We’re not in a secret cave just grabbing artists off the street! It starts with the managers and labels first: they now know we’re open for business. | | | | | Gucci Mane in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, August 2010. (Jason Persse) | | | | |  | “We’re not in a secret cave just grabbing artists off the street! It starts with the managers and labels first: they now know we’re open for business.”
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| | rantnrave:// Remember when artists used to announce new albums months in advance and set them up carefully and methodically with radio singles, interviews and all sorts of promotion? Me neither. In case it wasn't already clear, 2016 sealed it: The new norm is release now, announce later. We offer our belated goodbye to the traditional album setup with our REDEF MusicSET Surprise, Surprise: We Don't Need No Stinking Release Dates... But that doesn't mean you don't still need marketing and promotion. You just need a different kind. Not marketing is the new marketing. #Duh. As we continue collecting year-end lists from around the web, the 2016 critical consensus has become crystal clear. It starts with BEYONCÉ and SOLANGE and ends with DAVID BOWIE, CHANCE THE RAPPER and FRANK OCEAN. All worthy albums, all but one of them (Bowie) released with less than a week's warning, and all easy to write about because they came with a great story. It's not remotely surprising that critics across the spectrum would fall for them. Marketing, in whatever form, still works. (It's also not surprising that critics are still copying each other's homework, but that's another rant for another day)... Why yes, a dude named MOZART does indeed have the best-selling CD of 2016. You can chalk that up to funky math, in which the record biz looks at 6,250 people buying a 200-CD box set and pretends it sees 1.25 million people each buying a single CD. You can also credit the simple and obvious reality that Mozart fans are a lot more likely to buy music, and a lot less likely to stream it, than DRAKE fans. Lesson: Keep marketing CDs to classical fans. Don't sweat it with pop fans... GUCCI MANE TINY DESK CONCERT. What else do you need to know?... Another great live session in a very different vein from jazz drummer JAIMEO BROWN and his group TRANSCENDENCE... SOUNDCLOUD declares itself a legal safe space for DJ mixes... You *were* in a need of a bath time playlist, weren't you?... RIP BOB KRASNOW, an old-school record exec who new how to set up records the old-fashioned way and who was instrumental in the careers of artists from FUNKADELIC and CAPTAIN BEEFHEART to METALLICA and MOTLEY CRUE during stints at ELEKTRA, WARNER BROS. and his own BLUE THUMB RECORDS. Here's a vintage profile of a record man in what seems a very different and long ago era... RIP also JOE LIGON of the MIGHTY CLOUDS OF JOY. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Billboard |
| In an expansive and emotional interview, Billboard talked with the five core members of the Revolution about the song, the album, the film, and the incredible artist with whom they shared so much. "He loved us, we were his family." | | |
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 | MusicAlly |
| “We’re not in a secret cave just grabbing artists off the street! It starts with the managers and labels first: they now know we’re open for business.” | | |
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 | Harvard Business Review |
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 | Mother Jones |
| We talk with the iconic rocker about the Standing Rock fight, his new album, and why "everything will work out fine." | | |
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 | REDEF |
| We used to anticipate big albums for weeks and months because we knew exactly when they were coming. Now we anticipate them for weeks and months because we don't. A look at the topsy-turvy world of album release dates. | | |
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 | Red Bull Music Academy |
| As the founder and owner of iconic Chicago music venues Metro and smartbar, Joe Shanahan has an emotional investment in the city’s scenes that stretches back decades. | | |
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 | The Ringer |
| Twenty years after ‘Endtroducing …,’ the artist and his peers discuss crate digging in the digital age. | | |
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 | The Calvert Journal |
| The revolutionary partisan songs that provided the soundtrack to Tito's communist regime all but disappeared from public life when Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s. But now they're being heard again, sung loud and proud by activist choirs | | |
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| Billboard |
| If you were about to release the biggest album of 2016's last quarter, you might be nervous about some stranger hearing it before the street date. Paranoid, even. Your team might create a password for a journalist to use at the red metal gate of a small Hollywood studio. | | |
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 | The Daily Beast |
| He was unlucky in love, not much to look at, an alcoholic and a pill popper. But as soon as the music started, the king of country music could break your heart and mend it, too. | | |
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 | The Current |
| I was walking through Manhattan recently, making my way up 5th Avenue to check out all the Christmas displays like a typical Midwestern tourist, when I looked up and realized something odd: I was standing at the foot of the Empire State Building, an instantly recognizable spire that I had been eyeing for blocks. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| Social media has become a valuable platform for drawing the circle of conversation about mental health and our pop stars much wider. | | |
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| The Ringer |
| Yachty, 21 Savage, Uzi, and hip-hop’s generational shift. | | |
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 | The New York Observer |
| The music industry veteran offers strong words of advice for aspiring leaders. | | |
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 | NPR |
| The former Skid Row frontman spent a lot of his glory years under the influence, but his first true high came from singing in Christmas mass as kid. He discusses his new memoir with NPR's Ailsa Chang. | | |
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 | The Fader |
| At 15, the MC declared himself the grime scene savior. At 25, he’s delivering on his promise. | | |
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 | Insomniac.com |
| In a country that might appear distant and impenetrable to us, it turns out in some ways they’re not so different after all. | | |
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 | Perfect Sound Forever |
| Rock critic/editor Chuck Eddy talks about his writing career | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| We speak with the Fall’s Brix Smith Start about her memoir, one of the year’s most illuminating rock bios-and one that provides clarity on her complicated band with ex-husband Mark E. Smith. | | |
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 | Stereogum |
| Every December for the past nine years Matt Neatock and I have produced an Oscars-style video tribute to all the bands that called it quits during the preceding 11+ months. Since it’s already been such a sad year, I’m reluctant to pile on, but rules are rules; if we didn’t post this video how would you know Hot Hot Heat broke up? | | |
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 | via YouTube |
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