The ultimate playlist
February 24, 2020

Spotify is owned by the big companies now

At the end of 2019, Spotify was worth $27.57 billion, with 65% of it being owned by just six parties: the firm’s co-founders, Daniel Elk and Martin Lorentzon have 30.6% between them, Tencent Holdings Ltd. has 9.1%, and a run of three asset-management specialists holding hold 25% - Gifford has 11.8%, Morgan Stanley has 7.3%, and T.Rowe Price Associates 6.2%. Sony and Universal continue to jointly own between six percent and seven percent of Spotify.

"The mobile experience of Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and YouTube Music are all built in a way where unless one seeks out playlists created by friends, it’d be easy to be completely oblivious to their own musical tastes. Why, with so many music streaming platforms, we’ve arrived at a fairly flat and isolated way of experiencing music" - Penny Fractions asks in an excellent article about the social context of streaming media.

"His improvised condemnation of Boris Johnson as a “real racist”, commentary on Windrush, reparations, Grenfell and tribute to London Bridge victims Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones made the moment a landmark for the music of black Britain" - Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies, wrote in the Guardian about Dave's performance at the Brits Awards, adding - "respect to all of the artists empowering a new generation of black people emerging from Britain: this is only the beginning of the next stage of the struggle".

Since the beginning of indie-rock scene in the 1980s, bands have usually been putting out albums every two years, but within the last year-and-a-half, artists on indie labels like Domino, Polyvinyl, Sup Pop, Barsuk, Saddle Creek, and Matador have been putting out music at a more frequent rate - every couple of months there's something - single, EP, song for compilation - coming out. “People used to tour to support music, and now people put music out to support tours” - as indie musician Sasami Ashworth told Billboard. Polyvinyl Label Director Seth Hubbard shares her sentiment - “The model of never going away does seem to be like the new normal... Now with Spotify being what it is, and social media being what it is, the reality for a lot of artists is that they need to tour more often to make a living".

In the last few decades, musicians have come to rely heavily on touring to generate revenue, and that means more travel, more concession stands, and more cars jammed into parking lots, which means more carbon in the atmosphere and more waste on the ground (and in the water). To limit their carbon footprint some bands have stopped touring (Coldplay), others are cooperating with Reverb, a nonprofit that supports musicians looking to neutralize or at least lessen the environmental impact of their work. Its premier service involves embedding a trained Reverb staff member within a band’s preëxisting crew, with the exclusive purpose of handling the logistics associated with running an environmentally responsible tour.

Let’s say that streaming becomes the de facto method of music delivery/consumption for the DJ community – what might this mean? - Attack Magazine asks theoretically (although it might just end up that way). It means that digital mixers and players will be able to collect and collate information from DJs about what they play, by whom and for how long. Digital mixers will be able to harvest every single piece of information from their actual front panel controls, which opens the door to DJ ghosts. Does it even signal the end of DJing? Probably not, it might simply be that in the future everyone, even A.I.s, can be a DJ.

Most musicians’ jobs don’t seem to be going anywhere in the age of artificial intelligence, it is more likely we're nearing a period ripe for hybrid creativity - Consequence of Sound argues in an interesting article, naming numerous examples of musicians using AI as an intelligent instrument. Ai tools exist right now and enterprising musicians are currently using them in creative ways. This will only increase as more tools become available and more musicians experiment with them, ushering in a new phase of creative expression that incorporates an ever-evolving AI tool set that enables musicians to more fully express our humanity.

Black is the color of my true love's player
February 12, 2020

The new generation of classical music - black and modern

While popular music is constantly evolving, classical music is stubbornly frozen in time. The field in the USA is overwhelmingly white - black musicians make up only 1.8 percent of orchestra members, Latino musicians just 2.5 percent, and white musicians comprise 85 percent of orchestra members. The general population is around 12 percent Latino, 12 percent black. Classically trained musicians Wil Baptiste and Kev Marcus are changing the rules - their collaborative project Black Violin, with a unique sound that fuses classical string instrumentation with hip-hop, has been attracting vast audiences from low-income children, which might also be an entry for many of them.

Women (and Men) on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
February 12, 2020

40 years after - how punks changed Spain

Homosexuality in Spain was only decriminalised in 1979. Spanish women had long been subject to a patrician curfew, which made most streets and bars an entirely male domain by 9pm. The country’s Civil Guard could detain anyone whose clothes, hair, or face gave them the flimsiest pretext under the prevailing law of “dangerousness and social rehabilitation”. The country was still being effectively run by soldiers and priests when a ragged lineup of young punks staged a free concert at Madrid Polytechnic on 9 February 1980, and everything changed, for the better. Forty years later, that night is remembered as the event that launched La Movida Madrileña, a countercultural eruption in the city during the country’s volatile “transition” to democracy.

Mom's little helper, only clever
February 11, 2020

AI in music - helps create otherwise impossible new songs

There are many musicians who feel that the onset of AI will spur a new golden era of creativity. Over the past several years, several prominent artists, like Arca, Holly Herndon, and Toro y Moi have worked with AI in order to push their music in new and unexpected directions. Musicians working with AI hope that technology will become a democratizing force and an essential part of everyday musical creation, just like with all the previous technologies.

DJing from a USB stick changed the game completely in the last 10 years - faster and more reliable USB technology opened the gates of DJing to bedroom hobbyists and newbies who could carry their whole record collections in a pocket. That also made DJing much cheaper, and certain skills much easier - most obviously, beatmatching. Through certain fresh innovations - hot cues, wide pitch, and the controversial sync button among them - the art of DJing has been blown wide open, offering new opportunities for experimentation which, in turn, have led young producers to create genuinely new sounds and styles.

Misophonia, also known as sound rage, is a negative predilection for the body sounds of others - rubbing, sniffing, scratching, crackling, wheezing, whistling. Those suffering from it react to specific trigger sounds, not necessarily loud sounds but repetitive ones, with negative emotions and thoughts. Could misophonia also be triggered with push notifications, like the ones in smartphones - "I wonder whether the recurrent retreat to a digital space can contribute to the intensification of misophonia or to its development. The risk here is to consider any manifestation of life as a push notification, to see other people’s activity as an enduring attentional bombardment".

They look like young brothers of the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard who plays Bee Gees songs in a Talking Heads way, so how come the Blossoms don't have Top 10 singles (albums do good, though), although they produce singles with hit potential. "It's just the way music is at the moment," observes drummer Joe Donovan - "bands just aren't the thing".

Smart, but stupid enough to die young
February 06, 2020

Smart speakers and every smart device you love will die, quickly

The American producer of smart speakers Sonos caused an uproar announcing they will stop releasing software updates and new features for a group of their "legacy" products - the original Zone Players, Connect, and Connect:Amp, first-generation Play:5, CR200, and Bridg. The announcement caused an uproar among their customers, so Sonos changed their tune saying they will deliver bug fixes and security patches to legacy products. For how long? - “for as long as possible”, without any hard timeline. Engadget points out the fact that the old stereos from the 1980s or even older are working just fine to this date, and the new, "smart" ones tend to have an expiry date of five years. Watch their video-analysis below.

No club is an island
February 06, 2020

Mark, My Words: The 100 Club is saved, the UK isn't

Savages at the 100 Club

A report in 2015 revealed that the UK had lost 35 per cent of its live music venues in the previous eight years because, on its own, the venue is but a solitary minnow squaring up against a school of sharks... But when their isolated individual voices combined with the help of the Music Venues Trust, they were saved - NME's columnist Mark Beaumont writes, defeatistically, about UK's exit from the EU, and how UK's clubs were saved on the very principle of unity.

The alternative party
February 05, 2020

Why illegal raves are flourishing in the UK

In recent years, unlicensed underground raves, which are run by decentralised networks of soundsystems and party crews, have flourished across the UK, the Guardian reports. These raves vary from 5,000-strong mega-raves in Bristol warehouses, to three-day breakcore soundclashes on south coast beaches, to intimate psytrance parties in the woodlands of Lancashire, and multi-rig “teknivals” on Scottish wind farms. The G names three roots of this phenomenon - widening social divides, ongoing Tory austerity and creeping gentrification.

Ultra- plenty, expensive, popular
February 03, 2020

Rise of the electronic music festivals in the last 10 years

"Once hotbeds of countercultural thinking, psychedelic encounters and free love, festivals underwent their own process of commodification [at the turn of the decade], turning into consumer experiences with clear price tags" - Resident Advisor says in an article about electronic festivals. "One effect of the collapse in record sales is that money shifted towards the live experience: gigs, clubs and festivals... In dance music, producers often found themselves launching DJ careers in order to support their studio graft", RA says, adding "some people in the industry whisper that festival culture is reaching saturation point". So, they should go "back to the spirit of experimentation that first turned these outdoor gatherings into testing grounds for new ways of living in harmony with each other and the planet".

Shakira and J-Lo made history last night as the first Latina artists to headline the Super Bowl halftime show. Shakira and Jennifer Lopez performed solo and together to put on "a stunning half-time show" at the Super Bowl in Miami where the Kansas City Chiefs beat the San Francisco 49ers 31-20. Shakira put plenty in her seven minutes - 30-seconds snippets of her hits 'She Wolf', 'Whenever, Wherever', and 'Hips Don't Lie', and even some Led Zep's 'Kashmir' and belly dancing. Lopez’s 'Jenny From the Block' marked the handoff from Shakira, which was followed by 'Waiting for Tonight', 'Love Don’t Cost a Thing', and 'Let’s Get Loud'. J-Lo also dueted with her daughter Emme singing 'Born in the USA', with an American flag wrapped around her (was it some kind od immigrant-policy commentary?).

K-pop boy-band BTS is one of South Korea’s biggest exports - with ticket sales, music downloads and merchandise racking up a reported $4.65 billion last year, which amounts to 0,3% of South Korean GDP. They have sponsorship deals with companies from all over the spectrum - when BTS stepped out in a Hyundai Palisade last year, the SUV was on back-order for months. Sportswear manufacturer Puma had s deal with BTS for track suits and sneakers; global character brand LINE Friends had a deal for cellphone cases and plush dolls; South Korean beauty brands VT Cosmetics and Mediheal have a marketing deal with them for makeup, perfume and face masks; even toy maker Mattel is partners with BTS, for figurines and Uno card deck.

MIDI 1.0 was released 37 years ago, and it had a big influence on music as a tool for manipulating and transferring sound. Now, it has finally received a major update - MIDI 2.0 is expanded from 7-bit values to 32-bit values (like going from the resolution of a 1980s television to the high-def TVs of today). It means that instead of 128 steps for features like volume, there will now be billions. With more memory, this should mean music played on MIDI 2.0 instruments will feel more analog, and make it possible for non-keyboard instruments to work better with MIDI.

Music, like pretty much everything else, is caught up in petro-capitalism. Vinyl records, as well as cassettes and CDs, are oil products that have been made and destroyed by the billion since the mid-20th century. Is rejecting physical media and embracing streaming the answer? No, because digital media is physical media, too. Digital audio files rely on infrastructures of data storage, processing and transmission that have potentially higher greenhouse gas emissions than the petrochemical plastics – to stream music is to burn coal, uranium and gas.

Zed Leppelin
January 29, 2020

Are cover bands illegal?!

Not only are the tribute acts performing the songs of the original act, they are trading off the name, brand, images, and reputation of the original act, making on average, $500 per night per member, while a successful tribute act can gross over $10,000 a night during peak season. In some cases, they might be illegal - if the original act can show that they lost audiences or live revenue as a result of the tribute act. In 2009, a Bon Jovi tribute band Blonde Jovi had to change their name due to “likelihood of confusion”, although all the members of the tribute act - are women (pictured above).

After she won it all, where do we go?
January 28, 2020

Billie Eilish - "the quintessential Generation Z pop star"

"She appears to be one of those rare artists whose unlikely breakthrough signals a turning point for the whole industry. Her totally untested route to fame indicates that, for this generation, the unspoken rules that 00s female pop stars had to follow may finally be starting to fall away" - the Guardian predicts change after Billie Eilish's big win at the Grammys - "She’s a nonchalant, nihilistic figure... moody and quiet".

How about being the guitar player?!
January 25, 2020

Are immersive shows the future of live music?

Presented with ever-higher ticket prices, music fans have become more demanding; hence a rise in immersive, Secret Cinema-style gigs. We have already stepped into that future - Skepta’s Dystopia987 in Manchester was part gig, part theatre, at Travis Scott’s second annual Astroworld festival guests could ride ferris wheels and carousels, US rock band Starset used augmented reality to place a huge virtual spaceship to land on the stage...

In the country music industry, there is a saying “You don't want to be 'Dixie Chicks-ed", meaning you don't want to say one thing that's going to blow up your whole career. Dixie Chicks went from global stars, to being "canceled" (no albums, sporadic concerts, low radio-airplay), to heroes. The crucial moment was their political comment, which they didn't apologize for, didn't regret it, and, in the end - "it paid off, for them, and for everyone else who refuses to shut up and sing".

In a 2018 study, 50 percent of musicians reported battling symptoms of depression, compared with less than 25 percent of the general adult population. Nearly 12 percent reported having suicidal thoughts — nearly four times the general population. But with a new wave of initiatives and organizations seeking to help, the industry is taking action like never before.

Minimum for a wage
January 21, 2020

How short is too short for a concert?

Cardi B carried on for only 50 minutes last summer at Target Center. The over-the-top hip-hop hitmaker might have spent more time doing her hair and makeup. ZZ Top exited the Minnesota State Fair grandstand after just 63 minutes. Does their Rock Hall of Fame career still have legs after 50 years of touring? Minneapolis music hero Alexander O’Neal performed for a mere 45 minutes at the Dakota last month. How long should a concert headline set last?

Late last year, when Roddy Ricch’s debut album 'Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial' dropped, meme-makers and especially TikTok users keyed into the opening seconds of the song 'The Box' - particularly the squeaky-wheel noise at the start, which, it turns out, is ideal for micro-videos. Three official singles were issued from the album last year, and 'The Box' still doesn't have a video - "When the rapper with the biggest song in America couldn’t foresee what song would take him to the top of the charts, it’s a reminder that nobody in this business ever really knows exactly what might squeak through".

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