Music writer Ted Gioia takes a critical look at today's music magazines which are (supposedly) leaning too much towards nostalgia: "Music writers serve as the conscience of the art form. They don’t simply reflect back to fans what they expect or want to hear. This is always important to remember but especially right now when the dominant platforms reward technocrats at the expense of musicians. Music media outlets have a responsibility to push back against these forces of marginalization and homogenization that not only hurt individual artists but weaken the en

White noise is the music industry’s next big thing. Streaming services have seen an explosion of tracks in the last year consisting entirely of hissing, humming, fizzing and other varieties of radio static, as well as recordings of rainfall, ocean waves and crackling bonfires. Some of the recordings have earned their creators millions of pounds. Record companies and tech firms have taken notice" - Guardian is looking into the into the interesting phenomenon.

How music is being used and its effect on people is the topic of the Anne Helen interview with musicologist Lily E. Hirsch. "The discussion came up among music scholars of whether music used as torture even is music. Can music actually be torture? At first, I was caught up in the discussion, but immediately I started to think, This is not the point. The torture is the point. What this is doing to people is the point, not whether or not it’s music." Hirsch has also written a book about the issue.

Approximately 100,000 fresh tracks are now being uploaded to music streaming platforms every day, according to Universal Music Group CEO and Chairman, Sir Lucian Grainge, and the outgoing CEO of Warner Music Group, Steve Cooper, the Music Business Worldwide reports. Another big milestone - Apple Music confirmed that the total number of tracks on its platform has now surpassed 100 million.

ContraBrand Marketing Agency released their latest report How Artists are Going Viral on TikTok in 2022, featuring analysis of all 20 of TikTok’s weekly Top 200 Tracks by country charts. CB's study specifically examined all tracks released in 2022 which went on to become respective artists' most streamed songs in their Spotify catalog, with a minimum of one million streams.

The key takeouts:

Artist-Generated Content (AGC) the most common method for breakout artists to go viral in 2022 (35.5%). It is also the most cost-effective and lowest barrier to entry for artists looking to break into the music industry.

Of the 208 artists analyzed in this report, 117 of them were unsigned (56.2%) — all accumulating more than 1 million Spotify streams thanks to TikTok. 63.1% of these unsigned artists went viral without the need to run ads, pay influencers or hire agencies to develop trends around their tracks.

Read the full reports here.

"When we try to define what country music is, what could possibly tie together a genre with such wide aesthetic variance and complex history, those two occasionally contradictory arcs—nostalgia for some mythic, bygone rural idyll paired with unapologetic candor and sharp observation—more or less sum it up. When we’re looking at Loretta, we are indeed looking at country" - Esquire writes after the passing of Loretta Lynn. Vulture goes deeper:  "She wrote true stories ripped from real rural life about what it meant to be a woman".

Dedicated music listeners are quitting streaming services trying to grapple with the unethical economics of streaming companies, and feel the effects of engagement-obsessed, habit-forming business models on their own listening and discovery habits - Guardian looks into the change of music hearts. “With streaming, things were starting to become quite throwaway and disposable. If I didn’t gel with an album or an artist’s work at first, I tended not to go back to it” - says Finlay Shakespeare, Bristol-based musician and audio engineer who quit his streaming service account, after he realised that a lot of his all-time favourite albums were ones that grew on him over time. “Streaming was actually contributing to some degree of dismissal of new music.” The G suggests six ways to find new music…

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Decriminalizing Artistic Expression Act, which limits the ways an artist’s lyrics can be used against them as evidence in criminal cases, the LA Times reports. The bill establishes a presumption that lyrics have minimal value as evidence. It covers all forms of creative expression but is especially salient for hip-hop artists, whose slice-of-life lyrics have frequently been cited by prosecutors in criminal trials as proof of guilt. The bill has been championed by the hip-hop community, the music industry and free-speech advocates.

Oud is a guitar-like stringed instrument popular in the Arab world, popularized in the Western world by Yemeni-American musician Ahmed Alshaiba who produced renditions of some of popular culture's most recognisable sounds on the instrument. The 32-year-old died in a car accident in New York in late September. His music will, however, live forever. Middle East Eye selected five of his most recognizable covers.

Composer David Bruce connects the physical qualities of instruments and the music that's written for them. His video is essentially about the way the design and layout of instruments affect the music that's played on them. He starts off with samba, but also goes over to west Africa and Spain.

"The scars in Ka’s music come with lessons he feels duty-bound to pass on. For the first time, he steps fully into the role of teacher, claiming the title of griot for his era of wounded street soldiers"- Pitchfork writes in a review of Ka's 'Languish Arts' and 'Woeful Studies'. "The Brooklyn rapper’s two new albums set hard-earned wisdom to the lushest music of his career" - The P points out.

Music rights company Concord has bought the publishing and recorded music catalogs of Tony Banks, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford, as well as the publishing and recorded music catalog from their years in the band Genesis. The Wall Street Journal reports that the ‘megadeal’ is ‘valued at over $300 million’. These catalogs contain songs such as 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway', 'Sussudio', 'Against All Odds', 'All I Need is a Miracle', 'In the Air Tonight', 'I Can’t Dance', 'That’s All', 'Land of Confusion', 'The Living Years', 'Invisible Touch' and other hits.

Pitchfork is looking back 30 years - they selected "150 albums that... shaped the way music would sound in the decades to come", and "250 songs that would make up Pitchfork’s ultimate ’90s mixtape". Here are the 10 best albums:

Nirvana: Nevermind

A Tribe Called Quest: 'The Low End Theory'

Hole: 'Live Through This'

Janet Jackson: 'The Velvet Rope'

Björk: 'Homogenic'

Wu-Tang Clan: 'Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)'

Liz Phair: 'Exile in Guyville'

Radiohead: 'OK Computer'

Lauryn Hill: 'The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill'

My Bloody Valentine: 'Loveless'

"Why did the sound of an inflatable clown toy falling down the stairs so capture the musical zeitgeist of September 2022?" - that's the question the music theorist Adam Neely explains in his latest video. The "sound" is the song 'Cbat' by experimental hip-hop producer Hudson Mohawke, supposedly the perfect "sound" to have sex to.

"Music is now so abundant as to be completely overwhelming in its availability, and that listeners, faced with everything at once, are increasingly playing it safe and sticking with the tried-and-tested" - Guardian's Alexis Petridis writes exploring the supposed disappearance of music discovery. He believes getting music placed on a TV show, film, advertisement or TikTok video can help. However "music discovery and consumption in 2022 is a weird, confounding, counterintuitive and strangely fascinating place, where the traditional ways of doing things have been completely overturned, but it isn’t entirely clear what’s replaced them".

Producer Aphex Twin and the engineer Dave Griffiths have launched an app called Samplebrain, which translates inputted sounds into similar samples. The “sample mashing” design software has been in the works for some 20 years. Aphex Twin describes the app: “What if you could reconstruct source audio from a selection of other mp3's/audio on your computer? What if you could build a 303 riff from only acapellas or bubbling mud sounds? What if you could sing a silly tune and rebuild it from classical music files? You can do this with Samplebrain.”

Pitchfork shared a lovely read about jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders who died at 81 this weekend - "a guy who saw music as a means to keep food on the table, as well as a route toward holiness... For Sanders, transcendence didn’t exist only in some rarefied other realm; it was something you worked at here on Earth, with your lungs, and your lips, and a good reed if you could find one". Sanders belonged, the P points out, "to a cohort of musicians who, in the middle 20th Century, threw open the doors of jazz to allow for fierce dissonances, extended instrumental techniques, and a new style of improvisation oriented toward freeform collective expression rather than individual solos". Vulture also shares a beautiful read about the saxophonist: "Sanders not only represented the heart and hustle of New York City, he embodied its communal spirit as well. Be it the volcanic peaks or meditative valleys of his work, Sanders always spoke a very clear message: Love is everywhere, and it always finds a way".

London-based singer/rapper Alewya is back with a new video 'Let Go', the first new music since her debut EP, 'Panther In Mode', from November last year. Alewya shared a thought about the new track: "The feeling of being on the precipice of something new but not there yet - it’s uncomfortable". It is to be a mark of a new shift into a "wild" new phase for her: "I'm freeing myself up, getting more confident in how lost I feel. With 'Panther In Mode', I was coming from a more poised space. The next phase is more wild. I won't hold back anymore."

To celebrate their first 15 years, Consequence is releasing a list of their 75 favorite albums of the last decade and a half. Plenty of various albums between Lorde's 'Melodrama' and Kendrick Lamar' 'To Pimp a Butterfly'. Check out the full list.

YouTube music theorist Adam Neely wonders what we expect from AI and how might it replace human musicians. He thinks "it's clear that something going to change somehow and something might get lost... but a great deal of other stuff [will get] added".

Consequence made a list of 100 best albums of all-time, It's a list that "assessed the mercurial value attached to art, from perceptions at the moment of creation, to retrospective consideration, to the impact on ever-evolving fashions". Check out what lies between Janes Addiction's 'Nothing's Shocking', and Pr

Raymond Chen, Microsoft’s principal software engineer, has discovered that Janet Jackson's 1989 song 'Rhythm Nation' heads the power to destroy laptop hard-drives. Chen said it "contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used”. Music theorist Adam Neely was there to explain the heart of the issue.

In May, rapper Young Thug and 27 other men associated with his YSL (Young Stoner Life) record label were arrested and charged with 56 counts of criminal activity. The indictment alleges they have committed crimes spanning murder, attempted murder, carjacking, robbery, possession of drugs and firearms, and witness intimidation. Essentially, prosecutors allege that Young Thug is the leader of a street gang. "The artist is at the centre of one of the biggest rap court cases in music history; a legal saga that has halted his career at its commercial peak and, with his lyrics being employed against him by prosecutors, reignited the debate around using art as evidence in court" - The Fa

R.E.M.'s Micheal Stipe is about to release his long-teased solo song 'Future If Future' as a split 12" single with singer-songwriter Beatie Wolfe, Billboard reports. The disc will not be pressed on traditional polyvinyl chloride - the record will be the world’s first commercially available 12" made from sustainable bioplastic. It will be available for pre-order on Friday (September 2), in a limited run of 500 copies.

Atlanta’s top legal representative Fanni Willis said she has no plans to stop citing rap songs' lyrics in criminal indictments any time soon, Rolling Stone reports. “I think if you decide to admit your crimes over a beat, I’m going to use it... You do not get to commit crimes in my county, and then get to decide to brag on it, which you do that for a form of intimidation and to further the gain and to not be held responsible” - Willis said during a press conference for a criminal case that does use lyrics as evidence. Her statements come months after Young Thug and Gunna were arrested for allegedly violating the RICO Act. Young Thug's lyrics were cited heavily in his indictment.

"Be uncompromising in what you’re doing with your music. If you really feel it, then go with that" - Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember shared his career advice with The New Cue. Also, he believes you can't really plan to have a career in music: "Just do what you want to do and maybe later on in the rearview mirror you’ll see it as a career". Kember also says he doesn't really plan to reform Spacemen 3: "There is no reason why every band should reform just because people have gotten into them 30 years later. Careful what you wish for as well. I remember going to see The Velvet Underground when they reformed and I left halfway through. I’m a massive fan but I was just like, ‘Naaaa, I don’t think I need to do this to their memory'".

"From dazzling Taiwanese math rock to Y2K-inspired R&B", Pitchfork had rounded up "a list of generally overlooked recent releases that deserve some more attention", which were released in 2022. Defcee is there, as well as mediopicky, Naima Bock and others. Check out the list below - https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/great-records-you-may-have-missed-spring-summer-2022/.

MBW investigated a curious case of an obscure artist/record label, variously known as Diversify and Variegate, who was/were profiting by purposely tagging big-name artists as primary collaborators, thus reaching said artists’ fanbases via algorithmic music delivery systems like Spotify’s Release Radar? "One suspects DSPs will eventually offer some widespread form of 'profile locking' that prevents fake uploads. But until then,  highly inventive 'artists' can  drive millions of streams – conservatively earning tens of thousands of dollars each – from the distribution of songs with intentionally incorrect metadata".

Adam Neely's band Sungazer couldn't start a synth on their Hamburg show on a boat, which inspired the YouTube music theorist to make a video about stage fright. "Fear can be a good thing because it keeps you present and it keeps you hungry... We can use our fear and redirect our energy back out onto the audience to give our performances more vivid emotional color" - is the conclusion.

The Mars Volta have reunited and announced a new album with single 'Blacklight Shine', 'Graveyard Loce' and 'Vigil'. Many fans weren't happy with its latin-rock/yacht-rock sound. But the MV's main two boys don't really mind, as they say in the Guardian interview. “I’m not bound by genre. The only thing that matters is if music makes you feel something” - says Omar Rodríguez-López, and adds: “Losing ‘fans’ is baked into what we do. I don’t know a greater happiness than losing ‘fans’. A true fan is someone interested in what’s happening now, and then there’s everyone else trying to control what you do or project on to it. I have an aversion to that. That sounds like school. That sounds like the government. That sounds like the police. And unfortunately that’s what a lot of people who think they’re fans end up thinking like”. His bandmate Cedric Bixler-Zavala goes back to the perspective of the band: "Omar said the Mars Volta can be whatever we