudly heterodox – also fits many performers. Some are autodidacts, attracted to the juicy secret knowledge that you won’t get from the mainstream media, while lacking the analytical tools necessary to sort the wheat from the chaff. And given that musicians who express an interest in politics are disproportionately leftwing, it’s inevitable that a minority will drift to its furthest fringes. Prodigious weed-smoking may also play a part".

"Openly confrontational trap and drill songs like 'Faneto' have bled into the consciousness of this summer's rebellion, capturing crowds through their fusion of righteous anger and unbothered celebration" - Scalawag magazine writes in an interesting essay about what constitutes a "protest song" today. It's a complete change of perspective, Scalamag argues - "these songs know that our systems cannot be purified through an uplifting mantra, a catchy tune, or even a structural reform—only a committed, unrelenting program of insurgency could begin to address the atrocities at the core of the state".

"There are many fans with no proximity to the streets who are seeking for a vicarious thrill through music. These people think they’re supportive fans of Black artists, but they’re really dehumanizing them. They prefer artists to be live-action manifestations of violence, not just out of a disregard for the artist’s well-being, but for that of real-life victims of gun violence and substance abuse" - Complex writes in a great essay about authenticity in rap. "No one wants to see anyone get hurt, and we carry sympathy for artists who have been victims of violence, but too many rap fans then revere the next artist for being an 'official' aggressor of the same acts. It’s time to detonate that dissonance".

"I think the most important part of being a singer is the will to communicate something" - Bang Si-hyuk, founder and CEO of Big Hit Entertainment, has said about his concept of making stars. He encouraged members of his biggest project, BTS, to have personal social media accounts and to communicate freely with fans. Mark Mulligan, a music-business analyst and managing director of MIDiA Research, thinks this concept has led to a seismic change: "Big Hit monetizes fandom. In some ways, it's not even the artist that is the product; it's the fan which is the product". An excellent read in NPR about BTS, Big Hit, and fandom in general.

Some of the bands picked up by Stereogum for their best of new bands of the year list:

Dogleg - cathartic high-octane emo-punk

Anjimile - like Tracy Chapman attempting Sufjan Stevens songs and ending up with something startlingly unique

Porridge Radio - wistful melodies, raw self-reflections

Backxwash - a refreshingly new texture in the rap landscape

Sault - a tapestry of Black art and Black experience across time and borders

Bartees Strange - nobody sounds like him, and nobody could...

“As a piece of engineering, it’s really impressive” - an electronic musician and academic dr Matthew Yee-Kin says to the Guardian about audio deepfakes - “they break down an audio signal into a set of lexemes of music – a dictionary if you like – at three different layers of time, giving you a set of core fragments that is sufficient to reconstruct the music that was fed in". The G in convinced, rightly so, deepfake music is set to have wide-ranging ramifications for the music industry - any company that wouldn't want to pay the market rate for using an established artist’s music, they could create their own imitation. And big companies are getting into it: Google is working on it within their Magenta Project; startup Amper Music is producing custom, AI-generated music for media content; Spotify employed François Pachet, former head of Sony Music’s computer science lab, in its AI research group...

"Spotify has to keep three competing interest groups - investors, audiences, rights-holders and creators - happy or it does not have a business. As it gets bigger and more established, however, it feels that it can afford to make moves that may antagonise rights-holders / creators and audiences but that will keep investors happy" - Music Industry Blog writes in an analysis of the new Discovery Mode Spotify announced this week (offers artists and labels more play for lower royalty rate). "The logic is that Spotify is getting so big that those two audiences cannot do without it (the ‘too big to fail’ stage) but that investors have many other places to put their money. So, investors are more ‘at risk’ than the others".

An excellent text by Matthew Ball about the connection between technology and music, how the development of tech has changed or steered the way through the future of music. He predicts that the next big step in the development of technology and music will be based on user-generated content, somebody just has to find the right model. His argument is that "almost all new music today, with exception of indie rock, is 'all digital' and thus fully separable by instrument, beat, vocals, etc. In many cases, a hit track is made up of numerous samples, beats, and sounds that come from a patchwork of creators", so everything is already there, except the model.

A very useful article by Henry Prince about monetisation features at the biggest platforms for artists and managers turning to live-streaming. The article provides artists with a beginner’s guide to ways of making money from live streaming at Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter...

The excellent Cherie Hu highlights three major themes not just in how big-tech music strategies are constructed, but also when and why their execution falls short. Her latest blog post:

1. The commoditization of music streaming is nothing new, but must be acknowledged in any conversation about big tech’s role in the music industry.
2. Thinking about the impact of content-driven music strategies, three interlocking parts come to mind: Licenses, ecosystems and interfaces.
3. No corporation is a monolith, but most of them are generalists

Hyperpop pulls heavily from SoundCloud rap, emo, lo-fi trap, PC Music label, as well as from trance, dubstep and chiptune, Vice writes about the fluid genre. They hear Charli XCX, sonic fusionists/chaos-makers 100 gecs, glitchy rappers David Shawty, and animated electronic producers Gupi as representatives of hyper-pop. What is distinctive with this new genre is that its "identity is less rooted in musical genetics than it is a shared ethos of transcending genre altogether, while still operating within the context of pop".

Vice started a series called Unpaid Royalties about the myriad ways that the music industry exploits Black artists, and what's being done to change them. They started with the three most common types of contracts an artist might sign today, offering a window into how the “bad deal” isn’t an anomaly - it’s by design.

Both the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 - 24kGoldn feat. Iann Dior's 'Mood', and the No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 albums chart - Pop Smoke's 'Shoot For the Stars, Aim For the Moon' were aided by massive popularity on TikTok. Fleetwood Mac have climbed to the Top 10 of the albums chart after going viral on the video-sharing service. Billboard staff discusses the impact of the video platform on its charts.

TikTok seemed like a space mainly for hip-hop and pop artists, but this year the door was opened for indie-rock as well, Water & Music reports on the change of trends. Mitski’s song 'Me and My Husband' went from roughly 100,000 streams a month to 100,000 streams a day, thanks to a TikTok trend. The most popular song on Spotify for indie-rock legends Pavement is a 1997 B-side called 'Harness Your Hopes', an unofficial, uncredited clip of which is currently included in over 20,000 videos on TikTok. The second most-streamed song on Spotify by the band The Front Bottoms is a 2014 deep cut 'Be Nice to Me', which, thanks to being featured in over 47,000 TikTok videos through an unofficial clip, is currently dwarfing every song from the band’s brand new record. There's an issue looming over TikTok's head - figuring out how to properly pay royalties on user-generated content.

Complex delves into the power of (non)streaming, with the prime example of Brooklyn rapper: "6ix9ine fully leaned into the idea that in today’s era, any attention is good attention. A hate-click is still a click. He knew that getting someone to stream his song out of pure curiosity would put just as much money in his pocket as a stream from an avid fan who actually enjoys the music... To keep operating as he was, 6ix9ine desperately needed revenue from streams. And to get streams, he needed attention, whether it was positive or negative. Getting flat-out ignored was his biggest fear".

Cherie Hu, one of the biggest authorities on music technology and music industry, predicts the future of music business and technology for Beats & Bytes blog. Hu sees futuristic brain-computer interface for music consumption, and the rise of "fake" artists like algorithms, holograms, vocaloids...

"Black women struggle against stereotypes and are seen as angry or threatening when we try to stand up for ourselves and our sisters. There’s not much room for passionate advocacy if you are a Black woman" - Megan Thee Stallion wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times, adding - "In every industry, women are pitted against one another, but especially in hip-hop, where it seems as if the male-dominated ecosystem can handle only one female rapper at a time. Countless times, people have tried to pit me against Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, two incredible entertainers and strong women. I’m not 'the new' anyone".

NPR’s new podcast Louder Than A Riot is the story of the “interconnected rise of hip-hop and mass incarceration” in America where "rhyme and punishment go hand in hand". From Bobby Shmurda to Nipsey Hussle, each episode explores an artist's story to examine a different aspect of the criminal justice system that disproportionately impacts Black America. It goes from the point of power - the power the music industry wields over artists, the power of institutional forces that marginalize communities of color, the power of the prison industrial complex and the power dynamics deep-rooted in the rap game.

"The worry is that the next generation of performers will come only from certain sections of society. It felt as if the chancellor was rebranding the arts sector as some sort of luxurious, decadent hobby, and now it was time for everyone to get their hands dirty – perhaps literally, as we are very short of people to pick fruit" - Tim Burgess of the Charlatans wrote for the Guardian commenting on UK chancellor Rishi Sunak's words that artists should look for other jobs. Burgess reminds the politician that in 2018 alone, the music industry contributed more than £5bn to the UK economy, and it employed 296,000 people.

MixMag questions the moral dilemma of reopening clubs during the pandemic. Some believe it is not worth the risk of transmission, and possible lockdowns, the others say we need to start reopening our societies. The magazine talked to promoters from Italy, Czechia, Germany and UK about their experiences and attitudes.

Something Old, Something New blog presents several YouTube music critics who do their critics in a different way, closer to YouTube as a medium, and to today's audience. The two SOSN takes out WillNE, a funny British guy, and Caitlin Marie Reacts who listens and reacts to classic albums.

Guitarist Joe Satriani shared his thoughts on Eddie van Halen with the Billboard, after the virtuoso guitarist's passing: "The little technical things that guitar players can talk about for hours, they get picked up by a million people in a second. Everybody can copy the technical bits, but nobody could put the heart and soul and personality into each little bit like he could and no one delivered it like he did. He wrote great songs that were fun". Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello looked up to him: "Eddie Van Halen was one of the greatest, most inventive, truly visionary musicians of all time. He was an unparalleled titan in the annals of rock & roll". Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan was also an unexpected fan: “I am truly saddened by his loss; and isn’t it strange that a man who played an instrument spoke directly to so many in an unmatched way that rivals only a few: Coltrane, Hendrix, Parker, Miles, Django”.

A small group of Donald Trump supporters played Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the USA' outside Walter Reed Medical Center, where the American president is being treated for Covid-19 infection. Consequence of Sound explained how completely bizarre that is: "To emphasize for what has to be the bajillionth time, 'Born in the USA' is not a pro-patriotism song. It’s a lament for a country addicted to feeding its working class populace into pointless wars, only to leave them neglected once they return. So the fact that these people were blasting this protest song outside of a military hospital, where actual members and veterans of the military are trying to rest and be cared for, crosses irony over to actual ignorant cruelty".