US satellite radio service SiriusXM is reducing its workforce by 475 roles, or 8% of its total staff. At the end of 2022, SiriusXM had 5,869 full-time and part-time employees, 5% more that the prior year. SiriusXM announced layoffs are “critical for us to take the right steps now to secure the long-term health and profitability of our business.” SiriusXM posted annual revenues of USD $9.00 billion for the year 2022, up 4% YoY. Its pre-tax profit in 2022 weighed in at $1.61 billion, up 5% year-on-year.

Guitarist Gary Rossington, the last remaining original member of the US rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, has died at the age of 71. Rossington appeared on all of their albums and co-wrote the 1974 hit 'Sweet Home Alabama'. He was also one of the survivors of a 1977 plane crash that killed several of his bandmates, and marked a turn in their career. Rossington had been playing shows as recently as this last February.

Music YouTuber Rick Beato shares his thoughts in his latest video about how creators crushed the music business, he himself being a creator now, and part of the music business previously. He goes back to where it all began - file-sharing services and social media. However, he insists that it's still an opportunity.

Dance music has got so hard and fast recently, Mixmag believes and tries to find clues as to whether it has really happened and - if so - why. “My whole take on the faster, harder side of things is that people turned 18 over the pandemic. They’d heard about techno, but they’d never experienced a club [and] they were listening to stuff in the house, coming from maybe hard dance, or hardcore or ravey happy hardcore stuff. Then they burst into a club and want to hear things at 100 miles per hour because they haven’t heard anything different" - Glasgow DJs and producer Quail shares his thoughts. Techno artist Sunil Sharpe thinks part of the reason is also down to a loss of clubs: “In ways the traditional nightclub environment used to regulate tempo but as the amount of clubs has thinned out over the last decade, it feels like the scene has moved more towards locations that capture the original spirit of rave culture when tempos were faster."

An interesting article in The Pickle about YUNG YiDiSH, a library in Tel Aviv that serves as an alternative music venue in the evening. “It was obvious to me that a cultural place, in order to be relevant, needs to be in a noisy space, a hurtful space, a space where you can do things” - the founder Mendy Cahan shares his idea behind the library/club. He also believes that preserving Yiddish goes well with punk: “There is no establishment behind Yiddish. We don’t have an Académie Française, we don’t have powers from above. But Yiddish finds its way, and we manage, and have always managed, to teach our children to read and write without these structures.”

"Hip-hop turns 50 this year. Institutions that once ignored the genre are getting in on the celebration... But the way hip-hop makes music remains completely unprotected by law. Over the past four decades, even as hip-hop’s method of sonic collage became a basic mode of music making across genres, the legal conception of what music is, and what constitutes authorship, remains rooted in our pre-digital past. As we move into the second half of the hip-hop century, it’s high time to change that" - music writer Dan Charnas insists in Slate's piece about sampling. "The landscape is far too precarious for creators, and so we need two things: a clearer, broader conception of fair use and, for everything else, an expanded compulsory license law, which would ideally clear up that gray area, creating rules for engagement that avoid legal wrangling, ensuring owners’ rights and income without stifling new creativity."

A 33-year-old woman died, two people were hospitalized in critical condition, and seven others sought medical treatment for non-life-threatening injuries after a crowd stampede at a GloRilla concert in Rochester, New York on Sunday. The incident occurred at around 11:00 p.m. local time at the Main Street Armory. The police reports that concertgoers began to panic after believing they had heard gun shots. However, investigating officers “found no evidence to support a shooting having occurred.” UPDATE: Aisha Stephens, 35, of Syracuse, has died after being hospitalised following the incident at the concert in Rochester, New York. Two other women, Rhondesia Belton, 33, and Brandy Miller, 35, died in hospital after being injured.

"I went into it just thinking, ‘this might be the last record I ever make but if it is then I want to make something absolutely extraordinary and leave no stone unturned in terms of being creative’, not prepared to let anything whatsoever come in to the creative process and change my way of thinking whatsoever. I had to just come up here, close that hatch and forget I had a family and forget I had a mortgage and had to put food on the table and just be creative" - Steve Mason, former member of The Beta Band, says in The New Cue interview about his latest solo album 'Brothers & Sisters'. "The idea behind the record more than anything was to make something uplifting. I wanted to make something which was positive and uplifting and gave people a beautiful experience... People are very careful about where they spend the money these days and I quite like the idea of being an entertainer. People want to be entertained and they want to go home with their hearts full rather than their eyes full of tears."

An amusing list in Rolling Stone - "It’s a strange but often hugely appealing musical subgenre, and this is our attempt to figure out which are the true best songs of the fake best songs". Plenty of interesting music among the 50 chosen ones, set between ‘Time To Change’ by The Brady Bunch from the 1972 movie 'The Brady Bunch', and ‘That Thing You Do!’ by The Wonders from 'That Thing You Do!' (1996).22

"Big, queasy guitars, bloated bass, drums that hit like a medicine ball to the forehead—the album exudes a sense of both revulsion by and fascination with bodies and the things they do" - Bandcamp goes presenting their recent Album of the Day, 'Dogsbody' by the New York industrial/post-punk band Model/Actriz. Flood Magazine lists a number of references it can detect on the album, whereas Pitchfork declares it Best New Music (grade 8.2), saying "the band’s expertly contained noise-rock din is the perfect foil to frontman Cole Haden’s white-hot charisma".

An interesting story in the Tracklib about members of a Discord community by the name of Sample Hunting, who have developed a new model of sample discovery, even the shortest samples. The new method includes Google Assistant which can even detect samples less than a second long, and is usually able to detect samples that have been chopped or time-stretched. Tracklib is a crate-digging platform to sample and clear original music.

Chance The Rapper organized a free festival and conference in Accra, Ghana for 52,000 in January, which went without any serious trouble. The inaugural Black Star Line Festival (named for Marcus Garvey’s black-owned global shipping line from 1919), included a 6-day conference with performances by Mensa, Erykah Badu, T-Pain, Jeremih, Sarkodie, Tobe Nwigwe, Asakaa Boys and M.anifest along with special guests Dave Chappelle, Sway and Talib Kweli. Chance The Rapper had two goals, as he's told Pollstar: "The goal... was to perform for my people, which I got to do in that moment. And two was to produce an event that was safe and intentionally Black that no one there could in their right mind ever forget they took part in."

lovely story in Pitchfork about Elliott Smith's teenage band Stranger Than Fiction of which the musician was kinda embarrassed. The band released six albums of guitar-based music in the 1980s, with Smith refusing to talk about later on. The P, next to the story of collecting the rare recordings, insists it's not that bad at all. "Once you make it past the surface-level impression—awkward kids making awkward stabs at rock music—these six records upend pretty much every received notion about who Smith was, what motivated him, and how he worked. Above all, craft mattered deeply to him, even at low points when it seemed that very little else did. These tapes bring that quality to the fore, presenting Elliott Smith the tinkerer, the woodshedder, the perfectionist."

Nigerian afrobeats megastar Burna Boy was Spotify's most-streamed African artist globally in 2022. He sold out Madison Square Garden in 2022, and has also performed at halftime at the NBA All-Star Game. The Burna Boy will also become the first African artist to headline a show at London Stadium, and is about to perform at Coachella. Trapital's Dan Runcie looks back at Burna Boy's decade-long career and his path to stardom.

Jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter, one of the most distinctive voices of his generation as a soloist, composer and bandleader, has died in Los Angeles at the age of 89. The 12-time Grammy award winner was a well-known figure on the jazz circuit since the late 1950s, playing alongside several greats, including Miles Davis, Carlos Santana, and Herbie Hancock, as well as in the jazz supergroup Weather Report, helping shape much of 20th Century jazz music. Jazz explorer Ted Gioia surveys Shorter's "remarkable compositions from the 1960s" - here.

Functional music is defined as something “not designed for conscious listening”, often encountered on popular playlists designed to promote sleep, studying or relaxation. It is estimated that it was earning around 120 billion streams annually (Taylor Swift’s entire catalog did around 8 billion streams through all of 2022), worth over $630 million annually for recording rights holder. Not everybody is happy with it - Universal Music Group chairman Lucian Grainge wrote to staff recently that “great music” is under threat from “a flood” of “lower-quality functional content that in some cases can barely pass for ‘music.’"

Steve Mackey, a prominent producer and the longtime bassist for Pulp, has died. On Twitter today, Pulp announced that Mackey “passed away this morning.” No cause of death has yet been reported. Mackey was 56.

Singer-songwriter Noah Kahan went viral with his song 'Stick Season' with one of his videos having over 10 million plays on TikTok, and the song over 100 million streams on Spotify. In the Song Exploder episode about his hit song, Kahan talks about that part of the year between autumn and winter, and about his influences life Counting Crows, and Paul Simon. He also shares his bracingly honest appraisal of the winding path he took — in his life, and in his music — to get to where he is now.

On Wednesday (March 1) the US House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to advance a bill that would effectively give President Joe Biden powers to ban TikTok in the US. The bill, known as the ‘Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries Act’, would also allow for the control of other China-related economic activity, if signed into law. The passage of the bill comes just days after The White House’s Office of Management and Budget issued a 30-day deadline for the app to be deleted from Federal employees devices due to national security concerns. On Monday (February 27), Canada also announced the banning of TikTok from all government-issued devices. Last week, The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, also banned its staff from using the ByteDance-owned video app on their work phones over cyber security concerns. The European Parliament also banned its staff from using TikTok this week.

Pianist Vijay Iyer, bassist and synth player Shahzad Ismaily, and vocalist Arooj Aftab have related their first collaborative track - beautiful 'To Remain/To Return' from their debut 'Love In Exile', recorded live in the studio with minimal edits. The song, as well as the collaborators' feelings about their album are quite promising. “Making music with Arooj and Shahzad is nothing less than an out-of-body experience. I’m weirdly in awe of our unhurried, mysterious creations; they seem to arrive fully formed from somewhere else" - Iyer says. "This piece holds, at its core, the delicately unfolding emotion of separation anxiety induced fury (see: love, self exile) between two people who are deeply connected. One is leaving and the other is asking them to stay. The former is saying ‘I will leave but I will also return’; in better form for the both of us” - Aftab says about the song. Ismaily adds, "We all provide the best we can. In my case it's euclidean rhythms, crystals to hold the oceanic beauty of Vijay's keys and the silent raven of Arooj's voice. We grow to the company that we keep; I am both fortunate and grateful".

"With the influx of cash that’s led to a music catalog buying spree over the past few years, where does all of this money come from?" - The Bag looks at the other side of the headline. Musicians have become much richer in the past five years since Hipgnosis kicked off this catalog boom. The biggest financiers:

Blackrock, who invested hundreds of millions of dollars via Influence Media Partners,

Litmus Music launched with $500 Million in funding from Carlyle Global Credit

Hipgnosis Song Management raised $1 Billion from Blackstone

"Music, being a focal point of emotion and a basis of connection between people, is an entry point to these conversations and can be used to help direct people to awareness, education and care" - Nick Greto of the Sounds of Saving says in Dada Strain interview. SoS is a music mental health nonprofit organization with a mission to use a connection to music of all genres as a direct path to greater mental wellbeing and to hopefulness during crisis in order to decrease suicide.

"If the courts decide that not enough human input goes into an AI-generated work, then that work cannot be protected by copyright, and then the work will fall into the public domain, meaning that creators would lose their IP protections" - the law expert Barry Scannell points out for the MBW. Last week exactly that happened - "the US Copyright Office (USCO) refused to grant a copyright registration to AI images in Kristina Kashtanova’s Zarya of the Dawn comic (the Work), which used Midjourney generative AI art... This decision potentially has major implications for US creative industries, from music to art to gaming, as it calls into question whether works which utilise (even in part) AI technology can be protected by copyright."

A great read in Vice about the "shady, high-paying private gig industry", which has almost all the biggest pop and rock stars on one side, and just about anybody who has enough money to pay them, on the other side. As Vice puts it, it comes down to this: "With unimaginable amounts of money at the disposal of central governments and lucrative corporations, stars with relatively clean PR images are being tempted to get a slice of the action"

“I absolutely love doing covers. It’s such a joy to offer my perspective on songs I admire and spread the word about amazing artists" - California folk singer-songwriter Shannon Lay said sharing her cover of Elliott Smnith's 'Angeles'. "'Covers Vol. 1' is the first in a series of cover records celebrating my obsession with shannonizing songs” - Lay announced her new album, out April 14th.

"These days, with devices and surroundings in constant competition for your visual attention, I’m interested in auditory experiences" - experience designer Layne Braunstein in the QZ argues why a future of soundscapes in offices could make us more creative and productive. "Sound has the incredible power to impact mood, increase productivity and creativity, and decrease stress and anxiety. The future of design for workplaces lies in wielding the power of evocative sound—a sense arguably more powerful than visuals and scent."

Out of the pandemic and the shutdown, Trapital's Dan Runcie looks back at the ideas and trends that have started back at the height of the isolation age. He believes that some are destined to never achieve substantial success, such as Clubhouse, Bored Ape Yacht Club, artists immersed in digital environments, Community... A few might have a future - DEI initiatives that lead to real change, Verzuz, NFTs, while some are certain to stay - music rights sales and acquisitions, TikTok and short-form video, high prices for live entertainment...

British musician Will Pearce likes insects and music, so he combines these two affections and shares it with the world. He makes lovely little songs about insects, especially beetles, such as mole beetle, and crucifix ground beetle. But, Pearce also comes out of the exoskeleton, singing about grass, toads, bees, and other beings from nature.

Music streaming has been the driving force behind the recorded music industry’s return to growth after roughly 15 years of declines. According to IFPI, the global recorded music streaming revenue has increased from ~$0 in 2004 to ~$17 billion in 2021, which is equivalent to the size of the entire global recorded music market in 2008. Universal's CEO Sir Lucian Grainge sent a New Year memo saying the economic model needs to evolve. Jimmy Stone explains why Grainge believes it's time for a change.

London studio and music venue Total Refreshment Centre has just released compilation 'Transmissions From Total Refreshment Centre', produced in collaboration with Blue Note. Pitchfork hears a modern type of fusion here, with a nod to the points in the past: "What’s striking about each of the compilation’s featured artists is how thoroughly they integrate adventurous improvisation to the skittish rhythms. Groove and vibe are present but they’re not the key to the music; exploration is". Guardian says it "captures a complex, thrilling moment in a fast-expanding musical community", whereas The Quietus announces "you’ll hear genres such as jazz, hip-hop, soul, funk and drill combined, putting together an incredible gumbo of sounds that connects avant-garde jazz to the more modern sonics of contemporary London".