"Left for dead with the advent of CDs in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format, with fans choosing it for collectibility, sound quality or simply the tactile experience of music in an age of digital ephemerality" - The New York Times looks into the trend (via New York Today). However, "there are worrying signs that the vinyl bonanza has exceeded the industrial capacity needed to sustain it. Production logjams and a reliance on balky, decades-old pressing machines have led to what executives say are unprecedented delays. A couple of years ago, a new record could be turned around in a few months; now it can take up to a year, wreaking havoc on artists’ release plans... Consumption of vinyl LPs has grown much faster than the industry’s ability to make records. The business relies on an aging infrastructure of pressing machines, most of which date to the 1970s or earlier and can be costly to maintain".

Paul McCartney made an appearance. Bruce Springsteen serenaded the 3,000 people who attended. Alicia Keys sang. The Jonas Brothers ended the night - the event at the Javits Center in New York on Wednesday night raised $77.5 million for the charity that focuses on reducing poverty. Rollin. stone reports about the event.

Some interesting thoughts by The Roots' drummer Questlove about history in his new book 'Music Is History': "I can relate the history dispassionately. That’s something to practice. It’s important. If you let all your emotions in all the time when you’re giving historical accounts, you may find yourself too often overcome by sorrow, rage, and wonder... At the same time that it’s worth being honest about the importance of personalizing history, it’s vital not to limit ourselves to personal points of entry... Understanding history begins with learning history, and learning history begins with being able to see both inside yourself and outside yourself". Rolling Stone brings the excerpt.

Singer/songwriter Amy Shark and hip-hop artist Genesis Owusu both attracted six nominations across as many categories for the 2021 Aria awards. Shark is up for album of the year for 'Cry Forever', whereas her single 'Love Songs Ain’t For Us' (featuring Keith Urban) is nominated in the publicly voted categories of song of the year and best video. She is also nominated for best artist, best pop release and best Australian live act for her Cry Forever Tour 2021. Owusu is nominated for best artist and best album of the year for his debut 'Smiling With No Teeth'. He is also in the running for the best independent release, best hip-hop release and best Australian live act for his Smiling With No Teeth album tour.

The lone existing copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s album 'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin' was bought for $4 million by PleasrDAO, a group with a passion for buying digital collectibles honoring “anti-establishment rebels”. Their previous purchases include NFTs connected to Edward Snowden and the Russian band Pussy Riot, with Nadya from Pussy Riot now being a PleasrDAO member. PleasrDAO describe themselves as “a collective of artists, anons, crypto degens, cypherpunks, and visionaries”. Rolling Stone met the group.

Songwriter and composer Leslie Bricusse, well known for the Nina Simone classic 'Feeling Good', and the theme songs to the James Bond films 'Goldfinger' and 'You Only Live Twice', has died at the age of 90. Bricusse won two Oscars - Best Original Song 'Talk to the Animals' from 1968's 'Doctor Dolittle' and Best Original Score for 'Victor/Victoria' in 1983. His songbook also includes 'Candy Man' and 'Pure Imagination' from 'Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory'. BBC remembers the "lyrical genius of film".

"It’s a genuinely exciting time for music, and three and a half hours seemed, if anything, not enough to give a real feel of all these ideas in the air" - Centuries of Sound reads about its selection of music from 1939. The times were changing back then - "this is the year that swing starts to really split; band leaders were taking inspiration from blues to create an upbeat kind of stripped-down jazz, which would soon be labelled 'rhythm & blues', 'jump blues' and eventually 'rock & roll'. Then there were the swing pioneers, looking to break down ideas about rhythm and melody, big names like Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington who were kicking off what would soon become 'Bebop'".

"There's always been a time where you come home and you practice in the mirror what you coulda shoulda woulda said – and I think the most important thing about progression, especially having to do with racism and injustice, we have to face ourselves before we face anyone else. That is the only way towards progression" - London singer-songwriter Joy Crookes tells NPR in an interview about her debut album 'Skin'.

An interesting conversation by Miley Cyrus and Mickey Guyton in Rolling Stone about being first and/or only. Guyton talks about her experience of being a black country singer: "There’s this box that women in country music are supposed to fit in, but then add on a Black woman in that box and that box is even smaller. I was given this little tiny box that was allotted to me to make some noise, but not too much noise. And it was suffocating". Cyrus goes on about country radio: "That’s making you very vulnerable, relying on radio or on loyalty or people doing the right thing. Never bet on anyone doing the right thing. That’s my best advice".

Investment giant KKR's new venture Chord has acquired the KMR Music Royalties II portfolio for approximately $1.1 billion, Music Business Worldwide reports. The catalog, which contains over 62,000 copyrights across multiple genres, includes hits by The Weeknd and Lorde.

Employment in the UK music industry plunged by 35% from 197,000 in 2019 to 128,000, UK Music unveiled in its This Is Music 2021 annual report. The report also shows that in 2020 music industry’s economic contribution fell 46% from £5.8bn to £3.1bn in 2020. Launching the report, UK Music called on the Government to introduce tax incentives and other employment-boosting measures to help the sector rebuild after the pandemic.

A number of digital service owners – including Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Google – are trying to cut the amount of money they pay songwriters in the US to the “lowest royalty rates in history”. The National Music Publishers’ Association, on the other side, is looking to raise the current rate up to 20% of a streaming service’s annual revenues (it's 15,1% at the time). Music Business Worldwide tries to find out whether the music streaming services can actually afford to pay artists more.

A lovely little article in the Guardian about Yugoslavian pop music in the 1980s when it got closest to the trends of the western world: "Yugoslavian musicians defied the limitations of technology to make superb electro-pop in an apparent socialist utopia... Yugoslavian disco, post-punk and electronic music thrived in the 1970s and 1980s – yet was mostly forgotten until recent efforts by hobby archivists and specialist record labels".

An interesting chat in The New Cue with the hit-balladeer James Blunt who talks about his life in pandemic: "I've been on the road for 17 years and I was forced to go home. I discovered all kinds of things. I discovered I had children, I didn't know that… Where the hell did these come from?!?". On life post-pandemic: "I suppose people are just excited to be out and able to socialise with each other. And then I've been playing live shows and that's been amazing too because again, people are thrilled that there’s any live music. I can play them Baa Baa Black Sheep and they’d still probably turn up. They might be expecting some other singer, but they'll take what they can get".

Adele's comeback single, 'Easy On Me', broke the global record for day-one streams on Spotify after its release on Friday, Rolling Stone reports. UK superstar achieved the same feat on Amazon Music. 'Easy On Me' had 19.75 million chart-eligible day-one Spotify streams (10 plays per head per 24 hours are counted), nearly double of BTS' 'Butter', which had 11.04 million plays on its day one on Spotify in May.16

Atmosphere shares a space-rap song ‘Barcade’ with a posthumous verse from MF Doom; Black Country, New Road manage to get chaotic and groovy in the same song - 'Chaos Space Marine’; just some pretty folk-rock by Scout Larue Willis on ‘Love Without Possession’; Stammering share s math-prog song ‘No, Yeah’.

WordTips has a great feature - Singers Vocabularies. They counted the words used by 100 modern stars and the 100 greatest singers of all time and added up the number of unique words they used per 1,000 and used the formula for the feature. What they found is that the star with the biggest vocabulary overall is legend Patti Smith, who uses 217 unique words per 1,000 - she used 2,669 different words across a total word count of 12,291. The modern singer with the biggest vocabulary is Billie Eilish who uses 169 per 1,000. Legend Luther Vandross and modern star Trey Songz are tied with 66 for the smallest vocabulary. The song with the most unique words is Lou Reed’s 'The Murder Mystery', recorded by The Velvet Underground, with 639 words.

An interesting conversation on the Bandcamp with Weedie Braimah, a master of the djembe, a West African drum, the origins of which date back to the 12th Century. He talks about his position: "I am a quote-unquote percussionist. But let’s go deeper... There was a time when the drum wasn’t segregated. Let me say that again: There was a time when the drum wasn’t segregated. We, in this world in the West, segregated the instruments. We segregated the drums so bad that now cats be like, ‘Yeah, man I’m the drummer, and he’s the percussionist’". Braimah also goes on to explain the history of djembe.

The music theorist talks about working on music that explores human perception of time through irregular grooves in his latest video. Neely explains that "because they're grooves you're meant to feel them, to embody them, to move to them. With everything groove-related, when you overthink them, ever regular grooves you're kind of missing the point". It all started two decades ago with the song 'Soil' by System of a Down.

The first Black Lives in Music study found that 63% of Black music creators in the UK had experienced direct or indirect racism, including explicit racist language or different treatment because of their race or ethnicity, and 67% had witnessed such behaviour. Racial microaggressions were rife, experienced by 71% of Black music creators and witnessed by 73%. The report highlights the racial pay gap that disproportionately affects Black women. DJ Mag brings the important story.

Music writer Ted Gioia tries to see into the future, here are some of his predictions:

Record labels will gradually lose both the ability and desire to develop new artists. They will focus increasingly on their old catalog and archival materials.

More new artists will get their big break from web platforms... So I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole new platform emerges during the next decade—an interface that makes it fun and exciting for music fans to hear new music.

Listeners will have favorite new songs, but not know (or care) about the name of the artist.

Musician incomes will continue to shrink, but some young musicians will still earn large sums of money by being influencers.

Dead musicians will start showing up everywhere—via holograms, biopics, deepfake vocals, and other technology-driven interfaces.

Get ready for A-Pop from Africa, I-Pop from India or Indonesia, and a whole host of competing sounds and styles from Latin America, China, Eastern Europe, etc.

An interesting conversation by David Byrne and Lorde in Rolling Stone about catchy songs. Here's the elderly statesman: "You can say something quite profound, something kind of radical, even, but the melody can sound quite beautiful and seductive on the surface. And then it sucks you into something where it might really change your way of thinking. There was a time when I thought things had to be edgy. I was maybe afraid that if things sounded too beautiful or pretty, then it was shallow. Like a greeting card. You can’t be saying anything serious this way".

Produce Pandas are said to be China's first ever "plus-size" boyband, debuting in July last year, sing upbeat songs about being confident and true to oneself. Some fans are now revelling in the idea of having celebrities that look just like them, after years of seeing thin and clean-cut male stars known colloquially as "little fresh meat" - BBC writes looking at the bottom of the story.Five wonders

Pitchfork asked its readers to rank the 200 best albums released between 1996 and 2021, in celebration of the site's 25 years online. The People's List is also an interactive, infographical look at how their readers’ gender identities, ages, locations, and the number of years they’ve been reading Pitchfork. Check it out here.

"'Geist', an album largely focused on spiritual shifts and ruptures, is a quiet, lovely, undramatic rendering of the dramatic... How ruination can lead to resurrection, and life can feel sweetest when one surrenders to change" - Pitchfork reviews the new album by Shannon Lay. Clash describes it as "the vulnerable soundtrack to a person’s self-discovery during a period of long, hard reflection", whereas Narc hears "an incredibly beautiful and delicate record". Dusted likes the comforting side of it - "it’s humble, heartening and wise".

Mobile payment service Cash App launched Cash App Studios, an initiative designed to help independent creatives, including artists, musicians, directors, and designers, fund their projects. Any artist working with Cash App will retain ownership of their work and won’t have to pay back the cash. It all sounds great, but there's a back side of this story, explained by Trapital's Dan Runcie who sees the initiative largely as a marketing play—an extension of Cash App's hip-hop influencer strategy—while taking note of the Tidal/JAY-Z connection, as Matty Karas points out.

A beautiful and insightful TED talk by Hrishikesh Hirway, creator of Song Exploder, a podcast about the creative process of songwriting. He talks about how important it is to be fully engaged when listening to a song, and compares it to listening to people, giving them full attention and effort. He also plays one of his songs and goes into the construction of it. Great stuff!

Disney+ has shared a great new trailer for 'Get Back', Peter Jackson’s new three-part documentary chronicling the making of The Beatles’ penultimate album, 1970’s 'Let It Be'. Jackson said it is a “story of friends and of individuals. It is the story of human frailties and of a divine partnership. It is a detailed account of the creative process, with the crafting of iconic songs under pressure, set amid the social climate of early 1969. But it’s not nostalgia – it’s raw, honest, and human". The documentary features – for the first time in its entirety – The Beatles’ last live performance as a group, the rooftop concert on London’s Savile Row on January 30th, 1969. It is set to premiere over Thanksgiving weekend (November 25th, 26th, and 27th).

"The projection is sometimes intense, but I feel like people in the public eye and artists in particular are social activists by mistake, because we’re these screens upon which people project everything. They project light, they project what’s wrong, they project what they hate" - Alanis Morissette told Olivia Rodrigo in their Rolling Stone chat. Oliva Rodrigo spoke about her disowning her songs: "I always think that creativity is sometimes really magical and celestial, and if you’re a vessel for an amazing song, that’s awesome, but sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with you. I try to not attach a lot of ego to it".

Pitchfork is continuing to celebrate its 25th birthday, the latest b-day cake being a selection of favourite albums by some of Pitchfork's own favourite musicians. Some interesting choices: ANOHNI chose 'Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Power in the Blood' ("Buffy is one of the people I am relying on to help me understand how to move forward as an artist and as a human being"), Bun B chose Radiohead’s 'OK Computer' ("when life starts moving too fast, 'OK Computer' is still there to help slow it down for me"), Daniel Kessler from Interpol chose Aphex Twin’s 'Richard D. James Album' ("pushed music to where it had never ventured before"), Thundercat chose Slipknot’s 'Slipknot' ("awesomeness"), Timbaland chose OutKast’s 'SpeakerBoxxx/The Love Below' ("groundbreaking").