It's the art form that has the most profound daily effect on me which I know nothing about... I don't know one note, I can't play anything, I don't know how a song is written, and I think that that kind of pure ignorance allows me to be an unmitigated fan. | | | | Choir members at Kanye West's Sunday Service at Coachella, April 21, 2019.
(Rich Fury/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “It's the art form that has the most profound daily effect on me which I know nothing about... I don't know one note, I can't play anything, I don't know how a song is written, and I think that that kind of pure ignorance allows me to be an unmitigated fan.”
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| | rantnrave:// April showers are bringing more than May flowers this year. They've already brought free music streaming services from both AMAZON and GOOGLE. More or less. The free tiers of AMAZON MUSIC and YOUTUBE MUSIC have limited catalogs, are designed to play playlists rather than specific songs and are tethered to the companies' respective smart speakers. They're free and they play music but they're about as portable as health insurance, and if you want to hear the reigning #1 song in the country at any given moment, you're out of luck. If you ask for some country rap, you've got a fighting chance. Which is to say, SPOTIFY, whose stock took a hit when news of the Amazon free tier leaked a few days early, is in no immediate danger of losing its most valuable differentiator, and its stock can go back to where it was if it wants to. (So far, it does not seem to want to; Spotify investors have other things and other competitors to worry about.) But Amazon's and Google's advances into the free sphere may present a different kind of threat. To so-called casual music fans ("so-called" because casual is a loaded word), those limited catalogs may be good enough, and to advertisers, those free listeners could be pots of gold, as more than one analyst has noted. And it's in ad revenue, rather than user numbers, where Spotify may eventually feel the bite. As may some other notable Amazon and Google competitors. Assuming these free offerings gain a foothold... I'm ever-fascinated by the concept of the casual music fan. If you only listen to radio pop, and you only listen to it on the radio, does that automatically mean you don't have a serious relationship with, or need for, music? Or is it possible you're exactly as engaged with the 12 songs that pass through your brain every day as other people are engaged with the 1,200 songs that pass through theirs? Also, is it possible Spotify one day becomes a boutique brand aimed entirely at the latter group, while some other company becomes the go-to brand for everyone else? Which brand would you rather be?... Setlists from JANELLE MONÁE, TORO Y MOI, REM and many others are the prizes in an online auction benefiting programs for young writers, which launched Monday night. SETLISTS FOR YOUNG VOICES is the brainchild of writers NICK HORNBY, DAVE EGGERS and MICHAEL CHABON. As a lapsed grabber-of-setlists-from-club-stages, I love this. PATTI SMITH's setlists are handwritten on hotel stationery, which is, obviously, a goal all touring artists should aspire to... SIRIUSXM gets out of the car... BANDCAMP launches a vinyl pressing service... BLINK182 is, objectively, a terrible password. May I recommend 5SECSOFSUMMER or SUM41 instead?... RIP LES REED, OMAR HIGGINS, STEVE GOLIN and RAY BODDINGTON. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | The New Yorker |
| A lot of us who write about music talk about how a song or album saved our lives at one point or another. Eric Vogel understood the idea literally, as a debt he'd spend the rest of his life repaying. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| In a banner year for growth in Latin music, Ozuna reflects on his record-breaking run to the top -- and the controversy dogging him from his past. Plus: America’s next generation of bilingual stars, Anitta and Brazil’s bright new future, and more. | | |
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 | The FADER |
| YG and Nipsey grew up in the public eye, transforming themselves from super raw children of the struggle to symbols of aspiration, entrepreneurs, and avatars for Los Angeles. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Songwriters and publishers are in an ongoing cold war with Spotify, which is fighting against increasing their pay. | | |
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 | BBC Music |
| Success on smart speakers comes down to how well record labels and artists can optimise their songs’ metadata. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| A Coachella post-mortem with festival impresario Paul Tollett, who explains why headliners actually need those multimillion-dollar paychecks, and what excites him after 20 years of booking acts. | | |
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 | Genius |
| In an era when memes can take musicians to the top of the charts within a matter of weeks, an increasing number of artists are being labeled as industry plants. Many independent singers and rappers who experience a sudden surge in popularity are given the tag, which implies that they were actually receiving support from a record label all along. | | |
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 | Variety |
| Ian Hunter borrowed a bit of Easter imagery for "Roll Away the Stone," the closing number from Mott the Hoople 's final studio album in 1974. He didn't take the religious symbolism much further for a song that is a jubilant paean to enduring love and, implicitly, to the power of music itself. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| After a few of his most difficult years and a brief retreat from the spotlight, the rapper returned with Sunday Service - a performance of spiritual music where he rarely took center stage. | | |
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 | Page Six |
| “This was the Wild West of the cable era and [MTV executives] were doing anything they could to connect with viewers,” said. | | |
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 | Longreads |
| Hoping to reconnect to their love for the iconic musician, Kevin Sampsell and an old girlfriend go to hear his best known band play without him. | | |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| Chuck Dizzle started "Home Grown Radio" in the early 2000s as a platform for local artists like Kendrick Lamar, Nipsey Hussle and YG to shine. Now it's a leading voice in hip-hop. | | |
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 | CBS Sunday Morning |
| Selling out stadiums across the globe, topping the Billboard charts, and landing on Time magazine's Most Influential People List - it's the South Korean boy band's time. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| If you were a rock photographer in the mid-'60s, being invited to photograph Bob Dylan was perhaps the best thing that could happen to you. You'd get a front-row view to the then-burgeoning countercultural revolution. You'd get to trade wisdom with the tousle-haired genius who wrote "Visions of Johanna.” And, if all went well, you'd have your photo credit slapped onto some of the most definitive iconography of the vinyl era. Most of all, you'd wind up with great party stories-ones you could... | | |
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 | The Guitologist |
| Think of any unmonetized cover song or song clip in your video catalog as "unmined gold". It's gold. It's in the ground just sitting there. Someone will find a way to get to it eventually especially as technology makes the effort more affordable. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| After a lengthy breaking from recording, the group known for Seventies hits like “Back Stabbers” returned to the studio to make one final album. | | |
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 | The Bitter Southerner |
| Forty years ago, the generation that shaped Southern hip-hop also lived through the Atlanta Child Murders, the kidnapping and killing of 30 African Americans between the ages of 7 and 27. With the murders in the public eye again , Dr. Joycelyn Wilson investigates how her generation’s music was shaped by — and still memorializes — the trauma. | | |
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| Billboard |
| Jolland Chan is one of the most prolific songwriters in the history of Cantonese pop music, with over 1,000 titles to his name, including two of the most popular karaoke songs of 2018, "Can Never Say Goodbye" and "Half Moon Serenade." | | |
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 | Afropunk |
| DeForrest Brown, Jr. went to the Dweller Festival and asked the question, can one celebrate Black underground artists and audiences in a gentrified genre? | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| A father and rock critic reflects on watching his young son discover his first favorite artist. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | From "Cuz I Love You," out now on Nice Life/Atlantic. |
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| © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group |
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