When somebody doesn't like something and you've worked on it privately for some time—and writing something is an extremely personal act—it's a gut punch. But a director can listen to five pieces of music that weeks have been spent on and go, 'I don't know, play me something different.' You have to, by job description, eat it. | | | | Turntable fiend: Eric B at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, Nov. 2, 1987.
(David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “When somebody doesn't like something and you've worked on it privately for some time—and writing something is an extremely personal act—it's a gut punch. But a director can listen to five pieces of music that weeks have been spent on and go, 'I don't know, play me something different.' You have to, by job description, eat it.”
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| | rantnrave:// So it turns out it's easy for artists to make money on SPOTIFY. All it takes, according to this MUSIC BUSINESS WORLDWIDE story based on unnamed sources and calculated guesses, is 1,200 premium accounts at $9.99/month, a couple playlists stuffed with 30-second songs purchased from music libraries, and maybe a bot to keep those playlists playing round the clock. Except for the $12K in monthly subscription fees, your 12-year-old niece could do it. And she'd be rolling in TESLAs by the end of the month, if MBW has its numbers right. Some questions: Is it in fact this easy? (Spotify "stopped short of confirming" what MBW says someone in Bulgaria actually did over several months in 2017.) Why isn't your 12-year-old niece doing it? Why isn't anyone else doing it? Or are they? Key question from a commenter: "What makes you think major labels haven't been doing similar things?" I'm at a loss to answer that one, save for the 30-second track thing, which isn't something major labels tend to have in their catalogs in large numbers. But in a subscription world that pays out based on plays, why would any label, publisher or manager not have 1,200 or more accounts chalking up plays 24 hours a day? What's the incentive not to? What's the business case against? What does payola look like this in this universe? Who suffers—besides everybody else who ends up sharing a smaller pool of royalties in what is, essentially, a zero-sum royalty system? Would a blockchain system help? How exactly?... I have no idea if the members of Norwegian black metal band TAAKE are Nazis or white-supremacists. Absent any new evidence, I'm more or less willing to take frontman HOEST's word that they are not. But the old evidence—starting with that swastika he wore onstage in 2007—is rather damning. And the fact that he's still trying to explain it away rather than simply apologize ("I regret it" or "I'm sorry" would be a good start) makes it easy to sympathize with the clubs who have canceled shows on Taake's US tour and the artists boycotting clubs that haven't. Free speech meet the free market... BET's three-night miniseries THE DEATH ROW CHRONICLES continues tonight with two hourlong episodes, "Enter Tupac" and "East vs. West," and finishes up with two more hours on Thursday... CHRIS CORNELL's widow, VICKY, chats about addiction with ABC's ROBIN ROBERTS this morning on GOOD MORNING AMERICA... The other O.A.R.... "I had a brother who played the guitar. He's naughty. And he's not much bigger than you actually." LIAM GALLAGHER interviewed by schoolchildren. As sweet and adorable as a high flying bird... Get better soon, KESHA... RIP JUDY BLAME. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Mixmag |
| The devastating impact of theft in dance music. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Did a canny scammer suck over $1m from Spotify's royalty pool last year? | | |
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 | Newsweek |
| The band, which once displayed a swastika onstage, denies that it supports Nazi politics. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| Looking at two new anthologies of singles the artist made before she was famous—and what they reveal about the legend she’d become. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| From Forrest Gump to The Post, music supervisors can’t let go of Creedence. We trace the history of this cinematic cliché. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| The music video for "God's Plan" may be the moment we see Drake cross the "too famous to be in touch with reality" threshold. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| "There’s always a part of the planet that’s being threatened. We’re never gonna be finished with this. It just keeps going on. But we are still up and we’re standing." | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| "The good thing about our industry is that there is no cookie-cutter way of doing anything. What I think YouTube and all the other various platforms do is give more optionality and more opportunity for sourcing artists and also [helping with] the period of artist development that takes place." | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| The Ethiopian pianist Hailu Mergia, 71, had become a taxi driver. But after a reissue revived his career, he is releasing his first new collection in two decades. | | |
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 | Providence Journal |
| The Station nightclub fire, where 100 people died and hundreds more were hurt, will never be forgotten by those who were there or lost loved ones that February night. While many say they will never get over it, they have found a way to get along with it. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| She awed a young Elton John, influenced Taylor Swift and had the Beatles open for her. So why doesn't Brenda Lee get more respect? | | |
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 | Fast Company |
| Our annual guide to the businesses that matter the most. | | |
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| Noisey |
| As BTS, the ‘Black Panther’ soundtrack, Bad Bunny, Charli XCX, and more show, we should be optimistic about a future where everything popular isn't in English. | | |
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| Mixmag |
| His debut LP reflects the genre's development, and its growing worldwide appeal. | | |
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 | Broadly |
| It’s a celebration of Dolly Parton, but also, it’s a celebration of being the best version of yourself. | | |
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| Newsweek |
| “These guys were living large in this loud, in your face kind of way. It was a really exciting time. They basically changed the game,” Mario Diaz, executive producer behind BET’s docu-series "Death Row Chronicles" told Newsweek. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| Because we know you still have questions about who gets to play what when and for how long, we’ve broken down everything you need to know about figure-skating music. | | |
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 | NewMusicBox |
| Are all of our artistic offerings political in nature? When a composer writes a piece that is of its time and moment, is it a commentary on the current state of affairs? Do we want our audience to feel what we’re feeling, or to help them see how we’re seeing things? | | |
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 | 500ish Words |
| The relatively short shelf life of a rock band’s relevance. | | |
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 | Red Bull Music Academy |
| Like many other aspects of Jamaican music, we are unlikely to ever know for sure which of these was actually the first dub LP. But one thing is certain: each helped the form to mature and blossom into a bona fide art form, changing the way we think about popular music. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet |
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