BLUE defines, explores, and concludes a genre in one album. Nothing I’ve heard from anyone else comes close | | | | Billie Eilish in Charlotte, N.C., Oct. 3, 2018.
(Jeff Hahne/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “BLUE defines, explores, and concludes a genre in one album. Nothing I’ve heard from anyone else comes close”
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| | rantnrave:// As crucial as film and TV synchronizations are to artists and songwriters—they're the new radio in case you haven't heard, maybe even more than playlists are the new radio, not to mention they pay way better—it's high time the business settles on a way to spell the word in its more common, one-syllable usage. No one in a corner office or behind a producer's desk has ever talked about how important "synchronizations" are. That's an awful lot of letters and syllables, and I'm not sure anyone beyond ROBERT LOPEZ and KRISTEN ANDERSON-LOPEZ would know how to use it in a musical sentence. And so, which is it: synch or sync? Kudos to VARIETY's ANDREW HAMPP for popping the question in his "Songs for Screens" column, and for laying out the deep divisions in the music business. To wit, BMG, WARNER and CAPITOL all use synch, while SONY is an implacable sync user. The licensing platform SYNCHTANK spells its name with the H but goes without it in all other uses, which, I don't know, I'd hate to be the lawyer who draws up those contracts. Hampp, who neglects to mention that his own publication is a hardened sync advocate, proposes a compromise solution in which synch is used as the adjective and sync as the noun. But that could lead to sentences like "JOHNNY CASH's synch agent has secured the 7,491th sync for 'HURT,'' which, I don't know, I'd hate to be the editor in charge of that. My quick googling of several notable publications suggests sync is generally favored by writers and editors, who I trust on spelling more than I do composers and their agents (no offense). The GUARDIAN, I should note, has a fondness for the related spelling lip-synch, but lip-sync(h)ing is when your lips are moving and you aren't saying anything and I'm not sure I trust you in that moment. So let that all sync in while I go through my own writing to see if I've been as consistent as I'd like to think I've been (I'll get back to you on that). In the meantime, I suggest you sync or swim... I get the impulse—and necessity—for ITUNES and other services to penalize artists and labels who game their charts. But I wish iTunes would offer more evidence than it does here for its decision to wipe out the first week sales of KRIS WU's debut solo album, ANTARES, because of apparently fraudulent download patterns. Is it possible Wu, a Chinese-Canadian ex-member of the popular K-pop band EXO, could have earned those sales from a combination of a clever release strategy and resourceful overseas fans? Or is it more likely the result of shady mass downloading and/or record-label game-playing? And where are we drawing the lines between game-playing and marketing these days? VARIETY and iTunes don't quite seem to be telling us... New Jersey indie radio trailblazer WFMU is shuttering its online FREE MUSIC ARCHIVE next week because of funding issues (such as a severely reduced NEA grant), but says it's in talks with several organizations in the hopes one of them may be able to take over the project... NICK CAVE interviews MARIANNE FAITHFULL... RIP FRANCIS LAI and PHILLIP HERTZ. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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