I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on artists to be 100 percent organic all the time. But sometimes you have to pay your f***ing bills. | | | | Unwashed in New York. Cardigan sweater (currently on auction block): $300,000, estimated. Frightwig t-shirt: priceless.
(Frank Micelotta/Hulton/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on artists to be 100 percent organic all the time. But sometimes you have to pay your f***ing bills.”
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| | rantnrave:// A decentralized streaming service that hosts no music on its own servers but instead relies on far flung, privately operated "nodes" for its content, and that passes takedown requests on to those nodes to work out on their own. What could go wrong? What could go right? Is blockchain startup AUDIUS your dream escape from a universe of corporate-owned, label-partnered, lawyered-up, buttoned-up music services or is it a renegade nightmare lying in wait to repost all the problematic content you've spent months and years getting the other services to take down? Is the SOUNDCLOUD challenger going to make you famous or make you poor? Your answer of course depends on who you are—a DJ, say, who wants to share your killer mixes, or a publisher, say, who controls 35 percent of one of the songs in one of those mixes. It also depends on your audience-building and monetization strategies. And your general feelings about the internet. And whether or not you have a law degree. And, and, and. TECHCRUNCH is all in on Audius as a free, artist-friendly, open-sourced cultural hub. The VERGE is more skeptical of the service, which launched its public beta two weeks ago. "Audius contains infringing material that, if its promotional materials are right, the company cannot remove," the Verge's DANI DEAHL wrote on Wednesday beneath a headline that calls the site "a copyright nightmare." MUSICALLY wonders what happens if neo-Nazi music, banned from other streaming services, starts showing up. In one sense, it seems odd that, 20 years after the launch of the original NAPSTER, playing fast and loose with music content is still being pitched as a forward-thinking business model. In anther sense, fast and loose and sometimes outright illegal has always been an essential piece of the music distribution chain, from bootleg vinyl to underground cassette trading to Napster and LIMEWIRE and GROOVESHARK to mixtapes to YOUTUBE. Some of the players are run out of the business and some, sooner or later, become a legit part of it. All contribute to the culture. And all piss a lot of people off. Audius is certainly a fun site to explore right now, smaller than its streaming competitors but still overloaded with DJ mixes, remixes, hip-hop, pop and other such pleasures. LIDO's 2016 KANYE WEST-remixing LIFE OF PEDER album, which isn't on SPOTIFY but is on SoundCloud, was at the top of the trending page Wednesday; not far below, you might find, for example, pop songwriter MOLLY MOORE's current (and available everywhere) single "I LOVE YOU BUT I DON'T LIKE YOU." Neither they nor any artist (or songwriter or producer) is making a dime yet. But there are plans. Landmines, too... As of this week, you can—for the first time—ask APPLE's SIRI to play music on Spotify. You don't have to say "please" but you do have to say "on Spotify." If Apple was expecting Spotify to say "thank you," it was misguided... Confirmed: RIHANNA turned down this year's SUPER BOWL halftime show out of respect for COLIN KAEPERNICK. "Who gains from that? Not my people," she tells VOGUE. "I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler"... MUFFS drummer ROY MCDONALD remembers KIM SHATTUCK, and Shattuck's bandmates in side project the COOLIES are rereleasing their debut EP in her memory; it will benefit research into ALS, the disease that took her life... GRATEFUL DEAD drummer MICKEY HART remembers ROBERT HUNTER, who was "in a way, writing our story; our biography. If you listen to his words, you can hear our struggles." | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | The Ringer |
| Before it was the megalithic event that towered over the music landscape, the Indio, California, festival was a money-losing weekend in the desert. Twenty years after Coachella’s October 1999 debut, artists and key players from the inaugural edition look back on the killer lineup, how the festival industry has changed, and all that dust. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| From Kitty Pryde to Lil Nas X, going viral has gone from a quirky phenomenon to the new normal. | | |
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 | The Verge |
| It’s full of pirated material. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| One inspiration behind Flamagra, the sixth album by the L.A. musician, was the wildfires in his hometown. It became another opportunity for the musician to reckon with ideas of death and rebirth. | | |
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 | Vogue |
| Rihanna has left her mark on music, design, beauty, lingerie-and now she's upending fashion at the highest levels. She talks to Abby Aguirre about Fenty, being happy in love, and, oh yes, she has a few choice words for the president. | | |
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 | Variety |
| Unlike most countries, terrestrial radio in the U.S. is not required to pay a performance royalty on the music it plays, a situation that the creator community has long railed against, and the commercial radio community has long worked to protect. Below, recording artist-actor Common and SoundExchange President/CEO Michael Huppe weigh in on the situation. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| The online lives of Teejayx6, DaBaby, Megan Thee Stallion and other breakout rappers are as important as their music. | | |
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 | The Bitter Southerner |
| In the South of 90 years ago, young African Americans started dancing the Lindy Hop. It was an act of resistance, an assertion of freedom against the discrimination and violence of Jim Crow. Today, swing dancers across the South -- black and white together -- pay proper tribute to that legacy. | | |
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 | Avidly |
| I recently, unexpectedly, almost died. And then after that, I had to sit around in some of the worst pain I've known, thinking, as one does. A lot of what I was thinking about was the video for the Lizzo song "Truth Hurts," which I'd been watching over and over prior to the almost-death incident. | | |
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 | Gay Mag |
| Falling in love with your own soundtrack. | | |
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 | GQ |
| How a jam-heavy new album, an online radio show, and a legion of inside-joking fans put Vampire Weekend squarely into the Grateful Dead merch tradition. | | |
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 | The Music Network |
| 'Turns out the best way to stop music piracy wasn’t to fight the march of technology,' writes Nathan Jolly. | | |
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 | Penny Fractions |
| Don't fear the stream-ripper. | | |
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| Variety |
| It’s clear that the music industry’s future is female. | | |
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 | Longreads |
| While away at summer camp, Melissa Febos discovers the power of her generation’s rage and feminism. | | |
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 | Striped: The Story Of The White Stripes |
| Before The White Stripes closed out "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," garnered platinum records, or played "SNL," they were just a frenetic boy teaching himself how to play music in an attic and a quiet, artistic girl who wasn't interested in playing music at all. | | |
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 | Mixmag |
| Music events are encouraging environmental responsibility through conversation and actions | | |
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| NPR Music |
| The vibrancy of the band can feel childlike and candy-coated. But the group's songs are more about the pain of entering adulthood and leaving some of that sweetness behind. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| He has composed a Prom and scored Paul Thomas Anderson films. As he launches his own classical record label, the guitarist reveals how it all started with the humble recorder. | | |
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 | Chicago Reader |
| Lou Della Evans-Reid spent nearly 40 years as minister of music for Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church, but even at age 89 this trailblazer isn’t done spreading the good news. | | |
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 | YouTube |
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