YouTube handed music rightsholders over $3bn from ads and subscriptions combined in the 12 calendar months of 2019, according to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. She further claims that YouTube has paid out over $12bn to the music industry in total to date. In comparison, Google/Alphabet recently revealed that YouTube generated $15.15bn in advertising revenues last year. Business Music Worldwide analyses what these numbers mean for the music industry.

Psychologist and DJ Bertolt Meyer designed an electronic circuit that attaches to his arm, which then controls a synth with his thoughts. The SynLimb attaches to Meyer's arm prosthesis instead of his prosthetic hand. It converts the electrode signals that his prosthesis picks up from his residual limb into control voltages for controlling his modular synthesizer. The SynLimb allows him to plug his prosthesis directly into his synthesizer so that he can control its parameters with the signals from his body that normally control the hand. "For me, this feels like controlling the synth with my thoughts," Meyer says.

The National have covered INXS’ 'Never Tear Us Apart' to 'Songs For Australia', a compilation album put together by Australian singer-songwriter Julia Stone to benefit brush fire relief efforts. Kurt Vile has taken on Nick Cave’s 'Stranger Than Kindness', Rice remade Sia's 'Chandelier', Martha Wainwright covered Nick Cave’s 'Ship Song', and Stone herself made a cover of 'Beds Are Burning' Midnight Oil, along with a music video that pays tribute to Australian culture and wildlife.

A big benefit concert Fire Fight Australia raised close to A$10 million ($6.7 million for fire relief, drawing a record 1.5 million viewers across its domestic broadcast partners. Dozens of local and international acts performed at the 10-hour concert, more than 70,000 people attended the concert to hear from artists like Queen, Alice Cooper, Olivia Newton-John, John Farnham, Jessica Mauboy, k.d. Lang, Peter Murray, Conrad Sewell and Daryl Braithwaite.

A great read in the Electronic Beats about how film scoring has become an increasingly fertile industry for artists rising from the more experimental branches of electronic music and club culture. Last year, Bobby Krlic - better known as the experimental artist The Haxan Cloak - scored the Swedish horror movie 'Midsommar'. Oneohtrix Point Never first built his career with idiosyncratic, synth-laden productions, to skip over to experimental scores as Daniel Lopatin, producing two of Josh and Benny Safdie’s films, 'Good Time' and 'Uncut Gems'. Alec Empire, frontman of Atari Teenage Riot and longtime maverick of the German noise, industrial, ambient and digital hardcore scenes, has been involved in several A/V and film-scoring projects in his multifaceted career

Roddy Ricch‘s 'Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial' returns to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a fourth nonconsecutive week, moving up one spot and opening with 79,000 equivalent album units. Other new debuts on this week’s Billboard 200 chart include Green Day‘s 'Father of All Motherfuckers' who enter at No. 4 with 48,000 equivalent album units. Pop Smoke gets his first top 10 with 'Meet the Woo, V.2' debuting at No. 7, gaining 36,000 equivalent album units.

German clubs are fighting to be classified as cultural institutions - last week a bipartisan group argued in front of a national parliament committee to reclassify clubs and live music venues. Nightclubs are currently classified as entertainment venues, equating them with brothels and casinos, the status change would make them legally equivalent to concert halls, operas and theaters. About 100 clubs have closed in the past 10 years, and a further 25 are under threat. So serious has the problem become that it has its own word: clubsterben, or club death. The Clubcommission collective told the Bundestag’s committee for building, living and urban development that music clubs were “the pulse of the city”, adding that an estimated 3 million tourists come to Berlin annually to visit its clubs, contributing €1.5bn to the local economy last year.

Chen of K-pop boy band EXO announced last month that he is to marry his pregnant girlfriend, which some fans didn't take lightly. Many fans did support Chen's straightforwardness in breaking the news about his personal life and defended celebrities' right to privacy, but some angry fans even took to the street in protest, demanding Chen's withdrawal from the group. In the weeks after Chen made the surprise marriage announcement, several other stars came forward to reveal their marital status. Prior to that, Sungmin, a member of another popular boy band, Super Junior, has been excluded from the band's activities since June last year after his surprise marriage to a musical actress in 2014 led to an angry reaction from some fans.

In the latest filing in musicians’ class action lawsuit against Universal concerning 2008 warehouse fire, UMG has acknowledged that master recordings of these 19 artists were damaged or destroyed in the blaze: Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Elton John, Beck, Soundgarden, Sheryl Crow, R.E.M., Bryan Adams, …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, David Baerwald, Jimmy Eat World, Les Paul, Peter Frampton, Michael McDonald, Slayer, Suzanne Vega, Surfaris, White Zombie, and Y&T. Universal claimed 17,000 artists were affected by the fire when they were suing for damages, these 19 are merely confirmed to have their masters damaged.

Irish singer Hilary Woods (some might remember her from the band JJ72) released 'Orange Tree', a lovely and gentle song, from her upcoming sophomore LP 'Birthmarks'. Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo releases 'Names of North End Women', his collaborative album with Spanish musician and producer Raül Refree, next week and he’s just shared 'Words Out of the Haze' producing plenty with just chimes and electronic percussion. German-Iraqi producer Boys Noize has released single 'Crush' featuring Rico Nasty. Czech electronic musician and queer activist has released 'Gossip' from her debut 'Fountain', produced using only her voice. Laura Veirs usually records songs after a process of editing and fussing, whereas with 'I Was A Fool' she grabbed her phone and "recorded this song as it wrote itself - it came out this way, completely formed and realized. I’ve released 11 albums, and this is the first song I’ve released that I recorded myself, in the moment, on my own"; it's about breakup.

Two of the UK’s most prolific ticket touts, Peter Hunter (51) and David Smith (66)- trading as Ticket Wiz and BZZ, have been found guilty of fraud - they used software to harvest tickets and resell them for profit. Hunter and Smith used multiple identifies and bots to buy £4m worth of tickets to events including gigs by Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift as well as West End shows such as 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child'. The pair sold them on secondary ticketing websites for £10.8m. Ed Sheeran's manager Stuart Camp gave evidence in December when he told the jury he had spotted £75 seats for a charity gig on sale for £7,000.

Aidan Moffat from the Arab Strap wrote a Valentine's Day special for the Quietus as Uncle Agony, answering to questions about love problems. One on the problems - love affair within a band: "Shagging’s great, but it’s also a gateway to many other emotions that may not have existed before: jealousy, infatuation, obsession, insecurity… emotions that may become especially apparent as you watch your paramour nightly shredding their way into the hearts, minds, and pants of ripe, enthusiastic, and sexually generous fans". Moffat released his new album 'Aux Pieds De La Nuit' today under the pseudonym Nyx Nótt - listen here

The reunited Rage Against the Machine have announced that they’re doing what they can to keep scalpers and broker sites from ripping their fans over tickets for their reunion tour. RATM say that "at many concerts, up to 50% of the seating is scooped up by scalpers and then resold to fans at much higher fees" (some tickets were already being sold for $400), so they decided to do "everything we can to protect 90% of the RATM tickets from scalpers”, adding "WE are holding in reserve 10% of the seating (random seats throughout each venue) to sell at a higher ticket price (but low enough to undercut the scalpers)”. They will be donating “100% OF THE MONEY over the fees and base ticket price to charities and activist organizations IN EACH CITY”, and they also plan to donate the profits from their first three concerts to immigrants’ rights organizations.

Pone was a beatmaker who helped shape the sound of French hip-hop in the 1990s, but when he fell to the motor neurone disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - (ALS), he wasn't able to produce music, at least not in the way he was used to. In 2019, with Ableton Live installed on his computer, he started producing again - using his eyes to operate like a mouse. He could do everything he used to, just at a slower pace. This way he produced a full album, 'Kate & Me', an instrumental beat record created as an ode to Kate Bush, and the first album in history to be entirely produced through an eye-tracking device.

To hear a snippet on new Pearl Jam single, 'Superblood Wolfmoon' fans have to visit moon.pearljam.com via their mobile phones and point their phone camera at the moon. As Billboard explains, the regular moon will turn into a bright red "Superblood Wolfmoon" and the song will automatically start playing. The experience is available through Feb. 18. The song is coming out on Pearl Jam's 11th studio album, 'Gigaton', March 27.

Billie Eilish has shared 'No Time to Die', dark and dramatic, with orchestral arrangements by Hans Zimmer and classic Bond-style guitar by Johnny Marr. The grandiose ballad was written with her older brother Finneas. The movie hits theaters in April.

A few interesting songs (+videos) these days: Grimes shared music video for her new single ‘Delete Forever’, about the opioid crisis, the latest from her forthcoming album 'Miss Anthropocene' (out next week); New Zealand rockabilly queen Tami Neilson dropped 'Queenie Queenie', an anthem of empowerment for women; Azealia Banks dropped a bass-heavy/strings driven new song, a bilingual, English-Spanish 'Nirvana'; sister duo CocoRosie relives their roller rink memories on their new track 'Restless', from 'Put the Shine On', the band's first album in five years; Human Impact is the new band of Unsane, Swans and Cop Shoot Cop members, and they shared their new single. attitude-heavy 'Consequences' off their debut album (due 3/13 via Ipecac); Beirut-based experimental musician Sary Moussa is ambient and minimalist on his debut album 'Imbalance' (out March 6), as well as on the single 'In Praise of Shadows'; producer Tornado Wallace dropped a new video 'Midnight Mania', a psychedelic bit with 'Avatar'-like characters sexy-dancing, it's a step away from being too strange...

Modern technology can be used to put on big unlicensed raves that have an old-school mentality - Mix Mag argues in their article about illegal rave crews in the UK setting up parties under the noses of the police. London-based party crew "SGL" was formed in November last year, and they have already organised three raves via a specially designed smartphone app. It transmits the party location to ravers in a way that can’t be monitored by police, and once there are around 200 people in the building then it’s much harder for the police to shut the party down, so they release the location over social media without worrying too much.

Streaming was already a popular hangout for Chinese musicians and artists across the region, and now with a general shutdown of public space with coronavirus online interaction is becoming essential, because people are effectively all isolated at home. Every streaming platform is full of music across genres, that includes major virtual nightclub-style events, one of which reportedly reached millions of viewers.

Bassist in a black metal band Vodka Vultures, a 22-year-old Holden Matthews has pleaded guilty to putting fire to three Louisiana Baptist churches last year. At his plea hearing, Matthews admitted to burning the churches "because of the religious character of these buildings, in an effort to raise his profile as a 'Black Metal' musician by copying similar crimes committed in Norway in the 1990s". Two points: 1. A fool; 2. This is not what black metal is about.

Spotify is paying close to $200 million upfront for the Ringer, the growing online sports and pop-culture outlet, as part of its push into podcasting, according to Bloomberg. This amount will be followed by more than $50 million later. Spotify has now spent more than $600 million to acquire four companies that can accelerate its podcasting business -- the Ringer, Gimlet Media, Anchor, and Parcast. In other music business news, Music Business Worldwide reports that SoundCloud has secured $75 million investment from SiriusXM – which acquired another leading music streaming platform, Pandora, last year in a $3.5bn all-stock transaction.

Little Simz won the NME award for the best British album for her 'GREY Area', with Lana Del Rey winning the best album in the world award for her 'Norman Fucking Rockwell'. Best song in the world award went to Billie Eilish for her ‘Bad Guy’, Robyn was named songwriter of the decade, FKA twigs got the best British solo act award, Clairo is the best new act in the world, Emily Eavis got the godlike genius award, and the Foals were named best live act. All the nominees and the winners at the NME. Photos from the awards - here.

Technology lawyer and musician Damien Riehl and his associate, programmer Noah Rubin have copyrighted all of the possible unique melodies, billions of them, in an attempt to prevent musicians from being sued on grounds of copyright infringement. They saved all the melodies on a hard-drive and placed them in public domain. Riehl made an amazing TED talk about it.

The idea of being divinely gifted, to such an extent as to dream lucidly of your artistic purpose and material, is a trope that often artists revert to. Ladysmith Black Mambazo founder Joseph Mxoveni Mshengu Bigboy Shabalala deployed this routine expertly as the foundational myth of the group - Mail & Guardian says about the South African musician who died Tuesday. Shabalala would say he had these dreams in 1964 over an extended period of about six months. He dreamt of an ensemble dressed in robes, performing a particular repertoire rich in harmony and melody. Musicologist Sazi Dlamini believes Shabalala’s primary legacy is in how he expanded the music’s visibility through his openness to collaboration, especially with his Paul Simon collaboration 'Graceland'. Smabalala himself said this about what they did: “We are not singing this kind of music to make ourselves famous — we are singing to remind our people of who they are.”

'Ohio' is a live favourite by King Princess; Moon Destroys have Mastodon's Troy Sanders on their psychedelic new song 'Blue Giant'; Myrkur go for strange, albeit easy-listening mix of Nordic folk and dream pop on 'Leaves od Yggdrasil'; Bay Area rapper The Jacka was killed in a 2015 shooting at 37 years old, and 'Can't Go Home' is his collaboration with Freddie Gibbs, coming out on his first posthumous album; Johanna Warren goes for simple and pretty on 'Bed of Nails'; Justin Bieber released a nice song 'Intentions' with a great message; The Strokes are back, drumless, with 'At the Door'; Poet laureate Simon Armitage launched a band LYR, mixing poetry, jazz and post-rock; Napalm Death released their first new songs in four years - an original 'Logic Ravaged by Brute Force' and a Sonic Youth cover 'White Cross'; I Break Horses go spacey psychedelia on 'I'll Be the Death of You'; Figazi people have a new band Coriky, much more laid down on 'Clean Kill'; Nigerian guitarist Mdou Moctar follows his last year's great 'Ilana' with a song 'Ibitlan', equally groovy and rich; Caroline Rose wrote 'Freak Like Me' because "I’ve always wanted to write a pretty song with the word ‘vomit’ in it"; Drain play just some straight punk-metal from California on 'Sick One'. Listening to all of these takes an hour or so, take that time, it's worth it!

The English pop-rock band have pledged to no longer play festivals that have too few female artists on the bill. Singer Matty Healy made the promise to Guardian journalist after this year's Reading and Leeds festivals were criticised for a gender imbalance. Only 20 of the 91 acts on the initial line-up are women, which made the journalist ask Healy to promise not to play festivals with far too few women, to which he agreed saying "people need to act, not chat".

“The Black Box” royalties is a growing sum of undistributed and/or undistributable royalties that have been collected on an artist’s behalf, and what happens with it is a hotly debated topic within the industry, as every collection society that has one deals with these unclaimed royalties differently. The Future of What uploaded a podcast about the subject John Simson (American University), Wayne Milligan (TriStar Sports & Entertainment Group) and Steve Ambers (SOCAN).

Snafu Records is a California startup officially launched this week, with $2.9 million in seed funding, and their approach, as its founder and CEO Ankit Desai said, is using technology "to essentially turn everyone listening to music into a talent scout on our behalf". The company’s algorithms are supposedly looking at around 150,000 tracks from unsigned artists each week on services like YouTube, Instagram and SoundCloud, and evaluating them based on listener engagement, listener sentiment and the music itself - Desai said the sweet spot is to be 70 or 75% similar to the songs on Spotify’s top 200 list, so that the music sounds like what’s already popular, while also doing just enough to “break the mold”. AI should find 15 do 20 tracks per week, and then the human team gets involved.

Iceland composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir got the 2020 Oscar for Best Original Score, making her the fourth woman composer to win overall, the first to win for a dramatic score, and the first Icelander to win any Oscar. She makes modern classical musical - "a moving fusion of ambient drone and contemporary classical that places an emphasis on exceptionally controlled tone", as Pitchfork describes it before they choose 7 of her essential tracks. There's some interesting music there: Mr. Schmuck's Farm - her project with Schneider TM, improvised electronics with scraping cellos sounds; on her second album 'Without Sinking' she improvises with layers of sound; on her project with Berlin pianist Hauschka they composed tracks inspired by colors; on her album 'Saman' (meaning "together"), she added her crystalline voice; she has done impressive work on the soundtrack for HBO series 'Chernobyl', haunting from a distance; her score for 'Joker' is special - she began composing before filming even started, an unusual practice, with director Todd Phillips and main actor Joaquin Phoenix using her music for inspiration; her latest track is 'Fólk fær andlit' ("people have faces"), released late January, about the (mis)treatment of immigrants on Iceland.

Rage Against The Machine have announced a full itinerary of 2020 reunion tour Public Service Announcement - the first shows of the tour will take place in America-Mexico border towns, and proceeds from those shows will go toward immigrant rights organizations. The tour starts at the end of March and runs all the way through November, from North America fo Europe. Run The Jewels will be opening the tour on most of the dates.