I’m somewhat addicted to lyrics and how people find a different way to say what we already know. | | | | "Material" girl: Nona Hendryx in Chicago, July 22, 1984.
(Paul Natkin/Archive Photos/Getty Images) | | | | | | “I’m somewhat addicted to lyrics and how people find a different way to say what we already know.”
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| | rantnrave:// Stream baby stream. We already knew 2019 was a boom year for the US recorded music biz and now the RIAA has put some dollar figures on that boom. Revenues jumped 13 percent to $11.1 billion, driven largely—OK, entirely—by an $8.8 billion streaming market, itself fueled by a 25 percent increase in paid subscription revenues. Paid subs brought in $6.8 billion in 2019—more than the entire recorded music business generated just four years earlier from paid streaming, ad-supported streaming, online radio, digital downloads, CD and vinyl sales, and syncs. Let the good times roll, and the let the vinyl keep spinning, too. While CD sales and digital downloads continued their race to extinction, vinyl sales grew 19 percent year-over-year and contributed $504 million to the pie. MUSIC BUSINESS WORLDWIDE, meanwhile, crunched the publicly available numbers and concluded that as of the last quarter of 2019, the three major labels were earning more than $1 million an hour from streaming. CC: All the artists on those labels. BCC: All the songwriters. If you're looking for potential red flags among the champagne and fireworks, BILLBOARD's DAN RYS notes that, as healthy as the overall streaming market appears, the growth rate has been steadily slowing over the last several years. Is the market, despite what digital cheerleaders would like you to believe, already maturing? Are family plans and other discounts eating away at the growth charts? Should record companies and streaming services worry about the estimated 11 million Americans mooching off someone else's account? Or is that an inevitable cost of doing business online, not worth spending too much time worrying about in a boom year, if ever? And as for the still-expanding vinyl business, there could be some bumps, or skips, immediately ahead, beyond anyone's control... Between 1981 and 1989, guitarist/songwriter/producer DAVID ROBACK co-founded three bands, each starting from a different point along a sort of spectrum of gauzy psychedelia. The last of them, the soft-goth cult fave MAZZY STAR, is the one that brought him (along with singer/songwriter HOPE SANDOVAL) his modest fame and fortune, but all three earned plenty of devotees. The RAIN PARADE, with its distorted and sometimes droning jangle, was one of the central bands of LA's Paisley Underground. OPAL doubled down on the psych-rock, added a hint of glam and, in the eyes of plenty of fans, was Roback's peak. Opal's only album, HAPPY NIGHTMARE BABY, is nowhere to be found in the paid streaming or download world but lives on at YOUTUBE. The band's relative obscurity is a fitting legacy for a reclusive performer who shunned all manner of spotlights and attention. "So much about music is overdetermined by television and what people write and say about it," he once said. "We don’t want to be part of that over-determination. We feel you should be able to shut your eyes and listen." With a switch of lead singers, Opal morphed into Mazzy Star, who faded into a measure of worldwide attention that lasted over the ensuing decades. And now, at age 61, Roback has faded out. RIP... PLÁCIDO DOMINGO is "irreplaceable—because the world no longer has a place for this particular kind of artist, who has done so much to help the field [of opera] and so much to harm it." A must-read essay by ANNE MIDGETTE on the disgraced tenor... The MILES DAVIS doc "BIRTH OF THE COOL" premiered Tuesday on PBS' AMERICAN MASTERS and is available online here... Hearts and hugs and a gentle welcome back to Welsh pop singer DUFFY. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| Domingo is the last operatic superstar. What happens to opera after #MeToo allegations bring him down? | | |
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| The ongoing blending of the music and podcast worlds - thanks to aggressive podcast investments from both Spotify and Sony Music Entertainment - has led to an interesting new hybrid marketing tactic: artists, from all genres and at all career stages, are now creating podcasts to promote their albums. | | |
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| The reclusive musician David Roback, whose haunting guitar tones as founder of Los Angeles bands including Mazzy Star, Opal and the Rain Parade helped define the sound of the city’s 1980s and ’90s rock underground, died Monday. | | |
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| The music on Mazzy Star's new album, "So Tonight That I Might See," is inward and deep. They're bringing their internalized music to a public stage whether or not they connect with the audience. | | |
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| MBW analysis shows that Universal saw recorded music streaming growth in excess of $600m in 2019. | | |
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| Friday afternoon's announcement that Paul Rosenberg will be stepping down as CEO of Def Jam Records caught nearly everyone by surprise - including, briefly, the label's parent company Universal Music Group, sources say. But the company pivoted quickly, appointing well-respected UMG chief counsel Jeff Harleston as interim chief while the suddenly public search for a new CEO accelerated. | | |
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| From immigration to the criminal justice system, this Queens artist is ready to tell his story. | | |
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| When you start a record campaign, your label lays out Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to evaluate a campaign’s success or failure, which govern whether your project continues to be funded or phased out. | | |
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| The music is recorded on cellphones and beamed across the globe. | | |
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| “Girl From the North Country” cast members talk about the first time they heard Dylan’s music. | | |
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| | | so tonight that i might see |
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| Distortion is familiar to most of us - a 'staticky noise,' a 'noisy static.' But in the right hands, its uses can bloom and its rigid contours soften. | | |
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| Read an interview with Holly Herndon on the Travis Scott-based A.I. program Travisbott. | | |
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| Revolt’s Lynzie Riebling came through to talk about key findings from Revolt’s study Gen Hip Hop (did you know gen hip hop has a buying power of $438 billion?!), why this work matters, Revolt’s competition, and more. | | |
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| Bluegrass has a loyal following, from the big cities of Prague and Brno to the rural parts of Vysocina and south Bohemia. Its countercultural status helped it spread. | | |
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| Columnist Mark Beaumont went to a private Circa Waves gig for super-streamers and witnessed a new dawn for luxury fandom, but not one without its dangers. | | |
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| With two critically acclaimed albums and a phone full of A-list collaborators, the wunderkind beatmaker from Canada is taking the spotlight. | | |
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| 'Girl in Amber' is a song wrapped around a mystery. It is a song that formed itself as if from a dream and it seems to possess a special, almost mystical, power. Back in 2014, I was sitting at Warren's kitchen table after a day of making music in his little studio at the back of his house in Paris. | | |
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| Your hypocrisy is showing. | | |
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| Danielle Beverly’s "Dusty Groove: The Sound of Transition" tells intimate stories about our deep connection to music. | | |
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| If there was a Mount Rushmore for reggae, Lee “Scratch” Perry's would be one of faces carved on it. The producer-songwriter-musician-singer, now 83, rose through the ranks of the Jamaican music industry, working with other Rushmore candidates like Coxsone Dodd, Joe Gibbs and Bob Marley before striking out on his own with his Upsetter label. | | |
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