Spotify introduced a significant redesign of its app, including the vertically scrolling “discovery” feeds, a new “Smart Shuffle” mode for playlist recommendations, a new podcast autoplay feature and more. Mashable points out that "Spotify's update aims to help users find more content on the platform. The idea is that users will scroll through their feed and see fragments of content that they then will save for later. But these changes appear to miss the thing that people actually enjoy about the app: all the music they love being in one place." The Verge agrees: "The new design goes heavy on imagery and vertical scrolling, turning your homescreen from a set of album covers into a feed that much more closely resembles TikTok and Instagram. As you scroll, Spotify is also hoping to make it easier to discover new things across the Spotify ecosystem."

"Buh Records, based in Lima, Peru... launched in 2004... specializes in Latin American experimental music, and while its catalog features plenty of contemporary artists from across the region—and the globe—it maintains a strong focus on unearthing overlooked classics and unknown gems that reassert Latin America’s place in avant-garde history" - Pitchfork presents the notable label, and picks out some stand-out tracks.

Spotify revealed on their Stream On event that through December 31, 2022, it had paid more than €34 billion in royalties to record labels, music publishers, and other rights holders since launch, MBW reports. In 2021 the streaming giant paid €7+ billion, which was up from €5+ billion in 2020, which means it will likely reach the €40 billion benchmark this year. Spotify says that “nearly 70%” of every dollar it generates from music “is paid back as royalties to rightsholders, who then pay the artists and songwriters, based on the agreed terms”. Spotify also revealed that in 2022, as many as 10,100 artists from over 100 countries worldwide generated at least $100,000, and 1,060 artists generated more than $1 million.

A great read in Bloomberg about Pras Michél, a member of the highly successful band The Fugees, who used his celebrity status to get close to several high-ranking politicians such as Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He also got in contact with a high-ranking China security officer and Malaysian businessman accused of embezzlement of billions of dollars from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, blowing much of it on artwork, real estate and gifts for celebrity friends including Leonardo DiCaprio and Kim Kardashian. Pras is awaiting a trial, charged with 10 offenses, ranging from conspiracy to witness tampering and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.

Peruvian YouTuber and economist, Ioanis Patsias staged a big tribute show recreating Rosalía's performance from her latest Motomami tour. Patsias played the avant-garde pop queen himself, and he was helped on stage by eight dancers, picked out from 100 who auditioned for the part. They recreated the costume changes, the dance numbers, the lighting and stage design at an amphitheatre in Lima’s Parque de la Exposición, managing to sell-out the venue, with 3,500 fans attending the show. It took months of preparation and $100,000 of Patsias' money, who only managed to recoup only part of the money

Pitchfork suggests "several approaches that ticketing companies, public policy makers, and the music community could follow to make buying concert tickets a slightly less infuriating experience:

• Stagger the presales for big tours
• Abolish surprise fees
• Unwind Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation
• Keep resellers in check
• Give artists a choice on dynamic pricing
• Remember the Bandcamp model, and that small can be beautiful."

A new biopic 'Mixed by Erry” tells an amazing story about a huge pirate cassette mixtape business in Italy in the 1980s and the 1990s. Enrico Frattasio started the label selling his tapes to illegal stallholders in his working-class neighbourhood in Naples. By the late 80s, Mixed by Erry had spread throughout Italy and beyond, employing 100 people with an annual gross of around €4,5m in today’s money. “I was the YouTube or Spotify of the 1980s... I was doing a serious curator job” - Frattasio says.

US satellite radio service SiriusXM is reducing its workforce by 475 roles, or 8% of its total staff. At the end of 2022, SiriusXM had 5,869 full-time and part-time employees, 5% more that the prior year. SiriusXM announced layoffs are “critical for us to take the right steps now to secure the long-term health and profitability of our business.” SiriusXM posted annual revenues of USD $9.00 billion for the year 2022, up 4% YoY. Its pre-tax profit in 2022 weighed in at $1.61 billion, up 5% year-on-year.

Guitarist Gary Rossington, the last remaining original member of the US rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, has died at the age of 71. Rossington appeared on all of their albums and co-wrote the 1974 hit 'Sweet Home Alabama'. He was also one of the survivors of a 1977 plane crash that killed several of his bandmates, and marked a turn in their career. Rossington had been playing shows as recently as this last February.

An interesting article in The Pickle about YUNG YiDiSH, a library in Tel Aviv that serves as an alternative music venue in the evening. “It was obvious to me that a cultural place, in order to be relevant, needs to be in a noisy space, a hurtful space, a space where you can do things” - the founder Mendy Cahan shares his idea behind the library/club. He also believes that preserving Yiddish goes well with punk: “There is no establishment behind Yiddish. We don’t have an Académie Française, we don’t have powers from above. But Yiddish finds its way, and we manage, and have always managed, to teach our children to read and write without these structures.”

A 33-year-old woman died, two people were hospitalized in critical condition, and seven others sought medical treatment for non-life-threatening injuries after a crowd stampede at a GloRilla concert in Rochester, New York on Sunday. The incident occurred at around 11:00 p.m. local time at the Main Street Armory. The police reports that concertgoers began to panic after believing they had heard gun shots. However, investigating officers “found no evidence to support a shooting having occurred.” UPDATE: Aisha Stephens, 35, of Syracuse, has died after being hospitalised following the incident at the concert in Rochester, New York. Two other women, Rhondesia Belton, 33, and Brandy Miller, 35, died in hospital after being injured.

An interesting story in the Tracklib about members of a Discord community by the name of Sample Hunting, who have developed a new model of sample discovery, even the shortest samples. The new method includes Google Assistant which can even detect samples less than a second long, and is usually able to detect samples that have been chopped or time-stretched. Tracklib is a crate-digging platform to sample and clear original music.

lovely story in Pitchfork about Elliott Smith's teenage band Stranger Than Fiction of which the musician was kinda embarrassed. The band released six albums of guitar-based music in the 1980s, with Smith refusing to talk about later on. The P, next to the story of collecting the rare recordings, insists it's not that bad at all. "Once you make it past the surface-level impression—awkward kids making awkward stabs at rock music—these six records upend pretty much every received notion about who Smith was, what motivated him, and how he worked. Above all, craft mattered deeply to him, even at low points when it seemed that very little else did. These tapes bring that quality to the fore, presenting Elliott Smith the tinkerer, the woodshedder, the perfectionist."

Jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one of the most distinctive voices of his generation as a soloist, composer and bandleader, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 89. The 12-time Grammy award winner was a well-known figure on the jazz circuit since the late 1950s, playing alongside several greats, including Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, and Herbie Hancock, as well as in the jazz supergroup Weather Report, helping shape much of 20th Century jazz music. Jazz explorer Ted Gioia surveys Shorter's "remarkable compositions from the 1960s" - here.

Steve Mackey, a prominent producer and the longtime bassist for Pulp, has died. On Twitter today, Pulp announced that Mackey “passed away this morning.” No cause of death has yet been reported. Mackey was 56.

On Wednesday (March 1) the US House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to advance a bill that would effectively give President Joe Biden powers to ban TikTok in the US. The bill, known as the ‘Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries Act’, would also allow for the control of other China-related economic activity, if signed into law. The passage of the bill comes just days after The White House’s Office of Management and Budget issued a 30-day deadline for the app to be deleted from Federal employees devices due to national security concerns. On Monday (February 27), Canada also announced the banning of TikTok from all government-issued devices. Last week, The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, also banned its staff from using the ByteDance-owned video app on their work phones over cyber security concerns. The European Parliament also banned its staff from using TikTok this week.

Pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist and synth player Shahzad Ismaily, and vocalist Arooj Aftab have related their first collaborative track - beautiful 'To Remain/To Return' from their debut 'Love In Exile', recorded live in the studio with minimal edits. The song, as well as the collaborators' feelings about their album are quite promising. “Making music with Arooj and Shahzad is nothing less than an out-of-body experience. I’m weirdly in awe of our unhurried, mysterious creations; they seem to arrive fully formed from somewhere else" - Iyer says. "This piece holds, at its core, the delicately unfolding emotion of separation anxiety induced fury (see: love, self exile) between two people who are deeply connected. One is leaving and the other is asking them to stay. The former is saying ‘I will leave but I will also return’; in better form for the both of us” - Aftab says about the song. Ismaily adds, "We all provide the best we can. In my case it's euclidean rhythms, crystals to hold the oceanic beauty of Vijay's keys and the silent raven of Arooj's voice. We grow to the company that we keep; I am both fortunate and grateful".

"With the influx of cash that’s led to a music catalog buying spree over the past few years, where does all of this money come from?" - The Bag looks at the other side of the headline. Musicians have become much richer in the past five years since Hipgnosis kicked off this catalog boom. The biggest financiers:

Blackrock, who invested hundreds of millions of dollars via Influence Media Partners,

Litmus Music launched with $500 Million in funding from Carlyle Global Credit

Hipgnosis Song Management raised $1 Billion from Blackstone

"If the courts decide that not enough human input goes into an AI-generated work, then that work cannot be protected by copyright, and then the work will fall into the public domain, meaning that creators would lose their IP protections" - the law expert Barry Scannell points out for the MBW. Last week exactly that happened - "the US Copyright Office (USCO) refused to grant a copyright registration to AI images in Kristina Kashtanova’s Zarya of the Dawn comic (the Work), which used Midjourney generative AI art... This decision potentially has major implications for US creative industries, from music to art to gaming, as it calls into question whether works which utilise (even in part) AI technology can be protected by copyright."

A great read in Vice about the "shady, high-paying private gig industry", which has almost all the biggest pop and rock stars on one side, and just about anybody who has enough money to pay them, on the other side. As Vice puts it, it comes down to this: "With unimaginable amounts of money at the disposal of central governments and lucrative corporations, stars with relatively clean PR images are being tempted to get a slice of the action"

“I absolutely love doing covers. It’s such a joy to offer my perspective on songs I admire and spread the word about amazing artists" - California folk singer-songwriter Shannon Lay said sharing her cover of Elliott Smnith's 'Angeles'. "'Covers Vol. 1' is the first in a series of cover records celebrating my obsession with shannonizing songs” - Lay announced her new album, out April 14th.

British musician Will Pearce likes insects and music, so he combines these two affections and shares it with the world. He makes lovely little songs about insects, especially beetles, such as mole beetle, and crucifix ground beetle. But, Pearce also comes out of the exoskeleton, singing about grass, toads, bees, and other beings from nature.

Neil Young performed last weekend in Victoria, British Columbia at the United For Old Growth march and rally, aimed at protecting old-growth trees and promoting “forest stewardship.” In his first live appearance since Farm Aid in September 2019 he said: “I’m only here for those trees up there. It’s a precious, sacred thing, these old trees. They show us the power of nature when we are being threatened. They show us the past. They show us our future. That’s something that I hope our Canadian government and business section will recognize. This has to do with Canada. It has to do with the ages, if we’re lucky enough to have ages. These trees have lasted so long. They deserve Canada’s respect.” Then he played 'Heart of Gold'.

"In recent years, Kyiv’s vibrant and progressive dance scene earned the city the nickname 'new Berlin'. Amazingly, the war hasn’t stopped the scene from thriving, and many Ukrainian DJs and promoters have managed to make the most out of the dire circumstance" - Vice goes to Ukraine to check the pulse on the nation's clubbing scene. Harry Pledov, musician and event organiser, believes partying is important since it provides a feeling of normalcy - "as the war drags on, everyone understands the importance of partying.” Also, he notes that the war has given the Ukrainian electronic music scene a huge boost - “International DJs no longer dare to come because of the shelling. And we’ve gotten rid of anything related to Russian culture – the songs, videos and movies that were popular. We now see it as our mission to fill that gap with Ukrainian culture.”

R Kelly has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for child sex crime charges, the New York Times reports. He was found guilty in 6 of the 13 counts against him, including three counts of coercing minors into sexual activity and three of producing sex tapes involving a minor. Kelly will serve 19 of his 20 years concurrently with another separate sentence he is serving, a 30-year bid for racketeering and sex trafficking.

Greg Prato interviewed over 20 musicians, friends, and admirers of his music for his latest book 'Lanegan' about the iconic frontman of Screaming Trees and solo artist. Nick Oliveri (ex-Queens of the Stone Age, ex-Kyuss) has an interesting story to tell: "Mark said he wrote some lyrics on 'Something in the Way' with Kurt on 'Nevermind'. But Kurt had played on some of Mark’s solo stuff, 'The Winding Sheet'. So, instead of getting paid, they just did this thing where, 'Hey man, I added a lyric on your song and you added a lyric on my song. Let’s just call it even. Whatever happens, happens.' Little did Mark know, if he would have had publishing on 'Something in the Way' on 'Nevermind', he would have had a lot of money. I remember him kicking himself in the butt a little bit about that – 'If I had that ‘Something in the Way’ publishing…'" Consequence picks out several quotes.

Concerts giant Live Nation generated revenues of $16.7 billion in 2022, with the concerts business being its primary revenue driver, generating $13.5 billion in 2022. The company also says that it "invested $9.6 billion in putting on artists’ shows in 2022" and claims to be "the largest contributor to artist income".

Spotify has launched a new AI feature called “DJ” which will deliver a curated selection of music, The Verge reports. It also features AI-powered spoken commentary about the tracks and artists, using a “stunningly realistic voice.” The idea is for Spotify to get to know users so well that the DJ can choose what to play. Spotify feels this is life putting an “AI DJ in your pocket.”

Taylor Swift has been named the Global Recording Artist Chart for 2022 by the IFPI, the global recorded music trade body. This chart is the only global ranking to accurately measure consumption across all formats, including streaming formats, digital and physical album and singles sales and all countries. The IFPI’s Top 20 list reveals, in order, the artists who generated the most money last year globally across streaming, download, and physical record sales combined in 2022. Here it its:

1. Taylor Swift
2. BTS
3. Drake
4. Bad Bunny
5. The Weeknd
6. SEVENTEEN
7. Stray Kids
8. Harry Styles
9. Jay Chou
10. Ed Sheeran
11. Eminem
12. Kanye West
13. YoungBoy Never Broke Again
14. Kendrick Lamar
15. Lil Baby
16. Billie Eilish
17. Post Malone
18. Juice WRLD
19. The Beatles
20. Imagine Dragons

Harry Styles had the world’s best-selling single of the year across all digital formats last year – including paid subscription streaming, ad-supported platforms, and single-track downloads with his single 'As It Was', making him the winner of IFPI’s Global Single Award for 2022. His single 'As It Was', according to IFPI, generated 2.28 billion global subscription stream equivalent units last year.