Veteran rapper Biz Markie has passed away Friday, July 16th aged 57, due to complications from diabetes, TMZ reports. Hailing from Harlem, New York, Biz Markie first made a name for himself as a beatboxer performing in Manhattan nightclubs in the early 1980s, releasing his first album 'Goin’ Off'. The 1989 single 'Just a Friend' propelled him to superstardom. The hip-hop universe is saying goodbye: The Roots drummer Questlove said “he taught me ALOT. I’m using ALL the education he taught me”; Beastie Boys' Mike D remembers his old friend and colleague - "we are so grateful to have had so many unforgettable experiences with the truly unique and ridiculously talented Biz Markie".

Mega Bog describes her new video 'Maybe You Died' as “dark, leathered, supernatural, horny, evil" - that pretty much applies to the song as well; Britsh folk icon Shirley Collins shares the haunting 'Sailor Boy'; Iron Maiden are back in the saddle - 'The Writing on the Wall' is their first new song in six years and a return to form, accompanied by a mini-film; folk singer-songwriter Shannon Lay starts with a cappella 'Geist' to expand into a waltz called 'Awaken and Allow'.

"It's an album that was created during the pandemic but it's not about that" Chvrches singer Lauren Mayberry says in The New Cue interview. She goes on: "I think maybe lyrically and creatively living through those things and being shut inside with your own thoughts makes you have to think about things in a way that you don't want to and I guess that I feel like the 2020s reflected in it in that way, but it's not like the themes of these songs are 'the world as it stands in 2020'. It's more just like it was an enforced lyric-writing camp I didn't want but that I'm grateful to have had".

New figures out of the US this week suggest that biggest hits are increasingly becoming smaller, Music Business Worldwide suggests, based on the latest streaming figures. The industry’s biggest streaming hit at the mid-year point of 2021 is significantly smaller than its biggest streaming hit at the mid-year point of 2020, of 2019, and of 2018. The biggest hit of H1 2021 in the US was Olivia Rodrigo’s 'drivers license', which attracted 460 million on-demand audio streams during the six months. In 2020 the biggest hit was Roddy Ricch’s 'The Box' with 728 million streams in the first half of the year, the prior year it was Lil Nas X’s 'Old Town Road' with 596 million streams, whereas in 2018 Drake’s 'God’s Plan' pulled in 655 million audio streams. This is all especially odd, of course, when you consider the massive growth in streaming’s popularity between 2017 and 2021. MBW offers a few explanations - it's a Covid-inspired anomaly, or maybe people are listening more to catalog music (older than year and a half).

You sense freedom and youth when listening to Torres' big-sounding new pop-rock single 'Thirstier'. Her album of the same name is due out July 30 via Merge.

"This is the story of Frankie and Johnny, who shot her man only to have Hollywood do her wrong" - the Songs in the Key of Death podcast introduces its latest episode a girl named Frankie who killed her man Albert one night in St. Louis, back in 1899. The story got a few Hollywood remakes, including one completely inaccurate with Elvis Presley.

You have not lived until you have seen this 57-year-old actress-director shrink herself down to Hobbit size to play a pre-teen. This is beyond PEN15, beyond Martin Short in CLIFFORD, this is… cinema” - The New York Times critic wrote about 'Aline', the unofficial biopic of Celine Dion that has critics in awe of its “kooky”, “truly weird” and “magnificent camp” approach. 'Aline' stars and is directed by Valérie Lemercier, and critics reported the bizarre moment in which Lemercier, at age 57, for one scene portrays Dion, er, Aline, at age 12, the Wrap reports.

Berlin-based musician and sound artist Holly Herndon has released a new artificial intelligence tool Holly+, which she refers to as her “digital twin”, that allows fans to upload any polyphonic audio and receive a new version of that music sung in Herndon’s own voice. Holly+ is as much a technological and artistic experiment, as it is a response to, and embrace of, the rise of deepfake technology, The Fader reports.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee of the UK parliament is calling for a "complete reset" of the market, with musicians given a "fair share" of the £736.5 million that UK record labels earn from streaming. In a report, they said royalties should be split 50/50, instead of the current rate, where artists receive about 16%, BBC reports. Musician Tom Gray, whose #BrokenRecord campaign prompted the inquiry, said "It feels like a massive vindication. They've really come to the same conclusions that we've been saying for a very long time".

A judge has approved Britney Spears’ request to hire her own private counsel to represent her in her ongoing conservatorship case, after her court appointed attorney, Sam Ingham, tendered his resignation, NBC reports. Spears has already picked Matthew Rosengart, a go-to attorney for A-list clients. Spears appeared in court on Wednesday where she told Judge Penny that she was “extremely scared” of her father Jamie, who remains the sole overseer of the conservatorship. “This conservatorship has allowed my dad to ruin my life,” she said through tears. “I’m here to get rid of my dad and charge him with conservatorship abuse.”

Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson gave a TEDx Talk where he gave an about inspiring and motivating speech on how you can be creative in the modern business world. He also touched on a difference between customers and fans: "We don't like customers because they can walk away. We like fans because we have a relationship".

"There were 555.3 billion streams of music on audio and video platforms in the United States in the first six months of 2021 – up by 54.3 billion year-on-year" - MBW reports, and points out to a much more important fact. "Catalog music’s share of total album consumption in the US has rises to 66.4%, whereby ‘catalog’ reflects anything released over 18 months before a consumer made a purchase and/or pressed play. That 66.4% figure was up from 63.9% in the first six months of 2020, and up from 60.8% in the first six months of 2018. Conversely, the percentage of total album consumption claimed by ‘current’ music – that’s music released within the prior 18 months of a consumer making a purchase and/or pressing play – keeps on falling. In the first half of 2021, ‘current’ music claimed just 33.6% of total consumption, down from 36.1% in H1 2020".

Centuries of Sound is making mixes for every year of recorded sound, and this time around it's the year 1937. The artist that marked the year was - Django Reinhardt, a self-taught, illiterate guitarist with only 8 fingers who would change the face of jazz, and music as well. That year also had Stephane Grappeli, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Robert Johnson and so many more.

"Morgan Wallen's 'Dangerous' is far and away the biggest album of 2021 in the US so far: It has netted 241,000 album sales and 2.3 billion audio streams, blowing out of the water any of the runner-ups" - Rolling Stone looks back at the numbers of the album stained by the racial slur scandal. What does that mean?: "Wallen is not a dysmorphic product of a toxic genre or niche fanbase growing like fungus in the armpit of some much healthier and more noble thing. He’s America. America loves him. Nobody wants to say it".

"Produced entirely by Kenny Beats, the album’s reserved musical approach magnifies the blunt scene-setting Vince has used to build his name over the last decade" - Pitchfork reviews the latest Vince Staples' album. Guardian deems it "much more personal and accessible than anything he’s put out before". "A record that evolves in real-time, ‘USEE4YOURSELF’ finds IDK speaking his truth. An amalgamation of styles that recalls the frenetic creativity of 00s Kanye, the record finds strength in personal revelation, with IDK often at his most individual when surrounded by his peers" - Clash Music reviews the latest album by IDK. NME points out how "talking about how following his dreams has led him to a happier life gives the record an optimistic ending".

Smaller labels and artists who once helped kickstart the vinyl comeback a decade ago are starting to bow out, Pitchfork reports. Production capacity has been especially squeezed since COVID-19 lockdowns disrupted supply chains; the global demand for vinyl albums was recently estimated at twice the available supply, causing the turnaround times for independent artists to expand to a whole year - up from two to three months in times of less demand.

Among dozens of nominees for this year's Emmys, there are some music ones. Apple TV’s 'Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry' documentary is up for three awards, whereas David Byrne’s HBO special 'David Byrne: American Utopia' has been nominated in eight categories. The New York Times’ docu 'Framing Britney Spears' is up for two awards. Elsewhere in the nominations, Cynthia Erivo picked up a nod for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, for her role portraying the late Aretha Franklin in the National Geographic miniseries 'Genius: Aretha', whereas Marcus Mumford is nominated for his 'Ted Lasso' theme, in the category of Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music. Check the full list at EW.

The Who's career-spanning documentary, 'Amazing Journey: The Story of the Who' is now available to stream for the first time on the Coda Collection. Anchored by interviews with Townshend and Roger Daltrey, the film tracks the band’s rise and career, and features a trove of previously unseen footage and performance clips. 'Amazing Journey' was directed by Murray Lerner and Paul Crowder and first released in 2007.

The A.I. Song Contest is an international competition exploring the use of A.I. in songwriting, which started last year and uses the Eurovision Song Contest’s format for inspiration, the New York Times reports. The contest welcomed 38 entries from teams and individuals around the world working at the nexus of music and A.I. They used deep-learning neural networks — computing systems that mimic the operations of a human brain — to analyze massive amounts of music data, identify patterns and generate drumbeats, melodies, chord sequences, lyrics and even vocals. The resulting songs included punk thrash, electronic dance, and folk. After an online ceremony broadcast on Tuesday from Liège in Belgium, a judging panel led by the musician Imogen Heap and including academics, scientists and songwriters praised 'Listen to Your Body Choir' for its “rich and creative use of A.I. throughout the song".

Black Music and Black Muses writer affirms the beauty of whistling; a great essay on the pretty little skill: "What superfluous love and mischief lurks in a sudden whistle? What calling into being of what playfulness and what hysteria travels on the thin wavering line between gasp and gust we call whistling, a form of telling ourselves secrets in public, a polite diversion from the blankness of it all... Why not let lips pressed together lightly and spiraling the air into witness be friendly? What malice is there in absent-minded desire? Why not objectify one another on a whim and improvise high-pitched windows into the atmosphere to say hello. Why do we feel entitled to the hyper-reverent silence of monasteries as we pass the living on sidewalks, in cities, full of synaptic impossibilities that only noise can heal or render as ease instead of shame?".

The New Cue writers really like Shaun Ryder's new album 'Visits From Future Technology' so they talked to the former Happy Monday, touching the issue of today's technology and the possibility to work remotely. 25 years ago "the only thing I would have been doing would have been crack cocaine and heroin", Ryder says. Speaking about time passing, he says "the thing is, as you get older time goes really quickly. If you think to the five years you spent from 11 to 16, that seemed like a million fucking years. It's 11 years since I was in the jungle, but to me that's five minutes ago. And it's five minutes ago when I made this album". About his lyrics: "There's loads of metaphors in that and I can't fucking remember what they were doubling up for. You sort of smuggle and cover up lyrics but now I can't remember what I was fucking metaphoring about!".

Tyler Thackray is a former dreadlocked metalhead, and current Android developer who builds and then destroys violins in his spare time. There's a point in it, as the New Yorker states: "The notion that you can torture—or to be tortured by—a violin in the first place arises from our sense that the instrument is somehow alive, responsive, perhaps even agential... with a social life that intersects with other instruments, people, histories. So much of playing an instrument is having your existence dictated by its demands, to the extent that your body and your instrument come to seem inseparable... These are not instruments that anyone will miss, and @violintorture is ferrying them into a hitherto inconceivable afterlife".

As of May 2021, TikTok surpassed YouTube in both the US and the UK for average time spent per user, per month on Android - US-based TikTok users on Android devices spent an average of 24.5 hours a month on the platform, compared to 22 hours per user, per month on YouTube; in the UK, TikTok users were spending 26 hours a month on the platform, while UK YouTube users were spending just 16 per month. As of October 2020, the TikTok app was reaching 732 million monthly active users globally, whereas YouTube had than 2 billion logged-in users playing music on its service every month, the MBW reports. TikTok announced that it was rolling out the option for its users to create videos of up to three minutes in length – up from what was previously 60 seconds.

Stage dives, tattoos, piercings and lung-emptying howls decorate Worlds Apart, the photo-zine documenting the hardcore punk scenes around the world. It is the brainchild of London-based photographer Amber Valence, featuring punks from Bangkok, Thailand, Jakarta, Indonesia, Melaka, Malaysia and Singapore. “The hardcore punk scene is everywhere; people of all ethnicities, genders, identities, all united by a common bond. I hoped to reflect the difference of each city, celebrate their diversity, and to also give an insight to those who may have yet to discover some of the amazing bands and photographers out there” - Valence told The Face.

The former American president, and the current cool guy has shared his annual summer list featuring music "I’ve been listening to lately". There are some household names like Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, as well as some lesser-known like Jazmine Sullivan, Arooj Aftab, Sza, Michael Kiwanuka...

A fun little post by the Tone Glow blog about each of their writers anonymously “gifting” each other an album they like and then writing their thoughts on what they receive. None of the writers knew who would receive their album, and none knew who their gift was from. It's 23 albums of experimental-meets-fun music.

“Proud to report that a New Zealand mother has named her children Metallica, Pantera and Slayer. She told me, ‘It’s not easy raising three of the heaviest bands'” - New Zealand documentary filmmaker and actor David Farrier shared via a newsletter article. The daughter named Metallica had a middle name of 'And Justice for All' (no mention of baby named Pantera's meddle name being Cowboy From Hell). In New Zealand, there are no restrictions on naming babies after bands or albums.

The West African quintet with one foot in art-folk and other in psychedelic soul, The Narcotix have released their debut EP 'Mommy Issues'. The Brooklyn-based band cites African wedding music, choral symphonies, and Afrobeat as major influences on their style, while Pitchfork points out that "early in their career, the Narcotix have a knack for subverting expectations. Their songs are bright and bursting with detail, fueled by an affection for the music they’ve inherited and the myths they’ve built from it".

Little Simz shares just some James Bond hip-hop with ‘I Love You, I Hate You’; UK jazz tuba player Theon Cross (member of Sons of Kemet) releases 'We Go Again', played almost exclusively on tuba; Moor Mother shares a bit of psychedelic rap with ‘Obsidian', featuring Pink Siifu; Black Dice offer some groovy chaos on ‘White Sugar’; Siiickbrain combines emo, rap, and industrial on ‘Silence’.

“Except during the writing process, we noticed that the riffs weren’t amping up into metallic sections—and everyone was okay with it” - Deafheaven vocalist George Clarke says in a Pitchfork interview about their new album 'Infinite Granite' (out August 20). The production on this album, judging by the two songs released by now, is post-punk big-rock sounding (somebody could mistake them for Interpol), whereas vocals are clean, and melodic. "There are all these little things that are personally satisfying about the switch, and that personal satisfaction was the reason we did it in the first place, you know?".