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.