It looks to me like Scooter Braun and his financial backers... have seen the latest balance sheets and realized that paying $330 MILLION for my music wasn't exactly a wise choice and they need money. | | | | Lucinda Williams with guitarist Stuart Mathis in New York, Dec. 27, 2019. "Good Souls Better Angels" is out today on Highway 20/Thirty Tigers.
(Steven Ferdman/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “It looks to me like Scooter Braun and his financial backers... have seen the latest balance sheets and realized that paying $330 MILLION for my music wasn't exactly a wise choice and they need money.”
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| | rantnrave:// Artists switch labels, labels pull old recordings out of vaults, strange records, legal but unapproved, show up in record store bins and atop SPOTIFY artist pages, these things happen, reissue repackage repackage, a vulgar picture but not breaking news. But usually not like this. I'm trying to think of another recent example of a prominent mainstream label digging up unreleased recordings of a living, major artist and releasing them against the artist's explicit wishes. Chapter 3 or 4, this is, of the ongoing saga of TAYLOR SWIFT vs. SCOOTER'S BIG MACHINE. She says she learned on Thursday, from fans on social media, that Big Machine was planning to release an album's worth of performances—today—from a 2008 CLEAR CHANNEL radio session. "This release is not approved by me," the label's most prominent former artist Instagrammed. "Looks to me like Scooter Braun and his financial backers... have seen the latest balance sheets and realized that paying $330 MILLION for my music wasn't exactly a wise choice and they need money." Ouch. The label and its owner said nothing on the record, but a "source close to Big Machine" told BILLBOARD all the music on the album was already available on YOUTUBE or at TARGET and is simply being released to the rest of the streaming universe today. The magazine was able to find two of the songs on an exclusive Target version of Swift's album FEARLESS. As for using YouTube uploads as a way to legitimize the rest of the album, the label may want to think that argument through. The label might also consider that the artist is going to win this public relations battle, and rather easily. It’s the label's legal right but it's her music. I'm curious how current Big Machine artists feel about the label's treatment of the work of one of their own. And how the album will perform with Swift's fanbase, which is fanatically loyal to her. (Then again, is there any risk for the label? What's the cost of uploading an album of already-existing masters to streaming services and not promoting it?) As for Swift, who's used her fight with Big Machine to crusade against private equity's role in music ownership, she called out the Carlyle Group, once again, in Thursday's Instagram post. And, she added, "Alex Soros and the Soros family." I don't doubt her motives at all, but the Soros family name is frequently thrown around by people whose motives are ugly, and weaponizing the name, no matter the intent, risks invoking more of that ugliness. That, too, is worth thinking through. MusicSET: "Taylor Swift vs. Scooter Braun and the Big Machine"... Meanwhile in FORTNITE, 12.3 million people reportedly showed up for Thursday's premiere of TRAVIS SCOTT's interactive "Astronomical" event, which will be rerun once this morning and three times on Saturday... BUZZANGLE is now ALPHA DATA... It's FRIDAY and although there's no new DIXIE CHICKS album, there's new music from LUCINDA WILLIAMS, ELDER, KALI UCHIS, JACKBOY, LIL GOTIT, JOHN CARROLL KIRBY, JAGA JAZZIST, YOUNGBOY NEVER BROKE AGAIN, BEC PLEXUS, the USED, TRIVIUM, KATATONIA, TOM MISCH & YUSSEF DAYES, ALINA BARAZ, TERRACE MARTIN, SYLVAN ESSO (live album and documentary), LORENZO SENNI, BC CAMPLIGHT, BRENDAN BENSON, QUELLE CHRIS & CHRIS KEYS, GRÉGOIRE MARET/ROMAIN COLLIN/BILL FRISELL, LENNON STELLA, WHITNEY ROSE, PAM TILLIS, ROSE MCGOWAN, DANZIG (sings ELVIS), AWOLNATION, BAD HISTORY MONTH, HAZEL ENGLISH, OTHER LIVES, UNIFIED HIGHWAY, the 100th installment of the ROCKABYE BABY! series, featuring LULLABY RENDITIONS OF WU-TANG CLAN, and singers including PATTI AUSTIN, ANDRA DAY and LEDISI saluting ELLA FITZGERALD, who would have turned 103 on Saturday, on ELLA 100: LIVE AT THE APOLLO!... And livestreams on top of livestreams on top of livestreams. WARNER MUSIC's PLAYON FEST runs for 72 hours straight starting today, featuring pre-existing live performances by CARDI B, ED SHEERAN, RODDY RICCH, PANIC! AT THE DISCO and seemingly the rest of the Warner roster, and benefiting the WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION's Covid-19 Solidarity Relief Fund... The Latin American-heavy GLOBAL MUSICFEST continues today through Sunday, featuring BIKE, EMA STONED and many more... The PATHWAY TO PARIS EARTH DAY 50 fest, on Sunday, has the likes of MICHAEL STIPE, PATTI SMITH, FLEA and CAT POWER... And GLAAD's TOGETHER IN PRIDE: YOU ARE NOT ALONE, also Sunday, offers KESHA, MELISSA ETHERIDGE, ADAM LAMBERT, BEBE REXHA and more... RIP FRED THE GODSON and JOSEPH FEINGOLD. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| | | sittin' in the kitchen, a house in macon |
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 | Complex |
| I hadn’t been to a real concert for over two months, and I didn’t have anything better to do tonight, so I downloaded Fortnite on my Nintendo Switch and attended my first video game concert. Here’s how it went. | | |
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 | Los Angeles Times |
| Travis Scott headlined 'Fortnite' instead of Coachella, debuting a new song with Kid Cudi. It was trippy. There were flaming microphone stands. | | |
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 | Billboard |
| Most of the time, when Cedella Marley's son Skip begins to sing, she closes her eyes. Not out of any parental apprehension or superstition, but so she can listen for pitch and sharpness - a remnant of the time she spent singing with her siblings Ziggy, Stephen and Sharon as part of The Melody Makers in the 1980s and '90s. | | |
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 | GQ |
| A decade after bottoming out and cleaning up, Jason Isbell has become the last of his kind: a guitar-playing, compulsively honest, relentlessly consistent songwriter. Oh, and he slays on Twitter too. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| What began as a random boogie has turned into a daily ritual, giving me a break from the insanity of Covid-19. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| Vivian Perlis founded Yale’s Oral History of American Music in 1968. Today, the project continues her mission to record the voices of American composers. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| Fans can now donate to their favourite artists via Spotify, but this feature is a tacit admission that the firm undervalues the musicians that make it viable. | | |
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 | VICE |
| America’s original gig workers are suddenly out of a job. Banding together as part of a broader labor movement may be the only move musicians have left. | | |
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| Billboard |
| Federal loans to help businesses during the coronavirus shutdown aren’t easy to navigate -- but charitable funds are easier to get. | | |
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| Complex |
| Rapper Fred the Godson, who died after contracting COVID-19, was always looking for new ways to wow listeners with his inventive lyrics. | | |
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| | | smell of coffee, eggs and bacon |
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 | Okayplayer |
| Poet Maya Angelou and "Shameika" are two Black women who found their way into Fiona Apple's work. Here is how the two are connected. | | |
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 | Esquire |
| You’ve never heard of Rock Lititz. But before the pandemic put the industry on hold, the biggest names in music were joining its waitlist. | | |
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 | Ludwig van Toronto |
| If live streaming is here to stay, however, there are still some technical hurdles to be overcome. | | |
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 | Texas Monthly |
| The Austin psychedelic rock band remotely wrote, recorded, mixed, and mastered 'World as a Waiting Room' in just thirty days. | | |
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 | British GQ |
| The Manic Street Preachers guitarist disappeared on 1 February 1995. Here, his sister, Rachel, talks about her “perpetual loss”. | | |
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 | Bandcamp Daily |
| Darnielle returns to the boombox--and to Ancient Rome--on the new cassette release. | | |
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 | Variety |
| When nutritionist Lisa Roth found herself looking for the perfect gift for a friend's baby shower back in the mid-2000s, she never figured on starting a musical movement for the toddler set and their parents. But the lightbulb flicked on and "Rockabye Baby!" was born. | | |
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 | InsideHook |
| Can curated streaming with the help of Thom Yorke and Angel Olsen entice you buy new speakers? | | |
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 | Dissect Podcast |
| Surprise! Season 6 is dedicated to Beyoncé’s masterwork "Lemonade". Through in-depth, highly researched analysis, we follow Beyoncé on her transcendent journey from subjugation to freedom. Today we unpack the visual album’s opening chapter “Intuition,” which features the song “Pray You Catch Me.” | | |
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| The New York Times |
| Will Toledo is leaning into his ambitions and leading his band into new territory on “Making a Door Less Open,” an album that comes with a new look - and a mask. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | | | "Bad news in my mail / Follow me home / Bad news on my trail / Bad news on my phone." From "Good Souls Better Angels." |
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| © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group |
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