If music has something to say to you, whether it’s jazz, country-and-western, Indian music or Asian folk music, go ahead and use it. | | | | | Larry Coryell in Amsterdam, 1973. (Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “If music has something to say to you, whether it’s jazz, country-and-western, Indian music or Asian folk music, go ahead and use it.”
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| | rantnrave:// In PRINCE's first week of full availability on SPOTIFY, users listened to a lot of ED SHEERAN and the CHAINSMOKERS, according to a MUSICALLY analysis that makes clear how catalog artists are doing compared with current hitmakers in the streaming universe. Not very well is the not very surprising answer. The site calculates Sheeran is currently reaching a whopping 42.8 percent of Spotify's users based on monthly listeners, while PRINCE is reaching 3 percent. (Also: Chainsmokers 37.8 percent, BEATLES 8.9 percent.) Which is fine. People like good, current pop music, and if you have that among the tens of millions of tracks in your catalog, tens of millions of people will gravitate to it. In other breaking news, more people watched THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE last week than watched E.T. But that doesn't mean people aren't listening to most everything else, too. Here's another number of interest: Twice as many Spotify users signed up for one particular Prince playlist in the past week than followed Prince's artist page. Which tells us two things: Playlists are the new [fill-in-your-favorite-blank]. And Spotify, like pretty much all the services, continues to not quite know what to do with artist pages (or, perhaps, if it should do anything at all)... Related line of inquiry: While he was alive, Prince withheld his music from most streaming services and from much of the rest of the internet, and locked away his unreleased music in an actual vault ("The Vault," as it is reverentially known by fans, is not a metaphor). Does his estate have the moral right to release it widely now? Quote of the day on that subject, from MITSKI: "The thought of me dying before I'm done with a record, and having it handled without me, is what makes me look twice before I cross the street"... How composer NICHOLAS BRITELL chopped and screwed chamber music in the service of one of last year's most moving films, MOONLIGHT... Thirteen newish protest songs, from A TRIBE CALLED QUEST and YG to BRUJERIA and TIM HEIDECKER... Ten old ones, from SCOTT WALKER and STEVIE WONDER to ICE CUBE and GREEN DAY... DR. LUKE counters KESHA (I don't mean to wade into the day-to-day back-and-forth and paperwork of every lawsuit, most of which don't concern me or you. But I think this one merits the attention)... Yes, you passionate bright young things of LONDON, let's do this... "Ubiquitous mogul" JAY Z is doing this... GUCCI MANE interviewed by MARILYN MANSON... T BONE BURNETT lobbies hard for music creators, really really hates the internet... RIP STANISLAW SKROWACZEWSKI. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Blockchain technology could help every musician get a fairer deal, from big stars to underground artists. Josh Hall finds out how the technology works. | | |
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| We continue to pry open, quite literally in Prince’s case, the private works of artists to feast on their off-cuts, but is this fair? | | |
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| After three years in prison, rapper Gucci Mane emerged last May such a changed man-in looks and in spirits-that some conspiracists theorized he had been replaced by a government clone. The old Gucci was dead. | | |
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| “'The Scenario' is everyone’s story,” says Simmons, of his own foray into the Broadway-meets-major-musical-catalog game. “It is a story about everyone evolving, learning, growing, and coming of age.” | | |
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| Nicholas Britell, the film’s composer, whose score is up for an Oscar, explains how he “chopped and screwed” the songs in the style of a Houston D.J. | | |
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| Artists like James Brown and Nina Simone helped the country express their outrage--and joy. | | |
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| Our politician-in-chief is obsessed with television-and our entertainers are expected to make profound political statements or else. | | |
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| You would have seen those Facebook posts last month when your friends posted up the 10 records that shaped them as teenagers. Most of your friends were lying to you and to themselves or at very posting a selective recall that avoided at least the first half of those teenage years. | | |
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| Celebrating a decade of the guitar player’s destiny-building wisdom | | |
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| What you see before you are the Final Audio Piano Forte X in-ear headphones, which cost a spectacular $2,199 and look, in the merciless words of a friend of mine, "like mini butt-plugs." Not only are they expensive and garish, they aren’t even all that impressive technically. But if you think that’s a recipe for a total luxury tech disaster, you’d be wrong. | | |
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| "The only people with the power to change the world are the audience, not us," Bragg said. | | |
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| Editing has been around as long as magnetic tape itself. | | |
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| YouTube views and animated musical films may up the odds, as the numbers behind the musical numbers show. | | |
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| One week after Prince’s much-publicised return to (non-Tidal) music-streaming services, how is his Warner Bros catalogue performing? | | |
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| I don't listen to Dave Matthews Anymore, but I'm glad I did. | | |
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| How acts who make a start on YouTube frame themselves as relatable underdogs-and the fans lap it up. | | |
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| A collective of female stars including Angélique Kidjo, Mariam Doumbia and Nneka is singing out against gender inequality in west Africa over a soundtrack of funk, blues and dub. | | |
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| I’m sitting at a table in a club in downtown Chicago with Larry Coryell in between sets. Wearing a sport coat over a white T-shirt and slacks, the man is holding court but is distracted--mainly by his wife, Tracey Coryell, a striking woman who looks to be roughly half of Coryell’s sixty-five years. | | |
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| A meditation on the one dimension of human existence that “goes past all racial conflict and all kinds of conflicts.” | | |
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| Perfume Genius got clean and fell in love. Then he realized sobriety doesn’t make adulthood simple. | | |
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| | | | | Larry Coryell (with John McLaughlin) |
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