The trailer for the six-part documentary series 'McCartney 3, 2, 1', featuring Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin has been released. It shows big-shot producer and big-shot bassist dissecting Beatles classics like 'Come Together', 'All My Loving', 'With a Little Help From My Friends', and 'In My Life'.

"Before Kurt Cobain was getting Rolling Stone cover features, he was just one of many Seattle teenagers enthralled by Seattle band Bam Bam and its late frontwoman, Tina Bell" - the Seattle Times announces a tribute concert to the proto-grunge band. "On July 9, Seattle-area musicians pay tribute to Bell, whom they revere as one of the founders of grunge, by playing a show of her music at the Central Saloon. Matt Cameron, the former Bam Bam and Soundgarden drummer who now plays with Pearl Jam, will hold down the rhythm section. Kendall Jones of Fishbone and singer-songwriter Ayron Jones will play Bam Bam’s chords and leads. And Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard will play a song as a special guest".

“When you’re wearing diamonds, it’s like a big f-you to everybody” - a new docu about jewelry in hip-hop culture dropped today, explores. "How and when did jewelry become part of Hip Hop culture? A$AP Ferg, Migos, Lil Yachty, Talib Kweli weigh in alongside 80’s heavyweights Eric B & Rakim and Slick Rick to see the much deeper meaning and purpose behind it all".

Portishead have released their 2015 cover of ABBA’s 'SOS' exclusively on SoundCloud, utilizing SoundCloud’s “fan-powered royalty” system, whereby revenue from its streams is driven directly by the artist’s fan base, Variety reports. The fan-powered system means royalties from each listener’s subscription or advertising revenue are distributed to the artists they actually listened to.

"The event hosted 400,000 miserable attendees, as excessive heat and poor planning combined for one of the worst debacles in modern festival history. The crowd turned violent, at one point tearing plywood off the walls and setting it on fire. The concerts gave way to multiple reports of rape and sexual assault, as well as looting, vandalism, and arson" - Consequence announces the first trailer for 1999 music-fest-turned-gore-fest. It is the first in a series of HBO documentaries executive produced by Bill Simmons, and it features Korn’s Jonathan Davis, The Roots’ Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter, Jewel, Moby, Creed’s Scott Stapp, and The Offspring.

"The Songs in the Key of Death podcast looks at the historic true crimes that inspired a selection of murder ballads. It combines music, true crime, history, and edge-of-your-seat storytelling". The latest episode goes into the Lawson family murders. "On Christmas Day 1929, Charlie Lawson committed the chilling act of murdering his wife and children. What’s darker is the reason why, according to some true crime authors. But are they right, and what do we know today about the rare phenomenon of familicide?".

"Many acts are looking a year or more ahead as they lock in itineraries for long-delayed road trips to support albums released even before the pandemic" - Pitchfork writes announcing touring-boom in the US. "Gigs in large cities are the primary goal for most national and international artists, but as open dates quickly fill up, markets [in smaller]towns within easy reach of big cities stand to play a key role in keeping tours on track".

"There's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, but there isn't good payola and bad payola. There's just payola" - Music REDEF's Matty Karas argues about Spotify's Discovery Mode, which allows indie artists to chose which songs they want to be played more on the streaming service, in return for a lower royalty rate. "If major labels have a built-in advantage on Spotify playlists, another way to put indie artists on an equal playing field would be to allow them to single out tracks for playlist consideration and *not* charge them for it. Call it Discovery Mode and don't change a thing about it except the price" - Karas points out. Two law professors on Billboard argue it's not really band kind, whereas Future of Music Coalition sees it through the lens of payola.

The lovely Neil Diamond song 'Sweet Caroline' has been adopted by English football fans as their unofficial anthem at the current Euro 2020 championship (yes, it's the year 2021, but it was supposed to be held last year, and it was postponed due to Covid crisis, and the official name held on). England football team will face Italy Sunday for the Euro 2020 championship finals.

Billie Eilish's older brother Finneas O’Connell topped the list of the most successful artists on Spotify last year, Music Business Worldwide reports. Finneas wrote 50% of hits for his sister, as well as released music as an independent artist himself, and co-wrote/co-produced tracks released in 2020 by the likes of Demi Lovato, Celeste, Halsey, and Justin Bieber/Benny Blanco. The second-placed songwriter on Spotify last year is Kid Harpoon, who collaborated with Harry Styles on the latter’s double-platinum 'Fine Line' album.

Music theorist Adam Neely makes music theory seem so simple and easy to understand, in general, and in his newest video as well. He talks about, and plays beautiful chords, and also talks about why deadlines are good for creativity, as well as why he thinks of himself as a musician, rather than as a YouTuber.

Freelance writer and former music editor of The Guardian, Michael Hann shares an interesting thought about music journalism with Music Journalism Insider: "I’d like to see rather more fun. Rather more acknowledgement that pop music is at heart a fundamentally joyful and ridiculous endeavour. Quite often, I feel like I am being forced to eat my greens by music writing, and denied my dessert. I need to stress I am not saying music writing should serve no social purpose—and evidently generations younger than mine, who rightly are dominating music writing now, want a lot of social purpose to their music writing—just that the balance has swung away from silliness and fun in a way I, speaking only for myself, regret a little".

The latest episode of The Listening Service podcast explores how our transactional economy underpins centuries of music-making from Notre-Dame’s patronage of the polyphonic Perotin, over Beethoven writing a symphony for £100 and Wagner losing over a million on the premiere of his operatic masterpiece The Ring cycle, to Pet Shop Boys singing about everything reduced to financial value.

Jezebel analyses Starbucks' history in music, from its humble starts to the million-making business: "The Starbucks compilations were utterly suburban in feel. Neat, inoffensive, and modern in their convenience, they presented a skin-deep assessment of the genres they represented. They gestured toward what it was to be cultured while requiring none of the time or work it actually took to be so. They commodified the grit of the ’60s coffeehouse and encased it in plastic".

MBW goes into some fun music math regarding Queen: the British rock band generated £41.95 million ($58.1 million) in 12 months prior to September 2020, with royalties amounting to £41.67 million ($57.7 million). In FY2019 (the 12 months to the end of September 2019), Queen Productions Ltd generated £72.77 million ($100.8m), of which £71.53 million ($99m) was from royalties. On the other hand, Hipgnosis Songs Fund takes 18 multiple as a reasonable reflection of the market value of gold-standard music publishing rights today. In the past three years, according to Queen Productions Ltd, the band’s rights have generated some £134.5 million ($186 million) in royalties. That’s an average across these three years of $62 million per annum. So, an 18 multiple on $62 million would make Queen’s royalty-bearing rights worth - $1.1 billion today.

"Millions of listeners now subscribe to lo-fi hip-hop playlists to relax, study, chill, and sleep. Its popularity has spawned a DIY business opportunity. Companies like Lofi Girl (formerly ChilledCow) have carved out their own lane, launched their own record labels, built an independent brand of merch, products, playlists, and more" - Trapital says presenting Music Ally's piece about the chill-hop genre.

"Have UK clubs benefited from embracing the concept of the Night-Time Economy, or is an emphasis on financial growth and political optics bleeding the life out of dancefloors?" - DJ Mag wonders in their interesting piece about the connection of politics and club scene, especially in London. "Club culture is fundamentally rooted in youth culture, and the cultures of communities excluded from the political mainstream: its vitality stems ultimately from those groups imagining and creating utopian alternatives to existing power structures, not replicating them. When we think about where these conversations might go next, perhaps the answer is for those on the front lines of dance music to seize this debate for ourselves, instead of outsourcing it to landlords, career politicians or baby boomers".

Bombay Bicycle Club frontman Jack Steadman - with a new name Mr Jukes - is joined by the relatively unknown East London rapper Barney Artist on the laid-back hip-hop groove 'Check the Pulse'; Manzanita combines surf guitar, garage rock and Latin American cumbia and guaracha on the uplifting 'Shambar'; 'The Angel of 8th Ave' by Gang of Youths is just some straight rock'n'roll; 'Alètheia' is just some straight - post-metal, by the French collective Year of no Light.

Music historian Katherine Schofield writes a short essay for the Grin, marrying her knowledge of Indian classical music and art, about how each swara or Indian note, seven in all, interrelate to cries of animals. Sur is a musical sound made up of swaras.

They rehearsed after school let out for the week on Friday nights, inspiring them to call the band On a Friday, but when they got signed, the label suggested they change their name. The band members all loved the obscure Talking Heads song, so the Radiohead were born. It gets worse on Rolling Stone's list of 25 worst band names - The Polka Tulk Blues Band is a lousy name for any band, let alone the one which will come up with heavy metal. Geezer Butler seeing crowd of people lined up to see the Boris Karloff film 'Black Sabbath' saved the day.

Tyler, the Creator has debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart as his latest studio offering, 'Call Me If You Get Lost' earned 169,000 equivalent album units in the tracking week ending July 1 in the US, according to Billboard. Of his sales, 114,000 came from streaming and 55,000 from official album sales, largely from deluxe box sets sold exclusively via the artist’s web-store. This is Tyler, the Creator's second No. 1 album - he previously hit No. 1 with his last album, 2019’s 'IGOR'.

A police officer from Oakland, California played a Taylor Swift song on his phone in a bid to prevent activists who were filming him uploading the video to YouTube, since the video platform regularly removes videos that break music copyright rules, Variety reports. The video was filmed by members of the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), which says it is a coalition that seeks to "eradicate police terror in communities of colour". The officer's efforts were in vain as the clip of the encounter in Alameda County promptly went viral and remained on YouTube.

ABBA's greatest hits album 'Gold' reached a landmark 1000 weeks on the Official Albums Chart Top 100, the first album to do so in UK chart history. ABBA's 'Gold' was released in September 1992, debuting at Number 1, and has gone on to be the UK's second best-selling album of all time -behind Queen's 'Greatest Hits' - with pure sales of 5.61 million, according to Official Charts Company data.

Watson D. Hirschfield is "a London boy making people laugh" on TikTik with his short lo-fi videos of himself performing old-school music videos. The 24-year-old boasts 600,000 followers on TikTok, attracted by their simplicity and humor. "He takes quickfire shots of himself satirising popular, old school music videos, tapping into their cheesiness to bring out a whole new level of entertainment" - The Face points out.

Part-punk crooner, part-singer-songwriter, part-experimental rapper, Teezo Touchdown is one of America’s shiniest new enigmas - The Face presents Texan rapper. "The surreal genre collagist re-emerged in 2020 with a series of oddball singles" with a look "that simultaneously references gangsta rap, ​’00s Hot Topic punk and ​’80s hair metal icons". He says he's just "trekking this journey. “So wherever you hop in, don’t worry, you’re early. This is a long ride that we have here, so wherever you hop in, come on. There’s room for you”.

The great music theorist Adam Neely's jazz band Gungazer restarted touring, and he has shared a video of the band talking about how and what to perform at their The Sultan Room concert. A lot of "do ba do", "duh", and "wub" talk, but they seem to understand each other perfectly.

"The question of control has surrounded Britney Spears from the start of her career. How much was she being manipulated by the powerful men who stood to profit from her image? To what extent was her existence manufactured by the demands of the system around her?" - The New Yorker asks in a long-read after the disturbing testimony pop star gave at the Los Angeles court about her conservatorship. "Many of the most harrowing revelations in her testimony had been visible to anyone who cared to look closely. She told the court that she’d wanted to express them for a long time but had been afraid to do so in public - 'I thought people would make fun of me'”.

"Woodstock itself wasn’t the life-changing event. The life-changing event was the Woodstock movie. I wonder if this film had come out and been held up in the same light and importance, would this have made a difference in my life?" - Questlove says to Pitchfork about 'Summer of Soul', his new documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. "This film is potent enough now to work its magic in ways that it wasn’t allowed to 50 years ago. Black people and history - it’s a painful thing. That plays a role in why it’s easy to forget things. I’m very happy that people see this now. But it’s a deeper well that we have to dig, and this film might be just the beginning of it". It's in theaters and on Hulu.

"Live Nation and AEG executives aren’t exactly running to answer calls from indie bands, while chart-topping acts like Twenty One Pilots and Tame Impala are much safer bets, guaranteed to sell out reopening arenas" - Rolling Stone points out to the issue of over-crowded touring calendar, in the US at least. "Venues are being queried by dozens of agents for the same slots and have to make pragmatic bottom-line decisions. And since Covid threw the staggered album-release cycle out of whack, concert dates on the entire docket right now are essentially a free-for-all".

A lovely documentary 'The Dancing Man of LA' about a grey-haired 69-year-old who goes to, well, almost to all the concerts in Los Angeles, and dances all the time. Howard Mordoh is a retired clinical laboratory scientist from and his "love of concerts spans genres, venues, and decades - and he's always dancing. But with live music canceled during the COVID pandemic, and given his husband's health concerns, Howard has to get creative in order to keep dancing".