Taylor Swift has topped Forbes‘ annual list of the world’s highest-paid musicians with $185m made in pre-tax earnings from June 2018 to June 2019. The bulk of Swift’s earnings came thanks to a new record deal, an array of endorsements and the tail end of her recent ‘Reputation’ stadium tour. Kanye West came in second […]
Brooklyn Vegan has an interesting year-end segment - favourite albums chosen by various musicians. The idea is great, the results so-so. Mostly, the lists are either too narrow or just what you'd expect. Except from the Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle. He's got some straight indie-rock -Purple Mountains and Big Thief, modern hip-hop - clipping., metal - […]
Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett surprise-released her 'MTV Australia Unplugged Live In Melbourne' this week, closing the set with a beautiful cover of Leonard Cohen’s 'So Long, Marianne' (watch below). The album is out digitally - on Bandcamp.
On Monday SoundCloud announced they will be setting up a free upload limit to 15 tracks. On Thursday they abandoned the idea. But the damage was done. Twitter pushed its “decentralized and open-source” streaming service Audius (free, unlimited upload) in the meantime, and another competing service Audiomack started s new ad campaign - "always free, […]
PopMatters made a good selection of 15 best R'n'B/soul albums published in 2019. There's Emeli Sandé with "a real touch of warmth and love" on her 'Real Life', Michael Kiwanuka with "luminous songs", Jamila Woods with songs that "feel like individual baptisms as much as compositions" and, obviously, a dozen others. Check the full list […]
Tickets site TickX gathered Spotify data and curated a set of artists, songs and genres for the moods happy, sad, sexy, love, angry, and chill. The statistics for the list dubbed The Ultimate Playlist for Every Mood were drawn from a variety of playlists that featured those six moods as keywords. Top songs in each mood are. […]
A photo-portrait of UK rapper Stormzy has been hung in the London National Portrait Gallery, with Gallery director Nicholas Cullinan saying he was delighted to exhibit the portrait “as a contemporary intervention", the Bustle reports. The image by Mark Mattock features the rapper wearing a crown made up of the letters HITH, standing for 'Heavy […]
Billie Eilish tops Billboard's Top 200 Albums chart for 2019 with her debut 'When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?'. The 17-year-old star becomes the youngest artist to have the year-end No. 1 album. No. 2 on the year-end list is taken by Ariana Grande and her 'Thank U, Next', and No. 3 […]
Instead of listing them from the No. 1 best to No. 100 best, AllMusic listed the albums in alphabetical order, with links to original reviews. There's a few classical music album, and it's only these that have a full five-star reviews :-). Still, a good list.
Kanye West has announced a new opera titled 'Mary', scheduled to take place at Miami Marine Stadium on Sunday, December 8, the last day of this year’s Art Basel, Complex reports. Once again tapping his Sunday Service choir, 'Mary' will be directed by frequent collaborator Vanessa Beecroft, who recently directed 'Nebuchadnezzar' last month in Los […]
New York federal prosecutors have accused R. Kelly with bribing a public officer for “the creation of a fraudulent identification document for Jane Doe #1”, NPR reports. Prosecutors allege in an indictment filed in Brooklyn federal court that the bribery occurred on Aug. 30, 1994, the day before Kelly married Aaliyah - who was 15 […]
It's middle-of-the-road music, mostly ladies in the top 10, no surprises, nothing experimental; a good and quick way to understand where does the RS stand. Check out the full list here.
On the top spot there's 'Norman Fucking Rockwell!' because "Lana Del Rey just might have written the next best American record she’s so obsessed with after all". The list finishes with Greet Death's 'New Hell', bearing "a feeling of depression in desperate search of catharsis". Check out the full list here.
Spotify has unveiled its annual Spotify Wrapped which tells its users what artists, songs, genres, and podcasts they listened to most in 2019, and 2010s overall as well. My Decade Wrapped gives Spotify users a chance to look back on the music that defined each of their years throughout the 2010s. TechCrunch...
“Death metal, or minimal techno, isn’t going to work 99 times out of 100” - Alex Hill of the music consultancy company MAV told the Guardian about the right choice of music for a restaurant. "Music is as strong a flavour as food – it’s just another thing to get wrong” - London restaurateur Dan […]
Kim Kardashian West helped save death row inmate Rodney Reed from execution, inspiring others like T.I., Meek Mill, and Rihanna to voice their support. The Face asks, and tries to answer, why do pop stars, and should they at all, do these things. The dilemma celebrities face - "risk speaking up, pissing people off, and […]
Rolling Stone holds this, let's call it conservative rock position, and it's reflected on their list of best albums of the 2010s. There's no surprises there really, but it's interesting to see what did end up on the list, and how high on it, and what did not. Check it out here.
They are the architect of the sad-banger, the creative genius, a long shadow over a tough decade, the pop icon redefining gender, the voice of the next generation, the survivor, the relatable superstar, the saviour of grime, rock frontperson 2.0 and the hip hop’s boundary-pusher. NME...
The Quietus is opposed to album rating and best-of lists in general, but still, they took a bullet for their audience and made a list of 100 best albums of 2019. Good that they did, it's one of the most diverse. In the top 10 only, they have Black Midi, Richard Dawson, and Sunn O))), […]
Sonically, Bambara are somewhere in the space between Nick Cave, goth-rock and melancholy, with new album 'Stray' coming out in February. The band released two songs from it, 'Sing Me To The Street' and 'Serafina', both dealing with death, just like the whole album; listen to both songs below.
PopMatters has chosen "ten particularly phenomenal albums from across the globe", the ones where "artists ask their audience to leave behind insular worldviews and try to understand new perspectives". They chose Nigerian blues guitarist Mdou Moctar, Izraeli pop-trio A-WA, afro-pop by Ekiti Sound, tropical pop by The Garifuna Collective, Afro-Cuban singer Angélique Kidjo, Turkish rock and […]
Will it end up being a travesty remains to be seen, but the Guardian reports about the new Michael Jackson musical as something quite usual. Playwright Julien Nitzberg wrote it, it's called 'For the Love of a Glove: An Unauthorised Musical Fable About the Life of Michael Jackson, As Told By His Glove', and it […]
BBC Music has announced Celeste as BBC Music Introducing Artist of the Year 2019. She has received critical acclaim for her soulful voice, and the best advice she got, as she told the BBC, was - "try to remain yourself". Previous winners of the award are Slaves, Florence + The Machine, The Big Moon, Idles, […]
"Not fashionable but eternal" - Revolver magazine writes about their choice for the best metal album of 2019. At No. 25 a "cosmic death-metal". All in all, Revolver says it was "one of the biggest years in heavy music in recent memory". Check out their best albums list here. They made a list of top 25 […]
Slipknot canceled their performance at their own Knotfest Mexico festival on Saturday night due to a broken barricade and an on-stage fire, Revolver reports. Audience members broke through the stage barrier and, after repeated attempts to fix it, Knotfest announced that the night would no longer proceed as planned. Evanescence, who were scheduled to go […]
"2019 assured us that the album is a far, confident cry from deceased. Billie Eilish and Lizzo showed us multiple ways to cram banger after banger onto a disc while aspiring to something greater than a mere collection of singles. Tyler, the Creator and Angel Olsen took their studio recordings to staggering new levels this […]
Drake was named Spotify's most-streamed artist of the 2010s with more than 28 billion streams of his songs. His most popular song, 'One Dance', played 1.7 billion times alone, but it wasn't the most-streamed one of the decade - Ed Sheeran's 'Shape Of You' is decade's most listened-to track with 2.4 billion streams. 2019's biggest […]
The Roots' Questlove will direct 'Black Woodstock', a documentary about 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival, held for one month in the summer of '69, featuring performances from Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, BB King and others, Variety reports. The film will feature previously unreleased footage shot by the late Hal Tulchin. The documentary […]
Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have shared their instrumental cover of the David Bowie classic 'Life on Mars'. The cover appeared in the seventh episode of HBO's 'Watchmen'. Coldplay refuse to tour so this is a chance to see them - recently they played an extended set at the BBC’s historic Maida […]
Mix Magazine made a list of the best DJ mixes from the 2010s, a survey of key moments, movements and trends of the last 10 years. The mixes range from one minute to six hours, 30 hours all in all. There are world famous names like Avicii, Four Tet, and Skrillex, to lesser known like […]
