Metalica have bought Furnace Record Pressing, a vinyl pressing plant based in Alexandria, Virginia, in order to keep up with demand for their back catalog on vinyl, in addition to meeting their needs for their forthcoming album, '72 Seasons', coming put in April. The band first started working with Furnace, one of the largest vinyl pressing companies in the U.S., in 2008, Loudwire reports. The company has helped keep Metallica’s catalog in print along with expansive box set reissues of 'Metallica', 'Master of Puppets', 'Ride the Lightning', 'Kill 'Em All', '...And Justice for All', and others. The plant will continue to press non-Metallica projects.

Directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, the team behind 'Everything Everywhere All At Once', won three Oscars in a single evening - Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. At 35 years old, they’re two of the youngest Best Director winners in history, and also the first Best Director winners ever to come from the world of music videos. Stereogum had a tough time selecting only five of their videos as the best ones.

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis recently said she would love to go see Coldplay "at 1 p.m." since at their usual gig time she's already tucked in. Billboard wonders if the idea od matinee rock concerts is even possible. "Most of our margin is on drinks. It’s hard to sell drinks at 1 p.m.” - says Peter Shapiro, owner of Relix magazine, as well as the Brooklyn Bowl venues in New York, Las Vegas and Nashville and a number of other clubs. The majority of ticket revenue and service fees go to the band and ticketing agencies, the headliners take home most of the night’s haul, leaving the venue to live off ancillary revenue, most of which comes from the bar. Shapiro says there is another crucial element keeping shows after dark - mystique. “You can see a show in the afternoon, but at the end of the arc of the day it works going to a show in darkness. It’s the arc of the day, the moon… rock n’ roll lives at night. It’s in the DNA of rock n’ roll

Ticket prices for the Taylor Swoift and Bruce Springsteen tours caused an outrage as they went into the four digits. However, as it was investigated by the New York Times, you cas easily get those kind of tickets for $200 or much less. You just have to - be patient "If you want tickets to a big, highly promoted arena show, whether it’s Bruce or Beyoncé, set a budget and register for the sale. If there are tickets you can afford, buy them. If not, log off and bide your time. Decent seats may well be available at better prices when the concert date nears. (Demand is usually highest when tickets first go on sale.) If you register, you’ll generally be notified if more tickets go on sale. Or you can simply set a calendar reminder to check availability as the date approaches."

The MBW breaks down the numbers Spotify shared in their Loud & Clear report about how much it pays in royalties, and to whom. The number of artists generating $50,000 or more a year stood at 17,800 in 2022, up by 1,300 from the prior year. However, in 2021, that same category grew year-on-year by 3,100, more than double its rate of increase in 2022. The $50k is the amount "generated" by artists, their royalties will inevitably be reduced once they’ve paid their distributor/publishing admin company/publisher/record company a fee, commission, recoupment charge, etc. Still, it's a monthly paycheck allowing the musician a decent living from cre

"'Radical Romantics' is essentially a collection of notes on love. Love—whether sexy, overwhelming, or vengeful—links together the recurring motivations of the Fever Ray catalog: curiosity and exploration, family born and chosen, sexual freedom and pleasure" - Pitchfork reviews the new album by Swedish artist (score 8.4, tagged Best new music). Guardian describes songs as "witty, inquisitive about physical and psychological relationships", whereas DIY Magazine points out that the album "posits the idea of love as an imperative condition for human function, and probes into both its darkest corners as well as the simple, mortal desire for affection, producing a fascinating study of electro-pop in the meantime. NME, similarly, hears "a collection of exhilarating pop vignettes examining love as a preoccupation, an unconstrained struggle and most importantly, a myth". "Even in the face of apprehension, Fever Ray has never surveyed their own future with this much conviction" - Paste Magazine insists.

"Several start-ups are now using AI-generated soundscapes of ambient, downtempo and chill-out beats in hopes of having the same impact as sound therapy on issues like depression, anxiety and dementia" - Hii Magazine looks into the "increasingly growing sector that investors are paying attention to." Berlin-based Endel has an AI system that produces soundscapes to help people focus, relax and sleep. The company raised $15 million in a second round of venture capital financing earlier this year, and has over a million active users. Wavepaths, with Brian Eno as a member, is UK company that makes generative music for psychedelic therapy. It is currently used by hundreds of legal clinics in over 30 countries and has raised $4.5 million in its initial seed investment round last year. Brain.fm's algorithmic system selects from a catalogue of human-composed melodies, harmonies and chord progressions.

The Conversation offers a few pieces of advice "if you want to train your musical taste to extend beyond the old favourites of youth:

1. Cultivate different modes of listening including in formal (concerts), focused (solitary), casual (as an accompaniment to other activity) and social settings
2. Make listening habitual
3. Be curious about what you’re listening to. You can help your brain form new patterns by knowing something of the story behind the music
4. Be patient and persistent. Don’t assume because you don’t immediately like an unfamiliar piece that it’s not worth listening to. The more you listen, the better your brain will be at triggering a pleasure response
5. Find a friend to give you recommendations. There’s a good chance you’ll listen to music suggested to you by someone you like and admire
6. Keep listening to the music you love, but be willing to revisit long-held beliefs, particularly if you describe your musical taste in the negative (such as 'I hate jazz'); it’s likely these attitudes will stifle your joy
7. Don’t feel you have to keep up with new music trends. We’ve 1,000 years of music to explore."

The New Cue talked to Jason Williamson about some of the albums that he’d been listening to when he wrote and recorded 'UK Grim', the new album by his band Sleaford Mods. An interesting choice:

A Flock Of Seagulls - "loose pastel melody type shit"

Alex Cameron - "it's just brilliant song-writing. He is really a big old troubadour in his own way"

Lone Lady - "got some really good sparseness"

Soft Cell - "lots and lots and lots of songs about alleviating gentleman in small porn theatres"

"Our nostalgia remains intimate, personal and fragile, it’s 'a sentiment of loss and displacement, a romance with one’s own fantasy'" - Washington Post's Chris Richards recently wrote a beautiful text about reunited post-hardcore bands at the Numero Twenty music festival. "Instead of a tomb, nostalgia became a trampoline — something you could jump onto with both feet, rebounding into an open future... The festival’s other big memory-smudge was out in the crowd where young attendees were outnumbered by their elders, but maybe only 3 to 1 — a division that felt most acute when the youngest ears in the house pressed toward the stage for Codeine, a band best known for making its tremendous slowness feel stark and colossal... There’s a prevailing idea that the most stylish members of today’s youth are obsessed with retrieving the lost ’90s, but let’s not forget that they’ve grown up in an over-connected century in which boredom no longer seems to exist. My guess is that the Codeine kids at Numero Twenty didn’t come to commune with the past so much as slow down the present".

German composer Volker Bertelmann. also known as Hauschka, won the original score Oscar Sunday night for his music for the World War I epic 'All Quiet on the Western Front'. For this adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque classic, Bertelmann used his great-grandmother’s turn-of-the-century harmonium, a pump organ whose carefully mic’d interior noises - “the breathing, the air, the wooden cracklings” sounded to him like “a war machine.” The song 'Naatu Naatu' by M.M. Keeravaani and Chandrabose from the hit Telugu-language film 'RRR' has made history by becoming the first Indian film song to win an Oscar, beating heavyweights like Lady Gaga and Rihanna.

London rock band Brace Yourself! is putting their Banksy painting up for auction because “people should be able to see it”, Guardian reports. The band was formerly known as Exit Through the Gift Shop, and they were asked by Banksy more than a decade ago to choose a new name owing to copyright issues with his Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary of the same name. The band indeed changed their name, and got a Banksy in return. The painting, also named 'Brace Yourself! - features Death driving a bumper car - is on show in London before sale where it has estimate of $600,000-$800,000.

"Now that gaming is bigger than ever, it feels like it’s only a matter of time until a video game can turn a decades-old hit into a viral cultural moment" - Dan Runcie points out introducing his latest podcast about the future of music and gaming. His guest Vickie Nauman, specialist in music and technology, believes that there's a big opportunity, and that it's going to be different: "What I love about gaming is that you hear music differently when you’re gaming. There’s so much potential we haven’t tapped into. Sync license is the best way to do things in gaming. You want something specific".

St. Vincent and The Roots performed a beautiful cover of Portishead‘s ‘Glory Box’ on The Tonight Show on Wednesday (Intl Women's Day). The atmospheric collaboration, faithful to the original 1995 single, saw St. Vincent deliver a powerful and haunting vocal, with her own spin on the song’s electrifying guitar solo. The Tonight Show house band The Roots accompanied her with subtle instrumentation, whereas a live string section gave a final touch.

The last three years have seen a slow rise in global music piracy, after a period of steady decline, according to a report from MUSO, a U.K. technology company. The platform has logged more than 15 billion visits to music piracy sites in 2022. Iran accounts for 15.05% of all piracy traffic picked up by MUSO, followed by India (10.29%), The United States (7%), and Russia (6%), Billboard reports. More than half of all the piracy in the United States takes place via stream-ripping, which relies on programs to get around YouTube’s copyright protection and convert audio into MP3s.

"That [love] takes time and commitment, and you have to dare to show yourself being vulnerable. It’s a huge risk, because you can be rejected” - Karin Dreijer of Fever Ray says to Dazed about their forthcoming album 'Radical Romantics'. In between her last and this album, Dreijer was diagnosed with ADHD - “I learned that, with ADHD, you probably are more sensitive to stress. It’s common to be driven by doing fun stuff, and it can be hard to know your limits.” Dreijer got into therapy which was “so, so scary; it can be really horrible,” but “sometimes, you have to expose yourself to the things you’re afraid of.”

Recorded music revenues in the US - money spent on streaming subscriptions, as well as physical and digital music - grew 6.1% YoY in 2022 to $15.9 billion, the market’s seventh consecutive year of growth, MBW reports. Streaming grew 7.3% to a record high $13.3 billion in revenue and collectively accounts for 84% of revenues. Wholesale revenues – the money that makes its way back to record labels, distributors and artists – were $10.3 billion in 2022, the first time they exceeded $10 billion in the market. Also, retail revenues from paid subscription services (Spotify, Apple Music etc) grew 8% to $10.2 billion in 2022, exceeding the $10 billion mark annually for the first time. Revenues from vinyl records grew 17.2% to $1.2 billion – marking the format’s 16th consecutive year of growth - accounting for 71% of physical format revenues. For the first time since 1987, vinyl albums outsold CDs in units - 41 million vs 33 million.

Spotify introduced a significant redesign of its app, including the vertically scrolling “discovery” feeds, a new “Smart Shuffle” mode for playlist recommendations, a new podcast autoplay feature and more. Mashable points out that "Spotify's update aims to help users find more content on the platform. The idea is that users will scroll through their feed and see fragments of content that they then will save for later. But these changes appear to miss the thing that people actually enjoy about the app: all the music they love being in one place." The Verge agrees: "The new design goes heavy on imagery and vertical scrolling, turning your homescreen from a set of album covers into a feed that much more closely resembles TikTok and Instagram. As you scroll, Spotify is also hoping to make it easier to discover new things across the Spotify ecosystem."

"Buh Records, based in Lima, Peru... launched in 2004... specializes in Latin American experimental music, and while its catalog features plenty of contemporary artists from across the region—and the globe—it maintains a strong focus on unearthing overlooked classics and unknown gems that reassert Latin America’s place in avant-garde history" - Pitchfork presents the notable label, and picks out some stand-out tracks.

Spotify revealed on their Stream On event that through December 31, 2022, it had paid more than €34 billion in royalties to record labels, music publishers, and other rights holders since launch, MBW reports. In 2021 the streaming giant paid €7+ billion, which was up from €5+ billion in 2020, which means it will likely reach the €40 billion benchmark this year. Spotify says that “nearly 70%” of every dollar it generates from music “is paid back as royalties to rightsholders, who then pay the artists and songwriters, based on the agreed terms”. Spotify also revealed that in 2022, as many as 10,100 artists from over 100 countries worldwide generated at least $100,000, and 1,060 artists generated more than $1 million.

“Everyone should sing, even if you can’t sing. I think everyone can, they just think about it too much and they just haven’t found where they can sing. I’m just pouring out what I’m feeling. I just wanna sing my heart out” - UK rapper Slowthai says in the Independent interview about his new album 'Ugly' ("U Gotta Love Yourself"). Slowthai turns to singing, with the production also leaning to the indie-rock side (producer Dan Carey previously worked with black midi, Squid, Chubby and the Gang, and Fontaines DC). The recent £1 pub gigs tour was also a novelty - “any way I can give the opportunity to people who come from a similar place as myself and are struggling, why would I not? For me it’s about playing music and sharing them moments with people".

A great read in Bloomberg about Pras Michél, a member of the highly successful band The Fugees, who used his celebrity status to get close to several high-ranking politicians such as Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He also got in contact with a high-ranking China security officer and Malaysian businessman accused of embezzlement of billions of dollars from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, blowing much of it on artwork, real estate and gifts for celebrity friends including Leonardo DiCaprio and Kim Kardashian. Pras is awaiting a trial, charged with 10 offenses, ranging from conspiracy to witness tampering and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.

Peruvian YouTuber and economist, Ioanis Patsias staged a big tribute show recreating Rosalía's performance from her latest Motomami tour. Patsias played the avant-garde pop queen himself, and he was helped on stage by eight dancers, picked out from 100 who auditioned for the part. They recreated the costume changes, the dance numbers, the lighting and stage design at an amphitheatre in Lima’s Parque de la Exposición, managing to sell-out the venue, with 3,500 fans attending the show. It took months of preparation and $100,000 of Patsias' money, who only managed to recoup only part of the money

Pitchfork suggests "several approaches that ticketing companies, public policy makers, and the music community could follow to make buying concert tickets a slightly less infuriating experience:

• Stagger the presales for big tours
• Abolish surprise fees
• Unwind Ticketmaster’s merger with Live Nation
• Keep resellers in check
• Give artists a choice on dynamic pricing
• Remember the Bandcamp model, and that small can be beautiful."

Ed Newton-Rex, the founder of the pioneering music-making AI platform, Jukedeck, which he later sold to TikTok, makes an interesting point in the MBW interview about the main benefit of AI for the music industry. Newton-Rex, himself a musician, believes it can increase the value for rights holders - "When you have AI, the music that you write, or that you own, can become so much more valuable, because it’s no longer just one static thing. It can be modified. So maybe a track you’ve written or that you’ve gotten in your library is lengthened to fit a different TV ad, maybe the instrumentation is changed to get the right mood in a video, maybe you change the entire style to fit something totally new. What starts out as one piece of music that [was] set in stone can become this living thing that can be adapted, endlessly. That’s very exciting."

It always did sound similar and, as it turns out, the word "saxophone" is etymologically related to the word "sex" - Olivia M. Swarthout points on her Twitter. It all began with proto-Indo-European word "sek" which means "to cut, divide".

Actress Jamie Lee Curtis shared her seemingly unusual bedtime habits with 'TODAY Show' hosts - the Hollywood star revealed she's tucked in at 7PM and wakes up around 4.30 AM. Curtis is also “challenging musicians to do concerts during the day,” since the usual schedules are way to late for her. “Why are there no matinees? For instance, I love Coldplay. I would love to go see Coldplay. The problem is, I’m not gonna go see Coldplay if they start their show at nine o’clock and there’s an opening act. I want to hear Coldplay at 1PM. I think if we filled a stadium with people who want to see matinee of Colplay, I think we would start a trend.” Billboard reports...

A new biopic 'Mixed by Erry” tells an amazing story about a huge pirate cassette mixtape business in Italy in the 1980s and the 1990s. Enrico Frattasio started the label selling his tapes to illegal stallholders in his working-class neighbourhood in Naples. By the late 80s, Mixed by Erry had spread throughout Italy and beyond, employing 100 people with an annual gross of around €4,5m in today’s money. “I was the YouTube or Spotify of the 1980s... I was doing a serious curator job” - Frattasio says.

"Music is one of the most valuable forms of self-expression out there" - Trapital's Dan Runcie insists in his latest memo. He also shares his thoughts on what the music industry can learn from gaming and monetize its popularity:

• Do-it-yourself music sampling - make it easier for fans to remix their own versions of songs, separate the stems, upload their versions to the streaming or short-form video platform of their choice, and ensure that the original artists get paid for the underlying work

• A.I. as a service - I can see software like ChatGPT packaged up as a $10.99 monthly subscription service for songwriters and musicians. Users pay a monthly fee to access their royalty-free music for commercial use

• In-app purchases in digital environments - 23% of Gen Z gamers (and 16% of all gamers) wish they could purchase music they hear in a game or be able to add it to a playlist