On Friday (June 24), a free livestream performance from the Backstreet Boys was watched by 45 million viewers in China via WeChat, the social app owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings, MBW reports. It was the highest-attended livestream concert on WeChat by an international artist. An additional element to the event saw UK-headquartered Driift, a producer and promoter of live streamed music events, produce a guest appearance on the livestream from Irish boy band Westlife. Broadcast from Smock Alley in Dublin and directed by Chris Howe and, the Driift-produced livestream saw the two boy bands duet remotely on the Backstreet Boys’ hit 'I Want It That Way' and Westlife’s 'My Love'.

Music theorist Adam Neely answers several new questions in his latest video: Why does E - A/E - E - E/G# - A sound so good? WRONG chord progression. What's the "third steam?" What is the craziest chord you can play? Why no classical bass, but classical guitar? Should people take AP music theory? What's your favorite/least favorite thing about the nYC scene? Is clickbait unavoidable?

h threats to our physical, psychological, and emotional well-being, and in order to feel safe and secure, we’ve had to get a bit more resourceful than usual. Enter dissociation, the response at the root of so much trauma" - Pitchfork introduces its longread about "dissociation culture", including "dissociation music". The author finds examples in songs by Mitski, Drakeo the Ruler, Black Midi, and many more.

How will digital technology shape the future of live music - that's the theme of the Guardian podcast about Abba Voyage, a digital Abba tour which debuted in London last month. The production cost £140m. The Guardian’s head rock and pop critic, Alexis Petridis, and the Guardian’s deputy music editor, Laura Snapes, were there. Was it history in the making?

Jazz bassist and music theorist Adam Neely shared a new video of himself "sucking" at playing metal, with the help of his friend, a metalhead Rob Scallon. He makes a full song in an hour and a half, playing all the instruments, and singing - 'I love my mom". Scallon did the same thing, just in the opposite direction - he plays jazz. Watch both videos - 50 minutes of pure music joy...

Tablet Magazine published an interesting longread about Ariel Pink being cancelled after attending January 6 attempted coup d'état. "Rosenberg’s career is the story of how indie rock purged monsters that the culture had wrongly tolerated—or perhaps it’s the story of how even the most supposedly open sectors of the American creative scene abruptly slammed shut, losing any remaining patience for the complexities and cognitive dissonances that form the bulk of human existence. Both are really the same story, of how American culture got so stupid and so boring so quickly".

Lizzo has decided to change the lyrics in 'Grrrls' the latest single from her forthcoming LP 'Special', after receiving criticism for using ableist language. The song’s original lyrics, “Hold my bag, bitch, hold my bag/Do you see this shit? I’ma spaz,” have been changed to: “Do you see this shit? Hold me

With a beat inspired by South Asian music seasoned with a dash of South LA, and lyrics [in Urdu] that demand respect from oppressors, 'Rozi' will make anyone feel like a superhero" - Consequence presents the new single by Eva B. She has been called Pakistan's first female rapper. who decided to keep her face and identity hidden.

Pitchfork this year adds a new list - a mid-June rundown of favorite albums of the first half of the year. This one is alphabetical and not ranked, and consists of personal picks rather than the results of a vote. The list includes some big pop names like the Weeknd, and Bad Bunny, some indie darlings like Animal Collective, and Angel Olsen, and a few underground names, like Astrid Sonne, Undeath, and Soul Glo.

42-year-old Daniel Lucey with the word "GOD" on his shirt tried to burn down the Satanic Temple building on Bridge Street in Salem, MA on Friday night, the Boston Globe reports. Lucey has since confessed to traveling to Salem with the intention of lighting the temple on fire, and that he intended for it to be a hate crime.

y has announced six new awards and rule changes for the Grammy Awards, including the Songwriter of the Year award. Grammys for the next year will also include Special Merit Award for Best Song for Social Change, as well the Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media, Best Spoken Word Poetry Album, Best Americana Performance, and Best Alternative Music Performance.

A fun new video post by Adam Neely with YouTubers giving musical advice to beginners in five words or less. Plenty of advice: listen to various music, practice a lot, love what you do and others will love it too, don't try to please somebody else, and plenty more...

Music YouTuber Rick Beato dedicated his latest video to guitarist Alan Mearns. Beato starts his video by presenting Mearns' early music - folk and straight rock - only to finish it with his latest album, which is guitar covers of JS Bach. Beato repeats the word "beautiful" several times. Quite right!

Mariah Carey is being sued by New Orleans songwriter Andy Stone for $20 million in damages over her holiday hit 'All I Want for Christmas Is You'. Stone alleges that he co-wrote a song with the same title five years prior to Carey’s release. Stone’s song was recorded by his country-pop band Vince Vance & the Valiants and released in 1989. Carey’s single was issued on her 1994 Merry Christmas LP. Pamela Koslyn, a Los Angeles attorney specializing in music and intellectual property rights, noted there are 177 works, many of them musical compositions, with 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' as the title. “Song titles aren’t entitled to copyright protection” Koslyn added, Deadline reports. Apart from the title, it is truly hard to find similarities between the two songs.

"Simple, sparse, and hard to pull away from" - Stereogum writes about folk artist Maria BC's debut album 'Hyline'; also tagged it Album of the Week. Pitchfork rated it 8.1, picking out the mood as its biggest quality - "an overarching melancholy that shadows everything like heavy storm clouds".

The Face was at the Flesh, "intimate festival", which "took place in a leafy location just north of London". The - "tunes were mostly hard-hitting techno, with an indulgent dose of crowd-pleasing edits thrown in". The looks - "pretty amazing". Check out the photos.

Next week, July 8 The Weeknd will play the first date of his ‘After Hours Til Dawn’ world tour at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, MBW reports. His stadium tour will be “the first global concert tour to integrate Web 3.0 technology for an enhanced fan experience”, with cryptocurrency exchange Binance named as the tour’s official sponsor. To mark the launch of the tour, Binance says it will donate $2 million to the XO Humanitarian Fund, which is administered by World Food Program USA.

An interesting point by Interpol's Sam Fogarino in The New Cue interview about live rehearsals: "When you’re in a room together, even if you’re really close, and the band has never come to fisticuffs over the years, we’ve had heated arguments, but nothing more, but still, you get with everybody’s daily mood, stuff that’s unrelated to the task at hand. There’s ego and desire and we’re all emotionally bound in this sexless three-way relationship, you know what I mean? It’s worse than a marriage, because it’s all the emotional shit but no sex at all! There’s no outlet in that way. Being separate, you were able to fully express yourself before sharing it with anybody. Then when we finally went to upstate New York to get together to play the material, it was extra special. We’d bypassed this whole usual laborious process".

Ambient music has risen in popularity, Pitchfork is wondering what will this mean to artists and the genre itself: "There’s something perversely thrilling in the idea that listeners with little to no professed interest in experimental music might be served genuinely outré sounds under the auspices of self-care... But I have also wondered—when these playlists command so many listeners, and are so explicit in their presentation of the music as something to play while you’re doing something else—whether they might end up tipping the delicate balance of Eno’s famous dictate about ambient: away from the interesting and toward the ignorable".

Justin Timberlake has sold his song catalog - copyrights on musical compositions he wrote - to Hipgnosis Song Management. Hypgnosis bought 100 percent of Timberlake’s catalog, which includes hits such as 'SexyBack', 'Cry me a River', 'Rock Your Body', 'Suit and Tie' and 'Can’t Stop the Feeling', MBW reports. Justin Timberlake's sales are currently in excess of over 150 million, including 88 million as a solo artist and 70 million with NSYNC. He has 26.5 million monthly Spotify listeners, over 6.4 billion video views, and his total YouTube subscribers fast approaching 10 million.

“We are shocked and filled with overwhelming sadness with the untimely passing of our dear friend, family member, and bandmate Andy ‘Fletch’ Fletcher” Depeche Mode announced in a statement today regarding the passing of their founding member and keyboardist. Fletcher served many roles for Depeche Mode behind the scenes, including acting as the band’s de facto manager, and spokesperson (Rolling Stone).

The biggest music streaming providers in China, Tencent Music and NetEase Cloud Music, added 4.0 million paying music users quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2022, and 7.8 million respectively. TME’s official ‘paying online music’ user-base now stands at 80.2 million customers, while NetEase now stands at 36.7 million customers. Spotify net-added 2 million paying customers to its service in Q1 2022, and now stands at 182 million Premium subscribers outside of China. When it comes to finance, however, the numbers go in the Swedish company's direction - its Premium subs business generated €2.379 billion (USD $2.67bn) in the first quarter of 2022. Tencent Music online music services revenue fell to USD $413 million, while NetEase Cloud Music’s online music services generated USD $140m. MBW has all the numbers and comparisons.

Rolling Stone presents the new David Bowie documentary 'Moonage Daydream', Brett Morgen’s "extraordinary portrait of the late artist as cosmic philosopher, glam trickster, and sage-like cypher via a stream-of-consciousness blend of vintage performances, rare archival clips and career-spanning interviews... For Morgen, the project would turn out to be a five-year odyssey that included a near-death experience, a hobo-like trip through New Mexico, and a radical rethinking of what it means to balance the professional and the personal when making a music doc".

Trapitals's Dan Runcie looks into the lockdown past and thinks about metaverse future in his latest post: "As exciting as the metaverse, NFTs, and web3 are, it heightens the desire for artists to be on every medium and platform possible. As entertainment becomes more and more fragmented, it takes more effort for artists to be everywhere, even the superstars... Two of the biggest opportunities for music in the metaverse are letting artists and fans create their own worlds, and getting more women artists and fans involved".

ces by Pitchfork's Jeremy D. Larson: "As one of nearly half a billion people who pay a small fee to rent the vast majority of the history of recorded music—not to mention the 2 billion people per month who use YouTube for free—I have found that, after more than a decade under the influence, it has begun to reshape my relationship with music. I’m addicted to a relationship that I know is very bad for me. I know I am addicted to Spotify the same way I was addicted to nicotine or Twitter. It makes me happy, aggrieved, needlessly defensive". However - "the beauty of the algorithm of your mind is that it makes perfect sense to no one but yourself".

Plenty of musicians on Time's list of 100 most influential people for 2022: Adele, Jazmine Sullivan, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner, Jon Batiste, Mary J. Blige, and Miranda Lambert. Check out the full list here.

“I take the month off of gigs and use Ramadan to focus on my spirituality, giving back, making time for family and close friends, revisiting the areas in my life that need improvement. Islam is all about being intentional with the way we live our lives" - Minneapolis-based DJ Yasmeenah told Mix Mag about how she spends this month-long period. Kan D Man says “It is a detox for me for the mind, body and soul. Sometimes in our industry, we are always rushing and on the go, especially being in London my whole life; I know how fast-paced life can be on a daily basis. It is a month I like to detox, switch off and reset everything”.

Wovenhand shared a video for '8 of 9' from their latest album 'Silver Sash' - it's dark and dramatic, just like the song, with a nature touch in this case. Equally emotional, albeit much less dramatic, is Sun's Signature's new song 'Underwater'. The project led by Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser will release their self-titled EP in June.