Coldplay's Chris Martin made a lovely show from his home, where he's closed due to coronavirus, in order to lift up everybody's spirits, which he managed to do actually. He made jokes, played several songs - 'Viva la Vida', 'Clocks', 'Yellow', 'Green Eyes', well, parts of them really, and sent messages regarding the virus. He passed on the torch to John Legend to play the next show, which he agreed to do - Tuesday (March 17) at 1pm Pacific time.
Jason Rainey, longtime guitarist for thrash metal band Sacred Reich, has died at age 53, Blabbermouth reports. Sacred Reich formed in Phoenix in 1985, when the members of the band were teenagers. The band’s sound was a hard, theatrical take on ’80s speed metal that sometimes crossed into hardcore. They released five albums, broke up in 2000, and reunited for occasional touring in 2007.
Duo Sama Dams (Sam and Lisa Adams) take a spot between art rock and garage rock with 'Not Gonna Lie'; instrumental project Eerie Gaits shared their tender song 'Saw You Through The Trees'; The Lickerish Quartet are just funny with their prog-glam rock song and video 'Lighthouse Spaceship'; 'X24' is a clockwork folk song by Kelora; Teyana Taylor shared a family-themed 'We Got Love', co-written by Kanye West; Lin-Manuel Miranda shared politics-themed cabaret song ‘I Have a Friend’; Brian Fallon shared a lovely Americana ballad 'Tender'; 'Lift Off' is a cool pop/free-jazz song by pop/soul artist Tom Misch and jazz drummer/producer Yussef Dayes; Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson is releasing a new solo album, and 'Personal Shopper' is a conceptual 10-minute prog epic announcing the summer LP.
"As with most rock music that sounds truly youthful, 'Melee' doesn’t invent new forms so much as connect bands once separated by subtle genre classification" - Pitchfork writes in a review of the debut album by Dogleg, and compares them to At the Drive-In, ...Trail of Dead, Cloud Nothings and Japandroids. Dogleg are video-games fans, which transforms into their music as an interest "in sheer, rejuvenating physical pleasure of controlling a lifelike version of yourself capable of jumping higher, punching faster, and sustaining more damage than any human could".
The That's Not Metal podcast made a really gallant job of creating a Google Spreadsheet with a list of over 100 (metal) artists who have had to either postpone or cancel their tour due to growing concerns over the coronavirus pandemic - Sheets includes links to their respective merch stores.
“When you’re young you think old people are a bit stupid. But they’ve done everything we’ve done, plus everything the previous generations did, and the one before that. I think old people almost become Buddhists. They’re like: ‘It ain’t worth me saying shit so I’m going to just sit here and chill’” - Mike Skinner, aka The Streets told in a Guardian interview about his new release 'None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive', a mixtape full of guest spots from young stars. A few more interesting thoughts, like the one on a choice of career - "I’ve got so many incredible stories of people changing their lives with rap. And it’s a nice thing to see. Because nobody wants a life of crime. It’s very hard work. It’s much easier to be a musician than a drug dealer”.
Organizers of this year’s Record Store Day have postponed this year's event from April 18 to June 20, due to coronavirus, Forbes reports. In a statement, the organizers say - “RSD acknowledges the need to be good citizens of both the local and worldwide communities while still giving our participating stores around the world the best chance to have a profitable, successful Record Store Day”. Check out this year’s list of exclusives here.
The Metropolitan Opera has announced that it will stream operas for free on their website in the wake of coronavirus. The stream will occur nightly at 7:30 p.m. ET via the homepage of metopera.org and will be available to stream for 20 hours, reports Vulture. The schedule for this upcoming week includes classics like 'Carmen', 'La Bohème', and 'La Traviata', as well as 'La Fille du Régiment', 'Lucia di Lammermoor', and 'Eugene Onegin'.
Organizers of the Vive Latino Festival in Mexico City chose to move forward with the event last weekend because “authorities are telling us that we are in Phase 1 [of the Coronavirus epidemic]” and “suspending mass events is not necessary”, according to Billboard. Nevertheless, many of the festival’s scheduled artists dropped out of the event, but not Guns N' Roses - they played a 22-song set that was highlighted by the first live performance of the 'Use Your Illusion II' track 'So Fine' in 27 years. Festival-goers were subject to intense measures upon their entry into the grounds - all attendees had their temperatures taken prior to being allowed access, Consequence of Sound reports. Guns N’ Roses intend to play all concerts in areas that haven’t limited public gatherings - in Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic.
Both Moog and Korg, two of the biggest names in analogue synthesizers, have each made one of their popular synth apps for a free download for a limited time to encourage creativity while people are staying home due to social distancing, self-quarantine and other preventative measures during the COVID-19 outbreak, Engadget reports. Moog is offering up it’s Minimoog Model D for iOS, and Korg is offering up its Kaossilator app for IOS or Android for free for a limited time.
Lil Uzi Vert debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with 'Eternal Atake', with the biggest streaming week for an album since 2018 - the album starts with 288,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in last week, with 278,000 of it in SEA units, which translates to a whopping 400 million on-demand streams for the set’s 18 tracks, the Billboard reports. That’s the fourth-largest streaming week ever for an album, and the largest week for any album since Lil Wayne’s 'Tha Carter V' started with 433 million clicks in October 2018. Elsewhere on the Billboard 200, Jhené Aiko scores her highest charting album ever, as 'Chilombo' debuts at No. 2 with 152,000 equivalent album units. Korean pop group NCT 127 lands its first top 10 effort, as 'NCT #127: Neo-Zone, The 2nd Album' debuts at No. 5 with 87,000 equivalent albums. Closing out the top 10 is Megan Thee Stallion, who scores her second top 10 effort with 'Suga'; 41,000 equivalent album units earned.
Genesis P-Orridge, founding member of cult experimental bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, has died, Alternative Press reports. With Throbbing Gristle, Genesis helped pioneer the genre of industrial music. In later life, they became a "body evolutionist", proposing a new gender that was beyond male and female. Boing Boing made an interview with the musician - he talked about dying. Alexis Petridis wrote a lovely obituary describing the musician as a "troubling catalyst who loathed rock yet changed it for ever" by inventing industrial music.
Irish singer-songwriter made her album 'Birthmarks' while heavily pregnant, using field recordings, synths, cello, and saxophone to create "an eerie, crackling record" with "substance", Brooklyn Vegan says. The Irish Times hears Woods venturing "further down the rabbit hole of experimentation, resulting in challenging but thought-provoking sonic soundscapes". Treble likes it the most: "Woods has fleshed out her ghostly, gothic folk into something bigger and heavier, informed as much by noise and industrial music as darkwave or neofolk... At times these feel less like songs, more like visceral, primal experiences".
Dr. Robert Murphy, an infectious disease researcher and the executive director of Northwestern University’s Institute for Global Health, shared some advice with the Vulture about going to concerts:
"Their music contains elements of math rock, krautrock, free jazz, minimalism" - PopMatters introduces Horse Lords, a "infinitely curious" band who "found a way to make these intricate, puzzle-like compositions soar with an electrified intensity that's uniquely engaging". 'The Common Task' is, PM says, "meticulous and complex, but also undeniably joyous and celebratory... For all of the cacophony, odd tunings, and unusually chosen paths, the way that the band gets into such an airtight groove is a pure joy to hear".
Dean Budnick, co-author of Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped, shared some ideas with Inside Hook about how to prevent ticket-scalpers from inflating concert tickets. Radiohead have limited ticket sales to individuals and forced concert-goers to match tickets with identification. Grateful Dead sold 50% of the tickets to their shows through their own mail-order service and limited the number of tickets that folks could purchase. Taylor Swift started a slow-ticketing model - she meted out tickets to a given show in the weeks and months leading up to a show so that fans knew they wouldn’t have to resort to the secondary market. One of the solutions is to limit the ability of folks to purchase tickets to shows within a certain geographic range.
Women made up only 12% of the songwriters responsible for writing the 700 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 year-end charts between 2012 and 2018, which is in stark contrast to one-third of all musicians identifying as female, according to Variety. It gets even worse when looking at music producers - gender breakdown for music producers who worked on the top 400 popular songs from 2012, 2015, 2017, and 2018, found a men-to-women producer ratio of 47:1. That translates to only 2.1% of those producers identifying as female.
The Guardian presents 'Guerrilla', the debut album by Angolan electronic artist Nazar as "a psychohistorical investigation", going from civil war in Angola to the rhythms of kuduro – a dense, explosive electronic music. Nazar calls the result “rough kuduro” – a caustic inversion of Angolan pride that packs the energy of kuduro down like gunpowder before blasting it apart, leaving distorted drums and pockmarks of dirt and noise, gun-cocks as percussion and whirring helicopter blades. Listen to the album 'Guerrilla' in full at Bandcamp.
"A lot of the songs of the Beatles felt to me very complete, because they had a voice, they had lyrics, and it was fine that the songs were two, three, four minutes. But as an instrumental, without the voice and the lyrics and the fact that it was me making the record, I felt like I had to give it something else, and not do a cover of the song, but my own interpretations" - jazz fusion guitarist Al Di Meola told All Music about his approach in Beatles' covers album 'Across the Universe'. 'Norwegian Wood' is a good example of it - a 2-minute pop song is remade into a 6-minute epic - listen below.
“It’s more a social thing than it is people knowing how to make the song on the computer. I am friends with the most amazing musicians that can do pop, rap, punk and jazz. All I do is facilitate. I really am a janitor” - one of the most sought-after producers, Kenny Beats tells the NME about his approach to music production. Although rap is his first love, he has produced music for musicians from all over the genre-spectrum - Rico Nasty, Mac Miller, Clairo, Idles, Schoolboy Q, Ed Sheeran. His latest love are the Bristol punks - "I think they’re the most important band in the whole world. Even having been close with them and working on their music, I’m still equally obsessed. Every time they play me a new song, I fall in love with them again. Their song-writing, point of view, just everything about them is what’s missing right now with bands and punk energy. IDLES are checking a box for me that nobody else is checking for me”.
Nissim is an orthodox Jew who was born a Sunni Muslim in Seattle by parents who were both rappers and drug abusers. He first converted to Christianity, and then to Judaism, which for him as an African-American makes perfect sense, as he's told the Level - “There’s really not too many other people in the world that should be able to relate over struggles and discrimination and prejudice than Jewish people and Black people".
Mac Miller, Lil Peep and Juice WRLD have died of drug overdoses; XXXTentacion, Jimmy Wopo, Nipsey Hussle and Pop Smoke are among the MCs to have been murdered. Guardian talked to their fans to see how they felt, one Lil Peep's fan sums it up pretty good - "it definitely felt like a personal loss, rather than a celebrity death”.
Glastonbury's first big line-up announcement features 52 per cent female or female-identifying acts (Taylor Swift, Diana Ross, Kendrick Lamar and Paul McCartney are headlining), and the NME loves it: "It is glorious, inspiring proof that the same old, tired excuses that still get trotted out by certain festival bookers don’t wash. Instead of moaning about how there aren’t 'enough female artists' or coming up with some face-saving, condescending scheme to give young female musicians 'a boost' and then seemingly forgetting all about it, Emily Eavis and her team have just surveyed the wealth of women making music right now and, you know, booked them. A novel idea!".
An interesting choice by the Fast Company of the 10 most innovative companies in music marketing, merchandising, getting artists paid, music production etc. One of the chosen 10 is Gener8tor, a startup accelerator for artists and musicians. Each artist receives a $20,000 grant to help build their careers, with Gener8tor taking no equity, royalties, or revenue share. Artists do, however, still have access to Gener8tor’s network of entrepreneurs and resources to help create a more sound business model for monetizing and growing their rising careers.
Rage Against the Machine have postponed the first leg of their upcoming reunion tour (March 26 - May 20) due to concerns over the coronavirus; they plan to start playing May 23rd. Billie Eilish has postponed her March US dates - the postponement arrives after Live Nation and AEG, two of the world’s biggest concert promoters, decided to halt all large-scale tours until April due to the pandemic. Canadian Juno Awards have cancelled all 2020 programming. After New York State has banned gatherings of 500 people or more due to the coronavirus pandemic, some NYC venues are temporarily closing their doors, and postponing events. JamFest in Atlanta on April 5, with Taylor Swift headlining, has been cancelled. All events related to this year's LA Pride have been postponed, although it takes place in three months from now, in June. Also, there's American bands having trouble going home from the EU since the US have posed travel restrictions. But, not everything has been cancelled - Kendrick Lamar has been added as Glastonbury headliner, Tool still plan to play the US this March (just one show cancelled so far), mewithoutYou have just announced their farewell tour...
An amazing interview in the Quietus with Egyptian poet Abdullah Miniawy and German electronic band Carl Gari about their collaborative album 'The Act Of Falling From The 8th Floor', about personal fear and struggle to reach freedom. Miniawy had to leave Kairo, settling in France and the group now operates between Paris and Munich, recording in a remote house in Neunburg vorm Wald, a town nestled in the Bavarian forest. When they started, Carl Gari played minimalistic techno instrumentals, when Miniawy joined them they grew increasingly abstract, skirting the edges of deconstructed club sounds and into sections of pure ambience to prop up Miniawy’s dramatic readings. Amazing stuff...
The music industry could lose as much as $5 billion - the same amount as the projected loss for the film industry - over cancellations and postponements due to coronavirus, analyst Kristen Jaconi, director of the Risk Management program at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, said. Kevin Kennedy, an industry analyst at IBISWorld, told the Rolling Stone that - “overall, the negative economic impact of the virus will be especially severe for smaller-scale operators that cannot effectively manage the risk".
From their start "being mediocre at best" to "touring with Madonna and Rick Rubin" Spike Jonze-directed documentary 'Beastie Boys Story' covers a life-time of a band. The docu is coming to IMAX theaters on April 3 and will then stream on April 24 via Apple TV+.
We need to stop pretending that we’re not trying to make a living. We need to make it OK to ask music lovers to support the music they love, directly. By buying an album in a physical or digital format, not just streaming (but stream it too!), the artist is more likely to see direct […]
Over the past several months, Sony Music has been investing aggressively in podcasts business, with those investments including at least five different partnerships and joint ventures with third-party podcast production companies - Somethin’ Else (U.K.), Broccoli Content (U.K.), The Onion (U.S.), Three Uncanny Four (U.S.) and Neon Hum (U.S.) - spanning topics including daily news commentary, investigative features, comedy/satire, politics and even family and parenting issues. Patreon sees a simple and obvious explanation for it: Sony Music’s foray into podcasting is a direct - and in many ways competitive - response to Spotify.
Music theorist Adam Neely makes music theory seem so simple and easy to understand, in general, and in his newest video as well. He talks about, and plays beautiful chords, and also talks about why deadlines are good for creativity, as well as why he thinks of himself as a musician, rather than as a YouTuber.
Freelance writer and former music editor of The Guardian, Michael Hann shares an interesting thought about music journalism with Music Journalism Insider: "I’d like to see rather more fun. Rather more acknowledgement that pop music is at heart a fundamentally joyful and ridiculous endeavour. Quite often, I feel like I am being forced to eat my greens by music writing, and denied my dessert. I need to stress I am not saying music writing should serve no social purpose—and evidently generations younger than mine, who rightly are dominating music writing now, want a lot of social purpose to their music writing—just that the balance has swung away from silliness and fun in a way I, speaking only for myself, regret a little".
The latest episode of The Listening Service podcast explores how our transactional economy underpins centuries of music-making from Notre-Dame’s patronage of the polyphonic Perotin, over Beethoven writing a symphony for £100 and Wagner losing over a million on the premiere of his operatic masterpiece The Ring cycle, to Pet Shop Boys singing about everything reduced to financial value.
Jezebel analyses Starbucks' history in music, from its humble starts to the million-making business: "The Starbucks compilations were utterly suburban in feel. Neat, inoffensive, and modern in their convenience, they presented a skin-deep assessment of the genres they represented. They gestured toward what it was to be cultured while requiring none of the time or work it actually took to be so. They commodified the grit of the ’60s coffeehouse and encased it in plastic".
MBW goes into some fun music math regarding Queen: the British rock band generated £41.95 million ($58.1 million) in 12 months prior to September 2020, with royalties amounting to £41.67 million ($57.7 million). In FY2019 (the 12 months to the end of September 2019), Queen Productions Ltd generated £72.77 million ($100.8m), of which £71.53 million ($99m) was from royalties. On the other hand, Hipgnosis Songs Fund takes 18 multiple as a reasonable reflection of the market value of gold-standard music publishing rights today. In the past three years, according to Queen Productions Ltd, the band’s rights have generated some £134.5 million ($186 million) in royalties. That’s an average across these three years of $62 million per annum. So, an 18 multiple on $62 million would make Queen’s royalty-bearing rights worth - $1.1 billion today.
"Millions of listeners now subscribe to lo-fi hip-hop playlists to relax, study, chill, and sleep. Its popularity has spawned a DIY business opportunity. Companies like Lofi Girl (formerly ChilledCow) have carved out their own lane, launched their own record labels, built an independent brand of merch, products, playlists, and more" - Trapital says presenting Music Ally's piece about the chill-hop genre.
"Have UK clubs benefited from embracing the concept of the Night-Time Economy, or is an emphasis on financial growth and political optics bleeding the life out of dancefloors?" - DJ Mag wonders in their interesting piece about the connection of politics and club scene, especially in London. "Club culture is fundamentally rooted in youth culture, and the cultures of communities excluded from the political mainstream: its vitality stems ultimately from those groups imagining and creating utopian alternatives to existing power structures, not replicating them. When we think about where these conversations might go next, perhaps the answer is for those on the front lines of dance music to seize this debate for ourselves, instead of outsourcing it to landlords, career politicians or baby boomers".
Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman - with a new name Mr Jukes - is joined by the relatively unknown East London rapper Barney Artist on the laid-back hip-hop groove 'Check the Pulse'; Manzanita combines surf guitar, garage rock and Latin American cumbia and guaracha on the uplifting 'Shambar'; 'The Angel of 8th Ave' by Gang of Youths is just some straight rock'n'roll; 'Alètheia' is just some straight - post-metal, by the French collective Year of no Light.
Music historian Katherine Schofield writes a short essay for the Grin, marrying her knowledge of Indian classical music and art, about how each swara or Indian note, seven in all, interrelate to cries of animals. Sur is a musical sound made up of swaras.
They rehearsed after school let out for the week on Friday nights, inspiring them to call the band On a Friday, but when they got signed, the label suggested they change their name. The band members all loved the obscure Talking Heads song, so the Radiohead were born. It gets worse on Rolling Stone's list of 25 worst band names - The Polka Tulk Blues Band is a lousy name for any band, let alone the one which will come up with heavy metal. Geezer Butler seeing crowd of people lined up to see the Boris Karloff film 'Black Sabbath' saved the day.
