You’re the only one doing anything f***ing interesting nowadays. | | | | Shawn Mendes at the Staples Center, Los Angeles, July 5, 2019.
(Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images) | | | | |  | “You’re the only one doing anything f***ing interesting nowadays.”
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| | rantnrave:// Good news #1: What may well be the best festival of this 50th anniversary WOODSTOCK summer is still happening on the anniversary weekend. It's happening in Cambridgeshire, England, and will feature the likes of THE COMET IS COMING, NUBYA GARCIA, MOSES BOYD, THEO PARRISH, GILLES PETERSON and A CERTAIN RATIO. Au courant, forward-thinking and exploratory jazz, techno, hip-hop, rock and more, played by a long weekend's worth of well curated 2019 talent in the English countryside for a ticket price of about US$200 for four days (tickets are still available). I can't think of a better way to honor the spirit of August 1969 than WE OUT HERE... Good news #2: The best chance for further tarnishing the actual Woodstock brand on the same weekend has been mercifully laid to rest. Taking a cue from its own artists, who had been lining up to back out of the fest over the past several days, WOODSTOCK 50 finally threw in the towel Wednesday. Dysfunctional in death as in life, festival founder MICHAEL LANG gave a postmortem interview with ROLLING STONE in which he said, and I quote, "I'm not a partner in Woodstock 50. They licensed it from Woodstock Ventures, where I am a partner." In BILLBOARD, meanwhile, JOEL ROSENMAN, one of Lang's partners in the original Woodstock, expressed his disappointment in Woodstock 50, "Michael Lang's company." Take it offline, guys, buy a couple of plane tickets to England and try again in 2069 if you're still feeling up to it... SPOTIFY's paid subscriber count is up to a sector-leaning 108 million, but that's less than the company expected. "We missed on subs," the company said in its Q2 earnings report... At PANDORA, subscription revenue is up but monthly listeners are down. Revenues and subscriber numbers were up at parent company SIRIUSXM... As a British judge formally began the process of liquidating PLEDGEMUSIC, the trade organization UK MUSIC asked for a government investigation into possible regulatory breaches by the failed crowdfunding platform. Pledge collapsed while reportedly owing as much as $3 million to artists who had used it for crowdfunding campaigns. Cofounder BENJI ROGERS says liquidation "was not the route that I personally wanted for PledgeMusic" but plans to save the company through the administration process fell through in the past week... RIP HAL PRINCE, JOSHUA WARREN and WALTER HOMBURGER. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | | | | Title song from album due Oct. 4 on Jagjaguwar. |
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