REDEF Set started a new curated collection of articles Live Music 2.0(21), about the state of live music in the (vaccinated part of the) world. There are several paths that could be taken: vaccinated fans in the orchestra section wearing black wristbands, non-vaccinated (but negative-tested) fans in the balconies, everybody in masks (like the Los Angeles Opera); Springsteen on Broadway will reopen end of June - attendees will need proof of vaccination and a photo ID to get in; club doors open to a full-capacity crowd, masks encouraged but not required.

Several companies have spent billions of dollars buying music catalogs of established pop stars. Variety goes behind the new model in the music business: "A song catalog is an asset much more complicated than, say, a Picasso or even many real estate properties, and some investors seem to enter the arena on the mistaken premise that all songs, or even all hit songs, are created equal. In reality, they are demanding, ephemeral assets that require a lot of attention — pitching, repackaging, finding new opportunities — without oversaturating and thus damaging the artist (a.k.a the brand) or the songs".

The World Intellectual Property Organization, a United Nations agency tasked with the protection and promotion of intellectual property, issued a lengthy report Artists in the Digital Music Marketplace, where its authors Chris Castle and Claudio Feijoo took a clear stand: "Why does everyone in the streaming economy seem to be prospering except performers whose work drives it all?". The report recommends a new streaming music royalty that would be paid directly to "performers (and potentially to producers)" without going through labels or publishers.

Jacobin magazine goes into a quest to find socialism in hip-hop, starting with the most famous examples - Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. - and taking a left turn to find some new ones in underground hip-hop: "A handful of artists have been unequivocal in their willingness to operate under a red flag. Paris, Immortal Technique, and the Coup have been recording radical songs since the 1990s".

Guardian goes into reasons why movie studies are remaking classic rock songs into epic pop songs for movie trailers. Nirvana's 'Something in the Way' got a completely new identity in last summer’s teaser for 'The Batman'. Teaser for Marvel Studios’ 'Eternals' revamps Skeeter Davis’ country ballad 'The End of the World', the preview for 'Venom: Let There Be Carnage' took Harry Nilsson’s 'One' and added an arsenal of menacing symphonics, the teaser for The Suicide Squad twisted the easy grooves of Steely Dan’s 'Dirty Work' into pummelling beats and the trailer for last year’s 'Wonder Women 1984' featured an epic reimagining of New Order’s 'Blue Monday'. Will Quiney, the theatrical music supervisor at trailer house GrandSon, explains: “You can create a narrative with your music selection. If you can come up with an amazing idea for a song and have that trailerised in a really cool way that blows them away, you’re going to beat the competition, you’re going to win that trailer.” says . “agrees: “Music is the secret sauce to a great trailer and the best trailer editors know how to make the most of it”.

"It may have been only 10 minutes, but I'll be thinking about my One-to-One Concert with Mario Gotoh for a long time to come" - NPR's Jeff Lunden wrote after attending a concert where there was a musician - and himself. These concerts are the brainchild of German flutist Stephanie Winker and a couple of colleagues, who wanted to create an unusually intimate musical experience. Launched two years ago in Stuttgart, they've been done in Australia, Japan, India, across Europe, and the US, and have proven quite suitable in corona-times

"Apparently, this Eurovision-backed project called American Song Contest will air on NBC in 2022 and feature one 'incredible solo artist, duo, DJ or a band' to perform an original song from each of the 50 states, five U.S. territories, and D.C." - Emily Alford writes in the Jezebel, begging America not to do it! Because - "what concerns me is that America, as is its wont, will take this missive humorlessly, and every armpit of the country will try and send the closest it has to an Ariana Grande or Kacey Musgraves, when they should be giving us Yank versions of Jedward and A.B.B.A. It does make one wonder if the whole of Europe isn’t doing this on purpose for their own mean little amusement".

"Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Aviv, Israel — the last time the event took place — was broadcast live in 41 countries and watched by an audience of 182 million, making it the world’s biggest live music event" - Billboard explains big labels' new-found interest in the European yearly pop song contest. By comparison, this year’s Grammy Awards drew 9.2 million viewers, whereas February’s Super Bowl, the biggest U.S. television event annually, drew 96.4 million TV and online viewers.

“There was a 360 portal and you could go step on stage with them, and you could pick your camera angles” - Christian Guirnalda, director of Verizon’s 5G Labs, told Rolling Stone about the recent Black Pumas show, recorded at company's Los Angeles 5G Labs. Producers filmed in 4K video on a camera connected to Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network, which can create a “visually lossless” experience that “eliminates the side effects of image compression that’s visible to the naked eye”. There was no postproduction, either - all the visuals were rendered in real time. Rolling Stone believes this is the future, even after the live shows return.

“It really comes down to WHO is at these events" - DJ Cakewals says to DJ Mag about clubbing events coming back in the US, in light of the pandemic slowing down there. It's the nuances that will matter: "How serious is the crowd and promoter taking precautions? And for how long? Will the security or person [in charge of] monitoring the crowd just get lazy after a couple hours? Hold each other accountable, even if it’s uncomfortable!”.

New concerts are being added on a daily basis to the touring schedule in the US, mostly by American artists, thanks to the high vaccination rate. Trapital's Dan Runcie asks, rightfully so, "will you have the energy (and money) to still attend all their shows in the post-pandemic boom?". Live Nation's CEO Michael Rapino sits down with Recode’s Peter Kafka to talk about the industry’s comeback and how he’s figured out new tricks.

Apple Music announced it’s adding both Lossless Audio and Spatial Audio with support for Dolby Atmos to its service. From June 1, Apple is bundling these HD formats into its standard $9.99-per-month streaming subscription price. Amazon Music moments after confirmed that a range of HD audio options on Amazon’s Music Unlimited Service will now all be available for just $9.99 per month. Music Business Worldwide's founder Tom Ingham believes this is bad news for music in general and predicts that "over the next decade, we can now expect a slow war of attrition to trundle on between music rightsholders and the world’s largest tech giants over precisely this value calculation". Ingham also believes selling pricey hardware is the wrong way to go.

The Foreign Desk podcast looks into the Eurovision Song Contest from a point of geo-politics, with a witty twist from the hosts, coming from the least-successful country. TFD asks what the dos and don’ts of using Eurovision to project your nation are, and does it really have real-world political potency? Europe’s most popular cultural event will take place in Rotterdam next week, following last year’s cancellation.

"I really like the parts of NFT that foreground the support of artists directly, and I love seeing whole new forms of art flourish in a new medium. But I think the financialization around the NFT space needs some heavy auditing... I don’t want people to bet on me like a racehorse” - Zola Jesus says to Pitchfork about NFTs, the latest creative-financial trend in music (and broader). Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova believes "NFTs are good because they claim that digital art is art, and they actually show that there is value in something that no one can touch”, whereas ANOHNI thinks "it’s shit".

The Punk Rock MBA YouTuber this week presents trap metal, a new genre combining trap-rap and metal, especially the industrial segment of it. The video-blogger goes from early pioneers like Suicideboys, Bones, Scarlxrd, Ghostemane, and XXXtentacion, and suggests newer trap metal artists like Mugxtsu, Mimi Barks, Sinizster, Gizmo and Sematary.

Bands from all corners of metal are creating ferocious music that offers new perspectives on discrimination, race, gender and sexuality - Guardian reports on the changing face of the world's most controversial genre. The change is being fronted by podcasts On Wednesdays We Wear Black and Hell Bent for Metal, online communities like Alt Together, and fanzines such as Blkgrlswurld and Tear It Down, as well as by bands such as Nova Twins (dealing with misogyny and racial microaggressions), Life Of Agony (fronted by a transwoman), Tetrarch (fronted by African-American female metal guitarist), Pupil Slicer (discussing issues such as transgender healthcare) etc.

In the past year, pop-punk has made its comeback with the help of hip-hop crossovers by 4kGoldn and iann, Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker, MOD SUN, Trippie Red etc. Also, TikTok, good at nostalgia and promoting subcultures, also helped out bringing pop-punk back. Consequence gets a closer look.

"If the music industry can get its own house in order, maybe it can set the tone for a journey out of the climate crisis" - Guardian argues in an article about the possible transition of the music industry - everything from recorded to live music - from carbon-exhausting to green, and in doing so, set an example for the society as a whole. Some have already started - British independent label Ninja Tune is divesting its funds and pensions from fossil fuels, it is installing renewable energy systems in its London headquarters and it is encouraging the pressing plants that supply its vinyl to switch to green energy. Brian Eno's Earth Percent is aiming to raise $100m (£72m) by 2030 from the industry itself to transition towards sustainability. Beggars Group also announced major new carbon reduction commitments. The dance music scene is taking steps too - Last Night a DJ Took a Flight report argued that tours could be routed more efficiently, local scenes and artists could be better nurtured to reduce the pull of foreign superstars, and exclusivity clauses (where artists can’t play more than one show locally) could be challenged.

The entertainment industry appears to have massively capitalised on memes - Vice points out in an interesting article about how memes are new songs, and live streams. At first, memes were created using some other content intended for something completely different, but over the last year, there’s been a more formulaic approach where tunes are either made with the focused intention of being recreated as memes on Reels and TikTok, or beats are added to popular memes. What happened was that the audiences now expect memes from the producers now, not music, as few producers attest to. "The advantage is that you have better reach, but then people always expect you to incorporate humour into your music” - Anshuman Sharma said, while Sarthak Sardana added - “after I started making memes, my Instagram interactions went up by 3x, but the kind of following I got wasn’t into music”. Rosh Blazze got 7.2 million views for his remix - “now, my audience only wants to listen to my meme remixes, and sees me more as a video editor than a music producer”.

"Genre doesn’t classify the style of music we listen to - it segregates the artists who make it. Our problem is that we’ve conflated these two to mean the same thing" - Sameer Gadhia of the American pop-rock band Young the Giant writes in the Rolling Stone about the issue of "artists of color" in alter-rock. He is about to change the narrative with his SiriusXM Alt Nation feature, 'Point of Origin', where each month, "I spotlight an artist of color from the alternative space and trace their point of origin to their childhood".

Social media has always been less spontaneous than it appears, but from its inception, TikTok has been even more controlled than competing apps. Company executives help determine which videos go viral, which clips appear on the pages of personalized recommendations, and which trends spill out from the app to flood the rest of the world - Blomberg writes in its article about the mechanisms at work on the popular app.

Music technology and music industry Cherie Hu goes deeper into NFT. Her high-points:

• Musicians have sold over 55,000 total NFTs since June 2020, worth over $60 million
• Independent artists still run the show, but major artists and labels are quickly catching up
• Several technical, legal and political challenges remain to mainstream NFT adoption in the music industry

TV needs new content in order to grow, while music, on the contrary, thrives on catalog music, MBW points out the examples of Netflix and music consumption in the US in lockdown. In Q1 2020, Netflix added nearly 16 million global paid subscribers quarter-on-quarter, whereas in Q1 2021, the platform gained just 4 million – 2 million lower than its own forecast. Music, on the other hand, was thriving on catalog music (records released 18 months or more prior to the time of listening) - it claimed more than two thirds (68%) of the US recorded music market (in sales-equivalent terms) in the first three months of this year. Catalog’s total share of US sales-equivalent music consumption in 2020 stood at 63.3%, up from 62.8% in 2019.

“We were the ones most negatively affected by the war on drugs, and America has turned around and created a business from it that’s worth billions” - Jay-Z said explaining his decision to launch Social Equity Ventures Fund worth $10 million, to support minority-owned cannabis start-ups. America’s legal marijuana market is estimated to be worth $61 billion at the moment and heading all the way up. Rapper-turned-cannabis mogul B-Real of Cypress Hill explains - “everybody and their mama is gonna come and stake a claim. The only thing you can do is to stay ahead”. "I’ve got a built-in marketing mechanism" - late Nipsey Hussle said of his cannabis business, now being overseen by his brother. XXL Magazine insists that hip-hop artists getting paid from the cannabis boom is more than just a side hustle - it's a matter of social justice.

A great text in the Quietus about the movie 'Sound of Metal' about a metal drummer losing his hearing. "Yet this film asserts the beauty of silence. The sound design immerses us in the surf of Ruben’s [main character] ears, forcing the undeaf onto [director]Marder’s subtitles, or leaving hearing suspended, making us question how we use noise to avoid life" - Soma Ghosh writes, adding "our worship of the physicality of rock has silenced the deafness in our midst, though deaf artists have shaped Romantic music since Beethoven".

"Formed in 1980, Rudimentary Peni shuffled awkwardly at the edges of the anarcho-punk scene, their breathless pace and sheer oddity marking them as something else entirely" - the Guardian looks back at the history of the UK punk band. The Quietus also goes on to explore "the curious case of Rudimentary Peni, a transcendent punk band". Band's first new album in 26 years, 'Great War', is out this week.

"Such high-profile homages to a band long under-appreciated beyond these shores... cut far deeper than any barbs in the script. They don’t just lift The Smiths into the revered echelons of your Beatles, Rolling Stones, Whos and U2s; they remind us how special a band we’ve come to define by their differences really were as a unit" - NME's Mark Beaumont writes about a recent 'The Simpsons' episode (as well as the recent movie 'Shoplifters of The World'), and what it means for the band (Morrissey didn't like The Simpsons, said he would sue, if it weren't so costly). The columnist believes "here’s our chance to rescue The Smiths from the pyre, unshackle them from the conversation around them and let their music settle back into its rightful place, just below the heart of the human condition".

Adam Met from the pop trio AJR wrote an outline for eco-friendly touring, including the ways in which everyone - artists, agents, promoters, venues, fans - can participate in technological, agricultural, and psychological solutions. For agents it would mean connecting flydates in ways that permit less travel, encouraging less private plane usage, and choosing the most direct bus routes. Venues could transition to electricity from renewable sources, standardize the requirements for food and drink vendors to use local farms and move away from single-use plastics...

Apple Music has published last week that their average per play rate is $0.01, which is roughly double what Spotify pays the artists. But it's not that simple - MBW and Trapital explain Apple Music's and Spotify's models, their reach, the number of users, and how much exactly they pay to the labels (not directly to the artists, actually). Variety also points out, with word of an unnamed executive, that the best option is "a lot of users streaming a lot of music”, which would in return mean a lower per-stream rate. For example, if one artist were racking up a high percentage of streams on a less-popular streaming service, their per-stream rate would be quite high — but they’d actually have fewer streams than they would on a site with more users. Spotify has an industry-leading 155 million paying subscribers and 345 million active users, according to its most recent report, while Apple last reported more than 60 million Music subscribers in June 2019.

Songwriter of, well, the most popular pop band in the history of pop music, has some ideas for underpaid songwriters, which he shared in an op/ed in the Guardian: "Record labels could encourage a 'songwriter in residence' model, where artists are paired with songwriters at the development stage, as a long-term partnership: the writers would effectively become part of the band, paid a regular salary... I suggest that streaming services allocate their royalty payments based on the behaviour of individual listeners. The subscription should be divided by the number of songs the individual listener has played during a month".