A-ha’s classic 1985 music video for 'Take On Me' has passed the one billion views threshold on YouTube, making them the first 1980s pop band and the first continental European act to step into the billion club. It’s one of the few pre-‘90s music videos to join the billion-views club alongside Guns N’ Roses' 'November Rain' and Queen’s 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. 'Take On Me' was recently restored and upgraded to 4K resolution.

Lewis Capaldi was the big winner at last night's Brit Awards picking up statues in Best new artist and Best song categories ('Someone You Love'). Dave won the No. 1 award, the Best album category, for 'Psychodrama', Mabel was awarded Best female award (30 years to the day her mother Neneh Cherry won her very own trophies), Stormzy got the Best male, and the Foals Best British group awards. Billie Eilish won in the International female category, with Tyler, the Creator wining in the International male category. Rising star award went to Celeste. Independent points out to Dave's political statement at the Brits - called out UK prime minister "racist", and lack of women, nominated or awarded.

Gdinya quartet Lonker See play jazzy/spacey post-rock on their new album 'Hamza', a one "that leaps straight into the action... The band gets to the heart of the matter in much shorter time" than on their previous album, the Quietus says in a review. 'Massive Oscillations' is the second album by the Forest Swords and James Holden collaborator Waclaw Zimpel - "an undisputed career highlight that finds Zimpel scaling new heights. While his debut picked up the baton from minimalist influences... here he goes for full maximalism and the results are staggering... A beautifully bold and powerful album" - the Q.

Stella Wedell from Berlin was 12 when she went on a Spanish holiday and had her walkman with a cassette with Pet Shop Boys, Shaggy and Bob Marley on it. She lost the tape, either on the Costa Brava or in Mallorca, only to be reunited with the cassette tape quarter of a century later at an exhibition by the British artist and photographer Mandy Barker, who specialises in creating pieces out of plastic marine debris. According to Guardian, Barker had picked up the tape from the Playa de Barlovento beach in Lanzarote, hundreds of miles away from where it was lost, had it restored – and made playable. Apart from the almost-romantic side of the story, there is the ecological side, as prof Richard Thompson, the head of the international marine litter research unit at Plymouth University, said - "the fact it has survived intact shows the durability of plastic and the threat it can pose to the marine environment”.

Let’s say that streaming becomes the de facto method of music delivery/consumption for the DJ community – what might this mean? - Attack Magazine asks theoretically (although it might just end up that way). It means that digital mixers and players will be able to collect and collate information from DJs about what they play, by whom and for how long. Digital mixers will be able to harvest every single piece of information from their actual front panel controls, which opens the door to DJ ghosts. Does it even signal the end of DJing? Probably not, it might simply be that in the future everyone, even A.I.s, can be a DJ.

"'Storm Damage' is an album by a man in his late 50s, musing on his life, lost love, changing surroundings, and mortality. By some incredible sleight of hand, he's managed to make that unpalatable dish, delicious"- PopMatters says in a review of Ben Watt's new album. Here, "he's backed by a cohort of musicians who embellish his music beautifully", but "the star of the show is his lyrics".

There hasn’t been a live music show in China since late January due to, coronavirus, enter - live-streaming. China’s musicians and promoters are organizing “bedroom music festivals” and live-streamed club nights. Initially, an idea hatched by VOX Livehouse, the legendary punk rock dive located in Wuhan, the city at the heart of the COVID-19 outbreak, the “live-streamed music festival” is now a nationwide craze, and genre, too, is no barrier. Options range from pop and hardcore punk to techno and experimental improvisation. What it means on a deeper level remains to be seen, but for now, these events allow China’s so-called “anti-social generation” to redefine sociality their way.

Most musicians’ jobs don’t seem to be going anywhere in the age of artificial intelligence, it is more likely we're nearing a period ripe for hybrid creativity - Consequence of Sound argues in an interesting article, naming numerous examples of musicians using AI as an intelligent instrument. Ai tools exist right now and enterprising musicians are currently using them in creative ways. This will only increase as more tools become available and more musicians experiment with them, ushering in a new phase of creative expression that incorporates an ever-evolving AI tool set that enables musicians to more fully express our humanity.

According to new data from equality advocate Jada E. Watson, female artists occupied exactly 10 percent of the space available on country radio in 2019. That, Watson says, is "barely enough to be heard", and much lower than two decades ago. In 2000, on the 19 February 2000 chart, women made up 40% of the week’s top songs. Calculating the drop, the percentage of songs by women in the Top 20 declined 75% in the past 20 years.

British music producer, DJ and record-label founder Andrew Weatherall, who co-produced Primal Scream’s landmark 1991 album 'Screamadelica' and helped bring the acid house genre into the mainstream, died Monday in London aged 56. His production work on 'Screamadelica' created a revolutionary mix of indie, hard rock, house and rave, changing British music, for the better, of course. Uncompromising, pioneering, and a true alternative visionary, his influence on modern-day music cannot be underestimated - DJ Mag says in the obituary.

"Emo has long been denied serious critical assessment, often dismissed as music for teens but never subject to the generous leeway or empathy given to pop music specifically designed for adolescents. But unlike with grunge or goth or any other subgenre that evolved from a defined set of sonic characteristics to a fashion phenomenon, the definition of 'emo music' is either too narrow or too vague to the point of being almost completely useless" - Ian 'Master of Emo' Cohen writes in the introduction to his list of 100 best emo songs, going back almost 40 years.

For musicians, an instrument is like a baby, the Guardian writes about the special bond and problems musician face tending the instrument, especially when traveling by plane. This battle came to the fore last week when the Malian musician Ballaké Sissoko accused US border officials of breaking his “impossible to replace” kora, a harp-like west African instrument, during a security check before flying from New York to Paris. He is on tour, playing in London next month, and he could not simply walk into a store to replace a hand-crafted, custom instrument.

"The most influential forerunners of punk on their respective sides of the Atlantic, these trailblazers established the tenets of glam that would serve as the foundations for future glam-punk" - PopMatters writes in an easy to read essay about the beginnings of glam-punk. "The transition of raw rock from garage to glam began in the mid-60s when Reed met Warhol... Striking pre-political poses that challenged the conventions of gender, sexuality, and class, Warhol's posse of eccentrics became an inspiration to the young Reed, who felt encouraged to ignore any pressures to compromise and to charge full-on with his decadent musings".

Rage Against the Machine have stopped approximately 85% of ticket scalping with the release of the not-quite-as-overpriced official charity tickets. A part of their plan to combat ticket scalpers is setting aside a tenth of the tickets at each venue of their upcoming tour to “resell” themselves at a higher price, but still less than what scalpers are charging. The band then gives that extra money to charity rather than lining the pockets of ticket resellers. According to Tom Morello's tweets, RATM raised over $3 million raised for charity in the first couple of days

'Miss_Anthrop0cene' is Grimes' darkest and most ambitious work, with each of its "10 tracks an embodiment of mortality and how humankind is inching ever closer to extinction", Consequence of Sound says in a review (grade B+). Speaking of the concept of the album, its title is a play on words - a combination of “misanthrope” and “Anthropocene” - with songs speaking of mortality and how humankind is inching ever closer to extinction. Sonically, there's a lot there - Bollywood-inspired melodies, drum and bass, folk, Britpop, dance, nu-metal, indie rock...

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.

Google Books provides free access to a huge number of music magazines, going all the way back to the 1940s, now mostly defunct. It's funny to see how music critics 35 years ago felt about Red Hot Chili Peppers ("baddest posse of white funk west of the mighty Mississip" - Spin), how Vibe announced "the most eagerly anticipated album in hip-hop history" (Snoop Dogg's), or how CMJ was trying to understand Portishead ("an invitation to a nightmare"). Billboard it the eldest among these, it was coming out during World War II (prior to that as well, it's just that the G-Books didn't archive it).

'Dark Matter' is debut solo LP by UK jazz drummer Moses Boyd, a modern, groovy-jazz album, rich with sound and easy to listen to. Brooklyn Vegan likes how it overcomes boundaries: "'Dark Matter' completely breaks down lines between genres. It’s jazz, it’s hip hop, it’s soul, it’s psychedelia - it’s a lot of things, and whatever subgenre you wanna call it, it’s a grooving, entrancing record that hooks you in from the start and ends way too soon". Guardian praises Boyd as "a skilled producer, artfully splicing warm acoustic tones with tempestuous electronic samples".

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.

"Fantasies are not real. There shouldn’t be any boundaries in that. What I’m interested in is the freedom of the imagination about sexuality and the fact that behind closed doors, when you’re not hurting anybody, you can imagine and do whatever you want"- Jehnny Beth of the Savages says about her debut solo album 'To Love Is to Live', out in May. She sees the stage similarly: “You can scare the shit out of yourself! But once you understand you’re absolutely safe, suddenly you can do anything – look at Iggy Pop. I see sex the same way – a wonderful way to test yourself. It is important because once you test yourself, you know yourself. You need that as a person and you need that as an artist”.

'Loom' wasn't supposed to sound like this - Kate Gately was already making her second album when her mother got ill and died, and the electronic musician scrapped those, and made 'Loom' during the process of her mother going away. And you can hear it - there's darkness, aggression, climax, coldness. Exclaim hears it as "a swirling mix of eerie atmosphere, devastating emotion and brilliant sonic abstraction", and Paste Magazine says "her bleak soundscapes eschew linear, melodic structures in favor of atmosphere, sound design and samples". MusicOMH writes that 'Loom' "is an intense record, full of feelings of loss, confusion and angst. It’s also an early contender for best electronic album of the year".