The first time I saw Charley Pride was on 'Hee Haw' when I was in the first or second grade. I remember thinking, 'This is awesome. This guy looks like me and there’s no one else on that show that looks like me.' | | | | 24kGolden (right, with Iann Dior at the 2020 MTV EMAs) was one of the most viewed artists on TikTok in 2020.
(Rich Fury/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “The first time I saw Charley Pride was on 'Hee Haw' when I was in the first or second grade. I remember thinking, 'This is awesome. This guy looks like me and there’s no one else on that show that looks like me.'”
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| | rantnrave:// My first internet job was editing a suite of daily news feeds for radio station websites way back in the dial-up days. I remember two specific things about the job—that the editorial staff was six full-time people doing what would probably be handled today by a single person making minimum wage with no benefits (but that's a different rantnrave for a different newsletter), and that at my final job interview, I confidently opined that online news was nothing but print news delivered in a different format. It was the dumbest thing I've ever said at a job interview, but I was young and so was the internet and they hired me anyway. I lived, I learned (a lot), and I've carried that mistake with me, on purpose, everywhere I've gone since. I use it as a defense against my own impulse to see everything in the context of what came before rather than the context of what could be. I acknowledge the 17 or 18 "but, but, but" responses and the five or six "really?"s that pass through my brain when, for example, TIKTOK mentions that "in the past year over 70 artists that have broken on the platform have received major label deals," and then I do my best to put them aside and try to consider what TikTok (which, for what it's worth, still hasn't been sold and still is operating in the US as if nothing ever happened) and the internet are trying to tell me. Is TikTok (and all its social media and gaming peers/competitors) just another way for artists to get heard and discovered by the same old media and tech and record companies that run the world, and are those 70 artists, who include POWFU, 347 AIDEN and JAWSH675, proof? Or are they bridges to an entirely new way of having a career in music (or any other art)? Or are they the beginnings of entirely new ways of *making* art? CHERIE HU, in a column for DJ MAG, considers the year in virtual concerts inside FORTNITE and ROBLOX and poses a challenge for creators: What if artists like TRAVIS SCOTT and LIL NAS X started thinking about those platforms not just as revenue-generating alternatives to live concerts, but as ways to reimagine the very idea of what a concert is? "Gaming," she writes, "can lead to whole new ways of thinking about creativity and storytelling in music." There's good interactive technology there, waiting to be appropriated. Maybe for FLEETWOOD MAC, TikTok is, at heart, a dreamy new marketing and publicity opportunity. But maybe for Powfu it's a catalyst for creative output that's as different from streaming tracks on SPOTIFY as vinyl records were different from player pianos. Or maybe the entire point of the preceding 500 words was just a way of letting you know that "DRAKE's 'Toosie Slide' Did Exactly What Drake Wanted It to Do." I'm not all that good at seeing the future anyway... Also please note, for the record, that we're still talking about Lil Nas X two full years after "OLD TOWN ROAD" started going viral on, um, TikTok. Who had that on their 2021 (it starts in two weeks!) bingo cards?... Four more episodes of SONG EXPLODER the TV series have dropped on NETFLIX, diving deep into songs by DUA LIPA, NINE INCH NAILS, the KILLERS and NATALIA LAFOURCADE. Meanwhile on SONG EXPLODER the podcast, COMMON explains how attending protest marches for GEORGE FLOYD in Minnesota and BREONNA TAYLOR in Kentucky inspired his 2020 EP, A BEAUTIFUL REVOLUTION (PT. 1): "I felt anger, I felt pain, I felt strength, I felt the inspiration of the people... At that moment I was like I'm going to do an album and it's going to be movement music"... RIP GWENDOLYN OLIVER WESLEY, BOB MOSES, JIMMY RABBITT, DAVID FITZGERALD and SHIRLEY GRANT. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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 | NPR |
| Stations have been playing Christmas music earlier than ever this year, as a way of luring in listeners during the pandemic. One Indiana station was doing it in July. | | |
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 | Mixmag |
| Ekow Barnes meets the popular Ghanaian party-starter who DJs on a mobile device. | | |
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 | Variety |
| TikTok’s year-end numbers are even bigger than one might expect. | | |
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 | DJ Mag |
| Cherie Hu looks at the ways in which games can create new ways of thinking about creativity and storytelling in music, and examines where the opportunities lie for this ecosystem in 2021. | | |
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 | Complex |
| In 2020, Travis Scott was a “brand whisperer” who made $100 million in partnership deals. Here are the highs and lows of his corporate ascent. | | |
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 | CNN |
| One of the undisputed winners of 2020's work-from-home transition has been Spotify, and it's not just because of all the new Taylor Swift albums and addictive true-crime podcasts. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| Has streaming volume really peaked in the U.S., or is the current stalled growth a blip? | | |
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 | VICE |
| As horrifying cases of violence against women make headlines, Chinese netizens point out that “reality is even more chilling than the song lyrics.” | | |
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 | Loud And Quiet |
| Six months after the murder of George Floyd, a look back on the instant reaction, where we are now, and the danger of reducing the removal of racism to a bureaucratic process. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Casual listeners think of him as a gentle giant of jazz, but critics and African Americans often saw him as a sell out or ‘Uncle Tom’. A new book aims to show how radical ‘Pops’ really was. | | |
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 | The Stranger |
| "For me and my co-workers, we do want the industry to come back, but it was intrinsically flawed to begin with... We need to do things a different way." | | |
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| DJ Mag |
| Since 2010, Butterz has been drawing a fresh blueprint for how independent UK labels can best function. As Jasmine Kent-Smith learns, Butterz founders Elijah and Skilliam have written themselves into UK dance music history books thanks to their close-knit, long-game approach. | | |
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 | Penny Fractions |
| A certain phrase in the record industry needs to be retired: “Major label." | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| From Jeff Tweedy’s practical advice and Mariah Carey’s decadent memoirs to scene-defining oral histories and deep-dives into the cultural archives, these were the books that stuck with us this year. | | |
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 | Kerrang! |
| The only countdown that matters. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| A new six-part Netflix series explores half a century of music under pressure. | | |
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 | Resident Advisor |
| The Canadian experimental artist talks about pipe organs, room sounds and the value of repeating yourself. | | |
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| Billboard |
| He started his career by signing *two* publishing deals back to back. Then came some "incredibly astute" decisions. | | |
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 | Perfect Sound Forever |
| As is the case with many traditions that have some basis in a historical event, the secular and the sacred have mixed through the centuries, effectively blurring the lines of distinction. | | |
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 | NPR Music |
| Is it possible to hear the music of 2020 without getting lost in the noise? NPR Music's critic Ann Powers studies a year during which nearly everything about loving music was turned upside down. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | Jeremih and Chance the Rapper |
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