It’s crazy. I feel like I’m in the game. Like I’m in Fortnite. | | | | Charli XCX at the 9:30 Club, Washington, D.C., Oct. 18, 2019.
(Kyle Gustafson/Washington Post/Getty Images) | | | | | | “It’s crazy. I feel like I’m in the game. Like I’m in Fortnite.”
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| | rantnrave:// In case anyone's unclear what November 2020 means to TAYLOR SWIFT, her social media offers a good clue: Her most recent INSTAGRAM post was about her endorsement in the US presidential election and her last tweet was a link to a get-out-the-vote video by BON IVER's JUSTIN VERNON (in which he sings through a mask; you can do it, too, if you really want to). But lurking in the background is another way November 2020 could be a season of change for the world's reigning pop star. As of November 1, Swift apparently is free, under her old contract with BIG MACHINE RECORDS, to release new recordings of her first five albums, something she has said she's eager to do as part of her ongoing quest to be in complete control of her work. She said it enough times in the aftermath of SCOOTER BRAUN's purchase of Big Machine 16 months ago to suggest she wasn't just letting off steam. Remaking her old albums would give her a chance to direct fans to recordings that directly benefit her rather than a label whose sale she bitterly opposed; it also would allow her to fully control movie, TV and commercial syncs for her songs. What she didn't know when she first talked about it last year was that a pandemic would keep her off the road for all of 2020. Is there a better time for redoing your life's work than the middle of a pandemic? For all anyone knows, she's already done it, has five albums in the can and is waiting for her moment. Whether such a moment is waiting for her is a matter of some conjecture. ALLEN KOVAC, who manages BLONDIE, who re-recorded an album's worth of greatest hits in 2014, told Rolling Stone last year, "The average re-record does 10 to 20 percent [in revenues] of what the original master does." SQUEEZE singer GLENN TILBROOK painted a worse picture for the magazine. A decade after releasing an album of re-recorded hits called SPOT THE DIFFERENCE, he said, "we’ve not had a single uptake" from a music supervisor. But those bands were past their heydays and neither has anywhere near the fanbase Swift currently has, nor the same ability to reach them. A pop star re-recording work that's less than a decade old and still enormously popular is a much less tested proposition. In 2018, JOJO remade two albums she had originally recorded for BLACKGROUND RECORDS, but the label had long kept the originals out of print, so she wasn't competing with herself. "My intention," JoJo wrote in Billboard (paywall), "was to give the fans the nostalgia that they couldn't get." Swift's intention has little to do with nostalgia. It would be more about controlling her career and her work, which makes her part of a more consequential trend—artists declaring their free agency. "The balance of power between labels and artists is tilting toward musicians," the Wall Street Journal's NEIL SHAH writes (paywall) in a piece about YO GOTTI, who's completed his deal with EPIC RECORDS, and TRAVIS SCOTT and KENDRICK LAMAR, who each owe their labels one more album. "The business," says DAVID STROMBERG, general manger of Scott's own CACTUS JACK label, "has changed"... Music publishing, strangely, seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with songwriters tripping over each other to sell their rights in their own work to companies like HIPGNOSIS, which is handing out millions of dollars like SPOTIFY hands out pennies. Hipgnosis' newest acquisition is 42 catalogs containing more than 33,000 songs from KOBALT MUSIC COPYRIGHTS, including pieces of MARIAH CAREY's "ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU," JUSTIN BIEBER's "SORRY" and the FROZEN hit "LET IT GO." The price: $332.9 million... DON'T ROCK THE INBOX is a great new country newsletter from NATALIE WEINER and MARISSA R. MOSS... Techno is officially music and DJs are officially musicians in Germany, where those designations have financial consequences... The title sequences, including song classic theme songs, from all of the late SEAN CONNERY's JAMES BOND films, courtesy JAZZWAX's MARC MYERS... RIP gospel great BISHOP RANCE ALLEN, JAMES BROAD and NIKKI MCKIBBIN. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| It’s been a rough year for Trapt, best-known for their 2003 hit “Headstrong,” and their fringe frontman. | | |
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| The video game has become a music venue as the pandemic continues to keep live shows off the road. The Latin pop star put his own colorful spin on the experience. | | |
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| Billboard spoke to artists and executives on the importance of voting. | | |
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| Pop culture critics say the whole conversation has been politicized, with some officials using it to boost their popularity. | | |
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| “The song is decrying the kind of person [Trump] is," says the Creedence Clearwater Revival founder of his 1969 antiwar classic. "He’s absolutely that person I wrote the song about.” | | |
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| Hip-hop’s foremost oracle returns with "ELE2," once again putting the world -- not to mention rap -- on high alert. | | |
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| House music originator Marshall Jefferson on how the rise of EDM has whitewashed dance music and crippled Black artists. | | |
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| Orchestras and ensembles are pivoting to video, but some worry about what gets lost in translation. | | |
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| The entertainment world is changing amid a pandemic, and drive-in shows are growing in popularity in Chicago. | | |
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| Hip-hop scholar Joycelyn Wilson discusses OutKast’s “Stankonia” two decades after its release. | | |
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| A conversation about the long and complex relationship between music and social justice movements, on our podcast "The Pitchfork Review." | | |
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| The band’s 2010 debut alienated as many listeners as it inspired before Salem dropped out of sight. Its new “Fires in Heaven” arrives in a different landscape. | | |
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| Still using her voice to change the world? You bet your life she is. | | |
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| Music Ally’s Global Experts panel is an international group of industry leaders, and each month we put a single, vital question to them. This month's question: "What is the most effective tool, idea, or approach to take in the next 12 months in order to best diversify your income streams?” | | |
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| "The venues we operate are running on fumes." | | |
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| “Swirling,” the Sun Ra Arkestra’s first new album since 1999, shows that his work is far from done. | | |
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| On Fela Kuti, #EndSARS, and cycles of oppression. | | |
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| The legendary music journalist and Elvis biographer on his new collection, "Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Life." | | |
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| The centerpiece of Copeland's latest album is a song born from the wreckage of the Clotilda - the last known slave ship to smuggle African captives to the United States. | | |
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| In 2019 Massive Attack commissioned the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to report on the live music industry and make recommendations for decarbonisation. Subsequently an exemplar show was planned in Liverpool for October 2020. | | |
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