I hate when mother***ers put out an album longer than 14 songs. Nobody wants to f***ing listen to that. Nobody's getting through that in a day. I don't care if it was Michael Jackson, I am not listening to 25 songs. | | | | Take me down to the hospital: Violinist Fiamma Flavia Paolucci performs at Tor Vergata Hospital in Rome on International Nurses Day, May 12, 2020.
(Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | “I hate when mother***ers put out an album longer than 14 songs. Nobody wants to f***ing listen to that. Nobody's getting through that in a day. I don't care if it was Michael Jackson, I am not listening to 25 songs.”
| | | | | | rantnrave:// The two best things about TONY's, the Italian restaurant on Route 9 where I spent dozens and dozens of nights with my family when I was growing up outside Boston, were the pizza, with cheese bubbles seemingly still forming when it arrived at the table, and the jukebox in every booth. You had to love a restaurant with a jukebox in every booth. You had direct control over the dinner soundtrack, but you had to share that control with everyone else in the restaurant, since the tabletop units were satellite controllers that all controlled the same player. A community playlist. I could practically taste that pizza and feel those buttons when I read about SPOTIFY's new Group Session feature, which allows multiple people to control the same playlist in real time. It's like having an old-school jukebox in the house, accessible to everybody, no coins or dollar bills required. But only in the house. Though the feature can accommodate up to 100 users, they all have to be in the same location. They all have to be close enough to each other that they might find it easier to just pass a phone around instead of trying to scan a code on the account owner's phone, which seems a little complicated. What I want, what I have always wanted, is sharing at a distance. I want to play music for my friends 25 miles or 2500 miles away, and I want them to be able to play music for me, and I want all of us to be listening to the same music at the exact time, as if we were in the same location even though we're not. A virtual soundtrack for a virtual clubhouse. I could just listen in on what a friend is playing if I wanted to, and maybe drop a few tracks of my own into the queue whenever the mood strikes. Gimme that, Spotify, and I'll hang around and order dessert... I've had my issues with TICKETMASTER's clumsy response to cancellations and postponements during the pandemic, but this open letter to the company from two members of Congress seems a little weird. Reps. BILL PASCRELL and KATIE PORTER spend nine paragraphs retracing clumsy steps that the company has already corrected before getting around to demanding that Ticketmaster be even more aggressive in offering refunds. I agree with the cause—a ticketing business whose parent company says it has enough untapped liquidity to easily survive the rest of 2020 "without doing any shows at scale" *should* be proactively refunding every ducat it can—but the demand seems heavyhanded, all things considered. Ticketmaster president JARED SMITH responds (and uses the opportunity to shred his competitors on the secondary ticket market, also justifiably, also heavyhandedly)... The owner of TEMPLELIVE in Fort Smith, Ark., isn't taking GOV. ASA HUTCHISON's no for an answer in regard to a scheduled TRAVIS MCCREADY concert Friday that violates the state's pandemic reopening order in multiple ways. The club says it's moving forward with what's being billed as the first major concert in the US since the country started reopening, and is having a press conference this afternoon... The much safer play for fans, if you ask me, is to stay home watch the classic 1985 PRINCE & THE REVOLUTION concert that his estate will be streaming on YOUTUBE for three days starting at 8 pm ET tonight. It's a freebie, but the estate is accepting donations for the WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION's Covid-19 Solidary Response Fund... This online album art coloring book is your awesome time waster of the day... Unless you'd like to waste your day with eight zillion PEEL SESSIONS, which I could hardly blame you for. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | | | |  | Penny Fractions | | A slightly extensive, though certainly not comprehensive, history of private equity’s roots in the music industry. | | | |  | Stereogum | | On OpenAI JukeBox, human creativity, and the future of AI-generated music. | | | |  | MusicAlly | | The topic of user-centric music streaming payouts is one that’s going to keep popping up, and many people talk about it from a position of gut feeling. | | | |  | Vulture | | If this is how we party now, pop’s reigning futurist is here for it. | | | |  | The New Yorker | | The strangeness of self-quarantine has encouraged a certain amount of controlled indulgence: when merely getting through the day feels like an accomplishment, it's easier to forgive oneself for odd cravings and minor social crimes. For me, this has mostly meant listening to " Danzig Sings Elvis," a new collection of standards made famous by Elvis Presley and reinterpreted by the sixty-four-year-old heavy-metal singer Glenn Danzig. | | | |  | Billboard | | Even after Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he would not permit a Travis McCready concert in Fort Smith to take place Friday the venue says it's moving forward, along with another show in Missouri planned for Saturday. | | | |  | The New York Times | | Volunteer-run broadcasters are a British tradition. During the pandemic, they’re cheering patients up with jazz standards and soft rock. | | | |  | Detroit Metro Times | | Detroit rapper Gmac Cash says it only took "about an hour" to write "Justice for Ahmaud" - an emotional two-minute-and-30-second track dedicated to Ahmaud Arbery, the unarmed Black man slain by two white men - one of whom was a retired law enforcement officer - while jogging in his Georgia neighborhood in February. | | | |  | The Undefeated | | Look at the conversation around ‘GOOBA’; it’s the theater around who he is that’s the draw, not the music. | | | |  | Los Angeles Times | | The Hollywood Bowl played through world wars and the Great Depression, but it couldn't beat COVID-19. How L.A. is losing its beloved symbol of summer. | | | |  | Salon | | "The act of singing itself might have contributed to SARS-CoV-2 transmission," the CDC says of a choir practice outbreak | | | | | Billboard | | From Dua Lipa to Blue Oyster Cult to Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, bands have been figuring out how to perform remotely during the pandemic. | | | |  | Rolling Stone | | The crisis is slowing the music business down, but publishers are still sending out deal offers - in some cases, more than before. | | | |  | Disgraceland | | He was taken from us too soon and we’re still searching for answers. | | | | | The Undefeated | | Over five albums in the ’70s, Wonder’s music focused on our humanity in a way much of society refused to accept. And still hasn’t. | | | |  | Variety | | It's a Spring Saturday and somewhere deep in Philadelphia, five twentysomethings are huddled in a small apartment, each hunched over a computer. The click-clack of their keyboards is the only sound heard in the room, but via their devices, they're running one of the largest music festivals in the world. | | | | | The New York Times | | A lucky group of concertgoers experienced live music for the first time since lockdown, in a series of ultra-intimate recitals. | | | |  | Dallas Observer | | A lone light shines down on a stage shrouded in darkness. There's the faint sound of movement, of shoes shuffling, throats clearing. Seconds pass, and the electric feeling of anticipation rises, the moment of, "They're here; the show is finally starting." | | | |  | The Ringer | | Revisiting the watershed year of 1990, when Digital Underground, Too Short, En Vogue, and others helped make the city the center of black music. | | | |  | Decibel | | Ex-Starkweather/current Below the Frost bassist Michelle Eddison brings the visual violence in a new series of transcendent paintings. | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | | | | "Gonna sing my worries away." | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2020, The REDEF Group | | |
