As everyone with a brain knows, it is the artist. All the lawyers and the PR men and the rest can stand around and take credit for what’s going on. But without the artist, nobody’s going anywhere. | | | | Stormzy headlining at Glastonbury, June 28, 2019.
(Harry Durrant/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “As everyone with a brain knows, it is the artist. All the lawyers and the PR men and the rest can stand around and take credit for what’s going on. But without the artist, nobody’s going anywhere.”
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| | rantnrave:// Since at least the time of Gregorian chants and troubadours, one of the most widely accepted truths of the music business has been that no matter how many records you think you can sell, the real money is in live performance. That's why no one even tried to make anything resembling a record until the 19th century. And why it's all been downhill since then. But new millennium, new formats, new rules. Or so says KOBALT's WILLARD AHDRITZ, claiming, in this TWITTER thread, that "a lot of" artists signed to Kobalt's recording/distribution arm, AWAL, "make 2x more from streaming than from their touring income." Unscientific, anecdotal survey from a biased observer who wants artists to sign to his new-school outsider venture, not your old-school insider venture. Maybe AWAL tends to attract artists who aren't keen to tour, or can't. Maybe "a lot of" means 28. Or maybe one of the industry's most tech-savvy, forward-thinking execs knows something you don't. He predicts "hundreds of thousands" of artists will be able to live off their music within the next decade. And he wants them to maintain ownership of their masters. Which no doubt will make it a little easier to keep making money from streaming or whatever format might follow... Which isn't to say you can't still make a hell of a lot of money on the road in a good year, like this one, especially if you're ELTON JOHN, BTS, PINK, BILLIE EILISH or the TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA... Culture wars touring kerfuffle #1: If you charge white people twice as much for tickets to your music festival as you charge people of color, there are going to be complaints, as organizers of Detroit's upcoming AFROFUTURE FEST have learned. The complaints came from biracial rapper TINY JAG, who pulled out of the fest after she learned about the pricing structure, from right-wing websites and, finally, from the fest's ticketing partner, EVENTBRITE, which demanded a change. After briefly experimenting with selling all tickets for one price but requesting an additional "Non POC Suggested Donation," the fest is now simply selling all tickets for $20. Festival founder ADRIENNE AYERS said the original intent was to prevent the event from being "co-opted by those with cultural, monetary and class privileges," and that several white ticket buyers told her they didn't mind paying more... Culture wars touring kerfuffle #2: If you call your band CONFEDERATE RAILROAD, there's a good chance you're going to lose gigs here and there. The Illinois Department of Agriculture disinvited the long-running outlaw country band from next month's DU QUOIN STATE FAIR after a political blogger questioned the booking. There were counter-complaints from the usual suspects. DANNY SHIRLEY, who founded the band more than 30 years ago, has said the name was meant to invoke Southern pride. Understandably, not everyone shares the same sense of pride, and "there's been some negatives of course," as Shirley once put it. The blog SAVING COUNTRY MUSIC, with which I often disagree, asks, not unreasonably, how other festivals might or might now treat LADY ANTEBELLUM and the DIXIE CHICKS, two country bands with proud Southern names and a lot more fans in blue states than Confederate Railroad has ever had... RIP JAMES HENKE and SPIRO MALAS. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | The New York Times |
| Two Spaniards, a Canadian, a Colombian and a clip from a Dominican television show helped turn a tribute to reggaeton into one of the hottest international songs of the summer. | | |
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 | Global News |
| In this digital age, surely there's a global database of music? Unfortunately, no. And it will be a while before there is. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Detroit rapper Tiny Jag pulled out of Afrofuture Fest last week over what she considered unacceptable, race-based ticket pricing for the event. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| The legendary Brazilian inverted the cacophony of samba, creating a worldwide sensation, forever influencing the sound of an entire country. | | |
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 | Variety |
| The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), created by U.S. music publishers and songwriters and designated last week by the U.S. Copyright Office to handle licensing and administering rights under the Music Modernization Act (MMA), boasts an impressive industry lineup. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Jody Gerson has transformed Universal Music Publishing Group. But who is the woman behind the billion-dollar publisher? | | |
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 | MTV News |
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 | The Quietus |
| Our man in San Francisco Ned Raggett chats with Pope about his forthcoming Cure concert film 'Anniversary' as well as more unusual anecdotes about his many music videos for them than you can shake a stick at. Or is that a sock? | | |
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 | Mind Matters |
| AI “artists”—in all the forms presently available -- merely replay their programming. | | |
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 | Pollstar |
| Some mid-years are more eventful than others; 2019, in terms of the live business, was especially so. | | |
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 | Complex |
| Before fame, Kanye West was a member of a group called the Go Getters in Chicago. Here's an inside look at the little-known beginnings of his career. | | |
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 | Vox |
| Stevie Wonder's irresistible ode to jazz, explained. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| Armstrong’s aura has amazed and confounded his fans for more than a hundred years. How could he, born indisputably black at the height of Jim Crow and raised poor, be so happy? | | |
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| Music Business Worldwide |
| Are charts which appear every seven days really cut out for the modern era? | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| The reality competition isn’t a springboard for emerging songwriters as much as an exegesis on the state of pop. | | |
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 | InsideHook |
| The dubstep sound of Skrillex and Diplo permeated clubs in the early 2010s. What happened? | | |
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 | Mixmag |
| Dance music’s hardest and most challenging genre is having a rennaisance. Here are the mixes -- past and present -- that explain why. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| Among artsy expats on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s, the Norwegian single mother Marianne Ihlen became the lover and (if you believe in such things) the muse of poet, novelist, and future musician Leonard Cohen -- who, a decade later, would say "so long" in what some of us regard as the most loving breakup song ever written. | | |
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 | PopMatters |
| Focusing on vinyl records and the labels that released them, An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels traces the parallel rise of social movements in the second half of the twentieth century and the vinyl record as the dominant form of music distribution. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| Critics who were writing about the band at the peak of its fame look back at how the group became so bitterly divisive. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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