We had Kerrang! magazine and the back of the vinyl albums that we owned. We looked through all the credits on the back of the albums to gain any hint of how bands were doing it. What kind of crew do they have? Do they have management? How does this work? Are there any photos that show them in the studio? We had to figure out everything ourselves. | | | | Preservation Hall Jazz Band's Branden Lewis and Ronell Johnson at New Orleans Jazz Fest, April 27, 2019.
(Tim Mosenfelder/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “We had Kerrang! magazine and the back of the vinyl albums that we owned. We looked through all the credits on the back of the albums to gain any hint of how bands were doing it. What kind of crew do they have? Do they have management? How does this work? Are there any photos that show them in the studio? We had to figure out everything ourselves.”
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| | rantnrave:// There are as many ways to read SPOTIFY's quarterly earnings report as there are ways to tune a guitar. The company now has 100 million paid subscribers worldwide, twice what rival APPLE MUSIC has (although Apple was recently reported to have passed Spotify in the US). It had $52 million in operating losses and $158 million in net losses in Q1 2019. That's better subscriber growth than the market was expecting, and worse financial results. Spotify's ARPU continues to shrink, though the rate of shrinkage has slowed. Lower subscription prices in new markets like India are partly to blame for that. For unrelated reasons (actually everything is related, but anyway), Spotify has had a rocky start in India. It's ingesting 40,000 tracks a day. It's spent $400 million buying up podcasting companies in recent months, decreasing margins in the short term in the hope of increasing profits in the long term. Podcasts will be a big part of the company's future. There's more, but those are basically the heads and subheads from the earnings coverage. That's a lot of subscribers, a lot of tracks and a lot of losses. Are all, or any, of the three parts of that sentence sustainable? Will a booming podcasting industry change the future math? Would that be good or bad news for the rest of the music business? What about for musicians? Or for anyone else who thinks it's possible to make money from streaming music? Will labels eventually charge more for their licenses to hedge against Spotify moving further and further away from a pure music play? Or will they charge more because they know how important continued user growth is to Spotify? Is there any scenario in which they charge less? Are you seriously asking that? If you devote every waking hour for the rest of your life listening to every track Spotify ingests this week, will you have enough time?... Breaking news (non-spoiler department): Metal bands love fantasy books and fantasy TV series and they write songs, even whole albums, about them. But GAME OF THRONES' mark on music is much wider than that. And not just because ED SHEERAN was in an episode. And that guy from MASTODON. And that split-second blue-eyed zombie cameo by CHRIS STAPLETON. MusicSET: "Winter Is Humming: Songs Inspired by Ice and Fire"... Speaking of musicians on screen, quite a few of them give director JOHN SINGLETON credit for giving them their first chance. And whether or not they're strictly about music, films like BOYZ N THE HOOD, which was ICE CUBE's movie debut, and POETIC JUSTICE, which starred JANET JACKSON and TUPAC SHAKUR and inspired a KENDRICK LAMAR song a couple decades later, are very much a part of hip-hop, as the LA TIMES' GERRICK D. KENNEDY explains in this moving remembrance of a director who left us way too soon. RIP... The reports of our death are greatly exaggerated, say the promoters of WOODSTOCK 50, which they swear is going to happen in August. Reports of their death, it should be noted, came from their own financial backers, who on Monday pulled out and announced the troubled festival's cancellation. The festival is "going to be a blast," promoter MICHAEL LANG defiantly press-released a few hours later. More to come. Or not... Best wishes to PEABO BRYSON and SYLVAIN SYLVAIN... RIP JO SULLIVAN LOESSER. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Sixty-five years after he smoked his first joint, Willie Nelson is America’s most legendary stoner and a walking testament to the power of weed. It may have even saved his life. | | |
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 | Complex |
| In a rapidly changing music industry, artists are exploring new business models, and they go way beyond selling music. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Songwriters and composers look to use new copyright laws to cash in on the boom in online gaming. | | |
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 | The Times of Israel |
| Tomtom magazine head Mindy Abovitz is hitting back at a male-dominated area of the music industry by spotlighting women percussionists. | | |
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 | Afropunk |
| Saluting Pedro Bell, the mastermind artist behind a set of Funkadelic album covers which helped create a new world. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| A milestone for the music streaming giant coincides with a bumpy entry into India. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| John Singleton, who died Monday (Apr. 29) at age 51, was the first major Hollywood voice that was directly of the hip-hop generation. | | |
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 | Broken Record |
| T Bone says he has stopped producing other artists. Instead he’s focusing on releasing his own music. In this interview with Rick Rubin, from Shangri La Studios in Malibu, he premieres two new songs on his acoustic guitar, talks about his pivot towards songwriting and chats about his famed career. | | |
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 | Analog Planet |
| Discogs founder Kevin Lewandowski at the Discogs headquarters entrance(Photo: Michael Fremer)AnalogPlanet editor Michael Fremer first encountered Discogs founder Kevin Lewandowski back in 2013 at the giant Utrecht Record Fair in The Netherlands. Lewandowski was there to promote Discogs and of course to buy records. | | |
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 | REDEF |
| Breaking news: Metal bands love fantasy books and fantasy TV series and write songs, even whole albums, about them! But the "Game of Thrones" mark on music is much wider than that, as these songs from and inspired by the epic series prove. | | |
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 | Pollstar |
| Carrie Underwood, hair in a loose bun, peeks around the corner split in the middle of an awards show stage. Dressed down in a faded black Guns ‘N Roses tee, there’s nothing muted about the smile that flashes across her face as Madison Marlow and Taylor Dye join Chrissy Metz, making her live singing debut, Mickey Guyton and Lauren Alaina for “I’m Standing With You.” | | |
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 | Global News |
| The music played during NHL games is lined up using a complex process. Alan Cross, who did it for two years, tells you how it works. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| On International Jazz Day, the music legend opens up about his struggles with addiction, the importance of striving and why the secret to jazz is generosity. | | |
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 | Red Bull Music Academy |
| London’s influential music hub began life around 1904 as a chocolate factory. In the 1990s and 2000s it operated as Caribbean social club. We pick up the story in 2012, with this excerpt from Emma Warren’s new book. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Various Artists' Dave Bianchi and John Dawkins on their successes and professional journey to date. | | |
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 | INSIDER |
| Originating in Houston, Texas, "slabs" are a popular type of custom car. Some of their defining characteristics are elbow-rimmed wheels, candy paint, and massive stereo systems. Slabs are perhaps most well-known for being a major part of the city's hip-hop culture. | | |
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 | Longreads |
| In 1973, Columbia Records professionally recorded the infamous band for a planned concert record. Columbia never released it. Maybe they never recorded it. | | |
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 | The FADER |
| Fury's new album "Failed Entertainment" is available now via Run For Cover. | | |
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 | CNA |
| Baerbel Bellinghausen’s obsession with string instruments began early in her life. “When I was 13 years old, I went to a concert with my parents. I could see the soloist and he played the cello. I was so fascinated by the sound of the instrument that I knew I must learn to play the cello; I have to learn how to build it.” | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| The producer’s gamechanging 1999 LP would eventually sell more than 12 million copies. But in an excerpt from his new memoir, he recounts why he originally thought it would end his career. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | On my mind 'cause Jazz Fest is going on and because the Rock Hall of Fame induction ceremony is playing this week on HBO and the Meters still aren't in it. Same old thing. |
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