If you wake up every day and say, ‘I’m OK,’ you’re going to just be that. If you wake up every day and look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I’m great, let’s go sell out that stadium,’ then you will. | | | | "Glitter" in action: Charly Bliss' Eva Hendricks at Cheer Up Charlies in Austin, Texas, March 13, 2019.
(Lorne Thomson/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “If you wake up every day and say, ‘I’m OK,’ you’re going to just be that. If you wake up every day and look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I’m great, let’s go sell out that stadium,’ then you will.”
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| | rantnrave:// About half a year behind schedule, APPLE MUSIC has passed SPOTIFY in paid U.S. subscribers. Weirdly, Apple isn't trumpeting this fact, or even mentioning it. The WALL STREET JOURNAL (paywall) reported it, quoting unnamed sources. Is Apple staying quiet because it's still well behind in total U.S. subscribers, and—by a significant margin—in both paid and total subscribers worldwide? Or because, as the Journal's ANNE STEELE and TRIPP MICKLE report, the service's slim profit margins mean those paid subscribers aren't doing much for Apple's bottom line? Or because it isn't polite to brag, and/or we simply don't talk about these things? RECODE's PETER KAFKA thinks the Journal buried the lede, which is that Apple is proving it can successfully pivot to a business that sells services rather than hardware, which has implications far beyond music, and which, even if the company isn't boasting in public, it's no doubt boasting somewhere. According to me, Spotify, in addition to the overall lead, still has the brand name, plus a track record of not having done its best to ruin its own music product. Hi APPLE, I'm talking about ITUNES. If you win this battle, assuming there's a battle to be won, do you promise to keep us users in mind every time you force an update on us? (A boy can dream, right?) One more factoid from the Journal story: As of February, Apple had 28 million paid U.S. subs and Spotify had 26 million. Even after you factor in your TIDALs and everyone else, that leaves a hell of a lot of customers still to be won over. So there's this question, too: If there does need to be a winner in the long run, who says it has to be one of them?... Like pass interference calls in the NFL, BILLBOARD's decision to kick LIL NAS X's "OLD TOWN ROAD" off its country chart is subject to review, according to apparently separate statements from the magazine to ROLLING STONE and the WASHINGTON POST. This episode has not been the chart gatekeeper's finest moment, but give Billboard credit for a (belated) full accounting of its decision-making process. And give TIKTOK credit for its hitmaking muscle... I noticed, when putting my weekly new releases list together for Friday's newsletter, there didn't seem to be any hip-hop albums coming out. This seemed strange, but didn't register as anything more than that. It should have. Hip-hop took an almost universal pass on releasing new music in honor of the late NIPSEY HUSSLE, and it's one of the more meaningful and beautiful moments of silence I've witnessed in some time. Respect... After a couple years of lightly flirting with streaming, longtime holdout KING CRIMSON will make its entire catalog available this spring. Band manger DAVID SINGLETON says Crimson's physical sales remain strong, but Spotify "has now definitely become one of the places that people, particularly younger people, find music." In case you were wondering... KEITH URBAN won his first (!) ACM Entertainer of the Year award, aka Male Entertainer of the Year, and DAN + SHAY and KACEY MUSGRAVES seemingly won all the other awards Sunday night in Las Vegas... Seattle rock fixture SHAWN SMITH, of BRAD, PIGEONHED and SATCHEL, died Friday, the anniversary of both KURT COBAIN's and LAYNE STALEY's deaths, which "added a certain measure of disbelief to the news," according to the SEATTLE TIMES. "One fan suggested online that April 5 be removed from the calendar." RIP... RIP also BILL ISLES, JOE QUIJANO and TIGER MERRITT. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | BuzzFeed News |
| Scooter Braun is a veritable hitmaker -- and he started with a 12-year-old nobody singing R&B covers in Stratford, Ontario. (Excerpted from "No One Man Should Have All That Power" by Amos Barshad.) | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Warner Music has relocated its West Coast offices to a downtown L.A. building where Model Ts were once manufactured. The move comes as development of the booming Arts District expands southward. | | |
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 | The Outline |
| The Identification of Music group on Facebook functions as both a place to learn from the industry’s most knowledgeable people and to hear fresh music that hasn't hit the mainstream yet. | | |
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 | Pacific Standard |
| Billboard's decision to remove Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" from its country chart exposes how artists' race and class-more than their sounds-have always defined genre. | | |
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 | Resident Advisor |
| Every seat is occupied in our passenger van, which is barreling north on a dark highway past Bogotá's city limit, where the valley lights thin out as they scale the surrounding mountains. My knees are touching the knees of the stranger sitting opposite me, a European man with many piercings and tattoos, who I assume is DJing at Radikal Styles, the festival we're all headed to. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| A year after the E.D.M. songwriter and producer’s suicide, his family and collaborators are announcing an album called “Tim” that will carry on his musical legacy. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Cherie Hu takes a deep dive into in-video-game concerts, following the huge impact made by Marshmello's performance in Fortnite | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Shawn Mendes is the red-hot poster boy of pop. His videos have been viewed 6bn times and he has more than 42m followers on Instagram. But don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him… just ask a teenager. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| RS tackles the complete catalog of the band that defined the Nineties and made the world a lot noisier. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| It might not surprise anyone working in Nashville, but country music remains very much a male dominated industry, according to a new study from leading thinktank USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| You’d think it’d be a hard time to be a Michael Jackson impersonator -- yet business is booming for some acts mimicking problematic stars. Jack Needham finds out more. | | |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| A widening sexual assault scandal at a glitzy Seoul nightclub has ended the careers of several major K-Pop stars. But the fallout reflects deeper shifts in the culture - and country's - attitudes around sexual misconduct. | | |
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 | Ars Technica |
| German musician builds instruments, then robots to play those instruments. | | |
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 | The Verge |
| With motion-tracking gloves and a full-body suit covered in sensors. | | |
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| Billboard |
| In the CRB rate determination, publishers asked for much more than what they got -- and those requests could have sunk the digital services that have helped buoy the recorded-music business back to growth. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| Along the way, Alan Elliott mortgaged his home several times to buy the existing footage, edit the film, and pay for insurance and lawyers; he needed the latter in abundance, as Aretha sued several times to prevent the movie from being screened, including its scheduled world premiere at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival. | | |
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 | The Atlantic |
| The CW show, which is ending after four seasons, gave new life to a genre that was losing ground on the small screen. | | |
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 | HuffPost |
| The Blood on the Dance Floor singer is an expert at winning teenage girls' trust -- and their silence. | | |
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 | Gizmodo |
| Smartglasses have a bad rep-you can thank the glassholes for that. To this day, most people still can't help but think of the first iteration of Google Glass when anyone brings up the topic of smart eyewear. That also means people start thinking about being recorded against their will, dorky design, and absurd prices for unconvincing tech. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| Singer-songwriter Dom Flemons on the cultural roots of Lil Nas X’s country-trap hit: “To see that mainstream stars are picking up on this idea, I think it’s fantastic.” | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | Thirty-two bonus points for the Viacom/atom bomb/Pakistan rhyme. |
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