In two to three years’ time, it should be totally unacceptable for large music industry companies to have no minority board members. | | | | Bettye LaVette at the Tibet House Benefit at Carnegie Hall, New York, Feb. 26, 2020.
(Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images) | | | | | | “In two to three years’ time, it should be totally unacceptable for large music industry companies to have no minority board members.”
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| | rantnrave:// Imagine if streaming services automatically skipped the last track of every album, jumping ahead to the next album in an artist's catalog before you had a chance to hear more than 5 or 10 seconds of that final song. PURPLE RAIN without "PURPLE RAIN." LEMONADE without "FORMATION." TO PIMP A BUTTERFLY without "MORTAL MAN." Kind of like the way streaming video services skip ahead to the next episode before you've had a chance to take in the credits for the one you actually set out to watch. Before you’ve had a chance to figure out who played the villain's boyfriend. Or what that song in the chase scene was. Or—and this is why we're talking about this—hear how the score ends. "I'm pretty sure it was the time I watched SCHINDLER’S LIST on NETFLIX that pushed me over the edge," DANIEL PEMBERTON writes in the GUARDIAN. When it was (almost) over, he recalls, "if you didn’t click the correct button within 10 seconds, you could wave bye bye to contemplating the emotional complexity of the past three hours (and JOHN WILLIAMS' magnificent, Oscar-winning musical conclusion)." Pemberton is not a bystander here. He's a film and TV composer whose credits include STEVE JOBS and MOLLY'S GAME, and he has an upcoming NETFLIX movie, ENOLA HOLMES. "That end credit music," he writes, "is the culmination of Enola’s theme; I have spent the previous two hours working towards it." And there's a good chance you, the viewer, will never hear it. It's as if THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL will be over and you'll be lucky to have caught a brief whiff of the two hidden tracks at the end before you're booted out of the album and into MTV UNPLUGGED NO. 2.0. Who came up with this standard? Streaming services didn't start it—try watching the end credits of any movie on basic cable—but they could stop it. And they could leave musicians to worry about other things, like getting streaming music services to do a better job of displaying credits. Theoretically, they have a little more influence there... Speaking of credits, I've mentioned "LOSE YO JOB," the police brutality protest song of the summer, two or three times in the past week, and I've left out the most important name each time. As a friend, producer/engineer JAMIE HILL, tweeted Monday, "It really bothers me that people are giving the credit for 'Lose Yo Job' to IMARKKEYZ & DJ SUEDE, & not also to JOHNNIQUA CHARLES—the woman who improvised the song that they subsequently remixed." Mea culpa. To his, um, credit, DJ Suede told PITCHFORK last week, "It was already a song, so we just had to sauce it up." He added that before he and DJ iMarkkeyz uploaded their remix, which quickly went viral, they talked to Charles and her sister "to get the business straight." Here's hoping that business includes a good chunk of all of the song's income streams, and here's hoping her songwriting and performance credits continue to follow the song wherever it may travel... The city of Liverpool is trying to figure out if PENNY LANE, as in the actual place, is named after an 18th century slave trader; if it is, it "may well be in danger of being renamed," MAYOR STEVE ROTHERHAM says. As of now, local experts aren't sure if it is... Is it possible GOLDENVOICE is considering an alternate major festival in the fall to replace this year's canceled COACHELLA? MAYOR GLENN MILLER of Indio, Calif., which stands to lose $4 million from the cancellation, says it's in discussion "and I believe we will be able to pull this off"... RIP BERT BIAL. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| In a season of turmoil, the executives at these 75 companies — labels, distributors and associations — are driving artists to chart-topping success outside the major-label machinery. | | |
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| Two influential organizations in the music world recently announced they would cease using the word "urban" to describe certain genres or artists. But it's more complicated than a simple cancellation. | | |
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| “I can promise you, whether we win or lose, what Spotify has done here is so offensive, it will never be forgotten,” says David Israelite, CEO and president of the National Music Publishers’ Association. | | |
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| The end credits are an unsexy but important part of the experience - but streaming platforms seem to be interested only in getting us to the next piece of content. | | |
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| "Queer punk" might be redundant if making over-the-top statements at the top of your lungs isn't precisely what makes punk "punk" and queer "queer." Here's a guide to the genre's history and legacy. | | |
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| As LGBTQ+ country artists like Orville Peck and Lil Nas X blaze a trail, Addison Nugent looks at the surprising and little-known tradition of queer country music that preceded them. | | |
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| The Houston trio’s third album adds a new chapter to the band’s improbable story. | | |
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| If there's a music video that captures the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of June 2020, it's YG 's "FTP" - which, obviously, is an abbreviation of "f- the police." The song and the clip are an homage to N.W.A's legendary 1988 song of the same name as well as "FDT (F- Donald Trump)," YG's 2016 collaboration with the late Nipsey Hussle. | | |
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| Creators are masquerading protest safety tips as dance videos and dismantling racist stats with a cappella singalongs. | | |
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| Friday's Music Ally TV Show focused on the #TheShowMustBePaused campaign, and the next steps that the music industry needs to take. | | |
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| From B-boys to cultural programs for students, Eric Stinton uncovers the 40-year history of hip-hop culture in the Aloha State. | | |
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| Attack's Arielle Domb speaks with Martyn Bootyspoon, Brad Allen and a host of LGBTQ+ club-adventurers about virtual raving. | | |
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| Over the last week, users on gaming-focused livestream platform Twitch received a sudden flurry of takedown notices for clips of old videos using unlicensed background music. | | |
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| These shows will be the first paid gig many people in the industry have had since March. But can a wall of windscreens replace a crowd? | | |
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| From Pop Smoke to Chief Keef, these repurposed anthems are backing demands for change. | | |
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| The elusive Detroit producer has an encyclopedic and eclectic knowledge of music. | | |
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| The rap duo shone a light on the multitudes contained in Atlanta and across the American South. | | |
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| It's king of the pandemic playlist but what even is bedroom pop and why should you care? | | |
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| Cancelled gigs and tours have hit musicians hard but the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Rufus Wainwright and Tim Burgess have filled the void by getting creative online. There’s still hope, they tell Alexandra Pollard. | | |
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| Woke up this morning to the news that British pianist Keith Tippett passed away at the age of 72. Until recently, Tippett's was just one of few names I seemed to always come across when scouring (or trying to make sense of) the late-60s/early-70s British jazz "scene." | | |
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| | | | | | | From "Blackbirds," due Aug. 28 on Verve. |
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| © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group |
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