“Just having money in general, especially when you’re showcasing cars or things on your body, you’re obviously a target. Hip-hop often tries to sell wealth and success on social media. But at some point, you’re just giving somebody a list of potential victims” - Rapper Glasses Malone says to LA Times after the recent killing of PnB Rock. He's just the last one in a string of the city’s black music community losses over the last couple of years. The LA daily sees a change - more security and less public flamboyance among local rappers.

Jamaica's broadcasting agency has banned music that "glorifies illegal activity" - such as drug and gun use, the BBC reports. The ban covers TV and radio and lists specific topics that are off-limits - scamming, drug abuse and the illegal use of firearms. Swearing or "near-sounding" replacements are also banned. Some artists who argue music is a reflection of life have criticized the ban.

An American artist or an academic can't get nominated for MacArthur Fellows award, and the pool of candidates is a tightly-held secret. It's also a sweet cash prize. This year's 25 Fellows will each receive $800,000, a "no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential". This year's class of so-called 'geniuses' includes three musicians:

Martha Gonzalez of Scripps College is a musician, scholar and artist/activist "strengthening cross-border ties and advancing participatory methods of artistic knowledge production in the service of social justice"

Ikue Mori of New York, N.Y., is an electronic music composer and performer "transforming the use of percussion in improvisation and expanding the boundaries of machine-based music.

Tomeka Reid of Chicago, Ill, is a jazz cellist and composer "forging a unique jazz sound that draws from a range of musical traditions and expanding the expressive possibilities of the cello in improvised music"

WeTransfer presents artists who have put down roots in the deserts of the world – including Tinariwen, Cate Le Bon, Mdou Moctar, Imarhan, and Itasca – to find out how the landscape has shaped their sound and altered their perspective. Algerian desert rock quintet Imarhan's frontman Sadam has an interesting perspective: "In the nostalgia there is hope because you would always hope to find again what you miss. The space in the desert gives a lot of room for nostalgia. The wind specifically is an element that brings nostalgia. It makes you travel in your mind. You will feel carried by the wind, even if you are surrounded by people.”

Okkervil River's Will Sheff is about to embark on the US tour, and he estimates that he’ll lose approximately $5-7,000 end on his East and West coast tours. He expects to lose double that in Europe. He shares his thoughts in the Stereogum interview: “These tours feel like you have to charge in with the bayonets and cannons. You already know from the manager telling you and every other band telling you, ‘It’s a tough climate, there’s no money – go out and fail!'”. On the other hand, Animal Collective have cancelled their UK/EU dates, citing "inflation, currency devaluation, bloated shipping and transportation costs and much much more",

based singer-songwriter and guitarist Meg Baird has shared a video for 'Will You Follow Me Home?'. It's from her new album 'Furling', out January 27, her first solo record since 2015’s 'Don't Weigh Down the Light'. The mysterious London collective Sault have returned with a brand new single ‘Angel’, produced by SAULT frontman Inflo, featuring vocals from Jamaican artist Chronixx.

“Today, in wartime, our community is starting to make itself visible again. New parties awaken memories of a long-forgotten phenomenon: life” - Kyiv-based photographer Arthur Vovchenko and Anna Lukash told Mix Mag after STEZHKA, queer party, was held on the first weekend of October. “We are going through very dark times, so parties are valued differently now. I feel that the community needs this space, we need to see each other, kiss, talk, and dance in order to support each other and ourselves” - Arthur says.

Radio pioneer Art Laboe, who spent seven decades behind a microphone, brought rock 'n roll to the West Coast and coined the phrase "Oldies but Goodies", died at age 97 on Friday at his home in Palm Springs. The radio legend is credited with pioneering industry standards such as audience requests and song dedications, and he is believed to be the first DJ to play rock 'n roll tunes on Los Angeles radio. He was also among the first DJs to play music by both Black and white artists, and he built a major following among Latino communities across the region. Laboe’s last show was produced last week and broadcast on Sunday night, two days after he died. LA Times shares a lovely story about their co-citizen.

Protests in Iran over the death of 22-year-old Iranian-Kurd Mahsa Amini entered a fourth week in defiance of a bloody crackdown. Amini died on September 16, three days after she was arrested by “morality police” for an alleged breach of Iran’s strict dress code for women. The nonprofit Iran Human Rights estimated that at least 154 people, including children, have been killed in the protests. Pitchfork points out to the de facto anthem of protests - 'Baraye', written by the 25-year-old singer Shervin Hajipour. The song’s lyrics are composed of crowdsourced social media posts from Iranians - “For my sister, your sister, our sister ... For dancing in the alleys ... For terror when kissing ... For women, life, freedom” - with each line beginning with “Baraye,” which translates to “Because of…” or “For…” in Farsi.

The Spectator introduces 'Industry', the British-made TV drama about young bankers: "More and more bankers are shirking expensive bottle-service clubs for those which can be considered ‘cool’ – venues such as Fabric, Fold and Oval Space, many nestled in the half-gentrified warehouse districts of east London. These play techno, house and other strands of electronic music which eschew the sugar-rush build-ups and bass drops of commercial dance. Many bankers treat this more in-the-know kind of clubbing as social camouflage: escaping the stigma of a boring corporate job with a night under strobe lights".

Approximately 100,000 fresh tracks are now being uploaded to music streaming platforms every day, according to Universal Music Group CEO and Chairman, Sir Lucian Grainge, and the outgoing CEO of Warner Music Group, Steve Cooper, the Music Business Worldwide reports. Another big milestone - Apple Music confirmed that the total number of tracks on its platform has now surpassed 100 million.

ContraBrand Marketing Agency released their latest report How Artists are Going Viral on TikTok in 2022, featuring analysis of all 20 of TikTok’s weekly Top 200 Tracks by country charts. CB's study specifically examined all tracks released in 2022 which went on to become respective artists' most streamed songs in their Spotify catalog, with a minimum of one million streams.

The key takeouts:

Artist-Generated Content (AGC) the most common method for breakout artists to go viral in 2022 (35.5%). It is also the most cost-effective and lowest barrier to entry for artists looking to break into the music industry.

Of the 208 artists analyzed in this report, 117 of them were unsigned (56.2%) — all accumulating more than 1 million Spotify streams thanks to TikTok. 63.1% of these unsigned artists went viral without the need to run ads, pay influencers or hire agencies to develop trends around their tracks.

Read the full reports here.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act, which limits the ways an artist’s lyrics can be used against them as evidence in criminal cases, the LA Times reports. The bill establishes a presumption that lyrics have minimal value as evidence. It covers all forms of creative expression but is especially salient for hip-hop artists, whose slice-of-life lyrics have frequently been cited by prosecutors in criminal trials as proof of guilt. The bill has been championed by the hip-hop community, the music industry and free-speech advocates.

Oud is a guitar-like stringed instrument popular in the Arab world, popularized in the Western world by Yemeni-American musician Ahmed Alshaiba who produced renditions of some of popular culture's most recognisable sounds on the instrument. The 32-year-old died in a car accident in New York in late September. His music will, however, live forever. Middle East Eye selected five of his most recognizable covers.

Music rights company Concord has bought the publishing and recorded music catalogs of Tony Banks, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford, as well as the publishing and recorded music catalog from their years in the band Genesis. The Wall Street Journal reports that the ‘megadeal’ is ‘valued at over $300 million’. These catalogs contain songs such as 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', 'Sussudio', 'Against All Odds', 'All I Need is a Miracle', 'In the Air Tonight', 'I Can’t Dance', 'That’s All', 'Land of Confusion', 'The Living Years', 'Invisible Touch' and other hits.

Pitchfork is looking back 30 years - they selected "150 albums that... shaped the way music would sound in the decades to come", and "250 songs that would make up Pitchfork’s ultimate ’90s mixtape". Here are the 10 best albums:

Nirvana: Nevermind

A Tribe Called Quest: 'The Low End Theory'

Hole: 'Live Through This'

Janet Jackson: 'The Velvet Rope'

Björk: 'Homogenic'

Wu-Tang Clan: 'Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)'

Liz Phair: 'Exile in Guyville'

Radiohead: 'OK Computer'

Lauryn Hill: 'The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill'

My Bloody Valentine: 'Loveless'

Producer Aphex Twin and the engineer Dave Griffiths have launched an app called Samplebrain, which translates inputted sounds into similar samples. The “sample mashing” design software has been in the works for some 20 years. Aphex Twin describes the app: “What if you could reconstruct source audio from a selection of other mp3's/audio on your computer? What if you could build a 303 riff from only acapellas or bubbling mud sounds? What if you could sing a silly tune and rebuild it from classical music files? You can do this with Samplebrain.”

Pitchfork shared a lovely read about jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders who died at 81 this weekend - "a guy who saw music as a means to keep food on the table, as well as a route toward holiness... For Sanders, transcendence didn’t exist only in some rarefied other realm; it was something you worked at here on Earth, with your lungs, and your lips, and a good reed if you could find one". Sanders belonged, the P points out, "to a cohort of musicians who, in the middle 20th Century, threw open the doors of jazz to allow for fierce dissonances, extended instrumental techniques, and a new style of improvisation oriented toward freeform collective expression rather than individual solos". Vulture also shares a beautiful read about the saxophonist: "Sanders not only represented the heart and hustle of New York City, he embodied its communal spirit as well. Be it the volcanic peaks or meditative valleys of his work, Sanders always spoke a very clear message: Love is everywhere, and it always finds a way".

To celebrate their first 15 years, Consequence is releasing a list of their 75 favorite albums of the last decade and a half. Plenty of various albums between Lorde's 'Melodrama' and Kendrick Lamar' 'To Pimp a Butterfly'. Check out the full list.

Consequence made a list of 100 best albums of all-time, It's a list that "assessed the mercurial value attached to art, from perceptions at the moment of creation, to retrospective consideration, to the impact on ever-evolving fashions". Check out what lies between Janes Addiction's 'Nothing's Shocking', and Pr

Raymond Chen, Microsoft’s principal software engineer, has discovered that Janet Jackson's 1989 song 'Rhythm Nation' heads the power to destroy laptop hard-drives. Chen said it "contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used”. Music theorist Adam Neely was there to explain the heart of the issue.

In May, rapper Young Thug and 27 other men associated with his YSL (Young Stoner Life) record label were arrested and charged with 56 counts of criminal activity. The indictment alleges they have committed crimes spanning murder, attempted murder, carjacking, robbery, possession of drugs and firearms, and witness intimidation. Essentially, prosecutors allege that Young Thug is the leader of a street gang. "The artist is at the centre of one of the biggest rap court cases in music history; a legal saga that has halted his career at its commercial peak and, with his lyrics being employed against him by prosecutors, reignited the debate around using art as evidence in court" - The Fa

R.E.M.'s Micheal Stipe is about to release his long-teased solo song 'Future If Future' as a split 12" single with singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe, Billboard reports. The disc will not be pressed on traditional polyvinyl chloride - the record will be the world’s first commercially available 12" made from sustainable bioplastic. It will be available for pre-order on Friday (September 2), in a limited run of 500 copies.

Atlanta’s top legal representative Fanni Willis said she has no plans to stop citing rap songs' lyrics in criminal indictments any time soon, Rolling Stone reports. “I think if you decide to admit your crimes over a beat, I’m going to use it... You do not get to commit crimes in my county, and then get to decide to brag on it, which you do that for a form of intimidation and to further the gain and to not be held responsible” - Willis said during a press conference for a criminal case that does use lyrics as evidence. Her statements come months after Young Thug and Gunna were arrested for allegedly violating the RICO Act. Young Thug's lyrics were cited heavily in his indictment.

"From dazzling Taiwanese math rock to Y2K-inspired R&B", Pitchfork had rounded up "a list of generally overlooked recent releases that deserve some more attention", which were released in 2022. Defcee is there, as well as mediopicky, Naima Bock and others. Check out the list below - https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/great-records-you-may-have-missed-spring-summer-2022/.

One man died and at least 40 others were injured as high winds exceeding 82 km/h (51 mph) caused part of the main stage at Medusa Festival in Valencia, Spain to collapse early Saturday morning (August 13), BBC reports. The festival grounds were promptly evacuated afterwards and organizers have since canceled the rest of the event.

The popular third-party Windows application for digital audio playback, the good old Winamp s back, Gizmodo reports. Developers posted the latest build of the software late last month, four years since its last update. At the peak of the download era, Winamp was renowned for its ability to play most popular audio formats and the customization of the user interface.

Women and first-time nominees dominate the 30th anniversary of the Mercury Prize, which celebrates the best British and Irish albums of the year. 11 of the 12 shortlisted albums are from the first-timers like Kojey Radical and Yard Act. Little Simz is the only artist here with Mercury history: her third album, 'Grey Area', was nominated in 2019, with her second nod coming for its follow-up, 'Sometimes I Might Be Introvert'. Simz also leads a pack dominated by women, with seven of the 12 albums by female solo artists or mixed groups, like Wet Leg, Jessie Buckley, and Joy Crookes. Guardian delivers a good insight.

“Next year, Pulp are going to play some concerts" - Jarvis Cocker said during a Guardian-hosted live Q&A. Next year also marks the 25th anniversary of the band’s 1998 album This Is Hardcore. This isn’t the Sheffield band’s first reunion. After splitting in 2002, after the release of seventh album, 'We Love Life', the five-piece reunited in 2011 for a series of festival dates.

Fans with access codes for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s much anticipated 2023 tour were offered tickets priced between $1,000 and $5,000, in Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing" system. “In pricing tickets for this tour, we looked carefully at what our peers have been doing” Springsteen’s manager Jon Landau said to the New York Times, adding - “We chose prices that are lower than some and on par with others. Regardless of the commentary about a modest number of tickets costing $1,000 or more, our true average ticket price has been in the mid-$200 range". Ticketmaster argued that only 1.3 percent of tickets sold went for more than $1,000.