People are realizing now that the new artists are producers. That's the most important role now. | | | | | Sinkane at the WOMAD Festival, Wiltshire, England, July 2015. (C Brandon/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “People are realizing now that the new artists are producers. That's the most important role now.”
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| | rantnrave:// FRANK OCEAN won't be at the GRAMMYS on Sunday, and there are whispers that DRAKE and KANYE may be absent, too. Maybe they have better things to do, maybe they're sending a message, maybe they don't see where they fit in. Whichever it is, the RECORDING ACADEMY probably should be more concerned than it's letting on... While it struggles to keep up with hip-hop and R&B, the Academy is getting better at generally not embarrassing itself—thanks in part to the mysterious committees that proofread nominations. There are a handful of potentially boring winners in the major categories at Sunday's show (8 pm ET on CBS) but no bad ones. And plenty of great ones. My wish list: BEYONCÉ's LEMONADE (album of the year) and "FORMATION" (song), RIHANNA's "WORK" (record), CHANCE THE RAPPER (new artist). My betting list: Not a clue, though if you hear ADELE's name once or twice, don't say you didn't know what you were getting into when you turned your TV on... This year's In Memoriam segment could be the longest and most heartbreaking ever. While we know there will be live tributes to PRINCE to GEORGE MICHAEL, show producer KEN EHRLICH says, quite reasonably, "You've got a lot of people incredibly excited about being nominated. I don't want to deny them by devoting a third of the show to people who've passed away"... All things considered, though, it might be a good idea to do something special for the beloved rapper we lost 11 months ago... Brush up on the nominees, the (sometimes strange) categories and the music in our REDEF MusicSET Grammys 2017: Creators, Categories, Controversies... My annual plea: MILLI VANILLI's music wasn't a lie. It wasn't fake news. GIRL YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE was a real album with real songs recorded in a real studio by real singers and real musicians. It was bought and loved by real people, played on real radio stations by real DJs and deemed worthy of a GRAMMY by real Grammy voters. Give them that Grammy back. For real... This is also turning into an annual plea: BILLBOARD, stop forgetting about DRE. Coming in at #4 on this year's POWER 100: the team of EDDY CUE/JIMMY IOVINE/ROBERT KONDRK/[NOBODY ELSE]... STEVIE WONDER is both songwriter and radio station owner, and when it comes to taking sides between performing rights organizations and broadcasters, you might be surprised where he stands. His is "probably the most reasonable and fairly balanced perspective one can have," according to him... ARETHA FRANKLIN: "I am retiring"... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from SINKANE, TINARIWEN, RAG'N'BONE MAN, QUELLE CHRIS, JESCA HOOP, MIGUEL ZENÓN, LUPE FIASCO, BRETT YOUNG, CHUCK PROPHET, THIEVERY CORPORATION, TEEN DAZE, ANDREW MCMAHON and OVERKILL. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | baby don't forget my number |
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 | The New York Observer |
| How do we keep the music journalism community engaged in healthy, constructive dialogue? | | |
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 | Billboard |
| Jeff Bezos envisions multiple Echoes in each home, plus one in the car. The more of these devices Amazon sells, the more the music industry stands to earn. “One of the primary use cases we had in mind when we invented Echo and Alexa was making the music streaming process in the home completely friction-free,” he says. “If you make things easier, people do more of it.” | | |
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 | Vulture |
| How “Super Bad” helped give us the Migos’ hit. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Last April, doctors told David Ponder, a 57-year-old gospel musician living near San Diego, that his heart was going to fail. He had already had quadruple bypass surgery; without a full transplant he and his music would likely die within months. | | |
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 | Harvard Business Review |
| The whole company is organized around it. | | |
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 | Noisey |
| The King of the Teens captures so many of rap's most promising ideas in one simple package. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Ryan Adams recalls the night at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville when a distracting voice in the crowd shouted out a request: a song by Bryan Adams. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| Deep in Pennsylvania’s Amish country lies Lititz, the unlikely centre of the stadium-tour business, where the props for the greatest shows on earth are designed and made. | | |
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 | Music Industry Blog |
| Music video's two power players are both in the news for strategic resets. On the one hand YouTube has announced that it is merging its YouTube Music and Google Play Music teams while on the other hand Vevo has announced it is postponing the launch of its subscription service in favour of prioritising global expansion. | | |
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 | REDEF |
| Upstarts like Chance the Rapper and Sturgill Simpson face off against superstars like Beyoncé and Adele for Grammy hardware in 2017. Read stories about the major nominees, the most intriguing categories and the making of the show itself. | | |
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| The New York Observer |
| By unpacking the role that the music industry has played in fracturing this cultural divide, we can focus on what makes us the same. | | |
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| Los Angeles Times |
| In the years leading up to a fire that killed 36 people inside an Oakland warehouse, city officials visited the building numerous times and investigated at least 10 code enforcement complaints, according to records released Wednesday by the city. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| Under Trump, should artists carry on nobly defying the ruination of public discourse? Or seize on a new mission, abandoning the illusion of aesthetic autonomy? | | |
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 | Thump |
| Stop telling musicians to be quiet and start telling them to get loud. | | |
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| Billboard |
| “Special music industry advisers to the Estate of Prince Rogers Nelson” is not a job title that Charles Koppelman and L. Londell McMillan expected or wanted. | | |
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 | Soundfly |
| In the 1970s and '80s, Japanese manufacturers created copies of instruments by Fender, Gibson, and more. Here's the true story of these "lawsuit" guitars. | | |
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 | The Muse |
| On Wednesday (Feb 8), the Migos--the rap trio that’s both humorously and quite earnestly described as the Beatles of this generation--were compelled to backtrack on comments that came across as homophobic in a recent "Rolling Stone" profile. But there’s another part of the story that’s unsettling. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| Or is that the musician-actor? Donald Glover, Janelle Monáe, and Riz Ahmed make the case for doing both simultaneously. | | |
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| Thump |
| Confessions of a reformed party girl. | | |
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 | The Moth |
| One half of the pop superstar duo Milli Vanilli recounts their rise and fall. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | From "Life & Livin' It," out today on City Slang. |
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| © Copyright 2017, The REDEF Group |
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