Jeff Beck, the celebrated rock guitarist who played with the Yardbirds and led the Jeff Beck Group, has died aged 78, the BBC reports. Beck was known as a keen innovator - he pioneered jazz-rock, experimented with fuzz and distortion effects, and opened the way for psych-rock and heavy metal. Beck, whose fingers and thumbs were famously insured for £7m, was an eight-time Grammy winner, recipient of the Ivor Novello for outstanding contribution to British music, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame both as a solo artist and as a member of the Yardbirds. His Yardbirds bandmate, Jimmy Page wrote on Twitter - “The six stringed Warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions. Jeff could channel music from the ethereal. His technique unique. His imaginations apparently limitless". Rod Stewart, who sang in the Jeff Beck Group, tweeted: "He was one of the few guitarists that when playing live would actually listen to me sing and respond".

The good people from Heavy Blog is Heavy have waited for the year 2022 to end, listened to all the albums coming out in December, and have served us now with a very good list of the 50 best (mostly) metal albums (and one interesting non-metal addition). Since HBIH considers music not to be a contest, they listed the 50 chosen ones from the "phenomenal year for music" in alphabetical order. A good one.

Universal Music Group has opened its first “music-based experiential hotel” in Madrid, uDiscoverMusic reports. The UMUSIC Hotel Madrid is operating at full capacity since the start of this year. The innovative hotel is located inside the historic Albéniz Theater building in the Spanish capital. “Through music’s unique power to inspire and unite – especially given UMG’s unparalleled roster of artists and labels – UMUSIC Hotels will both highlight these cities’ rich music heritages and provide new opportunities for artists to reach fans in immersive, innovative and authentic ways,” Bruce Resnikoff, President and CEO of Universal Music Enterprises, said of the project. Locations planned for UMUSIC hotels are Atlanta, Georgia; Biloxi, Mississippi; and Orlando, UMUSIC Hotels offer fans, guests, and artists immersive music experiences, incorporate elements of the local music scene,

Hardware company Kano made a name for themselves last year through a partnership with Kanye West who helped them design a Stem Player which contained his album 'Donda 2'. They have in the meantime severed ties with West, although its cofounder and CEO Alex Klein is gallant enough to admit that some days he feels “blessed” to have gotten West's eye on a player's new video cut or color combination. This year, Kano is launching a new product—a Stem Player with music by Ghostface Killah. The unique album by the former Wu-Tang Clan member will be released on custom white and black Ghostface Stems, and will run $240 and $360, respectively. “This is music for these people who care about me... It’s nothing for me to go in the studio and cook something up and just give it to [fans]. I don’t care about that. If you want it, you’re going to go get it” - Ghostface Killah says to Fast Company.

Cat Blanchett won a Golden Globe in the Best Actress in a Motion Picture category for her portrayal of fictional composer and conductor Lydia Tár. Austin Butler won in the Actor category for his portrayal of pretty much a real person - Elvis Presley. Kala Bhairava, M. M. Keeravani, and Rahul Sipligunj were awarded in the Best Original Song category for 'Naatu Naatu' from the Bollywood movie 'RRR'. Justin Hurwitz won Best Original Score for 'Babylon'. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, made a virtual appearance during the Golden Globes telecast saying "There will be no third World War, it is not a trilogy”. Variety reports...

"Globalism and diversity seem to have won in pop music. Good" - Matty Karas reflects on this year's Coachella line-up. Bad Bunny, Blackpink, and Frank Ocean headline the California mega-fest this April. "If you dare to bring a guitar to the desert, Goldenvoice will bury your guitar, and they might bury you with it... The kids want something else, and Goldenvoice will give it to them" - Tom Breihan points out.

The Guardian looks for clues for the popularity of nightcore, sped-up versions of existing songs, on streaming services and social media. Spotify-produced playlist Sped Up Songs is liked by more than 975,000 people; views of nightcore versions of songs on YouTube count in millions; on TikTok, the hashtag “spedupsounds” has 9.6bn views. The G sees record labels behind this trend - "sped-up music is a quick way for labels to monetize old music" since these kinds of remixes “drive songs up the charts” and are especially lucrative for catalogue material. There's a new trend going on parallel to nightcore - “slowed + reverb”, a slowed-down alternative "where producers pull down a song’s tempo to 60 or 70 quarter-note beats per minute, then add some skips, scratches, and stop-time moments. It’s a TikTok staple, with over 1.3m views on the app, and 623,000 followers on Spotify’s 'slowed and reverbed' playlist".

Lawyers for Dr. Dre sent a cease-and-desist letter to congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene threatening her with legal action after she used the rapper’s 1999 smash hit 'Still D.R.E.' without permission in a social media post, Billboard reports. “One might expect that, as a member of Congress, you would have a passing familiarity with the laws of our country" - lawyers wrote.

The New York Times looks into "trailerization" - the reworking of existing songs to maximize their impact in trailers for films and TV shows. One of the most successful recent examples is David James Rosen's take on Kate Bush’s 'Running Up That Hill' which he tweaked into a thunderous version for 'Stranger Things'. The Times explains different types of trailerizations: "There are reimaginations, which are usually instrumental covers by composers. There are overlays, where elements are added to a song in varying degrees. Then there are remixes, where the source material is distinctly altered, often to shift the context".

"The real leverage point for AI is cost savings. That’s because the music itself isn’t very good. Sure, there’s a certain novelty factor here—but that will wear off very soon. The real hook is that AI works for cheap, it’s almost like slave labor in the band" - music writer Ted Gioia argues in his latest post about AI-created music. His point for the perfect circle in the text - "that’s how these shifts happen. New tech enters the marketplace as a cheap alternative, and gradually becomes the preferred alternative—because the ‘ears’ of the audience have changed".

Trapital's Dan Runcie takes a closer look at SZA's latest release 'SOS', a very successful album commercially, which also ended up on several top albums lists. "Staying power should be a key performance indicator for any music release in 2023. In a world of nonstop releases, big marketing budgets, and streaming optimization tactics, the 'perfect rollout' is now table stakes for most major record labels and their top artists. But lasting endurance is harder to master. That’s what sets great music and great artists apart" - Runcie points out.

The success of ABBA Voyage, the avatar show based on the Swedish band set in London, could be replicated elsewhere in the world, in Las Vegas, Australasia, or somewhere else in Europe, CNBC reports. "We can duplicate the arena and the show” producer Svana Gisla told, adding - “the tech itself isn’t new but the way in which we’ve used it and scale and barriers we’ve broken down are new. I’m sure others will follow and are planning to follow”. It's really just a technical question, according to Gisla - “we have live musicians, so we keep our band and do seven shows over five days a week. But you could roll round the clock. Vegas will quickly adopt this style of entertainment and do Elvis or the Beatles”. However, it was no easy task - the London show was in the works for five years and had a £141 million (€160 million, $174.9 million) budget funded by global investors. It needs to get around 3 million people through its doors to break even, and the average ticket price is £75 (€85, $91).

"My plan for this year is to make a new record with the Bad Seeds" - Nick Cave writes in his first post of 2023 on his The Red Hand Files site. "This is both good news and bad news. Good news because who doesn’t want a new Bad Seeds record? Bad news because I’ve got to write the bloody thing". He continued on to detail the difficulty of songwriting: "Writing lyrics is the pits. It’s like jumping for frogs, Fred. It’s the shits. It’s the bogs. It actually hurts. It comes in spurts, but few and far between. There is something obscene about the whole affair. Like crimes that rhyme."

John Lydon's band Public Image Ltd. will take part in the competition to represent Ireland at the 2023 edition of Eurovision, the BBC reports. Former Sex Pistol's new song 'Hawaii' is a “love letter” to Lydon’s wife of nearly five decades, Nora, who is living with Alzheimer’s.

The Face chooses 10 pop acts they expect to "smash it" this year - Colombian-American producer/DJ Nick León, whose "tracks are powered by dembow rhythms, often fusing Latin genres like reggaeton and perreo with ambient, IDM, Miami bass and electro"; New York rapper Clip, distinct for her "nonchalant delivery and a love of scuzzy, leftfield rap production", Bar Italia who Mix "jagged art rock and grey-scale dream-pop"; and others.

The latest episode of Source Material podcast explores the symbiotic links between electronic music and house plants discovering how bass frequencies mimic bees and why festivals are adopting sonic soil pollution. Diving into the world of frequencies and root systems, RA's Martha Pazienti Caidan speaks to four musicians and artists who make music and/or technology for plants - biotherapeutic musician Imka, Joe Patitucci of PlantWave, an app that translates plants' biorhythms into music, sound artist Karine Bonneval and composer Erland Cooper.

"Many of the year’s most viral moments on TikTok were derived from live shows this year: Rosalía elaborately chewing gum during her song Bizcochito, Healy relentlessly touching his crotch, Gaga belting a power ballad while wearing an Edward Scissorhands-style claw and standing on a flaming stage. Perhaps these moments are reverse-engineered to go viral?" - Guardian asks about the nature of live shows. Tobias Rylander, who designed the 1975’s At Their Very Best tour, affirms the question - he says he’s always trying to put together “a show that reads well on social media”. LeRoy Bennett says that he and Lady Gaga were “absolutely” thinking about social media when designing her latest tour Chromatica Ball. Lorde and Rosalia had similar approach with their latest tours.

The New Cue talked to Bristol’s singer-songwriter Billy Nomates about her new album 'CACTI', out this Friday. She describes how she chooses songs from the raw material: "What I’m slowly realising is you never throw the dart closer to the bull’s eye than when you first burn off a demo, because you create something that’s just the feeling and sometimes it actually doesn’t need the other things. It’s taken me a long time to understand that but I’m starting to grasp it now. I think getting them out of the bin was a lot of encouragement, there was a lot of kicking and screaming, there was a lot of ‘naaah, what are you talking about, it’s rubbish!’. That’s the cons of being a solo artist, you are your best friend and your own worst enemy in those situations".

Ted Gioia writes an hommage to harpist Therese Schroeder-Sheker who has "devoted her life to performing music for the dying. She has done this on countless occasions, and has accumulated a huge body of knowledge, wisdom, and practical skills that she generously shares with others... This life story would be impressive under any circumstances, but especially so when you consider that Therese Schroeder-Sheker had a brilliantly successful career as a recording artist and concert hall performer. She could have spent her entire life as a music star, but instead put her primary focus on serving those in the most dire and hopeless situations... She is the antithesis of a pop star. Therese is an exemplar of compassion, caring, and contemplation".

The Weeknd’s 2019 track ‘Blinding Lights’ has become the most streamed song ever on Spotify with 3,332,163,962 streams (on January 1), the Hypebot reports. The track has overtaken Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape Of You’ (with 3,332,016,196 streams on January 1) which has held the top spot for the past five years — having taken over from Drake’s ‘One Dance’ in 2017.

UK girl R&B trio Flo have won the BBC's Sound of 2023, the annual list which showcases the next big things in music. Flo, who are aged between 19 and 21, were formed in 2019 and signed to Island Records in 2020. Flo beat Fred Again, Nia Archives, Cat Burns, and Gabriels.

"The past felt particularly not dead and especially not past on many of the year’s most acclaimed and most consumed albums. So much music deemed notable by critics and audiences alike in 2022 was profoundly shaped by the pandemic, the quarantine era in particular, giving it a temporal wooziness" - Jezebel reflects on the effects the pandemic has had on recent albums by Björk, Rosalia, Bad Bunny, Beyonce, and others.

ulture looks into the ideas of gender, being questioned last year in albums by Shamir ('Heterosexuality'), Hikaru Utada ('Bad Mode'), and Leikeli47 ('Shape Up'). "Each of these albums point to a path away from 'representation' being a totalizing force in discussions of how gender is broken down in music. Instead of existing solely as an identity for the artist in question to inhabit, the destruction of binary gender ideas can be a prerogative. Identity can only go so far. These artists show us how non-binary ideas of gender can be used as verbs, something to do, not just something to be".

A brave piece of investigative journalism in Rolling Stone about a Serbian DJ who they allege to be a war criminal. The story goes back 30 years to the Bijeljina city massacre from April 1992, where para-military group Arkan's Tigers (Arkanovi tigrovi) left their bloody trail. Rolling Stone alleges one of the combatants in the war was Srđan Golubović, who would later perform as DJ Max, also a co-owner of a record label, Ultra Groove Records. He was center stage at clubs in Belgrade and venues across Serbia, including at the world-famous EXIT Festival. A must-read.

"There were a lot of samples and things that needed to be taken care of. It was long, but it wasn’t grueling. What’s great is that a lot of these owners, writers, and publishers were De La Soul fans, and they had publicly understood what was going on" - De La Soul's Posdnous says in the Billboard interview about his band's music finally coming to streaming platforms. It was frustrating to be absent from the digital media: "It almost felt like we were being erased from history, because our music wasn’t up".

"Deep, empathetic bond between artist and listener is the most elemental connection in music" - Rolling Stone introduces its list of the 200 best singers of all time, which, "encompasses 100 years of pop music as an ongoing global conversation". The ultimate criteria was "originality, influence, the depth of an artist’s catalog, and the breadth of their musical legacy". Here are the top 10:

10. Al Green

9. Otis Redding

8. Beyoncé

7. Stevie Wonder

6. Ray Charles

5. Mariah Carey

4. Billie Holiday

3. Sam Cooke

2. Whitney Houston

1. Aretha Franklin

"There’s a long history of feared or conquered foreigners as musical innovators. But their new musical styles are initially attacked and suppressed, although they eventually enter the mainstream. This seems to be the case with the Aztec zarabanda... The chaconne, too, probably originated in Latin America before showing up in Spain in the late sixteenth century. Early source documents describe the dance as Peruvian, although some believe it came from the Caribbean coast areas of Mexico. As with the zarabanda, the chacona was viewed as sexy and disreputable" - music writer Ted Gioia goes back centuries looking for the roots of chaconne and sarabande, now examples of European classical music popularized by Bach.

Drugs and parties specialist Michelle Lhooq checked out New York Dimes Square scene and published a great post about it, including some very interesting thoughts:

“One thing is obvious: when too many people try to adopt the contrarian position at once, it’s no longer contrarian. Mavericks become the new herd.”

“At the end of the night we’re all humans working to the real cause of just being,”

"There’s no such thing as purity anymore."

Music theorist Adam Neely takes a left turn in his latest video talking about musical gear. His band Sungazer had built a custom in-ear monitor system in order to avoid troubles with bad sound engineers. What also changed is the way they play. The Wednesday Night Titans drummer had told them - "You play like you can hear yourself".

Record 2.232 million vinyl albums were sold in the US the week ending December 22, the highest figure it has ever been recorded since 1991, Billboard reports. The biggest-selling record was ‘Midnights’ by Taylor Swift, which moved 68,000 units. This is the second time since 1991 that vinyl sales have crossed the 2 million mark – the first time this happened was only last year, when 2.1 million records were sold in the week ending December 23, 2021.