A clever and optimistic thought in the Guardian, about humans in the time of stress: "Faced with the stresses and difficulties of the coronavirus outbreak, it should come as no surprise that so many people have found a response to the pandemic in music. Our bodies may be doing the right and responsible thing by remaining at home, but our minds are not so easily locked down. Things eternal still need to burst forth somehow, and in the face of the Covid-19 virus, music has become one of humankind’s most defiant public assertions that life must continue in harmony".

With tour and festival cancellation all over the world, at least five months’ worth of job prospects have dried up, virtually overnight. Streaming technology could bring a bit of money back to musicians and performers, but it won’t help the backbone of their industry: the roadies, tech teams, tour managers and riggers who set up the shows that sustain their careers. “It’s the first industry to stop dead” - CrewCare director Tony Moran told the Guardian.

UK musicians being affected by the closure of live venues and schools, and a stop to music teaching, have already lost an estimated £13.9m in earnings because of coronavirus, according to a Musicians’ Union survey. According to the Guardian, ninety per cent of respondents in the survey said their income had already been affected. I Lost My Gig Australia estimates total lost income from cancelled events in Australia at $300M. Number of people impacted by event cancellations came to 599.000. Australian are performing, online - last weekend saw online festival Isol-Aid featuring 74 acts playing 20-minute sets, live streaming from their bedrooms. Guardian says it "felt like the first laugh after a big cry. The energy was fun, hilarious and occasionally chaotic". Watch a part of it below.

Dean Budnick, co-author of Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped, shared some ideas with Inside Hook about how to prevent ticket-scalpers from inflating concert tickets. Radiohead have limited ticket sales to individuals and forced concert-goers to match tickets with identification. Grateful Dead sold 50% of the tickets to their shows through their own mail-order service and limited the number of tickets that folks could purchase. Taylor Swift started a slow-ticketing model - she meted out tickets to a given show in the weeks and months leading up to a show so that fans knew they wouldn’t have to resort to the secondary market. One of the solutions is to limit the ability of folks to purchase tickets to shows within a certain geographic range.

Women made up only 12% of the songwriters responsible for writing the 700 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 year-end charts between 2012 and 2018, which is in stark contrast to one-third of all musicians identifying as female, according to Variety. It gets even worse when looking at music producers - gender breakdown for music producers who worked on the top 400 popular songs from 2012, 2015, 2017, and 2018, found a men-to-women producer ratio of 47:1. That translates to only 2.1% of those producers identifying as female.

Mac Miller, Lil Peep and Juice WRLD have died of drug overdoses; XXXTentacion, Jimmy Wopo, Nipsey Hussle and Pop Smoke are among the MCs to have been murdered. Guardian talked to their fans to see how they felt, one Lil Peep's fan sums it up pretty good - "it definitely felt like a personal loss, rather than a celebrity death”.

Glastonbury's first big line-up announcement features 52 per cent female or female-identifying acts (Taylor Swift, Diana Ross, Kendrick Lamar and Paul McCartney are headlining), and the NME loves it: "It is glorious, inspiring proof that the same old, tired excuses that still get trotted out by certain festival bookers don’t wash. Instead of moaning about how there aren’t 'enough female artists' or coming up with some face-saving, condescending scheme to give young female musicians 'a boost' and then seemingly forgetting all about it, Emily Eavis and her team have just surveyed the wealth of women making music right now and, you know, booked them. A novel idea!".

We need to stop pretending that we’re not trying to make a living. We need to make it OK to ask music lovers to support the music they love, directly. By buying an album in a physical or digital format, not just streaming (but stream it too!), the artist is more likely to see direct […]

Over the past several months, Sony Music has been investing aggressively in podcasts business, with those investments including at least five different partnerships and joint ventures with third-party podcast production companies - Somethin’ Else (U.K.), Broccoli Content (U.K.), The Onion (U.S.), Three Uncanny Four (U.S.) and Neon Hum (U.S.) - spanning topics including daily news commentary, investigative features, comedy/satire, politics and even family and parenting issues. Patreon sees a simple and obvious explanation for it: Sony Music’s foray into podcasting is a direct - and in many ways competitive - response to Spotify.

Lockdowns and quarantines caused by coronavirus mean we’re in uncharted territory in a $54 billion global music industry. "There’s going to be immediate financial loss for bands" - on one side, as one promoter tells the NME, and on the other - "the anxiety of fans as to whether they’ll get sick at [shows]". Ticket sales are already suffering, with promoters pointing to a downturn in all regions of Europe, with the exception of Germany, festivals are getting cancelled, some giving refunds, some offering opportunity to use tickets in subsequent fests. Promotors are hoping that the warmer weather will clear the virus, until then some of the live music scene will surely end up online.

"If public gatherings are limited to the size of the average cheese rolling contest and all big shows are banned – suddenly the nation will have to flock to their local pubs and independent venues for their monster weekenders, exposing themselves to a whole new strain of underground brilliance" - Mark, My Words sees a light at the end of the corona-tunnel. Actually, two lights: "With an unexpected year off touring and every album-then-tour cycle in the world broken, we’ll see every single major act confined to their home studios meaning a culture-wide torrent of high profile new albums".

For the creative sectors, right now, there is a big emerging opportunity in people sitting at home, being bored out of their minds - Music x Tech x Future says in an analysis of coronavirus ramifications. Oline channels with visible music experiences on Twitch and YouTube are going to see a jump in viewers; we’ll see musicians recording more video content; some festivals will try to generate digital revenue in some similar form; younger startups will be making social music experiences. Not everybody has cancelled their gigs - Israeli artist Kosha Dillz is still going to SXSW, as he wrote for Variety. When he returns to Israel, he’ll need to quarantine himself for 14 days.

"What does truth mean in the context of pop music, and who has to suffer for that truth" - NBC asks in an interesting article after Billie Eilish questioned the validity of certain rappers' lyrics in a cover story for Vogue. "This discussion starts with a paradox" - NBC argues - "If the artist is not actually living the life described in their music, they can be criticized as fabricators or worse. But if every line is even close to true - the drug trafficking, the suicidal threats, the boozing, the violence, the promiscuity - it will likely lead to a brief flicker of a career".

Many successful bands benefit from the push and pull between one member who believes that music should be a vessel for ideas and activism and one who just wants to give people a good time, the optimal result being music that is simultaneously righteous and fun - Guardian writes about the curious/unfortunate Public Enemy split, supposedly over Bernie Sanders. “Chuck D, he’s the politician of the group. I’m just the friendly jester” - Flavor Flav said. "It’s a shame that after 35 years Public Enemy is no longer able to contain both impulses, but whoever is to blame, it’s not Bernie Sanders" - the G said; adding a good point: "Band dynamics are as hard to fathom as other people’s marriages, which is why our cultural obsession with splits and reunions goes far beyond music. They are case studies in the forces that bring people together and drive them apart".

While the coronavirus has taken a big toll on the arts world in terms of closed venues and canceled events, it has also spurred plenty of show-must-go-on creativity in some of the hardest-hit areas, as performers and organizations have tried to adapt to trying circumstances, playing in front of - a camera, streamed online, like Quartetto Dafne string quartet playing Beethoven and Borodin in La Fenice opera house in Venice on Monday. New York Times has the encouraging story.

You used to have to pick a side. You broke America by singing in English. You played the part of lover boy through peacocking and hypermasculinity. You made it in pop by picking your political battles. Bad Bunny is breaking all the rules with a glee that plays up how silly all these hyperspecific ideas about gender and language and pop stardom and activism have been all along - Vulture says in a commentary about latino reggaetone star Bad Bunny; who's just released his new album.

Concert venues and music businesses in Nashville are beginning to rebuild after being hit by several tornadoes Tuesday morning, Billboard reports, While popular concert venue the Basement East saw major damage, many other East Nashville-based music companies are also grappling with the aftermath of the destruction. Collective Artist Management (whose clients include Clint Black, Sara Evans and Edwin McCain) and Dualtone Records (the label home to the Lumineers, the Lone Bellow, Shovels & Rope and Amos Lee) both witnessed extreme loss. Craig Dunn, vp Collective Artist Management shared news on Facebook: “I was overwhelmed when I saw the devastation and damage to this beloved neighborhood in our great city. My sadness and dismay were quickly replaced by hope and optimism as hordes of volunteers showed up with snacks, water, and two hands willing to help clear debris. I DEFINITELY Believe in Nashville”.

"It’s only a matter of time when going to a party will mean just putting on Virtual Reality (V.R.) goggles and headphones at home and you’ll be at the event with people from all over the world, chatting in real-time with someone who could be present in their natural looks, retouched, as a cartoon, avatar… the possibilities are endless" - DJ UMEK told Attack magazine about what he thinks DJing will look like in ten years. DJ Heather has a philosophical perspective: "We are living in the future past present. The next ten years will be straddling the world of the analogue and digital. Reflecting a desire f the deejay, producer, club-goer, raver to connect on a tactile level while being able to maintain the convenience of having world access in the palm of their hand".

Last week the mighty chamber indie collective Magnetic Fields announced that their new album, ‘Quickies’, will consist of 28 songs; the longest of which clocks in at 2.35 and the shortest runs to just 17 seconds. It’s a new paradigm I’d love to see alternative music embrace again" - Mark, My Words argues in favor of short songs in rock.

An awful lot of the Austin economy depends on the festival, and its cancelation would affect a lot more than just the attendees, Texas Monthly argues in favor of going ahead with plans to hold South by Southwest this year (25,000 people have signed a petition to cancel it). People that depend on SXSW are - "caterers, pedicabbers, ride-hailing drivers, bartenders and servers, tech crew and security staff, and countless others who rely on SXSW as a windfall to pay off bills and get their heads above water each year. A whole host of bars and restaurants are able to weather the slow winter months because they know that, come March, rental fees and prepaid bar tabs will keep them afloat. Hotels and pizza places and portable-toilet rental companies have developed alongside SXSW".

Since the start of this year, Ozzy Osbourne, 71, had to cancel his 2020 tour to seek treatment. Elton John, 72, had to ditch dates after declaring himself “extremely unwell”. Madonna, 61, was forced to scratch a bunch of shows due to “overwhelming pain”. Aerosmith had to scratch dates due to various health issues experienced by Steven Tyler. The 56-year-old frontman of Metallica, James Hetfield, needed to cancel shows to look after his health. Beforehand, Paul Simon stopped touring at 78, Bob Seger at 74, Kiss aged between 68 to 70, Neil Diamond at 79, and Eric Clapton at 74. Guardian is trying to find consequences of this change, and it's quite simple. According to Pollstar, five out of the top 10 worldwide tours of the last year featured band members over the age of 50, which makes them the cornerstone of touring, especially since the audience who attends shows by older stars has the deepest pockets, raising profits for everyone. In general, the touring industry is generally estimated to generate between $50-60bn worldwide.

Spotify is asking record labels and artists for money to advertise their songs within its app, arguing that they’ll reach new fans and increase their popularity - Bloomberg writes in an analysis of the streaming giant's change of business model. The effort is controversial because it’s complicating wider talks over long-term music rights between Spotify and the record companies. The service has already introduced one tool, called Marquee, and is pitching a second.

Bernie Sanders has drawn endorsements from a wide range of Gen X and millennial rock musicians - from Vampire Weekend, the Strokes and Portugal. the Man to Jack White, Best Coast and Bon Iver, as well as a number of hip-hop artists, among them Public Enemy, Cardi B., Lizzo, Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike, Anderson .Paak, Lil Yachty, rapper T.I., and pop stars including Miley Cyrus, Zedd and Ariana Grande. It's not only Sanders who musician like - Cher, singer/actress Rita Wilson and her husband Tom Hanks are stumping for former Vice President Joe Biden, while John Legend, Melissa Etheridge, Rosanne Cash and Aimee Mann are backing Sen. Elizabeth Warren. LA Times discusses what does such support mean in the age of social media?

Lewis Capaldi this week starts a tour that will see him play some of the UK’s biggest venues, Sam Fender and Dermot Kennedy will soon play two shows each at Alexandra Palace, Billie Eilish plays four O2 Arena dates in July, Scottish troubadour Gerry Cinnamon is set to play arenas, castles, parks and even Glasgow’s Hampden Park stadium. How did it come to that? - some artists have huge followings thanks to social media, without having to play small shows. This often means they haven’t had the time to work on their live show and develop as artists used to. Guardian wonders whether it's damaging to young artists to be playing such big venues so early in their careers.

Lebanese singer-songwriter Juliana Yazbeck wrote an excellent article in the Gal-Dem about double standards when it comes to the perception of Arab music. "Apparently, my music is 'hard to sell' and 'hard to categorise'. A former manager of mine – also an Arab – said to my face that if I were 'less niche' I could book bigger shows and get paid more (read: get paid what I deserve). Who decides how niche I am? I would imagine that decision is down to me. Meanwhile, acts like Coldplay appropriate and fetishise our people’s culture and suffering (see: their latest album 'Everyday Life'), and we are meant to be grateful for being noticed by them. The same door that closes for us opens for white artists appropriating Arab culture". And she's not that niche at all, as Juliana says herself, she is - "combining Arabic singing traditions with rap and genre-bending electronica".

Indie singer-songwriter Moses Sumney, pop-punk bandleader Hayley Williams, and country duo Maddie & Tae are dropping their new albums in two or more multi-song installments, divided by months.  “All of this comes down to streaming” - one indie label campaign manager explained. Nick Blandford, Sumney's publisher, said - “attention spans are short. We can’t change that. But we wanted to try and play with it a bit”. MusicWatch managing director Russ Crupnick is completely practical about it - “every study we do around social says the No. 1 thing fans want to hear about is new releases from their artists”.

"Musicians don't drink like normal people," Canadian singer-songwriter Damhnait Doyle wrote in a Toronto Star op-ed earlier this year. "You drink before gigs, during gigs, after gigs, on your day off, on a travel day, at the airport bar, the hotel bar, in the bus, the back of the van, when the show sucks, when the show is off the hook, when your song is on the radio, when no one's playing your single. Alcohol is both the journey and the destination". The article inspired Exclaim to talk to several artists - Hollerado drummer Jake Boyd, singer-songwriter and Single Mothers frontman Drew Thomson, PONY bandleader Sam Bielanski and singer-songwriter Ansley Simpson - about how they got sober and what has changed since they stopped drinking.

16 years ago - in a more innocent, less litigious, and more freewheeling time - Danger Mouse made a sensation with his 'Grey Album' that combined music from The Beatles' 'White Album' and Jay-Z's vocals from his 'Black Album'. Rolling Stones is wondering would we get to hear such an experiment now? The answer is - probably not! Far more so than in the post-Napster days of 2004, the music business is on edge about copyright infringement. If anyone had the notion of creating something akin to 'The Grey Album now', those thoughts would be quickly extinguished, considered not worth the risk and cost.

Earlier this month, an ad agency space150 shared a song and music video called 'Jack Park Canny Dope Man', credited to an A.I. called “Travisbott”, based on Travis Scott’s original music and lyrics. The song was lousy, but it raises a serious question: How do we deal with the sampling and reproduction of an existing artist’s musical likeness when someone completely unrelated stands to profit from it? Holly Herndon, who collaborated with A.I. on her last album, raised the issue: A.I. is getting better at sounding like human beings, so what will the humans controlling the A.I. do with that power? Herndon told the Fader that she saw something like Travisbott coming: “I think we're going to see a flood of automated compositions, people using neural nets to extract the logic from other people's work and a lot of appropriation. We're going to see big issues around attribution”.

Plant enthusiasts are opening channels of communication with their plants through bio-sonification devices like Music of the Plants and PlantWave, conducted in the trending language of ambient noise. The resulting plant music is used in a variety of ways – mixed into songs, as background sounds in yoga studios, or as installations in art galleries. NPR is wondering what does it mean to have plants "playing music", and, indeed, should we take it as music, since these sounds aren't made intentionally by the plant to communicate. The article suggests people should try to stay away from anthropomorphizing the plants too much - the imposition of a human scale and pitch allows us to be more aware that plants are living, but it might make us think they feel like us, even when they don't.