If one-tenth of the energy people expend on reacting to news such as [the closure of the National Philharmonic in Montgomery County, Md.] was expended on actually going to concerts and donating, orchestras might not be having these problems. | | | | Sky Ferreira at the Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago, July 19, 2019.
(Barry Brecheisen/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “If one-tenth of the energy people expend on reacting to news such as [the closure of the National Philharmonic in Montgomery County, Md.] was expended on actually going to concerts and donating, orchestras might not be having these problems.”
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| | rantnrave:// It's bad enough having to compete with bots buying thousands of the best tickets to a concert you want to see the minute they go on sale and posting them on STUBHUB seconds later. Now try competing with the artist and promoter throwing all those tickets directly to StubHub without bothering to put them on sale in the first place. And marking them up. As if they were scalpers, too. Which they are. BILLBOARD's DAVE BROOKS and HANNAH KARP describe in detail how METALLICA schemed to secretly place 88,000 tickets for its 2017 North American stadium tour on StubHub and other secondary ticket sites at inflated prices with the help of the tour's promoter, LIVE NATION. Caught red-handed, thanks to a tape of a phone call about the plan leaked to the magazine, Live Nation not only admitted pretty much everything but made it sound like a perfectly reasonable business decision. Live Nation variously described the scheme as "a unique distribution strategy that used the secondary market as a sales distribution channel for select high-end tickets" and as a way to "use the secondary market to try to capture" the "true market value" of the band's tickets. Which is a fancy way, if you ask me, of saying Metallica scalped its own tickets. I mean, that's literally what scalpers do. Scalpers use bots as part of their unique distribution strategy to use the secondary market for select high-end tickets, whereas the band used its power of eminent domain to gather up ducats for the secondary market, but otherwise, same thing. There's nothing illegal about what Metallica did. But artists and promoters have complained for years about how scalpers use technology to steal away tickets from real fans and then sell them back to them at obscene prices. One of the ways they've tried to defeat the resale market is by raising prices to the point that there's no room for scalpers to charge more. Fans still get stuck playing hundreds and hundreds of dollars for what are now called "platinum seats," but now the promoter and the artist get to split the profit instead of the scalper and the resale site. Fine, I guess. I'd rather support artists than bots. But this forces artists to admit they're OK charging their fans scalpers' prices for their shows. Or, if they want to be underhanded about it, they can keep the face value low but then secretly move the tickets to resale sites and sell them for multiples of that face value. As if the price is someone else's fault. Which means fans have no choice but to go to those resale sites to find them. And now they have no way of knowing if they're buying that 10th row floor seat on StubHub from the band or from a bot. It could easily be either. And the band and the promoter and the rest of the music industry, if you ask me, have forfeited the right to complain about StubHub or any ticket scalper, ever. The line between legit seat and scalped seat has been erased and you, dearest music industry, has erased it... Major label 2018 revenues, broken down by individual labels and label groups... Songs of ICE and fire: Fests were canceled this weekend because of heat and because of the fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcements raids... JOHNNY CLEGG's war on apartheid... PRESIDENT TRUMP's attempt to go to bat for A$AP ROCKY... TAY-K guilty of murder, could face life in prison... RIP BOB FRANK. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Billboard |
| In February 2017, days before Metallica announced its WorldWired North American stadium tour, Live Nation president of U.S. concerts Bob Roux spoke by phone with a little-known wealth adviser turned event promoter who had been tasked by an associate of the band to sell 88,000 tickets directly on resale sites like StubHub. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| It’s easy to wring your hands about the decline of the field. It’s more helpful to support it. | | |
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 | Water and Music |
| Deviate Digital CEO Sammy Andrews joins this episode to unpack why there remain so many stubborn data silos among artists, labels, distributors, promoters and streaming platforms in the music industry, and how to address the problem. We discuss the types of data that music companies would actually benefit from sharing *more* with each other. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires, and Natalie Hemby empower women, challenge Nashville’s gender barriers on debut album. | | |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| Scottish songwriter lands enviable support from streamers. | | |
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 | Gadget Hacks |
| My autistic son loves music. One afternoon, when he was nine, I downloaded GarageBand to his iPhone to help with the boredom of a long wait at a doctor's office. Instead of pacing or escalating into a meltdown, he spent the entire hour and a half practicing, learning, and composing. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| They say rock songs could be used to share WiFi passwords or short messages. | | |
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 | Magnetic Magazine |
| Stop telling the DJ what to do. A new app aims to do just that. | | |
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 | Red Bull Music Academy |
| Everything you need to know about one of Jamaica’s most influential musical exports. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| With orchestras rare in the early 19th century, today’s classics spread in quartet arrangements, a new recording shows. | | |
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 | The Future of What |
| With more and more magazines and newspapers going out of business, writers find themselves with even fewer publishing options, and they’re being forced to look for work outside of the music industry. Join us this hour as we cover this topic with journalists, PR folks, and band managers, and talk about what comes next for this side of the industry. | | |
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| Rolling Stone |
| “There is no company in the world solely committed to servicing African music,” the Nigerian singer Mr. Eazi says. He aims to change that with emPawa Africa. | | |
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 | Chicago Reader |
| What happens if you indulge every corporate sponsor at the festival? Does the Chase Sapphire Lounge have to let you in? | | |
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| Billboard |
| "There keeps being this question lately of, 'Do we need record labels?' I think people don't recognize what we do and the value of our work," says the Superchunk bassist. | | |
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 | InsideHook |
| “Hey man, I just play the piano.” | | |
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| Gadget Hacks |
| Smartphone technology has become as ubiquitous as automobiles. In Austin, Texas, a city that is widely known as the "Live Music Capital of the World," smartphones have been embraced by the music community not just as a way to document and promote, but to create music. | | |
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 | Big Shot Magazine |
| From JM Silk to world-class DJ/producer/remixer, Hurley won't stop looking for the perfect beat. | | |
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 | Variety |
| David Crosby may or may not have stuck a joint in Cameron Crowe’s mouth the first time he ever met the future filmmaker, when Crosby was peaking with Crosby Stills Nash & Young and his intervie… | | |
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 | Lens |
| Sheet music? It clearly has its place, but rather than traditional notation, contemporary composers are using technology to represent their musical ideas. | | |
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 | The Hedgehog Review |
| The death and life of the great American hipster offers an alternative history of culture over the last quarter century. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | Brandi Carlile + Natalie Hemby + Maren Morris + Amanda Shires. From "The Highwomen," due Sept. 6 on Low Country Sound/Elektra. |
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