They were lit in a crazy way and you could never see the walls. It just looked like they were in these black rooms. You’d see the cigarette smoke, the cool clothes, and a saxophone—to a 14 of 15-year-old, it was so romantic, man. I just wanted to be in that room with those cats. | | | | Ray Charles at the Salute to Freedom benefit concert, Birmingham, Ala,, Aug. 5, 1963.
(Grey Villet/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “They were lit in a crazy way and you could never see the walls. It just looked like they were in these black rooms. You’d see the cigarette smoke, the cool clothes, and a saxophone—to a 14 of 15-year-old, it was so romantic, man. I just wanted to be in that room with those cats.”
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| | rantnrave:// Two things I believe: 1) With current technology, music can flow like water and therefore it should (and a buck per bottle for the stuff I actually want to drink doesn't sound unreasonable.) And 2) With current technology, royalties can be quickly routed to the creators of all that water every time it flows and therefore they should. You know this. I mean, duh. As a universe, we're doing a pretty good job of #1 and, for myriad reasons, a middling job of #2. You know that, too, but sometimes it helps to have the roots and branches of a problem you've been mulling for the past 100 years read back to you in plain English. Nothing like raw information to put an issue in perspective. In the guise of a longread that's supposed to be about how the existence of player pianos messed up everything for the U.S. copyright system (which makes for a catchy headline), the VERGE's SARAH JEONG turns in a pretty good explainer of who pays royalties to whom for what, and how, and why. Her take seems to be that it's too complicated and confusing. My take, somewhat surprisingly to me, is that, give or take a tweak or three, it kind of makes sense. But our takes are beside the point. No one needs to have a take on everything. It's exhausting. But it helps to understand as much as you can, to see the whole flowchart, from HARRY FOX and SOUND EXCHANGE to ASCAP and the COPYRIGHT ROYALTY BOARD to SIRIUSXM and SPOTIFY. To see who's paying, who's suing, who's complaining, who's making art for pennies, etc. Then you can come up with a new system, or at least a few tweaks to the old one, like, say, the MUSIC MODERNIZATION ACT, which, as Jeong notes, has unusually broad support from labels, publishers, PROs and streaming services. But if you think everyone thinks it's a good solution, you may not be looking hard enough. Not that you have to please everybody. And lots of smart people are rooting for it. It just would be nice to get it right. #2018goals... Late-breaking news: IHEARTMEDIA files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection... PHILADELPHIA DA's office won't oppose MEEK MILL's release for prison, though final decision is up to judge who sentenced him... I admit I had completely forgot MTV revived TRL last year until reading on Wednesday it had been canceled and then learning that, no, it's just on hiatus, and it's coming back in April in expanded form. So there's that. But the point is, can someone please let me know when MTV, or anyone, revives CATWALK?... Dumb reason number 297 why men get more shots in the music biz than women do, convincingly refuted by the MUSE's HAZEL CILLIS, but seriously, why do we have to keep doing this?... CHAUCER tweets SXSW... RIP DJ SPOKO, GUILLERMO CALERO, JAY B. ROSS and (I love this obituary) CLAUDIA FONTAINE. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | The Verge |
| The hidden costs of streaming music. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Brutally beaten by rogue cops, the jailed rapper has become a cause and, in an exclusive interview from prison, he speaks out and looks ahead. | | |
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 | The Muse |
| There has long been this idea that male rappers need less money to get dressed up, that they can kind of just show up as themselves as opposed to women who need more “work.” But there is a lot of money, effort, and professional styling that goes into the development of male musicians. | | |
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 | Forbes |
| Max Bell speaks with Blue Note boss Don Was about the challenges of running a jazz label, new models to widen the label's audience, and how he discovered jazz music as a boy. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| The cover of NME was still coveted by bands right to the end - but for readers themselves, it was a different story. Ex-staffers, publishers and musicians tell the inside story of how a once-mighty media brand lost its cool. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| While past SXSWs have regularly focused on the ever-shifting nature of digital distribution, inside-baseball business chatter in 2018 was taking a backseat to social and cultural responsibility. | | |
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 | Austin Chronicle |
| Hip-hop sustains the Festival's star power. | | |
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 | Passion of the Weiss |
| The power of introspective, private and (often) sweet music iIn a culture that so often celebrates display and boasting. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| They both seem tired of carrying around the weight of the cultural moment that made them, eager to demonstrate how much they’ve grown as people as musicians. | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| Why did Lyor Cohen take the job as head of music at YouTube in 2016? In his keynote speech at SXSW today, the music-industry veteran explained. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Could it have something to do with their ability to fail - and continue to rise? | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| With the underdog Number One hit "Five More Minutes" and new album "Seasons Change," "American Idol" winner takes charge of his career. | | |
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 | NewMusicBox |
| When brick-and-mortar record shops went the way of the analog dinosaur, some very important, humanistic interactions that advanced the music culture went with them: namely, the group experience of listening, evaluating, debating, and enjoying music face-to-face. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| Mount Eerie's second grief-stricken album in a year is about "the transition from a living person into a memory," its creator says. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| Stream the new LP from Pittsburgh's Slaves BC, and explore how Appalachian black metal artists find inspiration from beauty and destruction. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| It’s a lot of good things for Drizzy. | | |
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 | The Quietus |
| Black Eyed Peas have been praised for a supposed return to their "political roots" away from the "party bangers" of now-ten-year-old The E.N.D. But, argues Aida Amoako, the group have always had a politicised Afrofuturism at the heart of what they do. | | |
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 | Music Tech Solutions |
| Let’s set up transparency and controls so that the incentives are properly aligned to create the smallest black box possible. | | |
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| Stereogum |
| The story behind the album is every bit as unique and strange as the music itself. I’d be hard pressed to pick a favorite moment, but it’s not unfair to say that the story takes a significant turn when we get to Sept. 25, 1968, the day the recording sessions began. That is the scene we have chosen to excerpt today. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| Soul singer Claudia Fontaine, who has died aged 57, was a Zelig-like figure in the 1980s, backing up performances by Elvis Costello, the Jam and the Specials - and was not the only unsung pop hero of the age. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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