Moroccans Innov Gnawa announce their debut album with an easy listening global epic 'Chorfa'; Finneas and Ashe have reunited for a new duet, 'Till Forever Falls Apart', cheezy yet romantic earworm; post-metal Canadians BIG | BRAVE build tension on 'Half Breed' without ever releasing it.
Canadian jazz-fusion drummer Larnell Lewis was challenged to play a drum part - on the spot - to a song he'd never heard before, Metallica's 'Enter Sandman'. First, Lewis actively listens to the song, breaks down all the details, noticing patterns and themes and how the different instruments play off each other. At the end he steps into Lars Ulrich's shoes.
New York will allow performances venues to reopen starting April 2, with capacity capped at 33%, with social distancing and face coverings required by all attendees. AEG CEO Jay Marciano has said previously to Rolling Stone that this can't work: “We built an industry based upon selling out. It’s important for the experience. The first 50 percent of the tickets pay for expenses like the stagehands and the marketing, the ushers, and the rest and the venue, and the other 50 percent is shared between the artists and the promoter - so, if all you’re going to sell is 50 percent of tickets, nobody’s making any money. Selling 85 percent of tickets is roughly the break-even”. So, what's left is multiplying the ticket price by 3, right?!?
Jack Dorsey's digital-payments processor Square is buying a majority stake in Tidal, Jay-Z's music streaming platform, for $297 million, through a mix of cash and stock, The New York Times reports. The move is set to bring Jay-Z to Square's board of directors. Jay-Z bought Tidal in 2015 for $56 million.
Morgan Carey is suing his younger sister Mariah Carey star for defamation and emotional distress caused by her recent memoir 'The Meaning Of Mariah Carey', USA Today reports. Singer's older brother says the book falsely suggests he was violent, saying that as a result, he has suffered "extreme mental anguish" and "serious damage to his reputation". Last month Mariah Carey's sister Alison Carey sued her for $1.25m over the memoir - there are passages claiming that Alison Carey gave Valium to 12-year-old Mariah, tried to pimp her out and threw boiling tea on her were "outrageous" and meant to "humiliate and embarrass" her.
Kings of Leon will release their new album 'When You See Yourself' on Friday, in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT) - becoming the first band to ever do so, Variety reports. Their NFT will be released through YellowHeart, a streaming platform based on blockchain. Along with the album, Kings of Leon are auctioning off six “golden tickets” that will include perks like four front row tickets to any Kings of Leon show for life, and another package includes six individual art pieces celebrating the album’s release and Kings of Leon’s legacy. Recently, artists like Grimes and Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda sold their digital art as NFTs, to the tune of $5.8 million and $30,000, respectively. Music producer 3LAU has sold a collection of 33 different non-fungible tokens for a total of $11.7m.
David Crosby has sold all of his music - his solo work, his work with the Byrds, Crosby & Nash, CSN, and CSNY - to famed music executive Irving Azoff’s new venture Iconic Artists Group, Pollstar reports. It includes the recorded music and publishing rights to his entire music catalog. “Given our current inability to work live, this deal is a blessing for me and my family and I do believe these are the best people to do it with” - Crosby said.
Alfa Mist announces his new album with jazzy-hip-hop single 'Organic Rust'; "rocky pop" band Wolf Alice share their grand new ballad 'The Last Man On Earth'; Damon Locks - Black Monument Ensemble share a jazzy afrobeat song 'NOW (Forever Momentary Space)'; Mattie shares an electro r'n'b song 'Human Thing'; Bomba Estéreo goes tribal pop on 'Aqua'.
Three classically trained musicians tell the Guardian about the delivery jobs they turned to during the pandemic. Classically trained trombonist Rachel Allen had to take shifts with the delivery firm Yodel to make ends meet. Violinist Catherine Martin, who delivers groceries, says that "without concerts in my diary, I totally lost my motivation. I got quite depressed and I really realised I needed to do something”. French horn player Jake Bagby found pleasure in talking to people he delivers groceries to because everybody is alone (and lonely).
Electronic duo The Avalanches have won the 2020 Australian Music Prize for their album ‘We Will Always Love You’, uDiscover Music reports. The Avalanches were nominated next to Tame Impala’s ‘The Slow Rush’, Ziggy Ramo’s ‘Black Thoughts’, ‘Nyaaringu’ by Miiesha, Alice Ivy’s ‘Don’t Sleep’, Blake Scott’s ‘Niscitam’, Emma Donovan and the Putbacks’ ‘Crossover’, Fanny Lumsden’s ‘Fallow’ and Gordon Koang’s ‘Unity’. Previous winners of the Australian Music Prize include Sampa The Great, Gurrumul, A.B. Original, Courtney Barnett, and The Drones.
'The United States vs. Billie Holiday' comes down to what one single song does to the life of the singer, to the society, and the system. LA Times recalls what really happened when federal officers prosecuted Billie Holiday because of the song about a lynching in the American South - the powerful 'Strange Fruit', with the excuse of fighting against the drugs. Critics don't really like the movie.
An amazing story told in Jonathan Sutak's new documentary 'Dons of Disco' about the 1980s Italian pop star Den Harrow. There was however no Den Harrow (the name itself is a joke on Italian word “denaro”, money) - the face of the singer was Stefano Zandri, charismatic young Italian, who didn't speak any English so the producers Roberto Turatti and Miki Chieregato hired a Swiss-American singer Tom Hooker to do the singing parts (without the public knowing it). When Hooker quit the act and music, the Den Harrow character continued, with other singers recording the voice. New Yorker writes in a review that "Sutak tells this amazing story with an admirable directness and simplicity; he avoids the sense of documentary convention and seems to be following the urgency of his own sense of wonder".
More than 100 Italian artists staged a silent protest L'Ultimo Concerto last Saturday to raise awareness for the struggling live music industry. Italian musicians came to the venues and prepared everything just like for a normal show - with their instruments and sound-checks and all - and then just stood still in silence.
Indie-rock foursome Cloud Nothings were touring eight months a year, so when the pandemic had shut it all down, they started releasing all the music they could. They set up a Netflix-like subscription service on Bandcamp where fans could access exclusive projects recorded in the past year, releasing dozens of live recordings, and making several full-length albums. Band's frontman Dylan Baldi was pleasantly surprised by the response, as he's told The Ringer: "If you keep providing good, interesting things that you would want as a fan of a band or a fan of music, people will respond to it".
Spanish rapper Valtònyc, originally from Mallorca, was sentenced to three and a half years in jail after being convicted of slander, Lèse-majesté, and glorifying terrorism in his lyrics. A day before his arrest in May 2018 he fled to Belgium. Recently, another Spanish rapper, Pablo Hasél, was arrested while also practicing his freedom of speech. Valtònyc looks back on his sentence: "It seemed like a joke – almost four years in jail for a song. But it wasn’t: there are 18 rappers in Spain facing jail for similar charges".
Cave and Ellis' new album 'Carnage' comes out as a slightly more structured jam session, and critics really appreciate it. Alexis Petridis argues that "Cave and Ellis’s musical approach is still vividly alive, the dense, constantly shifting sound complementing the richness of Cave’s writing now". Pitchfork appreciates the lyricism of if - "As ever, Cave uses overtly religious imagery in ways both subversive and devout". Guardian's Kitty Empire loves the "immense grief and vast love" of the album, whereas Clash Music hears 'Carnage' as something "both beautiful and visceral, tender and blood-thirsty, wholly terrifying and completely absorbing".
Reggae pioneer Neville "Bunny Wailer" Livingston, has died at the age of 73 at a hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, the Jamaica Observer reports. Wailer, whose real name was Neville Livingston, was a founding member of the Wailers, which also included Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Wailer eventually left The Wailers in 1973 to find success as a solo artist, also winning three Grammys.
Music producer 3LAU has sold a collection of 33 different non-fungible tokens for a total of $11.7m, Business Insider reports. The collection includes special edition physical vinyl, unreleased music and unique experiences such as a custom song with the winner’s creative direction, which was won by the top bidder for $3,666,666. NFTs are digital representations of art (visual, audio, etc.) where ownership is tracked and verified on the blockchain. Sales in music-related NFTs this weekend alone – which included Grimes selling her WarNymph digital art collection for $5.8m – amounted to $18.6m, which is 80% of all music NFT sales combined over the nine months.
SoundCloud is introducing what it calls “fan-powered royalties” – its own branding of the user-centric royalties model – which it says will mean each SoundCloud listener’s subscription or advertising revenue is distributed among the artists that they listen to, rather than their plays being pooled, MBW reports. “Fan-powered” royalties will launch on SoundCloud on April 1, the platform suggests the move will “benefit rising independent artists with loyal fans”, and cites two independent artists currently operating on SoundCloud – Chevy and Vincent. Chevy currently has 12,700 followers on SoundCloud, Vincent has 124,000. By switching these artists to a “fan powered” model and away from ‘pro rata’, based on their recent playcounts on SoundCloud, the service estimates that Chevy’s monthly royalties will grow 217%, while Vincent’s will multiply by five, up from $120 to $600. Fingers crossed!
"I’ve never been a careerist, especially in music. It’s always been something I live and breathe with my family. Maybe it’s also a combination of a fear of failure, or not wanting to commit myself fully because I don’t want to ruin the thing that I enjoy most in life" - Cassandra Jenkins tells in a Pitchfork interview about her latest album 'An Overview on Phenomenal Nature'. She adds: "It’s part of my mental health practice to make sure I’m always learning about other things and not getting absorbed in the narcissistic act of putting out my own music. This record is a great example. I really didn’t think anyone was gonna hear it. But I loved making it, and it really carried me through a difficult period in my life".
Last week, Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda became the first major-label artist to launch a single via NFT auction. A 75-second clip of 'Happy Endings' was sold in an edition of 10 on the online marketplace Zora (number 10 went for 4 WETH, around $6,600). Shinoda explains to Input: "If you buy an MP3 of a song as an NFT, you don’t own the song. It’s the equivalent of buying a print of a piece of artwork or buying an original piece of artwork... It’s not about the physical item. It’s about the concept of ownership. It’s the concept of what is valuable to a collector". Matty Karas of MusicREDEF has put it quite simply - “You’re basically getting a digitally autographed MP3”.
Michael Gudinski, the globally respected Australian music entrepreneur and founder of Mushroom Group, has died aged 68, according to Hollywood Reporter. He worked with artists including Kylie Minogue, MacKenzie Theory, the Skyhooks, the Choirboys and many more. Today, Mushroom Group comprises a collective of independent record labels, such as Liberator Music, Liberation Records, and Bloodlines.
Los Angeles-based singer Lady Blackbird is releasing her debut album 'Black Acid Soul', a pop piano-jazz-sounding one. The New Cue says Lady Blackbird's "arresting voice breathes new life into old jazz moves. It’s powerful stuff".
Netflix documentary 'Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell' is "the first to successfully sidestep the quicksand of murder mystery, and focus instead on what Wallace accomplished in life", Guardian writes in a review. Also, "it’s the contribution of Wallace’s mother, though, that’s particularly significant. Firstly in the form of family photos and stories illustrating a childhood spent between their Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant and her family’s home in Trelawny, Jamaica". And - "there’s a detailed account of how Biggie came to dominate the local crack cocaine economy. These mid-90s, north-west Brooklyn specificities are fascinating and relevant; to Biggie’s art, certainly, but possibly also to his death".
Italian metal band Lacuna Coil joined a wide array of Italian acts in showing support to local venus - by standing silent, Loudwire reports. The group announced "L'Ultimo Concerto" at the Alcatraz-Milano stage, and while some fans may have expected a performance, Lacuna Coil have just stood still. It was a form of protest as part of an initiative pointing out the importance of these essential clubs for developing artists and contributing to the country's art and economy.
The prospect capacity re-opening in the largest U.S. markets with over 75% capacity was “within sight”, Live Cation's CEO Michael Rapino told Music Business Worldwide. He said that “a clear outline to a 75% to 100% capacity for outdoor U.S. events in 2021 was looking likely to be green-lit”. Good news from the UK as well - festival organisers are enjoying record ticket sales after the government’s announcement of its roadmap out of lockdown in England, Guardian reports.
A total of 11 women have come forward to accuse Atlanta scene staples T.I. and his wife, former Xscape member Tiny, of drugging and sexually assaulting them, according to the New York Times. None of the couple’s accusers know each other, but many describe sexual abuse, forced ingestion of illegal narcotics, kidnapping, terroristic threats and false imprisonment.
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste won best score - motion picture at 2021 Golden Globe Awards for their collaborative work on Pixar's 'Soul'. In other music-related Golden Globes news, 'Io Sì (Seen)' from 'The Life Ahead', written by Daine Warren and performed by Laura Pausini, won Best Song, Chadwick Boseman won Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture for his performance in 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom', and Andra Day won Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture for 'The United States Vs. Billie Holiday'. The full list of winners and nominees - here.
Morgan Wallen makes Billboard history with his latest release 'Dangerous: The Double Album' as the only country album to spend its first seven weeks at No. 1 in the 64-year history of the Billboard 200. Previously, Garth Brooks held the top of Billboard 200 for six weeks in 1992 with 'The Chase'. 'Dangerous' earned 89,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending Feb. 25 (down 5%), Billboard reports.
New documentary 'Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché' looks and the life of the late singer of iconic 1970s UK punk band X-Ray Spex, the first woman of colour in the UK to front a successful rock band. "Poly Styrene... introduced the world to a new sound of rebellion, using her unconventional voice to sing about identity, consumerism, postmodernism... the Anglo-Somali punk musician was also a key inspiration for the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements" - the press statement reads.
In the latest edition of his How to Get Good at Music segment, music theorist Adam Neely and his guest Christian Li argue there are no rules in music, it's the context that matters. Neely and Li emphasize that music needs to be alive, rather than just a series of notes.
Jon Batiste won album of the year for 'We Are', Silk Sonic won record and song of the year for 'Leave the Door Open' and Olivia Rodrigo walked away with best new artist ath the Grammy awards. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appeared mid-show to speak of Ukrainian musicians: "The war — what's more opposite than music? We defend our freedom. To live. To love. To sound. In our land, we are fighting Russia which brings horrible silence with their bombs. The dead silence. Fill the silence with your music! Fill it today. To tell our story. Tell the truth about war". Check out all the winners.
“I found myself reading about coronavirus and the effects of it on clubbing. I feel slightly blessed and overwhelmed wih what has happened because of it” - Goldie says in The Face interview. There's this other burning issue, smartphones - "‘Oh my God, what about my daughter’s kids? What about this new generation that have been pacified with telephones? Are they smart enough to jump over the telephone and go, ‘There’s a new trend where you switch it off and go to a club!’ It scares me slightly.”
"The best songs on 'Diaspora Problems' master this balance of chaotic hardcore with more approachable hooks and a wide palette of non-hardcore styles" - Consequence reviews the new album by the Philadelphia band. Exclaim believes the album makes them "one of the most important heavy bands in 2022". Ian Cohen calls it "staggering... a ticking time bomb hurled by a band tired of waiting on solutions and taking power into its own hands". The band is very political, what they emphasize in the Guardian interview: "The real political character of America is just sheer apathy and a focus on oneself, for the sake of survival”.
A nice little blog post by Medium about movie titles inspired by songs. The top spot is taken by Inner Circle's 'Bad Boys' - a song "about teenage life and becoming semi-aggressive as you start growing up... it’s about troubled kids who have problems at home”. The song was picked up in 1995 by the 'Bad Boys' action comedy franchise, which stars Will Smith and Martin Lawrence as two Miami narcotics detectives.
It seems like Covid-19 is disappearing, especially now as there's a much more sinister threat. However, for musicians, Covid is still hanging above their heads. Pitchfork explored the issue:: "For rising bands and independent musicians tours are a crucial way to pursue a viable career path as a musician and often serve as the crux of their income. If musicians catch COVID-19, that’s potentially hundreds if not thousands of dollars down the drain... With mask and vaccine mandates evaporating around the country, artists are forced to once again ask themselves an important question: Should they risk their health by heading out on the road, or should they risk their income by missing out on another year of touring? Lately, it seems like indie artists are realizing there’s a hidden asterisk in this ultimatum; they can give touring a try so long as fans mask up".
Billie Eilish and Finneas won an Oscar for their song 'No Time to Die' from the James Bond film of the same name. In the other music-related Oscar category, Hans Zimmer won an Oscar for best original score for 'Dune'. The Roots' Questlove was awarded an Oscar in the Documentary feature category for 'Summer Of Soul'.
The Face surveyed 314 young people aged 14 to 23 across the UK about life in the pandemic. The answer by a 14-year-old Lucy tells a lot and is very, very sad: “Being 12 when this pandemic began and turning 15 this year, it scares me how I’ve had the majority of my life in lockdowns. I got my first period, my first ‘love’, and although I feel like so many others have had a far worse time than me, I feel like I’ve lost my life to this virus. I think my experience is probably very similar to others, but I always wonder what life would be like if I could have gone out and experienced the things that a 13-year-old does".
"TikTok app is being blamed for the ‘TikTokification’ of music, but not only by adults who don’t understand it" - The Forty-Five notices a trend. "Urban Dictionary defines ‘TikTokification’ as, 'A song that was once amazing is now the worst thanks to TikTok'. While it’s true that trending music can get stuck in your head until you can’t bear to listen to your favourite song anymore, the complaint also reveals an online discourse that treats fans who discover music through TikTok as less authentic and respectful than fans who discover it elsewhere."
"The Foo Fighters family is devastated by the tragic and untimely loss of our beloved Taylor Hawkins. His musical spirit and infectious laughter will live on with all of us forever"- the Foo Fighters said in a statement. Foo Fighters drummer Hawkins has died aged 50. Watch Foo Fighters play ‘Everlong’ at their final gig with Hawkins, at Lollapalooza Argentina on March 20th, the last song the drummer played before his death five days later.
