| We are past our breaking point. We can’t hang on any longer. We want to participate in America’s economic recovery, but our venues can’t afford to re-open our businesses. Many of us have exhausted our PPP loans, our EIDL loans and whatever assistance we’ve been able to garner at the State and Local levels. |
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Spoonman: Blanco Brown at the CMT Music Awards, Nashville, June 9, 2021.
(Erika Goldring/Getty Images)
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“We are past our breaking point. We can’t hang on any longer. We want to participate in America’s economic recovery, but our venues can’t afford to re-open our businesses. Many of us have exhausted our PPP loans, our EIDL loans and whatever assistance we’ve been able to garner at the State and Local levels.”
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Games People Play
There are two sides, at least, to every story, and in the story of the neverending war between copyright owners and tech startups, you sometimes only need to talk to one party to get both of those sides. If, for example, you were at MTV/VIACOM's New York headquarters during the early days of YOUTUBE, you either worked on a floor that was suing YouTube for hosting Viacom clips without any kind of licensing agreement, or you worked on a floor that was uploading those very clips to YouTube, licensing agreement be damned, because it was good marketing. If, say, you're a major music publisher in 2021, you're currently either suing the gaming platform ROBLOX or you're in business with it. The former group, which announced the $200 million legal action Wednesday, includes the publishing arms of UNIVERSAL MUSIC, CONCORD MUSIC, BIG MACHINE RECORDS, DOWNTOWN MUSIC, KOBALT, HIPGNOSIS and several others, who say the gaming company is committing copyright infringement on "a massive scale" by charging its users to upload music it doesn't have the rights to. "Missing from that list," Music Business Worldwide's TIM INGHAM pointed out, were both WARNER MUSIC, which owns a stake in the gaming company, and SONY MUSIC, "which has partnered with Roblox on in-game events by artists including LIL NAS X." Can't live with 'em, can't something something. The Wall Street Journal notes (paywall) that while relationships between music companies and high-tech music users like Roblox, PELOTON and TIKTOK are "contentious and even litigious," the music companies are also "broadly excited about finding new partners across social media, videogames and fitness." The lawsuits, in that reading, might amount to an expensive way of saying hello.
On the other hand, without singling out Roblox, which has yet to comment on the suit, it's hard not to wonder why every tech startup seems intent on making its music partners go through this. The idea that artists, songwriters, labels and publishers need to be paid for any commercial use of their work (let's just pretend, for the purposes of this sentence, that terrestrial radio doesn't exist in the US) should hardly be controversial and should hardly need explaining, even to a disruptive tech startup. Especially now. Countless artists have gone more than a year without their main source of income, thanks to the same pandemic that, the Journal's ANNE STEELE and SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN write, "has accelerated the growth of at-home fitness apps and gaming and streaming companies." Considering that imbalance in fortunes, now seems a particularly cruel time to make the artists beg and/or sue. Which isn't to say there isn't any money coming in in music these days. There is. But Roblox's market cap is in the neighborhood of $52 billion, and as of this March it had 42 million users. Imagine getting the equivalent of this email from a company of that size. Don't be that company.
Relief Pitch
Music venues, unfortunately, can't sue the U.S. government for their missing money. So instead they wrote a letter. Six months after Congress passed the $16 billion SAVE OUR STAGES act, only 90 venues have had their applications for Small Venues Operators Grants approved, and only "a few" of those have actually received the grant money, the National Independent Venue Association reports. Mind-boggling. Inexcusable. Infuriating.
Getting Closer
CARRIE UNDERWOOD, JOHN LEGEND, GABBY BARRETT and KANE BROWN took home the top prizes at Wednesday's CMT MUSIC AWARDS, whose cross-genre and cross-generational collaborations included a guitar shredding duel between H.E.R. and a slightly outmatched CHRIS STAPLETON, and MICKEY GUYTON, BRELAND and GLADYS KNIGHT riding a "FRIENDSHIP TRAIN" together. The live audience inside Nashville's BRIDGESTONE ARENA was small and about half the performances were pre-taped, but the show felt one or two steps closer to live than any music awards show has been since the start of the pandemic.
Dating Dos and Don'ts
Musicians: Do not ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, period, full stop, do this.
Rest in Peace
Washington, D.C., folk and Celtic singer GRACE GRIFFITH.
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| Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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Chicago Reader |
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| Thirty years ago, a Black queer zine captured the scene that birthed house |
| by Leor Galil |
| Robert Ford and Trent Adkins shaped the bold, subversive, gossipy, funny, deeply engaged voice of Thing, felled by the AIDS pandemic in 1993. |
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Variety |
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| Indie Venues Send Distress Signal to Congress as $16 Billion in ‘Save Our Stages’ Relief Money Remains Tied up by SBA |
| by Jem Aswad |
| Nearly six months after Congress passed the $16 billion Save Our Stages act into law, less than 100 of the nearly 5,000 struggling independent venues have been approved for relief money, according to a report released Wednesday by the Small Business Administration - and just "a few" have actually received any funds. |
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Complex |
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| Sacred Ground: The Magic of Rick Rubin, American Songs, and Shangri-La |
| by Kyle Eustice |
| El-P, Kevin Abstract, Romil Hemnani, Jean Dawson, and The Blossom pull back the curtain on the creative haven that Rick Rubin has cultivated at Shangri-La. |
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The Washington Post |
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| Morgan Wallen’s abrupt return is a reminder of what has -- and hasn’t -- changed in country music |
| by Emily Yahr |
| Morgan Wallen was far too successful to ever disappear. But without any real public reflection on the past several months, his return to the spotlight is a jarring reminder that for all the introspection this last year about the lack of diversity in country music, some in the industry would be fine to go back to business as usual. This was an outcome many feared. |
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The Guardian |
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| Behind the rise of hyperpop |
| by Laura Murphy-Oates and Shaad D'Souza |
| Music writer Shaad D’Souza speaks to Laura Murphy-Oates about the rise of a vibrant and strange genre of music called hyperpop - and what its ascent tells us about the influence of big corporations like Spotify. |
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Los Angeles Times |
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| How Compton's Charm La'Donna found the courage to go from star choreographer to hip-hop MC |
| by Suzy Exposito |
| Charm La'Donna was already a success story, an A-list choreographer for stars from Kendrick Lamar to Rosalía. Now, at 32, she's made her rap debut. |
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The New York Times |
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| YouTube Isn’t the Music Villain Anymore |
| by Shira Ovide |
| YouTube seems to have shown that it’s possible to both upend an industry and help make it stronger. |
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Billboard |
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| As Royalties Sales Ramp Up, Labels Are Overwhelmed by New Accounting Requests |
| by Ed Christman and Glenn Peoples |
| Universal Music and other labels are overwhelmed with requests from artists asking to direct their royalties straight to the buyers snapping them up as assets. |
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NPR Music |
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| Floating Along In Uncertainty With Vijay Iyer |
| by Rachel Martin and Vince Pearson |
| For the final entry in Morning Edition's Song Project series, Vijay Iyer wrote a rhizomatic, inviting - and not entirely placating - instrumental piece to encapsulate his past year. |
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Level |
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| How Ronald Isley Became a Multigenerational Sex Symbol |
| by Bonsu Thompson |
| Fresh off ‘Verzuz’, the R&B legend discusses everything from prison concerts to his pandemic beard to a disgraced collaborator. |
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Complex |
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| Polo G’s Master Plan |
| by Harley Geffner |
| Polo G just scored his first No. 1 hit, and now he’s about to drop a star-studded album. But he has even bigger goals for his career, his city, and the world. |
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Consequence |
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| Disney Music Group’s Mike Daly Shares the Secret to Making a Hit Single |
| by Brad Steiner, Barry Courter and Mike Daly |
| This week on The What Podcast, Barry and Brad sit with Mike Daly, Executive Director of A&R and Music Publishing at Disney Music Group, to talk about the making of hit songs, the business of publishing, and more. |
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Billboard |
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| How Premier's Josh Deutsch Is Shaking Up Music Supervision |
| by Joe Levy |
| "There wasn’t really a scalable solution to music supervision, or even a full service offering strategy, supervision or [administration] on an integrated basis. So we built up a full music-strategy stack." |
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The New York Times |
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| Bobby Rush Lived the Blues. Six Decades On, He’s Still Playing Them. |
| by Brett Anderson |
| On the heels of winning his second Grammy, and on the verge of publishing a memoir, the singer, guitarist and harmonica player is enjoying a long-delayed moment of recognition. |
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The Washington Post |
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| As D.C. nightclubs reopen, DJs start to return to the rotation |
| by Chris Kelly |
| Slithering through a crush of people on the dance floor to meet a friend or make a new one. Orders shouted, arms extended and drinks spilled at the bar. Sweat descending, its origins not always clear. Whether in nightclubs, concert venues or warehouses, these are some of the physical elements of the best DJ nights. |
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Westword |
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| Spin Doctors: Hip-Hop DJs Unite Through the Southwest Alliance |
| by Kyle Harris |
| For years, DJ Antonio "Ontoneyo" Valenzuela had watched Colorado rappers and DJs get short shrift from the music industry. Dismayed, he saw artists failing to promote their new tracks and build a real fan base, local radio stations and promoters ignoring local artists, and DJs rarely getting respect from labels. |
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Ludwig van Toronto |
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| How Toronto's Royal Conservatory Avoided A Disaster |
| by Holly Harris |
| “We’re still here.” The RCM's Dr. Peter Simon talks about how the venerable organization has weathered the global pandemic. |
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Music Business Worldwide |
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| Believe successfully raises €300m in Paris IPO, giving TuneCore owner a market cap of €1.9bn |
| by Murray Stassen |
| The world of independent distribution and services is hotting up. |
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Please Kill Me |
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| Ira Robbins: Trouser Press, Lasting Impact & Life Thereafter |
| by Richie Unterberger |
| Ira Robbins began publishing Trouser Press in 1974 for all the right reasons: love of music on the margins, Anglophilia, fun. That he and co-founders Dave Schulps and Karen Rose didn’t know what they were doing was all the more reason to do it. |
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The Guardian |
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| Krept and Konan make a football anthem for modern England |
| by Lucy Campbell |
| BBC Three documentary follows the south London rappers as they grapple with writing a song for England’s Euro campaign -- and a changing nation. |
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| Music of the day |
| "Night Light" |
| Cold Cave |
| New and orderly. From "Fate in Seven Lessons," out Friday on Heartworm Press. |
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YouTube |
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New and orderly. From "Fate in Seven Lessons," out Friday on Heartworm Press.
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A 1989 "American Masters" doc on the jazz saxophone great, who would have turned 100 last summer.
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| Music | Media | Sports | Fashion | Tech |
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“REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in
everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask ‘why?’” |
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| Jason Hirschhorn |
| CEO & Chief Curator |
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