“I still go into a restaurant and people say, ‘I love your dad's work’” - Grammy-winning Jakob Dylan complained about being "a son of Bob Dylan" in other people's eyes, and not an established artist. Some don't even try to move further on from their parent's legacy, like the Bob Marley sons continuing the reggae tradition while keeping the family name. Some try and distinguish - Redfoo and SkyBlu, the electronic duo of LMFAO and the son and grandson of Motown Records founder, Berry Gordy changed music and their names. Sting’s daughter Eliot Sumner, adopted a pseudonym, Vaal, with which to launch her DJ career. Nas stepped into a completely different realm from his father, Olu Dara's jazz. Independent talks to them about being children of famous musicians.

TikTok user ido_coke on Jan. 19 published a TikTok video using the line “I’m not a perfect person” from the song 'The Reason' by early-aughts nu-metal band Hoobastank to underscore how she’d only recently learned it was not true that “hibernation meant the animals go to sleep for literally 4-6 months”. The video has garnered 1.7 million likes, and other users have generated some 48,000 videos in which young folks shared embarrassing facts about themselves to the song line. Those videos in turn have received more than 145 million views. The Daily Beast brings the interesting story.

T.J. Osborne, the singer of the Brothers Osborne, came out as gay in Time Magazine interview, which makes him the only openly gay artist signed to a major country label. “People will ask, ‘Why does this even need to be talked about?’ and personally, I agree with that. But for me to show up at an awards show with a man would be jaw-dropping to people. It wouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, cool!'" - he told Time.

An all-around nice guy with a profile name Old Composer does a reaction and a breakdown of 'Passenger' by Deftones and Maynard James Keenan of Tool on his YouTube channel. He goes just slightly into theory and really appreciates how the band has built the song. There's plenty of videos he uploaded, one of the newest was his reaction to Mudvayne's 'Dig' which he really - dug! He also did a video 'Why Led Zeppelin KASHMIR Makes Your Face Melt'. He is a composer, real name George “GiBi” del Barrio.

Sony Music acquired Kobalt’s indie distributor AWAL and its rights business for $430 million, continuing a trend of major labels acquiring the companies built to disrupt them (AWAL, ironically, stands for Artists Without A Label). Music analyst Bob Lefsetz says "this is a bad sign for artists. The more power major labels get, the worse it is for them... But now the people who left major label distribution to go to AWAL…are back where they started, and there’s no viable alternative. Never ever forget that distribution is king". Billboard naturally approves the acquisition.

Miss Grit releases noise-y and club-y 'Grow Up To'; a nice touch on 'Sixers' - hip-hop producer Old City samples Black Flag; one jazz great Alan Braufman gets remixed by one other jazz great - Angel Bat Dawid, on 'Sunrise'; Death From Above 1979 just play some rawk on 'One + One'; Julien Baker is joined by her boygenius bandmates Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus on 'Favor'; producer Adrian Younge shared a moving/disturbing 'American Negro'; hip-hop producer The Lasso of Small Bills shares the collaboration with Hemlock Ernst of Future Islands - 'Will We Be Us Again'.

The newly-established UK fund Round Hill has just acquired over 18,000 songs from another Round Hill-managed fund, for $282m, and it now owns Beatles classics ('She Loves You', 'I Saw Here Standing There'), plus songs recorded by The Rolling Stones, Backstreet Boys, Otis Redding, Britney Spears, John Lee Hooker, Marvin Gaye, Martha & The Vandellas, and The Supremes. Next up for Round Hill’s UK-listed fund is the acquisition of a 29% stake in the 100,000 copyrights previously owned by music publisher Carlin, which includes classic songs recorded by artists such as Elvis Presley, Meatloaf, James Brown, and Billie Holiday, for an estimated $81m, Music Business Worldwide reports.

"Fundamentally WhoSampled is a music discovery service... The idea being that, if you came to the site and you’re a fan of say, Michael Jackson, for example, you’re only a few steps away from discovering Quincy Jones and then hip-hop records that sampled Quincy Jones" - WhoSampled's Chris Read says in Berklee Online interview. WhoSampled is the leading destination for sample-based music, covers, and remixes, housing the world’s most comprehensive database of music with more than 730,000 samples spanning more than 1,000 years.

Spotify’s pre-tax loss in 2020 weighed in at €709m, five times the equivalent loss seen at the company in the prior year, Music Business Worldwide reports on the financial year of the biggest music streaming service. Other infos are much better - share price surged from $152.50 on January 3 to $341.66 on December 31, up 106%. Spotify's revenues grew 93% from 2017 (€4.09bn) to 2020 (€7.88bn). Spotify’s Sales & Marketing expenditure bounded up in 2020 - it jumped a full 25% to surpass a billion euros (€1.03bn) for the first time ever, doubling in the three years from 2017 to 2020.

'Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)' documentary by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson from the Roots won the Grand Jury Prize for the best documentary as well as Audience Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, the Wrap reports. Built around long-unseen concert footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a six-weekend event, that first-time director Questlove uses 'Summer of Soul' as a launching pad to explore race relations and Black culture in that tumultuous time.

British musician and actor Riz Ahmed is nominated for a Golden Globe in the Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Drama category for his role as a metal-drummer losing his hearing in 'The Sound of Metal', CNN reports. Another music movie in the same category - 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom', with Chadwick Boseman. Viola Davis is nominated in the female category with the same movie, as well as Andra Day in 'The United States vs. Billie Holiday'. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are nominated - twice - in the Best Original Score category - for the biopic 'Mank', and, next to Jon Batiste, in the animated movie 'Soul'. The other nominees are Alexandre Desplat for 'The Midnight Sky', Ludwig Göransson for 'Tenet', and James Newton Howard for 'News Of The World'. Directorial debut by Sia, 'Music' with Kate Hudson, is nominated in Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy. In Best Original Song - Motion Picture the nominees are: 'Fight For You' by H.E.R., from 'Judas And The Black Messiah', 'Hear My Voice' by Daniel Pemberton from 'The Trial Of The Chicago', 'Io Sì (Seen)' by Diane Warren from 'The Life Ahead', 'Speak Now' by Leslie Odom Jr and Sam Ashworth from 'One Night In Miami...', and 'Tigress & Tweed' by Andra Day and Raphael Saadiq from 'The United States vs. Billie Holiday'. Check out all the nominees - here.

Sony’s recorded music and music publishing operations grew 13% to 187.11 billion yen in the company’s fiscal third quarter, which ended December 31, from 165.66 billion yen in the year-earlier period, Billboard reports. Additionally, Visual Media/Platform grew by 54.8% to 74.62 billion yen from 48.21 billion yen, thanks to the 'Demon Slayer' movie. The company posted 59.69 billion yen in operating income, a whopping 64.7% increase over the prior year’s total of 36.25 billion yen.

"There’s this papering over the real ways in that things like bias and the social crises of our time actually exist in the real world, in this incredibly complex moral universe that’s driven by implicit and unacknowledged forms of hate and misunderstanding. To my mind, satirical and politicised music should be geared towards understanding these things in more complex and nuanced moral terms, economic terms and societal terms” -  Alastair Shuttleworth, the frontman of the UK post-punk band LICE says in the Quietus interview. Band's guitarist Silas Dilkes also believes that all the sounds the band makes should be made by one of the members - “I think there is virtue in going through the process of understanding how to harness sounds we were interested in and recreate them through a simple tool like a guitar. It gives you a better understanding I think of why you might want to make that sound in the first place". LICE's debut album 'WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear' is out now.

"The common thread between those I spoke to about making music or writing in the midst of grief was that the art became a tool to make sense of the trauma. It was not made 'great' because of the pain but instead became a method to begin to understand what they had been through" - Welsh indie-rock multi-instrumentalist The Anchoress (real name Catherine Anne Davies), writes in the Quietus about the idea that it is great pain what is needed to make great idea. She has also started her career with that idea, but nos she believes there's a way out of it - "rather than chase down the 'chaos' of our adolescent 'dancing stars', under the illusion that it might make us burn brighter, write better, I’ve come to learn that we should instead acknowledge those deep scars that they leave upon the body of our lives so that we can in time turn our gaze once more towards the light".

"We’ll never run out of lyrics because there are so many sutras we can choose from” Jon Chang, rhythm guitarist of the Taiwanese Buddhist death-metal band Dharma says in LA Times interview - all the band's lyrics are Buddhist sutras or mantras. Five of the musicians dress in black and sport some make-up, but the singer seems to come from a continent away - head shaved and dressed in her religion’s traditional orange robe, Buddhist nun Miao Ben fronts the Buddhist metal band.

US country music star Morgan Wallen has been removed from more than 400 US radio playlists after a video emerged of him saying the n-word to a friend, Variety reports. In the footage, reportedly filmed by a neighbor last weekend, the 27-year-old Nashville star is seen saying goodbye to some friends and using the racial slur. Wallen, who is currently one of the biggest country stars in the US, and had a No. 1 album in the US for the past three weeks, has apologized - "I'm embarrassed and sorry. There are no excuses to use this type of language, ever. I promise to do better".

Afghan-born Hamburg-based producer Farhot shares 'Feel Ugly' featuring soulful Tiggs Da Author; Drakeo the Ruler shares mellow and ice-cool 'Too Icey'; Miss Lava share heavy and melodic psychedelia in 'Brotherhood of Eternal Love'; Algiers' members Lee Tesche and Ryan Mahan share a dark clubby song 'Stealth Empire' by their project Nun Gun; DJINN share a bit of exotic psychedelia 'Love Divine'.

Starting Tuesday, Spotify users in South Korea will have access to more than 60 million tracks and over 4 billion playlists from around the world, ZDnet reports. Upon launch, Spotify will exert most of its domestic efforts on the global phenomenon of K-pop. In the last six years, Spotify listeners have streamed more than 180 billion minutes of K-pop with the share of K-pop listening increasing by more than 2,000% in the same period. Spotify’s customer base now stands at 320 million monthly active users and 144 million subscribers worldwide.

Hip hop photographer, legendary NYC cable access host and Beastie Boys associate Ricky Powell has died aged 59, Complex reports. His relationship with Beastie Boys opened up the door to work with LL Cool J, Public Enemy and Eric B & Rakim. He also worked beyond the hip-hop scene, photographing Andy Warhol, Madonna, Sofia Coppola, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Vin Diesel and more. He hosted a TV show, 'Rappin With the Rickster', for six years during the 1990s, interviewing stars including Laurence Fishburne and Sonic Youth. Numerous books of his work were published, and a documentary, 'Ricky Powell: the Individualist', was released in 2020.

A group of architects and creatives have presented a Vertical Theatre, a "future-proof" live performance venue designed for socially distancing and is touted as being "tourable" for the pandemic, Broadway World reports. The structure will go up several floors, will have a roof, with optional open sides to allow for optimum airflow and natural ventilation. The audience would be able to sit in balconies that can accommodate groups between 4-12 people or designated social bubbles, and it can hold between 1,200-2,400 fans.

Atlanta rapper Silento, real name Ricky Hawk, was arrested on 1 February and was charged with the murder of his cousin Frederick Rooks, who was found shot dead on 21 January, Variety reports. The 23-year-old had a hit with his single 'Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)' in 2015, accumulating 1,7 billion views on YouTube.

A nice little story in the Washington Post about a Paul O'Sullivan from the US who searched for other Paul O'Sullivans on the internet, sent friend requests to some, only to find out there were others who were music-lovers. The four of them - two from the US, one from the UK, and one other from the Netherlands formed a band 2016, and in December 2020 they released an EP 'Internet Famous: A Retrospective'. Didn't really have much of a choice about their name - The Paul O'Sullivan Band.

US actress Evan Rachel Wood has claimed singer Marilyn Manson "horrifically abused" her during their three-year relationship in the late noughties, Vanity Fair reports. Manson has denied the allegations, saying they were "horrible distortions of reality". Other women came out with similar allegations against Manson, real name Brian Warner - his personal assistant Ashley Walters, artist SourGirrrl, Sarah McNeilly, and Ashley Lindsay. Loma Vista Recordings - which released Manson's most recent albums - said that it would no longer be working with the artist and would cease promoting his latest album "effective immediately". Manson has also been removed from two US TV shows - 'American Gods' and 'Creepshow'.

“Although joking about does play into the thing we are comfortable with musically we don’t intentionally make things funny... Unlike film, you can get away with being funny by accident in music” - Black Country, New Road tell the Quietus about the "funny" parts in their music. tQ describes them as "a gang of affable, witty, fun loving people" with a special bond between them - "we also don’t really care about how we look to the audience; the big connection for us is between ourselves". Their hyped-up debut album 'For the First Time' comes out this week on Ninja Tune.

The YouTuber Rick Beato shares a very interesting video about how people lose their perfect pitch, without even realizing it. Beato realized that this happens to almost everybody when they reach 50 years of age, and, interestingly, it's almost always by half step.The ear can't hear

500 performers and 300 backstage workers such as make-up artists and hair-stylists are suing Kanye West for up to $30 million in damages after allegations that he failed to pay up for his Sunday Service shows, The Sun reports. The two class-action lawsuits allege that West broke employment laws at his Hollywood Bowl opera 'Nebuchadnezzar' in November 2019. The allegations are said to include failing to pay hundreds of employees on time, or not at all, as well as not delivering the overtime wages, meal and rest breaks and business expenses to which employees were legally entitled.

Paying more for the streaming of music could have a“potentially devastating” effect on the income of artists and songwriters - YouTube has warned the UK music industry following their efforts to force the video streaming giant to raise the amount it pays, Guardian reports. The Charlatans‘ Tim Burgess has written a piece in the Guardian as well speaking out against purported inequalities in streaming payments: "I’m not averse to the idea of a musical reset: using the pandemic as an opportunity to look again at how things are working in the industry. To take this moment and this strange landscape we find ourselves in, and just switch things off and back on again".

'The Sparks Brothers' documentary about avant-garde pop duo Sparks made its world premiere at the virtual edition of Sundance, and the trailer is out now. The film features rare and archival footage of Sparks' 50 years of weird, wonderful pop, extensive interviews with the duo of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, as well as interviews with collaborators and fans, including Flea, Todd Rundgren, Mike Myers, Neil Gaiman, Tony Visconti, Jane Wiedlin, Amy Sherman Palladino, Giorgio Moroder, Sex Pistols' guitarist Steve Jones, Weird Al Yankovic, Duran Duran, Jason Schwartzman, and more...

The colorful ensembles BTS wore in their "Dynamite" music video sold for a total of $162,500 at Julien's Auctions, bringing in more than eight times the amount they were estimated to bring in. Japanese art collector Yusaku Maezawa and YouTuber HIKAKIN bought it, Broadway World reports. A painting of Snoop Dogg’s self-portrait dog wearing a 'Doggy Style 25' gold chain signed by Snoop was the next top seller at $96,000, sixty-four times its original estimate of $1,500. All proceeds from the items sold at auction - numerous others were also offered - will go to MusiCares, providing aid to artists and music community professionals in times of need.

The electronic art-pop duo The KLF are a subject of a new documentary 'Welcome To The Dark Ages', which shows them in the midst of their current project - 'The People’s Pyramid’, a monument built out of 34,952 bricks forged from the ashes of the dead. Filmmaker Paul Duane made a documentary about the project, and shared his thoughts about it with the Quietus: "It struck me as the most remarkable thing an ageing pop group could do. A lot of the things Bill and Jimmy do are incredibly funny. The idea of monetising their ageing fanbase by selling them a memorial of their own deaths is kind of hilarious. Their fans are all in their 50s now, so you’re thinking about death and the disposal of your remains. So building a pyramid and selling them a brick for £99 each that they will be memorialised in in the people’s pyramid, on one level is a hilarious ploy on an ageing fanbase". The KLF are no strangers to excess - they became the top-selling singles act in the world ('America: What Time Is Love', 'Justified & Ancient') and then left the music business, burned £1 million of their own money and signed a contract agreeing to a 23-year silence.