YouTuber Polyphonic released his new video, 'The Untold History of Disco' about the music side of the disco and how it had reached the mainstream. Also, he puts it into a societal context, connecting it to the hippie movement, and the fight for minority rights. The disco decade finishes with the "murder" of the disco at a rally. Not much on the video side, but a great story!

An interesting text to think about in The Face about musicians taking part in the 2022 World Cup: "Looking at the expansive musical programming around the Qatar World Cup, it seems like international acts taking these dirty cheques has become more normalised. The question for artists is whether they want to be complicit in this culture-washing, and whether or not they actually believe that reaching fans in far-flung places is a good enough excuse. When it comes to moral gymnastics, it seems a big booking fee can be quite the performance enhancer".

"I’m happy to carry this remnant of my youth with me, not just as a reminder of two of the most beautiful people who walked the earth... but also that there was a time when I was both heroic and dumb enough to get a tattoo of a badly drawn skull with my girlfriend’s name on it" - Nick Cave answers a fan's questions on his Red Hand Files blog, whether he should get a tattoo. "I guess I am wiser now, but that folly of youth will always go with me, and when I am finally in the ground, the grinning skull will continue to mock and jeer at all the lofty pretensions and vanities and cautions of these, my latter years. So, should you get a tattoo, Chris? As a sage man of a mature age I would advise against it, which is why I think you should probably get one".

Composer, pianist, and YouTuber, Nahre Sol made a great short video about conducting. It features one of the most famous conductors of our time, Alan Gilbert, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, and pianist Julio Elizalde. Good stuff.

Canadian-Chinese pop singer Kris Wu has been sentenced to 13 years in prison by a Beijing court for charges that include the rape of three women, The Associated Press reports. The Chaoyang District court ruled that Wu, as well as others implicated in the case, supplied three women with alcohol in 2020 and raped them when they could no longer consent. He also received one year and 10 months for a 2018 event where he “assembled a crowd” and assaulted two women they got drunk. Singer and actor was fined 600 million yuan (€79.5 million/$83.7 million) for evading taxes. Hu will be deported after completing his sentence,

"A brilliant, innovative early ‘70s singer-songwriter who was the first artist signed to David Geffen’s Asylum Records... Her music fit early ‘70s Southern California vibe of her label and milieu, but it was stranger, with deep classical influences, wildly unusual structures and voicings and often dark subject matter" - Variety presents Judee Still, the forgotten California musician. Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom directed the new documentary ‘Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill’ - "a masterful job of making the most of what little there was, enlivening the narrative with contemporary interviews, photos and voiceovers, as well as drawings and passages read by a voice actor culled from her voluminous journals".

When it comes to musical tastes, people tend to favor songs with lyrics that correspond to their attachment style - researchers in the psychology department of the University of Toronto have found in a study that involved asking 570 people about their favourite songs. The participants were asked a series of questions about their relationship histories. The analysis of more than 7,000 songs revealed that people tended to like song lyrics that related to their attachment style in intimate relationships. This means most people tend to like songs that spell out what they are going through in a relationship. Vice reports about the study.

Yolŋu rapper Baker Boy has dominated the 2022 Arias, taking home a total of five awards for his album 'Gela', including the top gong for album of the year, as well as best solo artist and best hip-hop release, ABC reports. Amyl and the Sniffers took home Best group, and Best rock release (for their 2021 album 'Comfort to Me'). Tones and I took home the fan-voted best song award for 'Cloudy Day'.

"Dear, sweet tinnitus — the musician’s curse. Mine is actually pretty manageable most of the time, it comes and goes, and only really kicks off when I am playing live music, which now I come to think of it is most of the time" - Nick Cave answers a fan's question about tinnitus in his Red Hand Files blog. "An ear specialist once told me there was not much I could do other than to ‘love my tinnitus’ — and then charged me three hundred quid" - Cave continue "but, you know, I don’t love my tinnitus, I don’t love my tinnitus at all, it’s a pain in the arse. So, I feel for you, Denise, sitting there in your solitude, with your tinnitus for company, and I don’t really have any advice for you, other than to say, if it is any consolation, that not only my cricket choir is singing, loud and very clear, but Warren’s is too, and Larry’s and Colin’s (Greenwood), and Wendy’s and Janet’s and T Jae’s — all our dreary crickets singing their moronic and endless serenade back to you".

Daniel Vangarde is an artist, writer, and producer behind an array of releases that range from the wildly obscure to the instantly familiar, like Ottawan's 'D.I.S.C.O'. Vangarde had retired from music years ago, relocating to a remote fishing village in northern Brazil, after losing interest in music. However, at the age of 75, he is having a career-spanning compilation released. Because Music was keen to release the compilation, partly due to the success of his son, Thomas Bangalter, until recently one half of Daft Punk. Alexis Petridis brings the exciting story.

English guitarist and singer/songwriter Wilko Johnson, a member of the 1970s pub band Dr. Feelgood, passed away this week. The New Cue paid a tribute to the musician revisiting Johnson's list of records that shaped him. There are a few famous ones, like The Doors' 'LA Woman', or Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited', but also some lesser known, like Sir Douglas Quintet' 'Mendocino', and Mickey Jupp’s Legend's 'Legend (aka Red Boot)'.

All About Jazz writer Chris Vella made a collection of songs that allows you to get lost and "have it transport you to a state of bliss. Like the diamonds of the music, no matter the era or style, they just shine... They're not splashy or overly complicated... You can just hang inside the groove like it's in some kind of snow globe heaven".

New Tedium writer Chris Dalla Riva looked at what has caused the disappearance of key change in pop music: "As hip-hop grew in popularity, the use of computers in recording also exploded too. Whereas the guitar and piano lend themselves to certain keys, the computer is key-agnostic. If I record a song in the key of C major into digital recording software, like Logic or ProTools, and then decide I don’t like that key, I don’t have to play it again in that new key. I can just use my software to shift it into that different key. I’m no longer constrained by my instrument".

"One of the most dramatic impacts that streaming has had on the record industry is been the democratization of listening" - Music Business Worldwide underlined a phenomenon that has happened in pop music in the streaming decade. The outgoing CEO of Warner Music Group, Steve Cooper puts it clearly, in numbers: “A decade ago, our Top 5 artists generated over 15% of our recorded music physical and digital revenue. In 2022, they generated just over 5%”. It's not just a decline in share of revenue; it’s a decline in actual revenue generated - Warner Music Group’s Top 5 recorded music artists in FY2012 look likely to have cumulatively generated a larger sum of annual digital and physical royalties (≈$274.5m) than WMG’s equivalent Top 5 artists generated in FY2022 (≈$193.4m). WMG’s overall recorded music royalties more than doubled in that period - $1.83bn in FY2012 vs. $3.87bn in FY2022. "As a result, in any given year, an ever-greater share of total streams is drifting away from the Top 10 biggest hits, and towards a much wider array of ‘middle class’ artists with significant, but not necessarily chart-bursting, fanbases" - MBW points out.

A group of prominent musicans are among the signers of an open letter calling for the European Union to adopt a new law cracking down on deforestation, as part of its efforts to tackle the climate emergency. Coldplay, Brian Eno, Sting, Robyn, Barbra Streisand, Bryan Adams and David Gilmour, are among the musical signatures, next to veteran climate campaigners, as well as actors, directors and activists. ClientEarth

"'And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow' gently bombards you with one fantastic tune after another" - Guardian's Alexis Petridis writes in praise of Weyes Blood's new album (it's Petridis' Album of the Week). Pitchfork finds "a dispatch from the center of catastrophe—an idiosyncratic set of love songs and secular hymns with lushly orchestral arrangements" (tagged it Best New Music). The Line of Best Fit hears "a timeless classic, this record is one that you can revisit whenever you want to hear the comforting sounds of another soul trying to figure it all out". NME goes beyond the album itself: "By being pliable, open and more tender, Mering seems to suggest, perhaps we can save ourselves from the doom that this stunning record finds itself gripped within".

The best music books this year kept it personal" - Pitchfork points out introducing the best 15 books of 2022. Among them are "affable, conversational, and always funny, with surprising insights and ear-catching phrasings gliding in from every direction" book 'The Number Ones' by Tom Breihan about American No. 1 pop hits, as well as "an astoundingly intimate book-length conversation on art and grief" with Nick Cave by Sean O'Hagan. and 'Queer Country' by Shana Goldin-Perschbacher who draws "a vivid portrait of a movement at a point of breakthrough".

The global recording industry association IFPI, released 'Engaging with Music 2022', the largest music study on how people around the world enjoy and engage with music. It is based on the responses of more than 44,000 people in 22 countries. Highlights of the 2022 report include:

• Music fans are listening to more music today than ever before, spending on average 20.1 hours listening to music weekly - up from 18.4 hours in 2021.
• 46% of respondents use subscription audio streaming services, which offer uninterrupted and on-demand access to millions of licensed tracks.
• 69% of people say music is important to their mental health, 68% say that music is important when they exercise.

Mark Levine, author of 'We’ll Play Till We Die' and 'Heavy Metal Islam' looks into the power of music in Muslim countries. "The training and skills necessary to create a DIY music scene in a culturally and politically hostile culture overlapped significantly with the skills needed to create independent political subcultures capable of challenging and transforming patriarchal and authoritarian systems"- Levine writes. However, "looking back on the last two decades, it was clear that while music and art can help make revolution irresistible to large numbers of people, they don’t make its success inevitable or even likely. States often ramp up violent repression and deploy equally powerful aesthetic and affective tropes, imagery, narratives and identities to counteract the power of art".

Music writer Harmony Holiday was a part of Madlib's camp, and thought about what it was: "The entourage is its own worst enemy. It’s an endless funeral procession for the personalities that existed before of it, and the retribution that pursues it and evades it. It makes those men almost untraceable, intractable, easy to distract and extract from and run. I wanted to save this man from becoming the entourage’s pawn or mime, with the kind of feminine power that is mine, that makes men men. It turned me, for a time, into his pawn or mime, a thankless, timeless easy-to-abuse muse position. The entourage is a ruins".

In his latest post, music writer Ted Gioia presents a scientific basis for his alternative musicology—a holistic way of thinking about songs and their impact on individuals and societies. He makes the argument that too much of our world today is controlled by left-hemisphere-of-the-brain worldview — analytic and detail-oriented - and calls for the right hemisphere - controls creativity, intuition, and imagination - to take over. "The simplest way to tap into the right hemisphere is music… The connection between songs and the right hemisphere of our brains is so strong that stroke victims who have lost the language-making capacity of their left brain are sometimes still able to sing words they can no longer speak". A great intro to the theory.

Trapital's Dan Runcie looks into the Taylor Swift - Ticketmaster situation in his latest memo, and points out to the decision that most artists need to make:

• "If artists keep ticket prices lower, then more of their superfans who aren’t as rich can attend. The drawbacks are that lower revenue will put pressure on the artist to keep production costs low. That means that the artist’s show may not keep up with peer artists who still have lavish productions and may make more revenue as a result and capture more headlines.

• Alternatively, if artists keep prices higher to match demand, then the artist can maximize their profit per show, spend less time on the road, earn more money to put toward other interests. But this creates a concert experience for the fans most willing to pay, not necessarily the most passionate fans".

Universal Music Group-owned Deutsche Grammophon just launched its own high-resolution classical music streaming service called STAGE+. The subscription for the service will cost EUR €14.90 per month, or €149 per year. UMG thusly becomes the latest major record company to launch its own music streaming service, following the 2019 launch of Sony's high-resolution music streaming service Mora Qualitas in Japan. Also, classical music is rising in popularity amongst younger listeners, used to modern services

Ana Moura is one of Portugal’s biggest stars, a fado singer (or fadista) who has sold millions of records, and has just released her seventh album. This time Noura is reinventing the ‘Portuguese blues’ again, mixing its emotional intensity with kizomba, samba and trap. Guardian presents the fado star.

"A tribute to Buffy Sainte-Marie’s extraordinary life and career, Madison Thomas’s 'Buffy Sainte-Marie: Carry It On' is as captivating and vital as its legendary subject, the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar" - Tiff reviews the new documentary about the Canadian activist and musician. "Her spirit shines, her wit and warmth blast through the screen and her many talents inspire" - What She Said insists.

"When you go to a football match and there’s lots of people all singing together, in the 21st century that’s a unique thing. When do you get groups of people singing together unaccompanied other than at football matches, mass singing like that?" - Alex James (of Blur) says to The New Cue about his football song 'Vindaloo'. Having a football record, James argues, is "half as good as a Christmas record... I’ve come to realise, because it’s every two years that there’s a major tournament and Christmas is still yearly". He also favors "boozy singing late at night" with friends - "there’s nothing more wonderful than singing when you’re drunk, is there? It’s better than headlining Glastonbury, a bunch of mates all singing together".

At least five people were killed and further 25 others were injured in a shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, just before midnight Saturday, Colorado Public Radio reports. The suspect in the shooting at Club Q was identified as 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich. Upon entering the club, the attacker immediately opened fire before at least two people inside the club confronted and fought him, preventing further violence.

"So many posthumous jazz releases are just live concerts with the same songs we’ve already heard before, but this album (entitled 'HOME.S.') genuinely breaks new ground" - music writer Ted Gioia recommends the only solo piano album by Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson, released this week, 15 years after his death. "There is no time zone for jazz nowadays. Svensson played a key role in breaking down that barrier, one of the last in the genre’s long history of overcoming limitations. And that’s perhaps the most fitting legacy of all for this artist, whose music itself is timeless" - Gioia points out.

China's Tencent Music has created and released over 1,000 tracks containing vocals created by AI tech that mimics the human voice, Music Business Worldwide reports. One of these tracks, which appears to be called 'Today' has already surpassed 100 million streams, becoming the first song by an AI singer to be streamed over 100 million times across the internet.

"Growing up in a working class neighborhood, I judged the possibilities in my own life on the basis of what others in our home town had achieved. I was fortunate that I had a few success stories to latch onto—and others deserve that same kind of boost. They now have it in more than a dozen cities in North Carolina" - music writer Ted Gioia points out introducing music murals of John Coltrane, Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk, and others, painted by graffiti artist Scott Nurkin in several cities in North Carolina, where the painted musicians hail from.