One of the reasons one makes music or any kind of art is to create the world that you’d like to be in or the world that you would like to try. You would like to find out what that world is like. | | | | Terence Blanchard in Amsterdam, March 12, 1987.
(Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “One of the reasons one makes music or any kind of art is to create the world that you’d like to be in or the world that you would like to try. You would like to find out what that world is like.”
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| | rantnrave:// Artists continuing to complain they're not getting their fair share of SPOTIFY's revenues, as if they've ever got their fair share of revenues from anywhere in the music business. But here comes CITIBANK, which knows a thing or two about funny money management, to remind them what else they're not getting. Artists collected 12 percent of the $43 billion their work generated in the US in 2017 from streaming, ticket sales, radio play, YOUTUBE ads and streaming, the bank reports. By my quick calculations, that's 88 percent they're not getting. Which is a lot. So who can they turn to for help? One ironic possibility: the streaming companies they've all been complaining about. BLOOMBERG suggests reports like this could persuade artists to pursue direct deals with the likes of APPLE and Spotify, which could offer higher royalties if no labels were involved. And there's more money on the way, indirectly, from the streaming world. WARNER MUSIC says it has now unloaded all its Spotify stock for a total of $504 million, of which $126 million will be routed to artists. That's 25 percent, which is way better than 12 percent, for anyone keeping score. But it will end up being less than that, according to MUSIC BUSINESS WORLDWIDE, which says Warner will first pay itself any unrecouped balances in artists' accounts (no source cited for that tidbit in MBW's story, though). One more silver lining for artists, perhaps. Consultant VICKIE NAUMAN tells Bloomberg the streaming ecosystem has left labels with less leverage than they once had. And, seeing numbers like these, artists may well be in good position to ask for better deals... Candidates for the Hall of Fame of Pop Music Samples: ALISON MOYET's laugh. And this patch from the ROLAND M-DC1 synth module... Hi internet, can we please have more stories like this one investigating the internal logic of a TRAVIS SCOTT lyric about how we washes his hands? Create the site and I will link to it daily, kthxbye. (P.S. You know I love you, GENIUS, but this site would be all questions, no explanations)... "HEY THERE DELILAH" is being developed into a TV series... Read that last sentence again... And again... Inside NEW YORK's oldest record store... Upon being informed that its "Pussy Melter" guitar pedal was an objectively terrible idea, the audio company TC ELECTRONIC did the right thing and quickly discontinued it. But the band STEEL PANTHER, which helped design the pedal, is selling a new version on its own. It's pink. And it's still an objectively terrible idea. And probably sounds like crap. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | XXL |
| SoundCloud has become a launchpad for hip-hop's hottest acts. But can the streaming platform survive as its stars depart for more profitable pastures? | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| The downside of our bottomless digital grab bag is how it can minimize the music itself. Listeners are encouraged to take in as much music as is humanly possible. Tik Tok’s bite-sized snippets, made to ingest one-after-another, see this development in its most extreme, crystalline form. | | |
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 | Red Bull Music Academy |
| 93 Ways to Hear Alison Moyet's laugh. | | |
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 | Vulture |
| The key to writing a good song for brat-pop wunderkind turned musical futurist Charli XCX? Speed and avoiding her feelings. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| This is comedian Guy Branum’s theory, as amusingly detailed in this exclusive excerpt from his new book, "My Life as a Goddess." | | |
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 | Bloomberg |
| Creating music pays a little. Marketing it pays a lot. Musicians received just 12 percent of the $43 billion in sales generated from their work in the U.S. last year, according a report Monday by Citigroup. The figure includes revenue from CD sales, on-demand streaming, advertisements on YouTube, radio royalties and concert tickets. | | |
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 | TIME |
| 'I certainly never pictured that this was how it would be.' | | |
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 | Chicago Magazine |
| A decade out from her days rollicking in Grant Park, one fan sympathizes with the new generation of festival kids. | | |
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 | Celebrity Access |
| "One of the reasons one makes music or any kind of art is to create the world that you’d like to be in or the world that you would like to try. You would like to find out what that world is like." | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| The Cornish producer has released his first new music since 2016, and has been preceded by a typically twisted rabbit hole of clues for fans to decipher. | | |
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| | | look up to the skies and see |
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 | Rolling Stone |
| Scott’s new ‘Astroworld’ LP is an impressive feat of synthesis. | | |
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 | Bearded Gentlemen Music |
| Music Festivals have been taken over by coporations with V.I.P. experinces being more important than the music, but the music still brings geniunie moments. | | |
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 | Village Voice |
| Greg Tate’s 1988 review of “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back” swallows ‘the bitter with the sweet.’ | | |
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 | BBC |
| Why do black, female, UK R&B artists find it so hard to maintain their success at home? | | |
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| Red Bull Music Academy |
| An illustrated history of remarkable instruments devised for two or more players. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| Spotify has been able expertly highlight the ever-growing genre through a variety of playlists that capture the soft, the glitchy, the hard-hitting and more. Whatever your mood, there is a subgenre for you. Here is a quick little breakdown of what Spotify's booming dance and electronic section has to offer. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| The Colombian musician sits down with Noisey and talks about his rise to fame. | | |
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| Stereogum |
| 1991 is the year alternative rock went mainstream. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden were about to take over the world; "Out Of Time" and "Losing My Religion" turned R.E.M. into megastars; and the first Lollapalooza tour brought the underground across the country. | | |
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 | Afropop Worldwide |
| For his first seven years, Vinicius Cantuária grew up in Manaus, Brazil, a city which sits alongside the Amazon River. That boy could never have imagined a life of such breadth, length, and so many twists and turns, which would rival that fabled river. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| The revolution necessary to honor artists of all genders has to combat not only a history of bias, but sometimes even the institutions that seem to be supporting the fight. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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