Pitchfork this year adds a new list - a mid-June rundown of favorite albums of the first half of the year. This one is alphabetical and not ranked, and consists of personal picks rather than the results of a vote. The list includes some big pop names like the Weeknd, and Bad Bunny, some indie darlings like Animal Collective, and Angel Olsen, and a few underground names, like Astrid Sonne, Undeath, and Soul Glo.

42-year-old Daniel Lucey with the word "GOD" on his shirt tried to burn down the Satanic Temple building on Bridge Street in Salem, MA on Friday night, the Boston Globe reports. Lucey has since confessed to traveling to Salem with the intention of lighting the temple on fire, and that he intended for it to be a hate crime.

y has announced six new awards and rule changes for the Grammy Awards, including the Songwriter of the Year award. Grammys for the next year will also include Special Merit Award for Best Song for Social Change, as well the Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media, Best Spoken Word Poetry Album, Best Americana Performance, and Best Alternative Music Performance.

Mariah Carey is being sued by New Orleans songwriter Andy Stone for $20 million in damages over her holiday hit 'All I Want for Christmas Is You'. Stone alleges that he co-wrote a song with the same title five years prior to Carey’s release. Stone’s song was recorded by his country-pop band Vince Vance & the Valiants and released in 1989. Carey’s single was issued on her 1994 Merry Christmas LP. Pamela Koslyn, a Los Angeles attorney specializing in music and intellectual property rights, noted there are 177 works, many of them musical compositions, with 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' as the title. “Song titles aren’t entitled to copyright protection” Koslyn added, Deadline reports. Apart from the title, it is truly hard to find similarities between the two songs.

The Face was at the Flesh, "intimate festival", which "took place in a leafy location just north of London". The - "tunes were mostly hard-hitting techno, with an indulgent dose of crowd-pleasing edits thrown in". The looks - "pretty amazing". Check out the photos.

Next week, July 8 The Weeknd will play the first date of his ‘After Hours Til Dawn’ world tour at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, MBW reports. His stadium tour will be “the first global concert tour to integrate Web 3.0 technology for an enhanced fan experience”, with cryptocurrency exchange Binance named as the tour’s official sponsor. To mark the launch of the tour, Binance says it will donate $2 million to the XO Humanitarian Fund, which is administered by World Food Program USA.

“We are shocked and filled with overwhelming sadness with the untimely passing of our dear friend, family member, and bandmate Andy ‘Fletch’ Fletcher” Depeche Mode announced in a statement today regarding the passing of their founding member and keyboardist. Fletcher served many roles for Depeche Mode behind the scenes, including acting as the band’s de facto manager, and spokesperson (Rolling Stone).

The biggest music streaming providers in China, Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music, added 4.0 million paying music users quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2022, and 7.8 million respectively. TME’s official ‘paying online music’ user-base now stands at 80.2 million customers, while NetEase now stands at 36.7 million customers. Spotify net-added 2 million paying customers to its service in Q1 2022, and now stands at 182 million Premium subscribers outside of China. When it comes to finance, however, the numbers go in the Swedish company's direction - its Premium subs business generated €2.379 billion (USD $2.67bn) in the first quarter of 2022. Tencent Music online music services revenue fell to USD $413 million, while NetEase Cloud Music’s online music services generated USD $140m. MBW has all the numbers and comparisons.

Rolling Stone presents the new David Bowie documentary 'Moonage Daydream', Brett Morgen’s "extraordinary portrait of the late artist as cosmic philosopher, glam trickster, and sage-like cypher via a stream-of-consciousness blend of vintage performances, rare archival clips and career-spanning interviews... For Morgen, the project would turn out to be a five-year odyssey that included a near-death experience, a hobo-like trip through New Mexico, and a radical rethinking of what it means to balance the professional and the personal when making a music doc".