There is a proper procedure for taking advantage of any investment. Music, for example. Buying music is an investment. To get the maximum you must LISTEN TO IT FOR THE FIRST TIME UNDER OPTIMUM CONDITIONS. | | | | Crowd surfing to Hammerfall at Wacken Open Air festival, Wacken, Germany, July 2014.
(Sean Gallup/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “There is a proper procedure for taking advantage of any investment. Music, for example. Buying music is an investment. To get the maximum you must LISTEN TO IT FOR THE FIRST TIME UNDER OPTIMUM CONDITIONS.”
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| | rantnrave:// The NEW YORKER's profile of XL RECORDINGS head RICHARD RUSSELL is a great primer on how to run an artistic enterprise—especially the kind of enterprise that has no shareholders and where the top exec can therefore say, "Why should it grow? It shouldn't grow. It should be this size." In XL's case, "this size" is nowhere near as big as UNIVERSAL or SONY but big enough to contain one of the world's best-selling artists, which wasn't necessarily the plan at the beginning but which is, perhaps ironically, a direct result of building a business around music, not money. It also helps, of course, to know good music when you hear it and how to nurture the people who make it. MATTHEW TRAMMELL's longread isn't as fluffy as I'm probably making it sound, just a solid profile of what sounds like your platonic ideal of a music exec. One who is self-aware enough to point out a little later, "One of the reasons XL doesn't have to grow is that it's already quite big"... Speaking of fluff, SPOTIFY's DISCOVER WEEKLY playlists aren't quite as platonically ideal as this semi-deep dive into its algorithm/recipe would have you believe. But as hyper-personalized, machine-made playlists go, I'm not sure I've seen anything better. MATTHEW OGLE, who oversees the algorithm for Spotify, makes clear how much processing power and machine learning goes into those playlists, and swears the service has resisted calls from labels and artists to seed the playlists with promoted music. Dear Spotify: Please keep resisting. At the end of the piece, Ogle and his lead engineer offer tips on how to tweak your Spotify habits to get the best possible Discover Weekly playlist each week. Ideally, of course, you shouldn't have to tweak anything. My ideal algorithm will one day deliver me perfect playlists tailored for my tastes, my sense of adventure, my mood, my surroundings and my deepest hidden desires based on nothing more than noticing what I'm already doing. For $9.99 a month, obvi... Yes this sounds like a TUPAC documentary I'll want to watch... EMMANUEL MACRON, pianist... BILLY JOEL parking lot... AMERICAN IDOL is coming back even faster than LCD SOUNDSYSTEM. Not all judges give the idea a thumbs-up... The (apparently successful) search for the highway interchange on the cover of OK COMPUTER. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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 | Quartz |
| Thirty songs that feel like a gift from a music-loving friend, but were cooked up by an algorithm. | | |
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 | The New Yorker |
| By signing artists like Adele and Vampire Weekend, the label banks on long-term potential instead of chasing viral hits. | | |
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 | The Guardian |
| In the 1990s, rock combined with rap and dubious hair to spawn a new sound. Korn, Kerrang! and the festivals and labels behind the genre ask how it happened and why it keeps rollin’. | | |
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 | No Depression |
| On the path between penetrating poetry and raw rock and roll, Jason Isbell has hit his stride. | | |
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 | The Washington Post |
| Forget intergalactic rock operas. The most interesting stories are now about the smallest spaces. | | |
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 | Digital Music News |
| Publishers think they're getting a raw deal in America. But you can't deregulate without destroying some of the biggest streaming services in the world. | | |
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 | A Nation of Billions |
| “It’s all House music really…but I see it as [House] music which comes from Africa.” | | |
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 | Adam Neely |
| What is the Real Book and what in the heck is a jazz shibboleth? A history and analysis of the most influential book in jazz music of the past 40 years. | | |
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 | Nest HQ |
| The rate at which music is written and released has exploded in recent years. Practically speaking, it is impossible to ingest and process the weight of around 100,000 albums published per year. Consequently, the majority of it gets lost, forgotten, or simply unheard. | | |
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 | Slate |
| The most consistent male pop star of the 2010s, Mars first topped the chart seven long years ago (to the week) and should, in theory, be well past his prime by now. And yet it’s Bruno—not some young lion like Lil Yachty or Lil Uzi Vert—who comes out on top in a very competitive top 10. | | |
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| The Guardian |
| Utopian, eclectic and eccentric, the song contest was set up to unite cultures. Can it survive the rise in nationalism - and how will Brexit Britain's entry be received? | | |
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 | Longreads |
| Fronted by Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell, Temple of the Dog was the original rock supergroup. Their music video “Hunger Strike” helped launch a musical movement. | | |
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 | David Emery Online |
| When I started my career in music I worked in what was then known as the New Media department. “This new internet malarkey” we collectively thought “is probably something we should pay attention to. Let’s separate out the people that seem to understand what it is hope they don’t cause too much fuss.” | | |
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| Quartz |
| The technology underpinning bitcoin could help Spotify solve a big problem. | | |
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 | The New York Times |
| As opera’s biggest stars shared the spotlight at a gala concert on Sunday, the Met’s follow-spot operators lit them from six stories above the stage. | | |
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 | Pitchfork |
| At this point, Gary, Indiana is a steel town best known for its merciless decay. But it’s also the home of Jerrilynn Patton, a producer at the vanguard of electronic music who makes tracks that pulse with a quick and steady heartbeat. | | |
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 | Wax Poetics |
| The glory days of the super-producer are far from over; it’s just that the landscape has drastically shifted into a postmodern apocalypse, metaphorically similar to the cover painting of Earth Rot. Is Timbaland the closest we have to a Norman Whitfield? Is Kanye West the new breed of arranger? | | |
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 | The Fader |
| How do you cope when your social feed reflects how much the world devalues you? | | |
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 | The Music Business Journal |
| Coca-Cola is taking giant steps in developing countries to harness the loyalty of teenagers to its brand. The company, which has a long history of integrating popular music into its product lifestyle, is now making music the tool of choice (sic) “to refresh the world” and “inspire moments of optimism and happiness”. | | |
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 | Wear Your Voice |
| Lucky for us that a space like Afropunk is still within reach for black America and can serve as the inspiration for similar spaces to crop up. | | |
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 | YouTube |
| | | | Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross |
| | Written for the player piano in Banksy's Walled Off Hotel. |
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| © Copyright 2017, The REDEF Group |
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