"I embarked on an in-depth self-education process to learn about the larger history of music as a change agent in human history" music writer Ted Gioia in a Music Journalism Insider interview. He continues: "My latest book, 'Music: A Subversive History', is a culmination of that effort. It encompasses my early work of jazz and African-American music, but aims at something larger—really, nothing less than exposing the inner workings of songs as a source of power and enchantment in our societies and day-to-day lives. That’s really what drives me and motivates me nowadays: music as a change agent".

"Is there a way that a real-life music festival can be replicated in the virtual world?" - Guardian asks, and answers affirmatively, in case of Sea Change festival, at least. "Decision not to postpone or cancel but instead reincarnate the festival online, sooner and for free, was bold but also canny", the G argues. Many of the sets (including Jon Savage, Cool Greenhouse, the Orielles, Douglas Dare, Manu Delgado, Qasim Naqvi) proved brief affairs, but "the key to the weekend’s success was that by moving across platforms — from video streaming to Soundcloud, Twitter to Spotify to Instagram live – and providing links to explore works further (or purchase online), it managed to create both texture and a sense of companionability. Not once did it feel a flat or lonely endeavour; rather it found a great swell of congregation".

Since the beginning of the big lockdown, distribution platforms that cater to unsigned acts are seeing huge surges in activity, Rolling Stone reports. TuneCore, Vydia, CD Baby, Soundrop, United Masters, and Ditto all push music to streaming services for a fee, providing a useful service for acts without a label, or artists who want to retain ownership of their songs. All six platforms have observed surges in activity since the start of the pandemic and quarantine - in some cases, music uploads are up 300 percent.

Only 40% of Americans who regularly attend concerts and other similar events say they would return to shows before a coronavirus vaccine exists, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests. Based on interviews with 4,429 American adults, another 40% say they’d remain home pending a vaccine, while the remaining 20% said they either don’t know what they’ll do or may never attend such events again.

Ticket-holders for the cancelled SXSW 2020 were offered to defer their registration to 2021, 2022, or 2023 and to purchase registration for another of those years at 50% off. Not everybody is happy with it, as Billboard reports. Plaintiffs Maria Bromley and Pauta Kleber, who claim to have spent over $1,000 each on attending SXSW 2020, filed the suit against SXSW. According to Bromley and Kleber’s lawsuit, SXSW informed both plaintiffs that the offer to transfer their registration to a future year expires on April 30, 2020, and that SXSW “cannot be certain that future festivals will occur.” Their complaint reads - “SXSW has, in effect, shifted the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic onto festivalgoers … individuals who in these desperate times may sorely need the money they paid to SXSW for a festival that never occurred”.

Saharan desert rock quintet Tamikrest is "advocating for both unity and diversity in wonderfully dulcet tones" on their newest album 'Tamotaït', PopMatters argues. "Their music here has sonic overtones of hope, resilience, and reflection", PM adds, while withholding "the substance and soul, the meaning, the skill, the familiarity of rock and roll meshed with the distinct vocal timbres and melodic lines that have since become iconic of Kel Tamasheq life".

GQ has an interesting piece about how celebrities, in lockdown just like everybody else, have found a common global venue: "Instagram Live has become a digital smorgasbord, catering to all manner of pop-culture predilections. It’s now the premier venue for a collection of semiregular events that attract viewership from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands. While all these shows differ in content, there’s an energetic thread that runs throughout them: a quaint clumsiness and a spontaneous sort of humanity that you rarely encounter in such abundance on celebrity social media channels".

Black Midi, Tame Impala, Erykah Badu, Weyes Blood and Sunn O))) are among 50 artists scheduled to perform in NTS’s 24-hour livestream concert dubbed Remote Utopias on Saturday, May 2 (at noon London time, 4 a.m. LA time, 7 p.m. Shanghai time). It will also feature performances by Deb Never, Four Tet, JME, JPEGMAFIA, Rejjie Snow, Skrillex, Blood, Yves Tumor, Khruangbin. The livestream by the online radio will raise funds for The Global Foodbanking Network, a charity providing food to those in need around the globe. The stream will concurrently broadcast two live “stages”, aiming to emulate the setup of a music festival. Some artists are expected to perform on the live-stream, Badu will lead a guided meditation during her live-stream and JME will present a radio show about his favourite video game music.

Gay club The Chateau from south-east London recently live-streamed a version of their consistently chaotic club night U OK Hun, making "a massive hot mess party" with "go-go dancers, and rigging, with aerial performances”. Harry Gay, a support worker at the LGBTQ+ homeless support charity The Outside Project, started up Queer House Party with help from his roommates. The premise was simple – they would stream sets from their house-share in exchange for tips. Thousands of people soon joined in, and it’s now a weekly event. Gal Pals, queer dance party for womxn, trans and non-binary people, have hosted three fortnightly parties so far, and the plan is to continue until the end of lockdown and beyond. The people behind Knickerbocker have also gone online with "shonky and anarchic" party. NME reports at lengths about the LGBTQ-streams...

Post Malone’s Nirvana tribute livestream on YouTube last weekend raised more than $500,000 for coronavirus relief, CNN reports. Google matched $2 for each $1 donation. The event raised $500,000, including Google's match. Over $4.3 million has been raised in total for the United Nations Foundation's Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund for The World Health Organization.

TikTok has announced an in-app feature that allows users to donate to a number of charities. Content creators can now embed ‘donation stickers’ within their videos and livestreams that will encourage users to donate funds to a selection of approved organisations. Facebook will soon allow artists to charge fans for access to livestreams hosted through the platform.

"Bohannon tracks were huge in the Chicago clubs that gave birth to house music: Frankie Knuckles played a re-edit of Let’s Start the Dance at the Warehouse while Ron Hardy did the same with Caroline Crawford’s Bohannon-penned and produced Coming On Strong at the Music Box" - Alexis Petridis writes about Hamilton Bohannon, disco and Motown star, who died last week aged 78. "The list of house and techno artists who have sampled his work is huge: DJ Pierre, Cajmere, Underground Resistance, Danny Tenaglia, Dimitri From Paris. And house music gave Bohannon his biggest hit of all: Paul Johnson’s Get Get Down, a top 10 hit in 1999, was based on Bohannon’s 1978 track Me and the Gang". He was influential in hip-hop as well - Jay-Z, Mary J Blige, Public Enemy, the Ultramagnetic MCs and Pete Rock all sampled Bohannon's tracks.

"When you’re just overloaded on news, it can be demoralizing. This is where artists and writers have the ability to step in and really give people what they need. Sometimes the point is to make something that gives people joy, so that they have a break from the panic" - Tori Amos argues in favor of artists being a positive force in dark times, in New Yorker interview. "I really think that even in the darkest of times, our ancestors got something from art, some kind of spiritual manna—or, as the British would say, the bloody bollocks to move forward and not get stuck".

In 1964 an impresario named Rudy Duclós spotted four young guys from Florida named Tom, Vic, Bill and Dave playing in a band The Ardells in a Miami club and decided to organize them a tour in South America. The band, renamed "The Beetles" for this particular tour, was in for it. Duclós sold them to South American cubs as the real thing, he even got them a spot on Argentinian TV. Once they appeared on TV, however, the con was uncovered. The media ripped them to pieces, but the fans who bought the tickets their concerts didn't mind that much. Mostly everybody really liked their music and what they were doing. Finally - they made a lasting influence. They inspired competitors to make their own Beatle-posing bands, as well the formation of a genuinely nation-shifting band Los Shakers in Uruguay who helped to birth the country’s revolutionary rock nacional music scene. BBC tells the amazing story...

Apple's music creation software Garageband had nearly 13 million downloads from its add-on “Sound Library” since early February, and hundreds of thousands of free trial downloads of Garageband’s pricier siblings Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X, Rolling Stone reports. Apogee just experienced its most active month ever with its music-creation accessories including popular iOS and Mac products like HypeMic. Instruments manufacturer Roland has seen a spike as well, and Splice, which sells royalty-free samples and loops, has seen more than one million sound downloads a day. Instrument/gear seller Reverb is seeing extraordinarily high order volumes, outpacing even the amount of orders they see during the busy holiday season.

This month saw the streaming site introduced a function that allows listeners to tip specific artists they like, much as you might once have dropped a pound coin into a busker’s guitar case or compensated a starving bassist with van-based sexual favours... Should musicians depend on charity and goodwill to survive, making them ever more reliant on a platform making vast sums from their efforts alone and paying them a pittance? Now they’re posting monster multi-million-dollar profits, Spotify need to be rapidly increasing their payments until their suppliers – the musicians – can make a fair living off of significant streams - Mark, My Words takes a clear stand in his latest blog post.

More than 400 of the UK’s leading artists, among them musicians Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Rufus Wainwright, Jamie Cullum, Katie Melua, Stephen Hough, Terry Hall, Meera Syal, have signed a letter calling on the UK government to release funds to support the creative industries, Guardian reports. The artists warn that unless more is done the country could become “a cultural wasteland” because of the economic damage done during the Covid-19 outbreak. Find the letter text in full with list of signatories here.

GQ has a big story about Jason Isbell - alt-country singer-songwriter talks getting and staying sober, his succession of good albums (three at least), going to the studio, being his own publisher. On rehab: "It's always about the process. You're playing the game; you're not playing an opponent. You're doing the work in order to do the work”. Going to the studio: “The last time was really hard because I was very, very focused on what I was doing and also I was feeling pressure and not admitting to myself that I was feeling that pressure because I thought that admitting to myself that I was feeling the pressure would take away part of my advantage against it. And that took a while to figure out”. It's great to own your record company: “When I sell 59,000 copies of that record, I've recouped, and that means that I start getting paid. Last album, I did it in 10 days"; he sees both the label's share and the artist's share of the royalties: “And those are not the same size. Not by a long shot. It's way more for the label. Because that's who owns the masters. The artists, if all you are is an artist, you don't own shit. You're an employee". His new album 'Reunions' is out in May.

Citizen DJ is an open-source hip-hop sample tool launched by the US The Library of Congress, where users will have access to a massive audio collection that dates back over a hundred years. A preview is currently available, and the full service will launch this summer. There will be three ways to access these sound files: an interface for searching by sound and metadata; a simple music-creation app that easily allows the collection to be remixed with hip-hop beats; and various “sample packs” full of thousands of clips from particular collections. It is LOC's Brain Foo’s intention to bring back the golden age of hip-hop sampling, but Citizen DJ will be available for use in other musical genres.

DaBaby has debuted at No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with 'Blame It on Baby', with 124,000 equivalent album units in the USA last week, Billboard reports. Of those units, 110,000 were from steams, 12,000 from album sales, and 3,000 were in track equivalent units. 'Blame It on Baby' marks the eighth week in a row that an R&B/hip-hop project has led the Billboard 200, marking the longest such stretch in more than a year.

Nick Cave has launched a new livestream Bad Seed Teevee on YouTube, a 24-hour broadcast that will air concert footage, music videos, interviews and other rarities around the clock "for the foreseeable future".

Live Nation has updated its concert refund policy, enabling fans to get a full refund for the event no matter if it was cancelled or if it was postponed, New York Times reports. Fans who want a refund for a cancelled event, they will automatically receive a refund. If the show has been rescheduled, however, fans must request a refund within 30 days of the new show date being announced. Otherwise, tickets for the postponed event will be automatically valid for the new date. "Ticket Relief Plan" officially goes into effect on May 1, when ticket-holders will begin getting emails from Live Nation. Visit Live Nation's ticket refund website here.

"I hadn’t felt this much love for a new band in 20 years. That was both sad and disturbing. I’m not sure who it says what about, but regardless, I was head over heels in love with Big Thief" - ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer said about his now-favorite band. This week he shared a cover of Big Thief’s 'Not', and in the video he is jamming out on an acoustic guitar, on both of his knees, and you can't even see his head while he sings. That's love and passion!

Based on financial documents reviewed by Forbes, Kanye West’s net worth has recently reached $1.26 billion dollars. It's a tremendous change - less than five years ago, West publicly announced himself to be $53 million in debt. After striking a deal with Adidas to expand his Yeezy apparel brand, his income skyrocketed. Last year alone, West’s Yeezy sneakers sold $1.3 billion, with West himself personally pocketing $140 million in royalties. On the music side, West’s recordings and publishing rights are valued at around $90 million.

Professional Spanish dancer Albert Garcia has not been able to dance freely, so he took the opportunity to dance in an empty street in Valencia while taking out the garbage. He says performing in the street felt like "pure freedom", adding the applause he got from his neighbours' balconies felt so warm, like the ones he got dancing in Berlin Staatsoper and La Scala in Milan. BBC reports on the heartwarming story.

Captain Tom Moore, UK war veteran who walked laps of his garden to raise money for the NHS, has become the oldest person ever to score a number one single in the UK, the UK Official Charts reports. At the age of 99, his duet with Michael Ball covering 'You'll Never Walk Alone' sold 82,000 copies, with proceeds going to the NHS Charities Together fund. Capt Tom's birthday is next Thursday, meaning he will still be number one when he turns 100. The Weeknd almost beat Captain Tom but in a gallant move, he asked his UK fans to support the aged.

Isaiah Rashad returns with 'Why Worry', his first new song in 4 years, a good slice of soul-sampling hip-hop; Sigur Rós’ Jónsi shared his hypnotic new song 'Exhale'; Elder dropped their new album 'Omens', containing a great atmospheric prog song 'Halcyon'; Johnny Flynn - who plays David Bowie in new movie 'Stardust' has released 'Good Ol' Jane', intended to sound like an early, lost Bowie song; iLe and Natalia Lafourcade play futuristic Latin music on 'En Cantos'; Ben Gibbard played a nice piano cover of Nirvana's 'All Apologies'; Earl Sweatshirt's first single of the new year is a lazy 'Whole World'; just a beautiful song 'It's Hard to be Human' by Lawrence Rothman, featuring guest vocals by Marissa Nadler and the MUSYCA Children Choir.

On Monday, Amoeba Music, the largest independent record store in the US, started a GoFundMe in hopes of drawing support from regular customers, not just in Los Angeles but national and international visitors. And fans reacted enthusiastically - in its first 10 hours up, $35,000 of the $400,000 goal had been raised, in four days $200,902 has been raised. Amoeba's co-owner Marc Weinstein said in Variety interview that their "main cause is to keep this thing going, at whatever cost. Honestly, it’s always been our mission since day one is to do this. We care about music more than anything and we care about musicians". There are three Amoeba Music record stores in California, and all three have been closed since mid-March.

"Performing a curious blend of stoner rock, psych, and extreme metal, Elephant Tree focus treacle-thick riffs and dense sludge grooves into chilled odysseys. In doing so they retain the focus and drive of metal whilst embracing the floaty warmth of psych" - The Quietus writes in review of London band's new album. "Elephant Tree feel like a total refresh, smart and savvy, delivering a charmingly wonky version of the tropes that make the [stoner rock] genre so likeable".

"They’re one of the most important, influential, revolutionary hip hop groups of all time. They’re cross generational, and definitely get a big response when you say their name" a former nutritionist Lisa Roth told Variety about her 100th release - lullaby renditions of Wu-Tang Clan (out today). So far they've released lullaby covers of, obviously, 99 acts - Radiohead, Metallica, Elton John, Tool, The Beatles, AC/DC, Elvis Presley... - and the artists loved those - "Steven Tyler wrote liner notes to Aerosmith’s lullabies. Joe Elliot contributed liner notes to Def Leppard’s lullabies. Elton John has been nice to us, mentioning us in the press many times. Kirk Hammett from Metallica likes us. I’ve yet to hear anything angry or nasty", Roth says.