New Zealand singer-songwriter Anderson Rocio wrote a dreamy, nostalgic tune called 'Paradise' after binge-watching international news on the pandemic. The song was picked by the producers of Netflix hit 'Lucifer' to play over a dramatic scene in season five, which aired last month. “Life’s not paradise, and we all know that, but it’s pretty great regardless of all the challenges. And that’s what we felt about the lockdown” Rocio told the Guardian about the song, which is now celebrated as hymn to post-Covid hope.

American president Donald Trump has ordered a halt to talks over a package of COVID-19 relief bills that included more than $10 billion in aid for independent music venues, agencies and music companies indefinitely shut down by the global pandemic, Billboard reports. National Independent Venue Association has been warning that without federal assistance, more than 90% of its 2,500 members would go out of business. Now, NIVA says the collapse is happening.

Van Halen guitarist and co-founder Eddie Van Halen has died at the age of 65, from cancer, the New York Times, who calls him "virtuoso of the rock guitar" reports. Eddie and his brother Alex formed their first band in 1972, eventually adopting the Van Halen family name for the group in the mid-'70s. The band released 12 studio albums, including the Diamond certified '1984', which has sold over 10 million copies in the U.S. The band was awarded a Grammy and got inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007. Eddie van Halen's skills were also heavily sought out by many of his peers. He famously delivered the guitar solo for Michael Jackson's 'Beat It' off the 'Thriller' album. He's also worked with KISS, Black Sabbath, Brian May, Roger Waters, Steve Lukather and LL Cool J among others.

The US supreme court has declined to hear the case brought against Led Zeppelin by the estate of Randy Wolfe, late frontman of US band Spirit, in a long-standing copyright battle over 'Stairway to Heaven'. It was alleged that Led Zeppelin took the opening notes to 'Stairway to Heaven' from Spirit’s song 'Taurus'. Following a six-day trial in 2016, Led Zeppelin were cleared of plagiarism. That verdict was overturned in 2018. The case returned, but in March this year a US appeals court reinstated the original 2016 ruling. The only remaining recourse for Wolfe’s trustee team was the US supreme court, whose rejection of the case means it has finally ended, CNN reports.

California glam-rock band Steel Panther is offering a customised song with lyrics inspired and approved by the buyer. Before they record a song they will set up a meeting "and talk about what you want in your song and pry as much information out of you as humanly possible. We want your song to be good!". The customized song goes for $7,500.

The average size of the top 10 selling K-pop groups of the last decade is 9 members, there is even one with 23 members. The Pudding offers a few answers on why the bands became so large - it's a combination of the popularity of super-size groups, the growth of trends in casting, subunits, and survival shows, and the shifting roles within groups over time.

Machine Gun Kelly has landed his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with 'Tickets To My Downfall', which earned 126,000 equivalent album units, Billboard reports. The album was mostly written and produced by Travis Barker of Blink-182 and has been described as “pop-punk”. It also marks the first rock set to hit the top of the chart in over a year; the last was Tool’s 'Fear Inoculum'. K-pop group SuperM debuted at No. 2 with 'Super One: The First Album', Joji came in at No. 3 with 'Nectar', Pop Smoke’s 'Shoot For The Stars Aim For The Moon' fell from No. 2 to No. 4 and Deftones rounded out the top five with 'Ohms'.

This year festivals were virtual or none, a return to normal is expected in 2022 or 2023, and next year will see a “phased return” for events with hybrid models featuring some digital elements next to live ones, Guardian reports. What is to be expected next year at the music festival entrance are thermo scanners, interactive wristbands that vibrate to mark a lack of social distancing, and rapid on-site testing.

Rapper and entrepreneur Jim Jones started Quarantine Studios, a one stop shop for artists, producers and engineers to work in the studio from anywhere in the world. Complex says it is a unique virtual experience, enabling artists to still cooperate in lockdown. The magazine visited him in his Q-Studios.

Chris Cornell's posthumously released cover of the Guns N’ Roses classic 'Patience' has just reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Songs chart, making it the first time for a Cornell solo song to reach No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock tally, which tracks radio airplay across the United States. Cornell’s take on the GN’R ballad was released by his family on July 20th, in commemoration of what would have been the late rocker’s 56th birthday, Billboard reports. With Soundgarden, Cornell earned six No. 1 singles on the Mainstream Rock chart from 1994 through 2013. He also scored two chart-toppers with Audioslave.

"They are lifers. They are great songwriters. They plant their flag wherever they show up and fully commit" - Rise Against's Tim McIlrath said about Anti-Flag, who have a new documentary 'Beyond Barricades: The Story of Anti-Flag' premiering today. It was directed by Jon Nix, it features live and behind-the-scenes footage from over the years, interviews with all four members of Anti-Flag, and interviews with Tom Morello (Rage Against the Machine), Billy Bragg, McIlrath, Brian Baker (Bad Religion), and others. The film is as much about politics as it's about the last 30 years of punk rock as it's about Anti-Flag themselves, Brooklyn Vegan says in an announcement.

BBC reports from the parks of New York where jazz musicians usually playing at Broadway have found their new stage to perform. They, for a change, play together, as opposed to practicing alone at home, and they manage to earn something, hopefully, more than change. But, they're worried because the winter is coming, and it'll get different - it will be harder to play, and the audience won't be that eager to be outside, especially for longer than one song.

"Stories and songs bring us into contact with our best and worst natures, they enable us to locate ourselves in other people’s experience and they increase our compassion. But these things in a vacuum are useless. A story doesn’t cultivate empathy just by virtue of its having been thought up; it must be engaged with to become powerful; the story must be read, the song must be listened to, in order to acquire its full charge" - poet and performer Kae Tempest wrote in the Guardian about their new book 'On Connection', a non-fiction meditation on the power of creative connection.

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon made a new song 'Your Honor', which he premiered after talking to a few undecisive voters; Ed Harcourt 'Drowning in Dreams' is a piece of mellow electro classical music, a great morning song; folk-rock queen Joni Mitchell shared the first original demo of her career, 'Day After Day'; Mallrat plays some sort of hard-pop on 'Rockstar'.

When lockdown began in March, Fender launched their free guitar lessons initiative, which they now extended for three more months, Guitar World reports. The Fender Play app giveaway offers lessons for guitar, bass and ukulele using multi-genre, instructor-guided video lessons that can be accessed on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. Its user base grew almost fivefold in April of this year - increasing from 150,000 to 930,000 subscribers.

Jay-Z and Meek Mills initiative REFORM Alliance made their first major legislative victory as California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1950 into law, which will limit adult probation sentence maximums to one year for misdemeanors and two years for felonies. The new law was pushed forward in a campaign led by REFORM, Hip Hop DX reports. Newsom also signed a bill banning police officers’ use of chokeholds during arrests and another that made it so the state’s attorney general can independently investigate police shootings.

AC/DC have announced a reunion, featuring members who had left the classic rock band in recent years - vocalist Brian Johnson, bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd, have rejoined the band, Loudwire reports. Johnson had been the band’s frontman since 1980, following the death of original singer Bon Scott, but had quit in 2016 due to hearing loss; Williams retired in 2017; Rudd was sentenced to eight months’ house arrest in 2015 after being charged with drug possession and threatening to kill his personal assistant. The three returning musicians are joined by uncle-and-nephew guitarists Angus Young and Stevie Young, who had remained in the lineup. The band's last album was was 'Rock or Bust' in 2014. The band is presumably preparing an album called 'PWR UP', and they released 30 seconds of a new song called 'Shot in the Dark'.

'The Anthology of American Folk Music' is a six-LP compendium of folk, blues, and country songs recorded in the United States between 1926 and 1934, curated by Henry Smith, and issued in 1952. The set ultimately became one of the central texts of the folk revival, guiding artists including Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, The New Yorker writes revisiting the anthology. This fall, b-sides of every 78-r.p.m. records Smith used for the 'Anthology' are coming out in a box-set.

The best album ever to Beastie Boys' Ad-Rock - 'Sign of the Times' by Macka B, that's how he voted for Rolling Stone in their 500 best albums special. Rolling Stone shared Ad-Rock's list, which includes some unusual records like Ultimate Spinach's 1968 self titled album, German orchestra leader and clarinet player Hugo Strasser's 'TanzHits ’71', Bridget Everett and The Tender Moments, a group of which he's a member, and a few musicians which might have existed, or not, like Chirp, Sergeant Crikey and Juan Epstein. More than 300 artists, journalists, and industry figures cooperated in making the list.

A great story about Thelonious Monk's 1968 Palo Alto high school concert came full circle. In the fall of the frantic 1960s, a 16-year-old high school student Danny Scher invited legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk to perform a show at his high school's auditorium in Palo Alto, California. White folk weren't buying the two-dollar tickets, so Scher opened up sales to the surrounding, poorer black folk so the concert turned out to be a great moment of jazz and unity. Luckily, the school's janitor recorded the performance and handed it to Scher who put it in his attic and it sat there for decades before he approached Monk's son, drummer T.S. Monk, who last week released it - "one of the best live recordings I've ever heard by Thelonious". PopMatters has the details.

Production collective Quakers released 'Double Jointed', an ironic take on racism with; Broadcast celebrated the birthday of late Trish Keenan with a release of a simple a lovely song 'Where Are You?'; punks Stick To Your Guns released 'Hasta la Victoria', with powerful lyrics, and a Viktor Jara quote; Deerhoof made a covers album mixing snippets of songs by Voivod, Velvet Underground, Sun Ra, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Beach Boys, Morricone and many more - 'Love-Lore 2' is one of those; Zulu goes from metal ripper to afro-funk 'Now They Are Through With Me'; Dutch-Ghanian singer-songwriter Nana Adjoa deals with nationalism in democracy in 'National Song'; shoegazers Nothing emanate being lost in 'Bernie Sanders'.

"Before there was metal, there was Black Sabbath" - Dr. Martens said ahead of the release of their new Black Sabbath boots, marking the 50th anniversary of Black Sabbath's self-titled debut and sophomore album 'Paranoid'. The boots are set to drop on October 1 on drmartens.com.

Country songwriter Mac Davis who penned 'In The Ghetto' and 'A Little Less Conversation' for Elvis Presley, has died at the age of 78, CoS reports. He also worked with Dolly Parton, Bruno Mars, Johnny Cash, Tom Jones, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, and DJ Avicii (on 'Addicted To Love'). In the 1970s Davis had a string of solo hits, including the number one single 'Baby Don't Get Hooked On Me', his signature song 'I Believe In Music', as well as 'Whoever Finds This, I Love You', and 'Stop and Smell the Roses'.

Nikki Patterson, of Aberdeen, has set a Guinness World Records for the most tattoos of Eminem - she has 16 portraits of the American rapper tattooed on her body, according to BBC. She got her first Eminem tattoo at 19, now, aged 35, she has 52 tattoos in total and 28 - including the 16 portraits - are based on The Slim Shady.

Helen Reddy, the Australian singer behind feminist anthem 'I Am Woman', has died aged 78, Variety reports. Reddy said she had penned the lyrics for the song - with lines such as "I am woman, hear me roar" and "I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman" - after struggling to find other songs which reflected her pride in being a woman. A sleeper hit, it went on to sell millions of copies worldwide, making Reddy the biggest-selling female artist globally for two years running. Also, she became prominent in the women's liberation movement. Her first hit, 'I Don't Know How to Love Him', was followed by a succession of others including 'Crazy Love', 'Delta Dawn', and 'Angie Baby'.

Bloomberg writes about efforts to restart the live events sector. The Utopia music festival in September served as a potential new model for the future as all the attendees were screened with a Covid-19 test a few days before the event - and again at the door - in an effort to create an event “bubble". The founder of Croatia’s Lighthouse Festival launched a 60-second, gargling-based Covid-19 test that is currently available over the counter in Austria. Ravel Hotel in New York made waves over the summer by offering rapid tests to revelers at its crowded rooftop parties...

17% music professionals say they would return to work now unconditionally, and an additional 43% say they would go to work right this second if health guidelines are followed, Pollstar reports on an industry survey. 75% of club owners said they are prepared to ramp back up at less than full capacity.

All seven members of BTS have become multi-millionaires after their label Big Hit Entertainment started an IPO. The K-Pop label issued its shares at 135,000 won, or $115 apiece, raising 962.55 million won, or $822 million, and giving Big Hit a market valuation of 4.8 trillion won, or $4.1 billion. Big Hit boss Bang Si-hyuk, who owns 43% of the management label, has become a billionaire. He gave the seven members of BTS, all in their early- to mid-20s, more than 68,000 shares each — that values their stakes at about $8 million apiece. The public offering values Big Hit at $4 billion. BTS fans in South Korea are hoping to buy at least one share in the management label.

The skies do sound different during the pandemic, as many have noticed, and indeed, birds are singing different tunes during lockdown, according to a scientific study by the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. By analysing the calls of sparrows recorded over decades, scientists confirmed a change in the birds' vocal repertoire when the city fell quiet, Science Alert reports. The birds upped the quality of their songs, as they called to defend their territory and entice a mate. The sparrows also sang more quietly.

Fuck The Facts release their metallic hardcore ripper 'Pleine Noirceur'; 'Estranged Fruit' is a powerful rendition of Billie Holiday / Nina Simone protest song 'Strange Fruit' by the Fishbone; 'Courage To Change' by Sia is a case of a pop song done well.