Canada established a government-funded, Christian church-administered boarding school system in the late 1800s, with the goal of forcibly removing Indigenous children from their “savage” parents and impose English and Christianity. Some 150,000 Indigenous children attended these schools before the last one closed in 1997. The mortality rate for those children was estimated to be up to five times higher than their white counterparts, due to factors including suicide, neglect and disease - nearly 38,000 sexual and physical abuse claims from former residential school students were reported, along with 3,200 documented deaths. Guardian presents Canadian rappers coming from the indigenous communities who are using their music as a tool of recovery for themselves and their communities.

The United States Government sold the sole copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s 'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin', previously owned by the pharma executive Martin Shkreli, NPR reports. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud in 2018, and was ordered to forfeit the album along with several other assets in order to fulfill a $7.36 million forfeiture judgment. The forfeiture judgment has been fulfilled with the sale of the Wu-Tang Clan album, sold to an undisclosed buyer. Shkreli's lawyer believes anonymous buyer paid at least $2.2 million.

Joey Jordison was a founding member of Slipknot in 1995, played the drums on the band's five first albums, staying until his departure in December 2013. He later revealed that he suffered from transverse myelitis, a neurological disease that limited his the ability to play the drums. Not only was he one of metal’s premier drummers, he was a key songwriter in the group, responsible for co-writing some of Slipknot’s best-known songs, Blabbermouth reports.

Billy Reeves was best known as a singer-songwriter who had worked with Sophie Ellis-Bextor in a band called theaudience. After he quit, he made an album worth of music when in a traffic accident he suffered severe brain injury and subsequently amnesia - "there’s a whole three-year chunk of my cultural memory missing – I don’t remember any of the music or TV shows from 1999 to 2001". He also forgot all about his recent music - "I was hearing songs that I had written but had no recollection of. I didn’t know what the lyrics were about, what I was thinking, who they were written for", as Reever wrote in a beautiful piece for the Guardian. He decided however to put it out, calling the record 'The Helicopter Of The Holy Ghost' - "I’m not religious, but it’s like the songs were written by a ghost because I don’t remember anything about writing them".

Looking for some quality experimental music? Tone Glow writers chose 32 albums from the year’s second quarter that they enjoyed. Their selection includes various albums: there's vocal jazz and Mongolian long song on Enji's 'Urgal'; Vanessa Rosetto's 'Legends of American Theatre' recorded from artist's New York window showing "a theatre deprived of curtain calls where people-watching persists"; Naoko Sakata's 'Dancing Spirits' characterized by "wilderness"; Neupink's 'Seaweed Jesus' which just might pass as hard-core hyper-pop; and plenty more unusual music.

Pop Smoke has two albums to his name, both of which were released posthumously, and both of which have reached the No. 1 on Billboard 200 albums chart, according to Billboard. 'Faith' debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart this week starting with 88,000 equivalent album units earned. 'Faith' features more than 20 guest stars, including Chris Brown, Future, Dua Lipa and Kanye West. Pop Smoke previously topped the Billboard 200 with his debut album 'Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon' last July. Pop Smoke was killed on Feb. 19, 2020, at age 20, after being shot during a home-invasion robbery in Los Angeles.

Splice is a cloud-based music creation platform that sells downloadable collections of vocal hooks, drum sounds, instrumental riffs and other sounds creators can use to build songs, Billboard reports. Splice subscriptions start at $9.99 a month and let users access over 2 million riffs, beats and sounds, all royalty-free, so creators who use them, own their work. It's growing big - in 2019 the platform had 250,000 subscribers. Two years later, that number had more than doubled, and during the pandemic daily downloads increased almost 50% amid “a pretty extreme explosion in new users”. In February, Splice raised $55 million in series D funding led by Goldman Sachs, on a valuation of close to $500 million, and the company is approaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Sony Music Entertainment has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against fitness apparel brand Gymshark, valued at approximately $1.3bn, Music Business Worldwide reports. Sony claims that Gymshark “has achieved its success by infringing sound recordings and musical compositions belonging to a number of different content owners on a massive scale”. According to the filing, Gymshark has “largely eschewed traditional advertising” and has instead promoted its products in videos posted to the likes of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. This may be an important case, because it highlights the place where platform-wide licensing deals for use of music in user-generated content meet the world of sync licensing. Regular users can use music in their videos, but rules change when it comes to brands and influencers paid by those brands, which is a commercial activity.

Kanye West announced his latest album 'Donda' for this weekend, although it wasn't released at the end. He did however throw an album listening party at the Atlanta football stadium, which impressed Music REDEF's Matty Karas: "It *looked* amazing. It wasn't a live performance so there was no stage. And there was no one sitting on the field which was covered in some kind of white material, over which Kanye roamed, in a red puffer jacket and WATCHMEN-like mask, while the album played. He would stand or sit in place for long stretches and then resume roaming, not saying a word, often raising one or both arms as if to give himself an amen. A lone, silent prophet wandering on what you might imagine was a cloud, surrounded by fans but also at a distance from them. It was less-as-more taken to its logical conclusion, and as arresting a music visual as I've seen in a long time".

After that awesome detour into jazzy club music with Moses Boyd, Alewya goes into the dark clubbing mode with ‘Spirit_X’; avant/hip-hop artist Moor Mother goes psychedelic on ‘Shekere’ featuring Lojii; ‘Superstate’ is a new graphic novel with 15 new songs from Graham Coxon, ‘Yoga Town’ is the first taste from it; Jamaican dancehall artist Skillibeng goes aggressive and dark on ‘Pull Up’, a collaboration with UK rapper Dutchavelli; Japanese post-metallers Mono rip it up on (khm!) ‘Riptide’; Homeboy Sandman shares an intense and jazzy ‘Lice Team, Baby’, featuring Aesop Rock.