Rave New World's Michelle Lhooq makes a great point in her latest newsletter about partying getting its long over-due recognition: "Suddenly, club culture was front-page news, rather than relegated to tabloid gossip or society pages; everyone poking out of their quarantine hovels now obsessed with knowing where the party’s at... Now, rave culture is going mainstream, Gen Z is arriving on the scene, and city officials are finally recognizing the economic value of nightlife—thanks in part to grassroots activism that kept beloved music venues afloat during pandemic shutdowns. Could all of this mainstream media attention finally destigmatize nightlife—a culture long associated with antisocial escapism and frivolous peacocking—and finally convince the gentry that partying is, in fact, an essential activity?".

Pitchfork goes into the sensitive issue of music ownership: "The reality that behind every young, female pop star exists a team eager to exploit that stardom by any means necessary has not exactly been obscure throughout pop history. The shadow of the svengali producer and manager, long solidified in the work of men like Phil Spector, Porter Wagoner, and Kim Fowley, lingers in the edges of the modern industry... But 2021 feels like a breaking point for a public understanding of industry control that stretches far beyond singular producer-artist dynamics or bad contracts. As high-profile artists like Britney Spears and estates like Aaliyah’s battle for control and fight off their respective leeches, they illustrate the ways in which a musician can be dehumanized to function as a kind of corporation, one through which a staff of bad actors can rotate, or be sold off in parts to the highest bidder".

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group have generated $5.60 billion in the three months to end of June, up by $1.53 billion (or +37.6%) on the same period of last year, Music Business Worldwide calculates. That $5.60 billion turnover equates to the three majors cumulatively generating $61.5 million per day in the year’s second quarter – or, in turn, $2.56 million every hour. In the first six months of 2020, the three major music companies generated $10.91 billion – putting them firmly on course for a cumulative $20 billion year.

"Concerts in real life have various constraints like budgets, the chance of accidents, space limitations, etc. But when it comes to a virtual world, there are none. If you have a crazy idea, you can get it implemented. And this widens the scope of how musical concerts can be done and how artists can interact with fans" - metaverse enthusiast E2Analyst writes in the Medium after seeing Ariana Grande perform in Fortnite.

"The 29-year-old rapper really stepped in it, and continued to smear it all over the place, when on July 25th during the Rolling Loud Miami music festival he made some truly vile comments about gay men and people living with HIV... After his clusterfuck of faux-pologies, DaBaby’s left those in the queer community no choice but to demand dollars... We don’t need apologies. We’re tired of apologies. To be Black and queer in this country is to constantly have to apologize for your own presence, to constantly assert your own value, and to constantly watch others dismiss you entirely. An apology ain’t doing shit for anybody. Instead, speak the only language that carries weight in this country: cold hard cash" - Rolling Stone gets to the bottom line with DaBaby.

The New Yorker writer likes the new Prince album, but still felt uncomfortable listening to it. This is why: "Prince didn’t have a will when he died. Every act performed with his music is done without his permission. Even the people who seemed to know him well speak of him as a mystery. Who, then, is qualified to say that they have any inkling of what he’d do with his songs? Recently, things got even more complicated: around the time that “Welcome 2 America” was released, news broke that many of Prince’s siblings had received buyouts from the independent music publisher and talent management company Primary Wave, giving it the largest stake in Prince’s estate. During his life, Prince was vocal about ownership, autonomy, and control. He did not want middlemen to take shares of his streaming revenue; he changed his name to a glyph partly in protest of what he saw as an onerous recording contract. The infrastructure profiting off Prince in death is the one he’s criticizing on 'Welcome 2 America'”.

Vulture Craig Jenkins looks beyond DaBaby being dropped from Lollapalooza after some public homophobic comments: "The connectivity the internet allows made it so people who grew up siloed in their like-minded communities now have to hear from the people on the margins, and the people on the margins got smart and organized and are starting to creep into positions of power and greater visibility, and the blowback for this has been unsubtle and retrograde and base and disgusting. A lot of people want things to stay the way they used to be and seem unable to grasp that the way things were required marginalized people to suck it up and live as second-class citizens in a country clearly built for someone else. There’s no going back to sucking it up. Here’s the thing: This ends one of two ways. We all die hating each other, or we start acting like other people exist and are deserving of the same respect and consideration that we demand for ourselves".

Last Thursday Kanye West had an album-release party, and the day after his 10th album 'Donda' was to be released. It didn't come out. Vice explores "how quickly could 'Donda' - or any other record, for that matter - actually hit streaming services after it’s finished? The answer depends on who you ask, and who you are".

"Last week, Kanye West hosted a 'Donda' album listening party for 40,000+ fans at the Mercedez-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. Kanye sold 40,000+ tickets for this event on three days' notice. Tickets were $20 or $50. He gave away around 5,000 seats, but still, he likely made at least $1 million from paid tickets. Plus merch sales. Plus the record-breaking Apple Music livestream. And all he did was press play and walk around the stadium. Only a handful of artists can pull this off" - Dan Runcie looks back at the release party of the album that wasn't released.

"What do musicians who blend fact and fiction owe their real life subjects?" - NPR's Ann Powers writes exploring "self-referential musicians making waves in 2021 not only because so many notable current songs tread this ethically shaky ground between self and other, true and imagined, but because that's what songwriters who perform their own work have been doing for at least a half-century... What unites these artworks is a thrilling immediacy that comes at the risk of their makers' dignity and their close companions' right to anonymity". A clever text about the sensitive issue.