As technology has advanced, the atomic unit of consumption has shifted, from prepayment for consumption of all the songs in an album (the CD), to prepayment for use of a single song (the download), to pay-as-you-go for an individual song (the stream). With each step, the artist gets paid less and later; with each step, the listener gains more flexibility in paying for and consuming what they want, when they want it. | | | | 20/20, the band, in 1980, the year.
(George Rose/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “As technology has advanced, the atomic unit of consumption has shifted, from prepayment for consumption of all the songs in an album (the CD), to prepayment for use of a single song (the download), to pay-as-you-go for an individual song (the stream). With each step, the artist gets paid less and later; with each step, the listener gains more flexibility in paying for and consuming what they want, when they want it.”
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| | rantnrave:// Hello 2020. TENCENT, of Shenzhen, now owns 10 percent of UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP, of Santa Monica (with an option to double that stake in the next 12 months). HASBRO, the toy company, now owns the entirety of DEATH ROW RECORDS, the onetime dream home of SUGE KNIGHT and DR. DRE. 8TRACKS, the digital mixtape service, is no more, but 8 track tapes, the awkward analog cassette format, are still out there in the wild. Also, everybody now owns everybody. There are no women in the largest font on the COACHELLA poster, and some people are having a hard time identifying everyone in the second-largest font, not to mention the third-largest. You're paying 55 percent more for concert tickets than you did in 2010, which doesn't seem all that shocking, and more than three times what you were paying in 1996, which also doesn't sound all that shocking, and TICKETMASTER thinks you should be paying more, which, well, you probably knew that, too. YOUTUBE streams now count on the BILLBOARD 200, and YouTube uploads appear to count as official releases, even if they're un-uploaded 24 hours later, for the purpose of extending the copyright on recordings that labels have no interest in anyone actually hearing. Political advertising has been banished from SPOTIFY, except in podcasts. R. KELLY is still an awful human, and now we have that much more detail (and while there's no way SURVIVING R. KELLY PART II: THE RECKONING was going to deliver the same emotional gut punch as the original, it's still remarkably powerful television). We'll come back to much of this in the coming days of weeks. Or, y'know, just read through the links below, which is kind of how this works, happy new year... One more time: "Best Music of 2019: The Year in Lists"... And "Alright Alright Alright: The 2010s in Music"... A huge shoutout to NATALIE WEINER for completing this revelatory yearlong project and for the thought-provoking essay that accompanies her final entry. Weiner on how we in 2019 remember the jazz music of 1959: "The stuff that white people listened to is the stuff that we still talk about; the stuff that Black people listened to is generally presented as secondary." She's threatening to turn the project into a book and here's hoping she does... Does anyone have a spare room that can hold 3 million or so records?... It's been a while since the last regular edition of this newsletter and we've lost a lot of unique musical voices along the way. RIP ALLEE WILLIS, a beloved-by-everybody songwriter whose long resume followed a dizzyig route from EARTH, WIND & FIRE to the PET SHOP BOYS to the FRIENDS theme to THE COLOR PURPLE on Broadway; VAUGHAN OLIVER, the influential graphic designer whose album covers for 4AD RECORDS are inseparable from the music on those albums; NEIL INNES, the MONTY PYTHON co-conspirator and BONZO DOG DOO-DAH BAND multi-instrumentalist who transcended every conceivable definition of parody with his peerless band the RUTLES; JACK SHELDON, a jazz trumpeter and actor who's probably much better known for singing this; Tuareg guitar master ABDALLAH AG OUMBADOUGOU; up-and-coming Minnesota rapper LEXII ALIJAI; and JERRY HERMAN, SLEEPY LABEEF, BVLLY, DAVE RILEY, VIC JURIS, JULIANO CEZAR, PETER SCHREIER, KELLY FRASER, ELIJAH NELSON, DALTON BALDWIN, LEE MENDELSON, TIM BOYLE and (we shall not speak ill of the dead) DON IMUS. Here's one final look at our list of all of 2019's noteworthy music deaths. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Analog Planet |
| Tour the Archive of Contemporary Music's incredible 3 million record collection plus memorabilia and other musical ephemera with the archive's founder and director Bob George. | | |
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 | Water and Music |
| The level of transparency that founder/CEO David Porter offered in his blog post is so, so rare in the music and tech worlds these days. I wanted to dig deeper into all the insights he provided and flesh out what I think they reveal about running a music-streaming company. | | |
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 | Quartz |
| The people who create the algorithms and define music categories often don’t even see what they are missing. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Even for the biggest stars, getting music onto streaming services can still be a complicated endeavor. To release ‘Jesus Is Born,’ West turned to Vydia. | | |
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 | Level |
| Artists like Bino Rideaux and Tierra Whack have forged a new artistic efficiency from ultra-short hip-hop songs. | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| Barring a major surprise, 2019 will have been the fifth straight year of growth for the global recorded music industry, taking it almost back to 2014 levels. | | |
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 | Complete Music Update |
| Chinese web giant Tencent ended its year by announcing it had finalised a deal to buy 10% of the Universal Music Group from French entertainment conglom Vivendi for $33.6 billion. Which poses a number of interesting questions for the wider music community as 2020 gets underway. | | |
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 | CBS Sunday Morning |
| His smash hit show on Broadway isn't the only reason the former frontman for the Talking Heads is so happy - in fact, he has many "Reasons to Be Cheerful." | | |
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 | MarketWatch |
| Prices for tickets on the secondary markets show that artists aren’t charging enough for concert tickets, and increasing prices is a ‘huge opportunity’ for Live Nation, executives say. | | |
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 | TechRadar |
| It's been a huge decade for audio. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| The songs and shows and beef and overdue cancellations and heartbreaking losses and so much more. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| We started the 2010s obsessed with our electronic hygiene-and ended them a nation of digital hoarders. Eleven ideas about the decade that killed iTunes. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| The pianist has always squared bold vision with deep empathy. But this year felt special. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| Lil Peep’s mother and his record label have filed dueling claims about who’s responsible for the young rapper’s death. At issue is the longstanding question of what the music business owes to its young stars. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Lloyd Barnes has run the Wackie’s recording studio and label since the late 1970s. As he prepares for his next chapter, he wants to ensure its spirit lives on. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Soaring choruses are out - but cross-genre sounds and lyrics about mental health are in. The brains behind hits for Lewis Capaldi, Camila Cabello and more reveal all. | | |
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 | The Trichordist |
| It was not my intention to respond to the Copyright Office request for comments on these regulations. However, several recent events changed my mind: The MLC’s selection of the Harry Fox Agency as its principal vendor; the selection of ConsenSys apparently as the cryptocurrency vendor of MLC; and the adoption by the Copyright Royalty Judges of the voluntary settlement of the initial administrative assessment. | | |
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 | Fast Company |
| The television show ‘Nashville’ brought national attention to the venue, but Erika Wollam Nichols explains how the cafe is true to its local community. | | |
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| Vulture |
| In the 2010s, she became its savviest power player. | | |
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 | New York Post |
| Carol Kaye, the 84-year-old "First Lady of Bass" shuns the spotlight and, for most of the decade, interview requests. But she's speaking out now to "set the record straight" about Season 3 of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," which features a guitarist character played by Liza Weil that's an homage to Kaye. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| There's this dumb thing I do every year: Coachella unveils its poster, and I write a way-too-long thing about all the little narratives hidden in that lineup, and in the way the poster lays that lineup out. | | |
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