Music REDEF's chief Jason Hirschhorn tweeted a thread of music business documentaries, including docs about the Rolling Stones, Bad Boy Records, Clive Davis, David Geffen etc.

Variety has listed pay-per-view concerts being held on New Year's eve, with artists ranging from BTS, Justin Bieber, Jason Isbell, Norah Jones, and Willie Nelson, to Post Malone, John Legend, and Jason Derulo. EDM music lists dance music livestreams with equally attractive names - Carl Cox, Armin van Buuren, David Guetta...

The UK government has announced that it had tried to secure better conditions for UK touring musicians during the Brexit negotiations, but the EU rejected its proposals, BBC reports. From 1 January, free movement of people between the UK and the EU will end, which means that touring musicians and their technical crews will face new rules, and could be subject to additional visa costs and paperwork. UK nationals will need a visa for stays of longer than 90 days in a 180-day period, and there will be restrictions on their activities. Spain, Italy and Denmark will require additional work permits.

Canadian producer and vocalist Lubalin posted hilarious videos chronicling "random internet drama into songs". Grandiose music and vocals in songs about a misunderstanding and stolen broccoli add to the comedy.

Diddy handed out $50 bills, as well as $50 Publix supermarket gift cards and bags containing hygiene products to a massive crowd in Miami Overtown neighborhood, Complex reports (watch the video below). Diddy's Sean Combs Foundation is also giving a grant to an organization that will help 175 households pay their rent throughout the health crisis. Beyonce added an ironic twist to her gifts - she gifted her friends a gold, diamond-encrusted chain that reads "2020", shaped like a hand giving the middle finger, Billboard reports.

In the year of big fear and great isolation, musicians turned to producing ambient music "to soothe us where human connection couldn’t", as Guardian puts it. There was consolation from the usual suspects like Brian Eno, his brother Roger Eno, the NYC mystic Laraaji. Dance producers like Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini switched to ambient music as well, Manchester jazzman Matthew Halsall created a weekly playlist, DJ and musician Auntie Flo launched a new digital radio station Ambient Flo with two channels - ambient music, and birdsong...

Run the Jewels have shared a stop-motion music video for their RTJ4 song 'Walking in the Snow' featuring action figure version of Killer Mike and El-P leading a revolution against an icy, authoritarian regime. “Everyone was very aware of the gravity of the subject matter and RTJ didn’t want to be too obvious or on the nail with the visuals, so we went with an ’80s style fantasy look with evil snow warriors and their icy king oppressing the bedroom toys. It was great to be involved with a project with a positive vibe to end a pretty fucked up year" - director Chris Hopewell said.

Music Redef made a sad, sad list of 600 music-related deaths in 2020 and at least 70 artists and industry figures lost to the coronavirus. The list could have been even bigger, had it gone even deeper globally...

There were 1.842 million LP’s sold in the US during the week leading up to Christmas, ending on December 24th, which made it the biggest week the format has had since 1991, Billboard reports. The previous record was achieved just a week prior, when 1.445 million vinyl records were sold between December 10th and December 17th. The top-selling vinyl album last week was Paul McCartney’s new solo effort 'III', which sold a 32,000 units, making it the third-largest sales week for a vinyl record since 1991.

Production company Seaview announced the one-time-only streaming performance of 'Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical' slated for New Year's Day, BBC reports. The musical will feature Wayne Brady as Django, Tituss Burgess as Remy, Adam Lambert as Emile, Kevin Chamberlin as Gusteau, André De Shields as Ego, Andrew Barth Feldman as Linguini, Priscilla Lopez as Mabel, Ashley Park as Colette, Owen Tabaka as Young Ego, and Mary Testa as Skinner. It was collectively created by TikTok members. 'Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical', in support of the Actors Fund, will stream on Jan. 1 (at 4 PM in California, 1 AM Jan. 2 in Paris, and 5 AM in Peking) for 72 hours only.

Armando Manzanero, the acclaimed Mexican songwriter and performer, has died aged 85 from Covid-19, CNN reports. Manzanero’s romantic crooner songs, sometimes translated into English, were performed by artists including Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Perry Como. He has written more than 400 songs and released more than 30 albums.

The 10-year-old drum-prodigy Nani Bushell declared herself a “total metal head” in her latest video. To prove it, she rocked an impressive drum cover of Slipknot’s 'Unsainted'. She played a double kick pedal on the bass drum for the first time, all while barefoot, and she also rocked a Slipknot-style red jumpsuit.

Venezuelan conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel, 39-year-old music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has premiered his virtual reality film 'Symphony' in Madrid. It took four years and the efforts of 250 people to produce the innovative project that's essentially happening in two huge white trailers. The film is split into two, 12-minute sections. The first, shown on a giant screen, follows three young musicians in Spain, the US and Colombia as they practise their instruments. For the second, visitors are invited into the other trailer, given a virtual reality headset and headphones and they suddenly become part of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, get trapped inside a violin and then fly through the constituent parts of a trumpet. The project will visit 100 towns and cities across Spain and Portugal on a 10-year tour.

Taylor Swift holds the Billboard 200 chart top spot for a second week with her album 'Evermore', as the set earned 169,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending Dec. 24, as Billboard reports. Swift's sales were aided by the arrival of the album on CD on Dec. 18. Paul McCartney’s new 'McCartney III' debuts at No. 2 with 107,000 equivalent album units, with 32,000 copies sold on vinyl, the third-largest sales week for a vinyl album (only Jack White and Pearl Jam had stronger vinyl weeks years ago).

Tony Rice, a "giant of the acoustic guitar", and "the master bluegrass picker", has died at the age of 69 on Christmas morning, NPR reports. Rice, famous for the quick, fluid sounds was "the king of the flatpicked flattop guitar... I don’t know if a person can make anything more beautiful", Jason Isbell writes on his Twitter. Ricky Skaggs, who had performed and recorded with Rice, called him “the single most influential acoustic guitar player in the last 50 years”. Other tributes came from musician Béla Fleck and the comedian and longtime banjo player Steve Martin. Rice released dozens of albums, and he played with everyone from Jerry Garcia to Dolly Parton and received many honours.

Navy Blue released his new song '1491' featuring Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def); Deftones singer Chino Moreno and Far guitarist Shaun Lopez have resurrected ✞✞✞ (Crosses) with a first new track from the project in six years - an 80s synth-pop cover of Cause & Effect’s 'The Beginning of the End'; Eddie Vedder released an EP which includes an acoustic cover of Bruce Springsteen's 'Future Days'.

BBC aired a lovely Christmas story about northern lights turned into music. The two people behind it are biologist Karin Lehmkuhl Bodony who lives in Alaska, and Alaskan composer Matthew Burtner, who works with natural sounds and scientific environmental data to make a piece of music derived from the sounds of the aurora.

R'n'b singer and TikTok star Zaria posted a couple of clips with a Metallica T-shirt on, which made some TikTokers attack her for rockin' Metallica merch, with one asking her to "name three Metallica songs". Well, that's when she stole the show - "Really? Only three? Only three songs? How 'bout I play 'em on guitar for you", Zaria replied and played parts of three Metallica songs on guitar, 'Master of Puppets', 'Enter Sandman' and 'One'. Loudwire really enjoyed the don't-judge-the-book-by-its-cover story.

Kanye West released a surprise EP 'Emmanuel' performed by Sunday Service on Christmas Day, Rolling Stone reports. The new project, executive produced and composed by West, arrives as a "celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ". It's five tracks of acapella songs in Latin.

The Neverland ranch of the late Michael Jackson has been sold to billionaire Ron Burkle, a former friend of Jackson, for $22m, a quarter of its initial asking price of $100m. The 2,700-acre (1,100 hectare) compound in Los Olivos, California has been rebranded as Sycamore Valley Ranch and has undergone extensive redevelopment since Jackson's death. The businessman saw the investment as a land banking opportunity, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Husband-and-wife duo LadBaby topped the UK 2020 Official Christmas Number 1 with their latest song 'Don’t Stop Me Eatin’'. The single scored 158,000, the biggest opening week for a single this year. Money raised from the single goes to foodbank charity The Trussell Trust. LadBaby now match a record jointly held by The Beatles and Spice Girls, the only other acts who can lay claim to a trio of consecutive Christmas Number 1s.

PopMatters made a very good selection of the 15 best hip-hop albums released this year, arguing that the "best records of the year served as rallying cries and made us reconsider the very genre itself". So, the PM's 15:

15. Megan Thee Stallion – 'Good News'

14. Pa Salieu – 'Send Them to Coventry'

13. Riz Ahmed – 'The Long Goodbye'

12. Denzel Curry/Kenny Beats - 'Unlocked'

11. Elzhi – 'Seven Times Down Eight Times Up'

10. Flohio – 'No Panic No Pain'

9. R.A.P. Ferreira – 'Purple Moonlight Pages'

8. Sa-Roc – 'The Sharecropper's Daughter'

7. Jay Electronica – 'A Written Testimony'

6. Spillage Village - 'Spilligion'

5. Run the Jewels – 'Run the Jewels 4'

4. Growing Concerns Poetry Collective - 'BIG DARK BRIGHT FUTURE'

3. Aesop Rock – 'Spirit World Field Guide'

2. Serengeti and Kenny Segal – 'Ajai'

1. Black Thought – 'Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane & Able'

Australian indie-pop musician Ben Lee went into 14-day quarantine in a Sydney military hotel when he returned from Los Angeles, and he used that time to make a 30-minute podcast a day (find them all here). Rather than talk about his music, he discussed himself, as well as some general themes like conspiracy theories, blockchain, death, gurus, marketing etc. What he tried to do, as he's told the Guardian, is to answer questions like "What am I about? Why have I been attracted to all these things? What are the common threads?”.

Leslie West, the towering guitarist who created the hard-rock milestone 'Mississippi Queen' with his band Mountain, died aged 65, the New York Times reports. West was respected for his versatile playing - from fingerpicking to metallic power chords - and was revered by a new generation of guitar players who followed, like Eddie Van Halen and Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore.

Minnesota Hardcore is a docu-series about the hardcore scene from 1980-1985 in Minnesota, with episodes about The Replacements, Husker Du, and Soul Asylum, as well as smaller bands like The Blu Hippos, Todlachen, Rifle Sport and Red Meat. Friendly outcast people, really...

New York rapper Ecstasy from the early hip-hop band Whodini has died aged 56, Billboard reports. Coming out of the fertile New York rap scene of the early 80s, Whodini was one of the first rap groups to add R&B twist to their music, thus laying the foundation for a new genre - new jack swing. They made the first rap song accompanied by a video. Live performances of the group were also the first rap concerts with the participation of breakdance dancers.

Brazilian-UK metal-electronica duo Petbrick - a collaborative project between Big Lad’s Wayne Adams and Iggor Cavalera of Sepultura and Mixhell - performed the last Fact Live set of 2020, combining metal and hardcore to create what they call “horrible noises”. Petbrick’s 30-minute performance offers a taste of the duo’s touring set, as well as two tracks never before played live from their Deafbrick collaboration with Brazilian acid punks Deafkids. Psychedelic visuals are by Cavalera’s partner Laima Leyton.

On Monday, Philadelphia punk rock band Mannequin Pussy reached out to their neighbors via Twitter in hopes of finding their 15-passenger blue Ford van, which had been stolen the night before, Brooklyn Vegan reports. A day after, the band announced that the missing van was found, by Philly ska band Catbite "on another street in north Philly. They popped open the back lock, hot wired tf outta it and dumped it 10 blocks????". Turns out Catbite also had their van stolen, and they found it less than a mile away a few days later.

Recording Academy has revealed the recipients of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards - Talking Heads, Selena, Salt-N-Pepa, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, opera singer Marilyn Horne, and late jazz great Lionel Hampton will all receive the Special Merit gramophones, Variety reports.

John McClure of Reverend & The Makers has offered to perform private one-on-one shows for fans who will be spending Christmas Day on their own. McClure told BBC he’s already been offering private performances through the pandemic.