"The giants of the financial world are now really waking up to the modern music business’s true value – and they’re throwing billions at it", Music Business Worldwide writes announcing a major shift in music rights. New York-based investment management titan Apollo Global Management is investing up to $1 billion in HarbourView. Investment company Blackstone is about to launch a new joint entity with Hipgnosis, that will have a billion dollars or significantly more to spend on music copyrights. KKR (& Co Inc) – which already has an existing billion-dollar investment vehicle in music running with BMG – has a portfolio of assets under its management worth $234 billion.

"One of the primary reasons most musicians—not just the top .01 percent—need to make money outside of recorded music is because the economics of streaming make it incredibly difficult to make a living, much less generate wealth, off listening alone. This is why the music business must fundamentally reconsider the potential for interactivity, community building, and immersion" - Dave Edwards, head of revenue at the music streaming platform Audiomack, notes in an analysis for tech blog Future.

Game-streaming platform Twitch has been the victim of a leak, with leaked documents appearing to show Twitch's top streamers each made millions of dollars from the Amazon-owned company in the past two years, Eurogamer reports. However, as music and technology analyst Cherie Hu points out, the top gamer on Twitch earns ~10x more per year from direct tips and subs than the top music artist on the platform. xQcOW made $752,467 in September 2021, whereas the top paid musician Kenny Beats has made $677,00 in the two-year period from Aug 2019 to Oct 2021.

"Despite disco’s rep as a frivolous trend, it was a fundamental chapter in American music and cultural history. Born out of Black music and queer subculture, it went on to influence generations of musicians. But disco also inspired a fierce backlash, and a concerted effort to write it off as nothing more than cool beats and bad fashion. That narrative stuck, and disco is just now starting to get its due" - the latest Quartz Weekly Obsession reads. It looks back at the start and the meaning of disco.

Betty Buckley, the actress who sang 'Memory' in the original New York production of 'Cats' tries to find some reason in Donald Trump's somewhat bizarre love for the song. "So, like, Trump was a handsome kid, but his dad was a bully, so he became a bully, just trying to impress Daddy. I can’t win with charm, he thought . . . and he’s always felt outside. In his heart of hearts, there’s this tremendous need, an insatiable need, to be loved, the love he never received from his father or mother. So that is in that song: that incredible longing to belong, to connect, to not be rejected, that’s what this whole thing is. All these years, I had no clue why that song touched him, but now, with this book . . . I get it, I get it!” - she tells the New Yorker.

The latest MusicREDEF newsletter points out the obvious - the similarities between Lil Nas X and Little Richard: "Nas, like Richard, is a theatrical musician who combines sexualized Black art and gender-bending provocations. They both thrived in a time when the taboo nature of what they do had loud sociopolitical resonance. Like Little Richard making everything from bluesy covers of Wilbert Harrison's 'Kansas City' to seductive slow drags like 'Valley of Tears', Lil Nas X's singles since his debut hit have expanded in a scattershot of directions. They've awed and frightened a lot of adults and served as a clarion call to free-thinking, progressive-minded ribaldry".

"In the digital era, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we have long had physical relationships with the pieces of culture we consume. The way we interact with something — where we store it — also changes the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update made me realize. Where we store something can even outweigh the way we consume it" - Kyle Chayka writes in an essay about the meaning of collections in a time of digital music. "While we have the advantage of freedom of choice, the endless array of options often instills a sense of meaninglessness: I could be listening to anything, so why should any one thing be important to me?".

"Banning Kelly’s music would be a form of censorship, and whatever metric is used to justify that ban should by all rights be used against others. But where does one draw that line? Kelly’s music continues to earn royalties, presumably millions each year. And stretching the question further, who exactly should be penalized? Should every songwriter, producer, or instrumentalist convicted of a certain felony category have each of their songs banned?" - Jem Aswad asks the essential question in Variety following R Kelly's conviction. Gives one possible answer: "Great art is sometimes made by horrible people, and whether or not a person is morally comfortable consuming that art, and earning money for that horrible person, is up to them". Jim DeRogatis, the journalist who brought the R Kelly story to the light, looks at the victims: "The verdict leaves several questions unanswered, including how the many people Kelly victimized will begin to heal".

"With live shows slowly returning, we’re seeing a fundamental contradiction play out: Even as livestreaming platforms continue to raise more funds and announce marquee celebrity partnerships, demand for music livestreams has gone down significantly from its peak last year" - Cherie Hu looks at the (last year's) promising new live music domain. "There are two possible reasons for this stagnation. One is that music livestreams just haven’t really innovated as a format to the point where fans are continually willing to pay for them... Maybe fans are just more interested in seeing these artists perform in person".

New York Times Magazine published an essay by Carina del Valle Schorske, 'Dancing Through New York in a Summer of Joy and Grief', which centers on the desire of people who've spent months in lockdown to be with others - "I needed my physique to affect and be influenced by different our bodies — this time not as a vector of illness however as a vector of pure feeling". Dada Strain looks somewhat deeply into it - "not just people’s need for simple contact, but for mass movement in improvised unison, for socially engaging rhythm, and for devising instants of momentary intimacy, locking into primordial practices of celebration and mourning".