Country music star Morgan Wallen has been announced as a headliner for this year’s Kicker Country Stampede, a country music festival in Kansas in June, Uproxx reports. It marks Wallen’s first confirmed performance since he was caught on camera using a racial slur in February. The three-day music festival, which touts Bud Light as a sponsor, goes down June 24th-26th at Heartland Motorsports Park in Topeka, Kansas. Along with Wallen, the lineup features Luke Combs, Riley Green, Blanco Brown, Maddie & Tae, and Ashley McBryde, among others. Variety reports, however, that the so-called comeback show was actually announced last September, not this week, and sources say it’s highly unlikely he’ll fulfill the gig.

Musicians Adam Neely and Ben Levin wrote and recorded an entire album in 24 hours over a Zoom call. They streamed the whole process on Twitch, had some guests, and raised over $15,000 for Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services during the stream. The album is basically hyper-pop with added pop and jazz.

Northern California singer-songwriter Jenna Mammina began hosting twice-daily webcast/livestreaming events on March 23, 2020, and hasn’t missed a single day since she started, which amounts to 730 unique shows in one year. She calls these live-streams “11:11 with Jenna” - with a new episode debuting daily at 11:11 a.m. and a totally different one following at 11:11 p.m. (those are New York Times, meaning that's 4:11 PM and 4:11 AM in Rome, and in Singapore the 11:11 AM episode is at 11:11 PM and the 11:11 PM is at 11:11 AM). She hosts these shows via Zoom and people can join in by visiting Facebook.com/Jenna.Mammina. She plans to continue indefinitely, as she's told the Mercury News - "I never want to stop. I love the community that we have created, the inner connectivity with people all over the world. I’m ready to keep going for as long as it stays in line with my life".

Lemmy Kilmister's ashes were placed in bullets and delivered to his closest friends and associates, per the legendary Motörhead frontman’s request. The revelation comes courtesy of Riki Rachtman, the onetime host of the MTV show 'Headbangers Ball', who shared a photo of a bullet with “LEMMY” engraved on it, writing - “Before his death #Lemmy asked for his ashes to be put in some bullets & handed out to his closest friends. Today, I received a bullet & was literally brought to tears. Thank you, @myMotorhead”.

Tokyo events and advertising company Hiroro gives its employees up to 10 paid days off when their idol is retiring, Vice reports. They’re also entitled to 10 days of bereavement leave, which is usually taken to mourn a relative’s death if their favorite idol is getting married. If one’s second, or even third favorite is stepping off the stage, employees can take up to three days off. Corporate Japan has a notoriously strict work culture and no national sick leave system.

A coalition of advocacy groups representing musicians and entertainers voiced their support for a new California state bill that seeks to limit the length of contracts for recording artists to seven years, Billboard reports. The FAIR Act would remove a damages provision that commonly discourages artists from leaving record deals after seven years if they have undelivered albums, even though they are legally permitted.

In 2019, music copyright was worth $31.6bn, up by 7%, or $2.1bn from the previous year, and the third consecutive year that the growth was more than $2bn. These record-breaking copyright valuations are due to streaming - its contribution to labels, publishers and CMOs has gone from 14% in 2015 to almost 47% in 2019. Tarzan Economics predicts that 2020 will be another record-breaking year.

1. Find your first 50 fans - “For us, it’s about, ‘How do we build an authentic audience and grow it very, very organically?’ It’s slow bake versus the microwave”
2. Create inflection points - “It wasn’t one explosive thing that just happened. It was us planting seeds in every place”
3. Form a personal board of directors - the key is finding people who aren’t intimately invested in your journey and can give rational, level-headed advice
4. Remember that there is no shortcut to success - "whatever it is you do, you actually have to do the work. You can’t just talk about it. You can’t be philosophical about it. You have to get the physical work in”
5. Use failure to propel yourself forward - “Failure breeds fear, and fear paralyzes people, which makes you go into a downward spiral. But how can you use that same exact energy to propel your forward?”

When Lady Gaga fired him, Troy Carter turned to Silicon Valley where he invested in Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, Warby Parker, Spotify, Gimlet, and Slack, Trapital reminds.

An interesting interview with dr. Stephanie Doktor, music professor, with MJI about John Powell, who liked Black music but was a racist. To summarize it: "Powell was an American composer who initially based much of his music on ragtime, spirituals, minstrel tunes, and jazz in the 1900s and 1910s. But in the early 1920s, he became a politically active white supremacist... He continued to perform his Black-based music at the same time he was collaborating with Marcus Garvey to have Black Americans removed from the nation. Instead of interpreting his pre- and post-war agendas as radically oppositional or his musical and political careers as antithetical to one another, I consider how they are actually imbricated. Doing so helps problematize the structure of modernist concert music. Put differently, Powell was not an outlier but rather a product of American modernism".

"It offers up metalcore and mathcore at its harshest, interspersed with ambient/noise interludes and flirtations with black & death metal and other heavy subgenres, and it covers a lot of ground within that realm. It's chaotic and discordant at times, bone-crushingly heavy at others, and atmospheric at others, and it remains dark and intense throughout" - Brooklyn Vegan writes in praise of London trio's debut album. The Quietus likes Kate Davies’ vocals and how "there’s an element of playfulness here too, which actually helps these bizarre, head-spinning song structures feel even more abrasive and derange... Believe the hype, this thing will tear your head clean off".

A funny and intelligent interview by Music Journalism Insider with music critic and editor Kevin Williams from several Chicago newspapers; here's a snippet: "I reviewed everything from Kid Rock to Diana Krall, Cafe Tacuba to Wu-Tang, and was a constant annoyance for the copy desk. One review of Incubus was simply, 'Incubus? No, succubus'. Rewrite. I described Wu-Tang as like being at the 95th Street Red Line stop, just a bunch of smart brothas taking turns yelling at you. Rewrite. I had so much fun".

"Is it ever a good idea to put on performances that depict police brutality, jail, and other facets of Black oppression, especially on the stages of white institutions? There’s the chance that these displays enlighten some viewers to the gravity of American oppression, but there is also the reality that they come off as pandering and upset people directly impacted by state violence" - Complex discusses the value, or harm, of these performances.

It wasn't really clear who exactly are the members of Detroit hardcore collective The Armed, who their apparent leader Dan Greene really is, and what the role of Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou entails. With their new album 'Ultrapop' they're losing the anonymity, and for the first time they've released a video showing eight musicians, who the band claims is them. The Quietus talked to their (probable) member Adam Vallely trying to clear things up. He says that band consists of "in terms of audio contributions, 25 to 30 people at any one time. Then that often boils down to the songs that we play being about six to nine people". On their new album they move away from their previous hard-core sound, adding pop and hip-hop elements - "we’re trying to truly be experimental and try to craft some sort of new experience for people... I’d rather be the band that doesn’t get all the way there but pushes the next person to be super great with something you were able to put forward". In general, Vallely says, "we’re setting these hilariously larger than life goals for ourselves, to create a new genre of Ultrapop, and eventually create something that is more Ultrapop than hardcore".

A fan described Nick Cave on his Red Hand Files blog how he gave his father an Elvis-themed funeral, and wondered what Cave had in mind for his final hour. Cave answered he would "be very happy with one too - to be ushered into the next world by the voice of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll singer of them all. 'Kentucky Rain', that’s what I’d like, 'Kentucky Rain' and 'How Great Thou Art' - Elvis singing gospel, with heaven and all its angels listening".

Verzuz announced a battle between soul and funk legends the Isley Brothers and Earth, Wind & Fire, on April 4. Two weeks later, on April 20, Verzuz battle will host a “How High 4/20 Special” featuring Redman and Method Man. Both events will be available to watch on Verzuz’s Instagram account or via the Triller app.

A lovely text by Guardian's Annie Zalecki about how Tori Amos changed/formed her as a person: "I had Tori teaching me how to be a woman on my own terms. She was secure yet vulnerable, so connected to her feelings in ways I couldn’t yet articulate, and comfortable in her skin... And Tori spoke frankly about religion and desire, and even discussed the impact of her own rape... To an introvert like me, her willingness to be open about these heavy topics was revolutionary... I marvel at how lucky I was to have had this aspirational role model: a woman fearless enough to speak all of her truths, so her fans could find their own".

Morgan Wallen spends his tenth consecutive week on top of Billboard 200 chart with his latest release 'Dangerous: The Double Album', Billboard reports. It is the first album to spend its first 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 since 1987 and Whitney Houston’s 'Whitney' album. 'Dangerous' earned 69,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending March 11, a slight deep of 11% from the previous week.

Nathan Evans completes his journey from postman to viral sensation to chart-topping smash as his hit ’Wellerman' takes the Number 1 spot on this week’s UK Official Singles Chart. The remix of the sea shanty with 220 Kid and Billen Ted climbs to 1 this week, after Evans' first TV performance of the track on last week’s episode of Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.

An interesting statistic in the MBW about the potential to earn an average wage as a musician, as opposed to a footballer. Spotify announced this week that 13,400 artists generated over $50,000 each in royalty payouts (records plus publishing) from their platform in 2020. There are now somewhere around 7 million artists with their music on Spotify, which means just 0.2% of artists on Spotify are generating $50k per year (median annual US wage). On the other side, there are around 320 million footballers today, and, by FIFA numbers, 128,983 of them actually get paid (something) to play, which is 0.04% of them.

A music festival took place in the Netherlands, with 1,500 mostly young people participating in an experiment about the spread of Covid-19, BBC reports. The rest of the country is in lockdown, yet the Dutch government has financed this electro-music festival and a scientific experiment that aims to see if there's a safe way to allow large-scale social gatherings to restart, without increasing the spread of the virus. The participants all had to be negative on Covid-test to take part at the fest and will be tested again next week.

Manchester Orchestra turn to dance rock on 'Bed Head', but those unmissable vocals are intact; Ben Howard is at his most relaxed and content on 'Far Out'; Bloodside is the new music/visual art project by AJ Lambert (daughter of Nancy Sinatra, and granddaughter of Frank, obviously), Protomartyr guitarist Greg Ahee and Preoccupations drummer Mike Wallace - 'Pica' is their first anything; Moraines share ambient yet uplifting post-rock 'The Brute', the first single from their upcoming debut album.

New rock n' roll biopic 'Creation Stories', about the cult UK publisher Creation Records and its frontman Alan McGee, is out this week, made by the 'Trainspotting' team of Danny Boyle and Irvine Welsh as producer and screenwriter, while Ewan Bremner, who played Spud in 'Trainspotting', stars as McGee. Brooklyn Vegan took this opportunity to select 21 best records by Creation. Here's the Top 5:

5. House of Love - 'House of Love'

4. Oasis - '(What's the Story) Morning Glory?'

3. My Bloody Valentine - 'Isn't Anything'

2. My Bloody Valentine - 'Loveless'

1. Primal Scream - 'Screamadelica'

Richard Bienstock and Tom Beajuour, the authors of the new oral history 'Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion' choose eight of the most archetypal and illustrative videos of '80s hard rock. It's Poison's 'Talk Dirty To me', Guns N' Roses' 'It's So Easy', Mötley Crüe's 'Looks That Kill' and several others similarly ridiculous. As for Binstock and Beajuour's book, All Music argues it is a "treasure trove of stories, drama, and details from one of the most over-the-top eras in rock".

Jason Derulo was a teenage-star, but at the end of 2019, his career has stagnated for a while. Them he discovered TikTok and now he is the most followed artist on the platform, he ranks 12th overall. Variety collected his advice: “Everybody has a different audience, and you have to spend some time to get to know yours. Then, the most important thing is good lighting, and use trending songs because they capture people’s interest instantly. Also, start your videos with a close-up — you have literally one second to stop people from scrolling, so what are you going to do with that second? Quick cuts keep people’s attention, and there’s tricks like having two or three sentences on the screen, but just long enough for people to read just the first one, so they have to watch the whole video again to read the rest of it".

Guardian explores an interesting theory - that there aren't any new pop bands anymore in western music, rather a line of solo musicians. Ben Mortimer, co-president of Polydor Records, says that it's much cheaper and simpler to start a solo music career - "you could download Ableton [production software], shut your bedroom door and get creating straight away. Culture is shaped by technology”. Ben Mortimer, co-president of Polydor Records points out a socio-cultural change - “The majority of young people aren’t excited by band music in the traditional sense: groups of lads with guitars. And that’s reflected in the number of streams these bands receive. That then impacts on what talented young musicians go on to create". The G admits however that it's exactly bands at the forefront of pop music in Asia.

Nazi punk and nazi black metal are both present on the biggest streaming services, and Medium observes a similar trend with electronic synthesizer music. Fashwave (a portmanteau of “fascism” and “wave”) or Trumpwave have emerged in recent years with lounge music sounds superimposed by fascist imagery like swastika and Hitler on top of it. Both Fashwave and Trumpwave come up frequently on YouTube, Soundcloud, and Spotify for those willing to look. Interspliced in between electronic beats on YouTube are speeches to segregationist or fascists leaders, as well as straight-up fascist speeches (no hyperlinks to those here).

In the span of mere weeks, Jay-Z’s net worth has jumped 40 percent up to $1,4 billion, SCMP calculates. In addition to selling 50 percent of his champagne brand Armand de Brignac, also known as Ace of Spades, to LVMH, Jay-Z sold a majority stake of his streaming service Tidal to Square. 51-year-old rapper and businessman ishappy about his partners - “I’m very fortunate. Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter, Square and Cash App, and Philippe [Schaus] and the guys who created LVMH – you couldn’t ask for better partners; they’re the top of the top. [Things] usually align like that when people do really great things. You could get into partnerships and people short-change the business for different reasons. These guys don’t cut corners, they try to get it right. It’s about respect".

"Over more than 40 years I've never had anyone say to me, 'I sure am glad I sold my publishing when I did. It was the best thing I ever did'. But I couldn't begin to estimate the number of times that folks like Tom Petty, Paul McCartney, Steve Lukather, Tom Johnston, Roger McGuinn, George Harrison and Donald Fagen have told me that selling their songwriting catalogs was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made" - Randall Wixen of the Wixen Music Publishing wrote in Billboard about a recent surge of sales/purchases of publishing rights by Hipgnosis, Universal etc. So, why are they selling? - "writers' representatives have seen the money they make plummet over the past few years (especially if COVID-19 or an artists' age interrupted touring plans) and hope to make some nice fees for 'helping' them sell their songs. A lot of the encouragement to sell (and make money off of the sale) begins with the assertion to songwriters that 'folks are offering insane amounts for catalogs' and 'you should sell ASAP because Biden might raise the capital gains tax'".

There's plenty of tension in that calmness at the beginning of live session version of 'The Code' by London-based Ethiopian-singer model Egyptian Alewya and British jazz drummer Moses Boyd. After the build-up, it turns into powerful rock/jazz/global territory. Previously, the two have recorded a live version of her song 'Sweating'.

Canadian Indigenous scholar, writer, activist, poet, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson speaks and sings of the urgency of taking care of a planet in peril on her new album 'Theory of Ice'. It is, as PopMatters explains - "a dramatic, deeply eloquent, and musically rich celebration of the Earth and one of its most precious resources: water". Although concerned about the future, Betasamosake believes "human relationships can create real change" and she makes "saving the planet... somehow seem within our grasp".