When I first met [Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi of] Rae Sremmurd, it was like everybody wanted to be hard. It's cool to be mean, but what happened to it being cool to be cool? They had the dope energy, so we said let's just do all cool, turnt-up, good vibes. Party s***. | | | | Haim's Este Haim at the Governors Ball Music Festival, New York, June 4, 2016.
(Daniel Zuchnik/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “When I first met [Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi of] Rae Sremmurd, it was like everybody wanted to be hard. It's cool to be mean, but what happened to it being cool to be cool? They had the dope energy, so we said let's just do all cool, turnt-up, good vibes. Party s***.”
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| | rantnrave:// YOUTUBE bad, SPOTIFY APPLE DEEZER good. That's the current music industry math, and the IFPI makes the reasons clear in its just-released GLOBAL MUSIC REPORT 2017, which otherwise reflects a healthy, growing international business—which, in case you haven't been paying attention for the past 15 or so years, is a big deal. Fifteen or so years ago is when piracy and the internet allegedly conspired to bring an even healthier music industry to its knees. Today, the threat is YOUTUBE—or, as the organization refers to the problem three separate times in the report, "user upload services such as YouTube." Here are the relevant numbers: Subscription services such as Spotify, both paid and ad-supported, had 212 million users in 2016 and paid $3.9 billion to music rights holders. Such-as-YouTubes, on the other hand, had 900 million users and paid out only $553 million. You don't need a calculator to understand why IFPI CEO FRANCES MOORE, despite her industry's resurgence, writes that "this is far from 'mission accomplished.'" One question for ALPHABET/YOUTUBE: How do you look a struggling singer or songwriter in the eye and explain that? One question for record companies: Besides asking for government intervention, what are you doing, right now, to improve the remuneration of your own artists, based on current streaming deals and revenues?... The report also serves as one more confirmation that streaming *is* the recorded music business, for better or worse. Streaming is "driving the format replacement cycle that the recorded music business has not had since the heyday of the CD," analyst MARK MULLIGAN writes. And streaming is expanding in emerging markets like BRAZIL and MEXICO, as SPOTIFY director of WILL PAGE affirms. The IFPI highlights CHINA and AFRICA as major growth markets... Oh, and the most popular artist of 2016, worldwide? DRAKE... Speaking of government intervention: ASCAP president PAUL WILLIAMS is lobbying for royalty reform on CAPITOL HILL today with a small army of songwriters and performers... MADONNA, who starred in EVITA, a film based entirely on secondary sources, thinks no one but she can tell her own life story, and anyone who would even try represents "a disease in our society." (She also says such a person would be a charlatan and a fool, which may be true, but still, no.) The film in question is "BLOND AMBITION," based on ELYSE HOLLANDER's BLACK LIST-topping script... A beautiful piece, by ANNE KAIER, on the transformative power of singing for a woman with a genetic disorder. (And on the power of literally finding your voice—a soprano—decades after your high school choir conductor tells you you're an alto.)... I love the idea of this, in which GENIUS asked critics to annotate their LEMONADE reviews a year later. But I would have loved to read more self-examination and rethinking, rather than just additional explanation and elaboration on year-old quick takes. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | The Huffington Post |
| Women aren’t rejecting rock. Rock is rejecting women. | | |
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 | Thump |
| A face-to-face interview with the Grammy-nominated producer, whose new album '9' pushes pop into another dimension. | | |
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 | IFPI |
| The global recording industry is seeing modest growth after more than a decade of significant decline. Years of investment and innovation have begun to reward an industry that has shifted from adapting to the digital age, to driving it. | | |
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 | NPR |
| The super producer who made trap go pop on collaborations with Miley Cyrus, Rae Sremmurd and Beyoncé reveals how Kendrick Lamar inspired him to scale back for bigger impact on "DAMN." | | |
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 | Billboard |
| "I don't want to be in the secondary business at all." Live Nation president and CEO Michael Rapino offered some straight talk during Canadian Music Week (April 18-23) in Toronto, where he was a keynote interview. | | |
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 | Newsweek |
| Turns out what some consider to be the "safest" genre for kids to listen to is actually the most drug-ridden. | | |
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 | PopMatters |
| The historical references the virtuosic instrumental work, and the stunning close harmonies all took intelligence and skill to master, but that doesn't mean that "Time (The Revelator)" should be beyond critique. | | |
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 | Genius |
| She's worked with Gucci Mane and is now Lil Uzi Vert's righthand in the studio. | | |
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 | Fact Magazine |
| Chal Ravens talks to Detroit techno legend Carl Craig about his ambitious decade-in-the-making orchestral collaboration "Versus." | | |
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| Genius |
| Do they agree with their words from a year ago, or do they feel differently now that more time has passed? | | |
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 | The Fader |
| Music spreads influence and joy across every border that seeks to police it. This U.K. artist is using that motion to create his own signature space. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| As a child, I sang in church. In fact, families in my small Catholic parish chanted the same melodies -- the haunting "Tantum Ergo," for example -- that medieval French families sang in Romanesque cathedrals. Standing next to my father, who sang with a musician's poise, I routinely chimed in. | | |
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 | Salon |
| Salon talks to Bobby Z and Doctor Fink about reactivating the band that electrified "Purple Rain" and going on tour. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| In this excerpt from the forthcoming Jason Molina book "Riding with the Ghost," Erin Osmon traces Molina’s early path from undergrad raconteur to Will Oldham’s pen pal. | | |
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| Billboard |
| Rookie K-pop acts like K.A.R.D and Loona are changing what it means to debut in the industry. | | |
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 | MTV News |
| Remembering (and regretting) the embarrassing backlash of 2012 | | |
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 | Watt |
| All artists aren't given the same freedom of expression. | | |
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| NPR |
| "When I was 16 I dyed my hair black and I started wearing white Oxfords." John Darnielle shares the Nashville Symphony Chorus-starring barnburner "Rain In Soho." | | |
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 | Clash Magazine |
| Ray Davies -- founder and leader of The Kinks -- offers counsel to those next in line. | | |
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 | No Effects |
| Laura shares with me what she has learned from doing her own show Reversal of the Muse, and then regales me with stories from her early days: dropping out of high school, sleeping in a double bass case, playing the Sidewalk Cafe in the mid 2000's, and much more. | | |
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