It really makes a difference to have a piano in the home. I feel like everybody, even if you don’t play the piano, you should have a piano. Every time I go into a house and it doesn’t have a piano, I’m like, what are you doing? | | | | Annie Ross in London, March 20, 1956.
(Mirrorpix/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “It really makes a difference to have a piano in the home. I feel like everybody, even if you don’t play the piano, you should have a piano. Every time I go into a house and it doesn’t have a piano, I’m like, what are you doing?”
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| | rantnrave:// Name game: The CHICKS have dropped the DIXIE and moved on with a very good album, and no one's talking much about the name anymore. Everyone's too busy talking about that boat. The BLACK MADONNA, JOEY NEGRO and PROJECT PABLO, who are all white, have shed their names of appropriated color, as has the California band SLAVES, which is making it a little awkward by releasing one last album under the old name, but still. Change is in the air, and after years and years of resistance, it turns out change isn't all that hard. If the Washington, D.C., football team, after years and years of defiant resistance, can give in and give up its name, so can you. You don't need to talk about it for more than a day or two if you don't want to. You just buy a new domain name, change your socials and get back to what you were doing before. And that's that for everyone except that one country band, which, instead of doing the obvious thing and renaming itself LADY POSTBELLUM, picked a shortened version of its old name that was already taken. A strange mistake to make (searching in SPOTIFY can be hard, but not that hard), but a mistake nonetheless, easy to fix, except the band didn't fix it, so maybe it wasn't a mistake after all. Instead of saying "oops, sorry, but we can get another domain name, no biggie, it's not as if we've released a note of music under this name," the band sued the Black woman whose name it had either inadvertently or advertently, it's hard to tell at this point, taken. LADY IRONY would be a good alternate name. Lawyers say the law may be in the band's favor because trademark blah blah blah. But everything else in the world, including not wanting to be known for the rest of time as, say, LADY KAREN, is working against the band, no matter what lawyers say. Is there any way to argue it hasn't already lost? MusicSET: "Lady A Sings the Blues"... Who has the leverage these days in negotiations between SPOTIFY and the major labels? Could either survive for a week without the other? The streaming leader's new deal with UMG, announced Wednesday, suggests a once-contentious relationship has become much less so, even as labels continue to gripe about a pivot to podcasting that they fear could cut into music revenues. As the WALL STREET JOURNAL's ANNE STEELE notes (paywall), UMG is endorsing Spotify's "two-sided marketplace" strategy, agreeing to be "a testing and development partner" for tools, data and marketing services that it and other labels eventually will pay for, potentially cutting into their own revenues. "Our plan is to be chief experimental officer," Universal CEO LUCIAN GRAINGE told the Journal... Music isn’t just the universal language, it's a bipartisan one, too. Minnesota Democrat AMY KLOBUCHAR—who cited FIRST AVENUE and PRINCE in the official announcement—and Texas Republican JOHN CORNYN have introduced a bill in the US Senate that aims to provide six months of financial support to struggling independent venues, promoters and agents... A great thread by JESSICA HOPPER about the wider issues in indie music that the sexual assault scandal that brought down BURGER RECORDS has exposed. Key point: "So many of the Burger stories originate at shows and venues—while concert-world is shuttered right now, here's the ideal time for examining HOW venues have enabled the abuse of young folk and women, and figuring out what you are gonna do so it NEVER can happen at yr venue"... Turning a tenor sax solo into a song lyric for the ages is one thing, actually singing it is something else altogether. RIP to ANNIE ROSS, owner of one of the most pliable voices in jazz history. Much of her renown came from the four years she spent in the vocal trio LAMBERT, HENDRICKS AND ROSS, but in a career that began in an OUR GANG film short in 1938 and ended in a New York cabaret club nearly 80 years later, she lived a life that would take three or four biopics to tell, rise, fall and rise included. BONO and THE EDGE could write the song for the end credits for the last one... RIP also COSMAS MAGAYA, GABRIELLA TUCCI and STU COHEN. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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 | Penny Fractions |
| When the record industry was most worried about the alleged threat of Napster, across the globe, a company, whose reach would one day surpass the dreams of the tech bubble’s poster child, was just getting started. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| La Monte Young, the composer who quietly shaped much of contemporary Western music, reaches his last act. | | |
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 | theLAnd |
| Faced with an existential threat, L.A.’s best indie venues anxiously await their post-COVID return. | | |
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 | REDEF |
| In which a white country band with a racist name declares itself "awakened" and changes its name... to one already in use by a Black blues singer. Complaints, discussions and a lawsuit quickly follow. But, wait, who sued who? | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| Ross was recognized as a natural performer from an early age. She essentially never stopped. | | |
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 | Pollstar |
| "It was shaping up as the biggest year of our history, by far. Harry (Styles), Eagles, everybody was working, tickets were sold. We were all sold out and ready to go. Then the s*** hit the fan. It was going to be our best year, and now it’s a disaster, just like everybody else." | | |
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| Pollstar |
| "We shifted and rescheduled more shows in two months than we have in the past 10 years combined. It’s still staggering to think about." | | |
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 | The Pudding |
| Quantifying the songs that will characterize the ’90s. | | |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Collaborators Savan Kotecha, Carl Falk, Julian Bunetta, and John Ryan recount the group’s story and sound for their 10th anniversary. | | |
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 | Women in CTRL |
| Our first report analyses the make up of the team, board members, Chairperson, and CEO positions across 12 UK music industry trade bodies in July 2020. | | |
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| | | i was right out of my head |
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 | Music Business Worldwide |
| 15 stories from black executives working in the industry that suggest improvement is required. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Britain’s 40,000 choirs have all been silenced, brass and woodwind players too. We meet the scientists racing to find out exactly how dangerous blowing instruments and singing are. | | |
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 | TechCrunch |
| The agreement brings on Universal to Spotify’s “two-sided marketplace” — a term Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has been using for years to describe the company’s overall strategy. | | |
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 | American Songwriter |
| It all started with a song. A beautiful one. He wrote it, and knew nobody could sing it more beautifully than his little sister. He says he had tried doing the song with his own band but failed, "because my band sucked." | | |
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 | Talkhouse |
| Talking creative pressure under quarantine (and more) with Alice Ivy and Cadence Weapon. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| In this exclusive excerpt, 'Total F***ing Godhead' Author Corbin Reiff recounts the story behind the creation of one of Chris Cornell’s most celebrated songs: “Black Hole Sun.” | | |
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 | Decibel |
| Everything you ever wanted to know about Sick of it All, but were afraid to ask. | | |
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| Music Business Worldwide |
| Vydia’s Roy LaManna on distribution, DIY… and why, if the record industry’s not careful, artists might find themselves replaces by virtual characters. | | |
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 | She Shreds |
| As Burger Records shuts down amidst allegations of sexual misconduct, we are reminded of the toxic masculinity that permeates music culture and DIY spaces. Only this time there may be a brighter light ahead of us. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| An 18th-century polymath has had his brilliant music and life diminished by a demeaning nickname. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | Annie Ross with Count Basie |
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