What people don’t understand is when punk started it was so innocent and not aware of being looked at or being a phenomenon and that’s what everyone gets wrong. You can’t consciously create something that’s important. It’s a combination of chemistry, conditions, the environment, everything and it’s not something you can orchestrate. | | | | Siouxsie Sioux, July 24, 1981.
(Harry Prosser/Mirrorpix) | | | | |  | “What people don’t understand is when punk started it was so innocent and not aware of being looked at or being a phenomenon and that’s what everyone gets wrong. You can’t consciously create something that’s important. It’s a combination of chemistry, conditions, the environment, everything and it’s not something you can orchestrate.”
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| | rantnrave:// Fresh off telling an American court that songwriters don't deserve the streaming royalty increase they've just been granted, SPOTIFY is telling European authorities that APPLE doesn't deserve the 30 percent fee it charges on App Store purchases. Burning the legal candle at both ends, as it were. SLATE's APRIL GLASER: "Spotify’s position is that it would like to keep more money from subscriptions while denying more of it to artists." Ouch. And accurate. In a blog post explaining Spotify's complaint to the European Commission, in which it accuses Apple of anticompetitive practices, Spotify's DANIEL EK makes a cogent argument for how Apple is putting all of APPLE MUSIC's competitors at a competitive disadvantage with its App Store fees. Apps like Spotify don't have to run their payments through Apple, but if they don't, Apple imposes a variety of "technical and experience-limiting restrictions" on them, in Ek's words. Spotify doesn't use Apple for payments and lives with limitations on, for example, how it communicates with its own users. If Spotify did run subscription payments through Apple, it's conceivable, according to my back-of-the-napkin math, that Apple would make more money off Spotify's subscribers than it makes off its own. Which is weird. You'd complain, too. Content may be king, but every major streaming music company has virtually the same content, while Apple has cornered a huge piece of the distribution chain. Other App Store tenants may be inclined to cheer Spotify on in this fight, but the music community may not be so quick to join in, having been jolted by Spotify's moves in the US less than a week ago. Which is to say, content may choose to sit this fight out... Artists name-dropped in JOE HAGAN's VANITY FAIR profile of the man who will announce himself today as the roughly 27th Democrat to run for president: BOB DYLAN, the CLASH, NINA SIMONE, FUGAZI, RITES OF SPRING, AT THE DRIVE-IN, BIG STAR, GUIDED BY VOICES, there may be a few others. Rock and also roll. Both kinds of music, as it were. Positive spin: This is a man who knows his own taste, is comfortable with it and probably isn't shy about singing along loudly in his car with the windows down and the guitars blaring. This is most definitely not a focus-grouped music collection. Negative spin: I kind of wish—nope, not now. This is a house with music in it. The green light on the stereo is perpetually on. I'm not going to ask for anything more. (Also, per the 40th paragraph of the Vanity Fair piece, BETO O'ROURKE once pulled the equivalent of a THREATIN to get his own band a plum gig in San Francisco. It did not go well)... Unlike their acting, screenwriting and directing colleagues, film musicians have been left out of movie streaming residuals. They're seeking to change that in their next contract. But that's not the only fight the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF MUSICIANS has on its hands. Its pension fund is in dire straits, putting musicians' retirement income in danger, and musicians are hoping for Congressional intervention... TOWER RECORDS, which still exists in Japan, is opening a vinyl store-within-a-store. Perhaps it will stock this new reissue of the LIQUID SKY soundtrack, a passion project for my friend JASON ROTH... RIP MICHAEL GIELEN and EDDIE LAMBERT. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | BuzzFeed News |
| The 18-year-old rapper’s Instagram flexes about money, drugs, and women have earned him millions of fans. In person, things aren’t quite so fun. | | |
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 | The Outline |
| Emma Westenberg’s career took off when she helmed a wildly popular Janelle Monáe video. But for many music video directors, the path to profitability isn’t always straightforward. | | |
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 | theLAnd |
| While Borderline Bar & Grill remains closed indefinitely, its regulars—some of whom have survived two mass shootings in less than two years—are working to rebuild their community. | | |
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 | Slate |
| All aboard the anti-monopoly starship. | | |
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 | The Tennessean |
| Nashville musicians are caught up in what many call a national crisis regarding multiemployer pension funds. | | |
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 | Detroit Metro Times |
| When we speak to the Kiss founding member Stanley, it is on International Women's Day. Instead of launching into a series of questions about lip-syncing truthers, or his mixed-media paintings, or whether he was aware that he had penned an anthem the city of Detroit never knew it needed, let alone asked for, we ask him about women. | | |
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 | Engadget |
| Wearing headphones at an Elton John concert is kinda weird, but less weird than you'd think. | | |
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 | UPROXX |
| While streaming rules reward longer tracklists with gaudy sales figures, the true winners are the ones who turn in quality over quantity. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| The ‘Simpsons’ showrunner opens up to Marlow Stern about why they removed their Michael Jackson episode, the Fox-Disney merger, satirizing Trump, and much more. | | |
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 | Texas Monthly |
| The album honors black culture in Houston, but also looks beyond it to the traditions of rural Texas. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| Many of the stars Lou Pearlman helped create are speaking out in a new documentary about his life, what went wrong and the scams that affected thousands and cost millions. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way talks about how his comic book project morphed into a new Netflix series. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| It used to be a test of a record executive's gut instincts. Now it's a bit of a mathematical equation. | | |
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 | Music Industry Blog |
| Recorded music revenues grew in 2018 for the fourth consecutive year, reaching $18.8 billion, up $2.2 billion from 2017. Streaming was the engine room of growth, up 30% year on year to reach $9.6 billion. For the first time streaming became the majority of label revenue (51%), and its growth continues to outpace the decline of legacy formats. | | |
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 | South China Morning Post |
| K-pop outfit BTS are without doubt the biggest boy band in the world, so it was no surprise that their four upcoming shows at Hong Kong’s AsiaWorld-Expo Arena next week immediately sold out. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Britain and France are largely indifferent to each other’s rap music. But musicians with links to Europe’s former colonies are bringing the styles nearer. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| Ryann Donnelly’s first book ‘Justify My Love: Sex, Subversion and Music Video’ is about sex in music videos, as inspired by her life as a musician. We spoke to her about it. | | |
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| Billboard |
| Series founder Jake Brennan tells Billboard he's also spinning off two new pods this year. | | |
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 | The Trap Set |
| Ian MacKaye has been involved in the creation and dissemination of an extraordinary amount of classic recordings. In this week’s installment, he discusses: his childhood in Washington DC; his grandmother’s advice column; his love of Ted Nugent and The Beatles; how skateboarding informed his view of the world; discovering punk rock; and more. | | |
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 | The Vinyl Factory |
| From running a jukebox business in Kingston to a record shop and pressing plant in New York, Joseph Hoo-Kim had the music industry in his veins. It was as founder of Channel One Studios however that the producer made his biggest impact. Following Hoo-Kim’s death in 2018 at the age of 75, David Katz looks back at the extraordinary legacy of this irrepressible reggae maverick. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | Siouxsie and the Banshees |
| | The estates of Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren still presumably collecting royalties for this 1988 dance-pop wonder. |
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