If you don't look out for your chops and pipes, you can't blow the horn and sing. Anything that'll get in my way doin' that, out it goes. That trumpet comes first, before everything, even my wife. Got to be that way. I love Lucille, man, but she understands about me and my music. | | | | Louis Armstrong sings, June 7, 1965.
(John Loengard/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “If you don't look out for your chops and pipes, you can't blow the horn and sing. Anything that'll get in my way doin' that, out it goes. That trumpet comes first, before everything, even my wife. Got to be that way. I love Lucille, man, but she understands about me and my music.”
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| | rantnrave:// MARTINA MCBRIDE would like to have a word with you, SPOTIFY. The country singer, who is—this is somewhat relevant—a woman, was on Spotify listening to some music by SARA EVANS, another country singer who is a woman, when she decided to create a playlist called "Country Music." As you know, when someone starts a playlist with nothing but a title, you help out by recommending songs "based on the title of this playlist." You helpfully recommended 10 songs by men for Martina's country music playlist. She found that, let's say, interesting, so she hit refresh, and you suggested 10 more men. And again. Same. Again. Ditto. On her 14th refresh, after you had showed her 140 songs, you finally suggested a song by a woman, CARRIE UNDERWOOD. You made these suggestions to a user who had just played several songs by a female country singer. If the recommendations were meant to be personalized, wow. If not, still wow. "I just have no words," McBride wrote in an INSTAGRAM story Monday morning. "I can't remember when I've been this mad." I'm going to step in and assume McBride, who is aware of the struggles of women to get on country radio, was exaggerating here. I'll bet she can remember when she's been this mad. But why, Spotify? Why not recommend something by the HIGHWOMEN or KELSEA BALLERINI or SHERYL CROW or TRISHA YEARWOOD or TANYA TUCKER, all of whom, as McBride noted, have brand new music in Spotify, somewhere in the first 14 or 15 screens of recommendations? Or something by any other woman? Of whom there are lots. Mainstream country radio has been operating for years under the assumption that its core audience consists of women who want to hear music by men. Playing two songs by women in a row is considered dangerous. (Note to new readers: I am not making this up.) Et tu, Spotify? For fun, I, a man, tried making my own "Country Music" playlist on Spotify. Guess what? It took me exactly 14 refreshes of your recommendations to see my first song by a woman (a different woman than McBride got; I got SHANIA TWAIN). I, for what it's worth, am a man, and six of my 10 most recently played artists are women, one of whom is the Highwomen, who have 1.4 million monthly listeners on your service and an acclaimed new album. Suggesting them would have made sense, no? For fun, I also tried creating playlists called Rock Music (first female artist: HEART, who appeared with my third refresh), Pop Music (lots of women right away), R&B Music (a couple women on the initial screen), Hip-Hop Music (two women in the first seven refreshes, both LAURYN HILL, making me wonder if you've ever heard of MEGAN THEE STALLION or CARDI B), and Jazz Music (hi, ELLA and BILLIE and ASTRUD and other women who sing, and only sing). And then, finally, I started a playlist called simply "Music." And I am now officially speechless. Try it yourself. You can do better, Spotify. Even Martina McBride knows that... Designing concert stages for optimal Instagramming is one thing. Building entire stages from scratch to accommodate fans shooting vertical videos seems a little, I don't know, excessive? Insane? Visionary? Exactly what you'd expect to happen when phone companies get into the stage-building business?... The trademark battle over the shape of your guitar... RIP AL EMBRY. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Literary Hub |
| The punchline—the sucker punch—of “Wichita Lineman,” the line in the song that resonates so much, the line that contains one of the most exquisite romantic couplets in the history of song, could be many people’s perfect summation of love. Some think it’s something sadder and perhaps more profound. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Dawn Ostroff, Spotify's chief content officer, says she plans on making hundreds of original podcast series next year as part of a strategy to expand the streaming platform's podcast offerings. The company aims to have 20% of the listening on its service be non-music. | | |
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 | Resident Advisor |
| How do deaf people experience electronic music? Dorothy Allen-Pickard and Antoine Marinot explore that question in our latest film. | | |
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 | ROI-NJ |
| Since 2014, Gibson has been trying to ban all guitar manufacturers from designing guitars similar to its trademarked body styles, including its semi-hollow ES-335. Lawyer Ron Bienstock has been working to challenge the legitimacy of the trademark altogether. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| "We were hopeful they would reach an agreement," says Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, but "the recording industry preferred no legislation at all." | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| A Swiss chateau. A Broadway musical all about her. And absolutely nothing she has to do. | | |
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 | 5 Magazine |
| You don't own that file, you license it, and with streaming it can easily be taken away. | | |
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 | Mpls.St.Paul Magazine |
| Thirty years ago, Janet Jackson spent the winter in the Twin Cities, making snow angels in Edina and hanging out at Calhoun Square. The result of her artistic residency? One of the greatest pop albums ever recorded in Minnesota. | | |
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 | Complex |
| Teejayx6 sat down for an honest conversation about the rise (and future) of scam rap, other rappers stealing his style, and feeling terrified after past scams. | | |
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 | Dazed Digital |
| The Bristol band’s co-founder discusses using technology to create a nostalgia-free retrospective of their classic album "Mezzanine." | | |
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 | Pollstar |
| Brandi Carlile ran through the streets of Denver to climb on to her first tour bus, after five or six years of touring in vans. Before that, she and her band drove their own cars – mostly to gigs in Seattle, about 30 miles northwest of her hometown of Ravensdale, Wash. Sometimes they drove all the way to Portland, Ore. | | |
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 | Innovating Music |
| Hazel Savage and her co-founder Aron Pettersson have built Musiio in Singapore to bring artificial intelligence to the messy large data sets of the music industry. The startup already has a unique and distinctive role in tagging mass music data sets. | | |
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 | Song Exploder |
| Robyn traces the long history of how she made “Honey,” a song that The New York Times called “her masterpiece.” | | |
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 | Guitar.com |
| The singer and guitarist looks back at his role at the heart of British pop music in the 60s and 70s -- including touring with the Stones, witnessing Hendrix’s first UK gig and what really happened when he was asked to join Jimmy Page’s new band in 1968. | | |
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| Billboard |
| In pop artist Lauv's new online game Billy Meets World, players navigate a pixelated cityscape as an animated version of Lauv's real pet puppy. But for Lauv's label, AWAL, the game is also a way to boost his listener base as he prepares to release his debut album. | | |
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 | 8Sided Blog |
| Congress has suggested YouTube open up Content ID for everyone. It’s about time this happened. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Raised in Zambia, the rapper moved to the US and made her name in Australia. Returning to her roots -- and carrying the weight of representation -- terrified her. | | |
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 | Wax Poetics |
| With the Café de Paris in darkness, all you can see is the light from smart phones raised high in anticipation. "Rain is wet, and sugar is sweet..." a voice calls, to the delight of the crowd. | | |
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| The New York Times |
| The new documentary series by Ken Burns aims to remind divided Americans of what they have in common. | | |
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 | The Great Song Adventure |
| “Projects like these tend to do two things,” says Froom, who has demonstrated a streak of sonic audacity throughout his career as member of the Latin Playboys and with his solo albums, "The Key of Cool" (1984), "Dopamine" (1998) with Suzanne Vega, David Hidalgo and other featured singers and "A Thousand Days" (2004), a collection of bittersweet solo-piano reveries. | | |
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