They feel like someone I can trust. If you strip away the fact that they’re famous artists and watch their videos and follow their posts, they feel like real 20 to 23-year-old girls who love Disney, cry over Korean dramas, love shopping and eating good food, like sleeping in, lazing around and playing games, and who go crazy over cute and fluffy things like their pets. | | | | T-Bone Walker at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, 1967.
(Chris Morphet/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “They feel like someone I can trust. If you strip away the fact that they’re famous artists and watch their videos and follow their posts, they feel like real 20 to 23-year-old girls who love Disney, cry over Korean dramas, love shopping and eating good food, like sleeping in, lazing around and playing games, and who go crazy over cute and fluffy things like their pets.”
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| | rantnrave:// Can we please try to not forget our history? Ugh this hourlong FREAKONOMICS interview with DANIEL EK, in which we're told that as a 20something living in the woods, playing guitar and meditating (I mean, ugh right there, but that's not why I'm ugh'ing right now), Ek "thought up the idea for SPOTIFY. It was very simple, really: an essentially infinite library of all the music in the world, available instantaneously, to anyone with an internet connection. How hard could that be?" Super simple and super not that hard, I yelled back at my laptop, inasmuch as companies like REALNETWORKS' RHAPSODY (which got there first), MTV NETWORKS' URGE (where I was working at the time) and YAHOO—there were others—were already doing exactly that. With millions of tracks. And playlists. And monthly subscription fees. And actual users. And yes it was hard for the product developers and coders and music teams to lay the groundwork. Which, at this point, had been laid. But I digress. We have a creation myth to attend to. It was the mid-2000s and ARCADE FIRE was inventing indie rock and Spotify was inventing music listening and THE WIRE was inventing television (wait, that one might be true). There is, of course, a better creation myth, the real one, which recognizes all that came before, examines why all those pioneers struggled to find a foothold, and credits Spotify for the great leap forward that did, in a way, invent modern music listening. Three innovations, in ascending order of importance, went into that leap: 1) The underlying technology was great. When you hit "play" on Spotify, music played close to instantaneously, which was several milliseconds quicker than it played anywhere else. 2) The IPHONE had been invented and Spotify made its product work on that game-changing platform. 3) It was free. You could listen all day for zero dollars and zero cents. Every service that came before is still kicking itself for not figuring that part out or, at least, not figuring out how to muscle record companies into going along. That was huge. Spotify was a better product with better economics, which may sound weird because it was also reliably unprofitable, but the economics really were better. So just say that. While also acknowledging all the pain and struggle that has flowed from that decision to limit the amount of revenue coming in, which in turn limited the amount of royalties and other payments going out. In 2019, Spotify is a public company, the music industry has turned around from its early 21st century doldrums and musicians and songwriters continue to struggle for their share of that sweet-smelling pie. The economics are still in flux, and it's pretty clear that none of those stakeholders has arrived at its final answer. Which may or may not include the very successful company Daniel Ek sort of dreamed up in a cabin in the woods a little over a decade ago... The NATIONAL MUSIC PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION held a town hall for songwriters Wednesday night in Nashville, and the anti-Spotify sentiment appears to have run strong. Trigger word of the day: "bundles"... The public memorial for NIPSEY HUSSLE begins at 10 a.m. Los Angeles time today at the STAPLES CENTER, and will be broadcast and streamed live by BET. Also: The intersection of Crenshaw Boulevard and West Slauson Avenue in LA, where he was murdered outside his own clothing store, will be renamed Ermias “Nipsey Hussle” Asghedom Square... This shot-for-shot remake of JOURNEY's "SEPARATE WAYS" video, by New York band ESCORT, is genius... This ergonomic double guitar strap is—I don't know, what do you think? Better or worse than the STEVE ALBINI system? And what about the T-BONE WALKER wrong-shoulder style displayed at the top of this newsletter? Who wore it best?... PRIESTS' KATIE ALICE GREER has not-so-nice things to say about IMAGINE DRAGONS. FOSTER THE PEOPLE's MARK FOSTER apologizes for once having said not-so-nice things about Imagine Dragons... RIP EARL THOMAS CONLEY and SCOTT BALLEW. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | black holes & revelations |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Gabe Reed was a failed rock star who reinvented himself as a concert promoter. Now he’s in prison for defrauding fans and rock’s elite out of $1.7 million. | | |
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 | Freakonomics |
| Spotify reversed the labels’ fortunes, made Daniel Ek rich, and thrilled millions of music fans. But what has it done for all those musicians stuck in the long tail? | | |
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 | God Is In The TV |
| Whilst on the face Spotify has filled a profit’s gap for the industry generally and is a good application for listeners, it has led to some worrying consequences for music. | | |
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 | DN.SE |
| The Swedish star Avicii was just finishing his third album when he died. Tim Bergling's father talks to DN about a year of grief and the new album. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| Last fall, the students in one of my writing classes alerted me to a wildly popular YouTube channel, run by an organization called Chillhop Music. The channel's description was gentle, unassuming: "We hope you enjoy these chill lofi hip hop tunes while studying / chilling / working," it read. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Bob Dylan’s first acting role was wiped because it took up space. What might we mourn from 50m songs deleted from Myspace? | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Parx, a former child actress who was credited on half of Grande’s “Thank U, Next” album, has become a go-to hitmaker, while chasing her own solo success. | | |
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 | Pollstar |
| FORM holds fewer than 2,500 participants, meaning Florence + the Machine and fellow headliner Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals will play to crowds of hundreds, easily the smallest audiences either will encounter this year. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| With a Netflix documentary of the performance on the horizon, Beyoncé’ is flexing her muscle, drawing attention from Coachella performers trying to live up to what she did last time. Nobody on the bill is likely to succeed. | | |
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 | Mixmag |
| We talk to DJ Seinfeld, AQXDM, ZULI and more about getting support from Aphex Twin. | | |
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 | GQ |
| This week, 'Her Smell' and 'Teen Spirit' are the latest films grappling with what goes on behind the scenes in pop. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| Elisabeth Moss is raw and charismatic in Alex Ross Perry’s portrait of a musician running off the rails. | | |
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 | MTV News |
| The K-pop girl group have made a name for themselves in the U.S., and they’ve done it all without even releasing a full-length album. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| Call it "country trap" or "hick-hop"-a bunch of young rappers are embracing a regional aesthetic again for the first time in a generation. But from where are they sourcing their visions of the South? | | |
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 | Fast Company |
| Ikea’s new Symfonisk line, developed with Sonos, is three years in the making. Here’s why it took so long to come to market. | | |
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 | R U Talkin’ R.E.M. RE: ME? |
| Adam Scott Aukerman are joined by R.E.M. founding member Mike Mills to discuss all things R.E.M. Mike talks early influences, some of his favorite records, and most importantly favorite snacks on the road. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| Once a classical clarinet player, Basinski ended up creating a deeply moving elegy for 9/11 with loops of muzak -- despite controversial views on the atrocity. | | |
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 | CBC |
| A coroner's inquest into the death of a drum technician who was crushed when a stage collapsed before a Radiohead concert in Toronto is recommending companies that build temporary stages for events undergo licensing. | | |
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 | HUCK Magazine |
| Despite most clubs in the city being whitewashed and shuttered with harsher licenses, a host of rebel collectives are fighting back -- carving out inclusive spaces that don’t shy away from politics. | | |
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 | Red Bull Music Academy |
| Legendary video game composer Yuzo Koshiro discussed the early days of his career, how he and Motohiro Kawashima sought inspiration in nightclubs for "Streets of Rage" and why he never let limitations stop him from pushing forward in this 2018 RBMA Lecture at Red Bull EWKND in Stockholm. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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