| Play with the ecstasy you had when you first began. |
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Sofa sounds: Jazz great Pat Martino relaxing, June 10, 1973.
(Len DeLessio/Corbis Historical/Getty Images)
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“Play with the ecstasy you had when you first began.”
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Three or Four Hundred
We all know stories of musical collaborators who met on TWITTER and maybe did their actual collaborating through social media or other internet-based means, but is this also now how music entrepreneurs in corner offices negotiate nine-figure deals? @P is PIERRE "P" THOMAS, co-founder and CEO of the Atlanta label/management behemoth QUALITY CONTROL, whose artists include LIL BABY, MIGOS and LIL YACHTY. @300 is 300 ENTERTAINMENT, the decade-old, data-driven, New York hip-hop tastemaker whose roster boasts the likes of MEGAN THEE STALLION, YOUNG THUG, FETTY WAP, GUNNA and lots more, and which has put itself on the market, according to Bloomberg's LUCAS SHAW, for at least $400 million. Trapital's DAN RUNCIE has the basics on what someone might get for those four hundred million bucks, including a roster whose recording income comes mostly from streaming, not radio, and a group of young pop stars whose sales numbers don't quite match their stardom and "who each have their bull and bear cases." Risk + reward. P's Quality Control label has a booming track record of artist and brand development and he has his bankers on deck and wants to talk. He also, apparently, has a twitter account. Which I guess is what you do in 2021.
Dot Dot Dot
TERRI LYNE CARRINGTON's Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice is teaming up with New Music USA to launch a mentorship program for women and non-binary jazz artists trying to break into a field still dominated by men. The program, Next Jazz Legacy, is accepting applications for its first class of six early-career artists, who'll receive $10,000 cash grants, yearlong performance apprenticeships and access to industry mentors and online classes at Berklee... TIM SWEENEY's long-running WNYU radio show BEATS IN SPACE moves to APPLE MUSIC... Who put the bomp in "WHO PUT THE BOMP (IN THE BOMP, BOMP, BOMP)"? Whoever it may have been, LE TIGRE's KATHLEEN HANNA and JOHANNA FATEMAN have settled out of court with "Who Put the Bomp" singer and co-songwriter BARRY MANN, who accused their 1999 song "DECEPTACON" of stealing lyrics from his 1961 hit, and who in turn sued him, claiming he and co-writer GERRY GOFFIN cribbed the lyrics from older doo wop songs and had no right to claim them as their own. The case was settled "without any public admission of liability," Pitchfork reports... In other "I don't own these lyrics and neither do you" news, GENIUS is asking a federal court in New York to restore its suit against GOOGLE and LYRICFIND, which it accuses of stealing its transcriptions of song lyrics. A judge threw out the case last year on the grounds that Genius doesn't have the copyrights on the lyrics themselves and therefore has no standing to sue. In its appeal, Genius is arguing that what's being stolen isn't the lyrics themselves, but the labor involved in transcribing them. My nonprofessional nonlegal opinion is that publishers should actually send their lyrics to the sites that pay to license them instead of making the sites source them on their own, which is a strange work flow.
Rest in Peace
PAT MARTINO, one of the giants of 20th century jazz guitar, if not *two* of the giants of 20th century jazz guitar. After carving out an influential career as both a sideman and bandleader in the 1960s and '70s with his exquisite tone and "singular soul-jazz feel," he had to learn how to play again, from scratch, after a brain aneurysm in 1980 left him with severe amnesia. It took him nearly a decade to master his instrument again. That experience was "the greatest thing that ever happened to me," he would say later in life... Agent JESSE ARATOW, whose clients included String Cheese Incident and Leftover Salmon.
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| Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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Money 4 Nothing |
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| Music‘s Environmental Impact with Kyle Devine |
| by Saxon Baird, Sam Backer and Kyle Devine |
| How is music made? Not how do record companies work, but how is music *made*? And where does it go after we're done with it? According to Kyle Devine, a professor of musicology at the University of Oslo, we’ve all been paying far too little to this story, closing our eyes to the environmental implications of our favorite sounds. |
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NPR |
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| Why hip-hop festival Rolling Loud seems to be a hotbed for arrests |
| by Audie Cornish, Mano Sundaresan and Mallory Yu |
| Rapper Fetty Wap was arrested at Rolling Loud New York on drug charges. NPR's Audie Cornish talks with music journalist Jayson Buford on the festival's history with police activity and rapper arrests. |
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The Believer |
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| RETRO READ: An Interview with Pat Martino |
| by Greg Buium |
| "Interaction is an instrument in itself." |
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Cambridge Core |
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| American music writing: an unruly history |
| by Eric Weisbard |
| Popular music writing has made for strange colleagues and quickly lost legacies. I want to sketch some of them and suggest how they continue to influence the US version of popular music studies, arguably more so in our moment than in the previous period that codified an academic approach. |
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PopMatters |
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| Thrift-Shop Paydirt: When Used Records Become Learning Opportunities |
| by Kurt Wildermuth |
| Being a thrift-shopper and connoisseur of used records offers the chance to learn about music history and unearth forgotten, should-have-been classics. |
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Trapital |
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| Why 300 Entertainment is Exploring a Potential Sale |
| by Dan Runcie |
| Acquiring 300 is a bet on the trajectory of its biggest stars—Young Thug, Megan Thee Stallion, and Gunna— who each have their bull and bear cases. |
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NPR Music |
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| Isaiah Rashad and Kal Banx lit up the darkness to make 'The House Is Burning' |
| by Rodney Carmichael |
| Isaiah Rashad and producer Kal Banx's relationship reveals how the best artist-producer collaborations work lot like life - with friends to distract us from, and soundtrack us through, all our drama. |
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Pollstar |
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| Monsters of Stadium Alt-Rock: How Green Day, Fall Out Boy And Weezer Crushed It Post-COVID In 'Hella Mega' Style |
| by Eric Renner Brown |
| Globe Life’s sold-out “Hella Mega” stop grossed $3.2 million, kicking off 20 dates that moved 659,062 tickets and raked in $67.3 million, including seven gigs that topped $4 million. But it symbolized much more, reasserting live music’s strength on an epic scale after a brutal year-plus. |
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Billboard |
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| Utopia Music Acquires Lyric Financial Amid Surge of Investment in Independent Music |
| by Glenn Peoples |
| Utopia Music has acquired Lyric Financial, a Nashville-based provider of royalty-backed cash advances. |
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Los Angeles Times |
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| How the music of Filipino youth continues to rock the regime |
| by Charisma Madarang |
| Though it has never crossed into the mainstream, the Philippines' reinterpretation of rock still feels like home in America. |
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Please Kill Me |
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| Like A Virgin: When Richard Branson’s Label Mattered |
| by Anthony Mostrom |
| The success of Mike Oldfield’s album "Tubular Bells" (1973) put Virgin Records, Richard Branson’s brand new label, on the map. Before it lost its way, and became just one more bauble among billionaire Branson’s crown jewels, Virgin was by far the hippest, most experimental-leaning rock record label in the world. |
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Culture Notes of an Honest Broker |
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| The Tragedy of Eva Cassidy |
| by Ted Gioia |
| She left us 25 years ago today, at age 33-never realizing how famous and beloved she would become after her death. |
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Complete Music Update |
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| Setlist: Covid wipes nearly $1 billion off song royalties |
| by Andy Malt |
| CMU's Andy Malt and Chris Cooke review key events in music and the music business from the last week, including the 10.7% (or 775 million euros) drop in royalties collected by the song right collecting societies across the world as a result of COVID-19 in 2020, and the leaked UK government report that suggests that COVID passports might be counterproductive. |
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Stereogum |
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| Read About Echo And The Bunnymen’s First Gig In An Excerpt From Will Sergeant’s New Memoir |
| by Will Sergeant |
| We are ready to go on. We have checked all the equipment. My trusty FAL amplifier red light is lit and ready to go. Les has borrowed a bass amp and we are all set. Julian bounds on to the stage like a 1970s Radio 1 DJ. “Hello. This is Echo And The Bunnymen.” I’m thinking, What was that? Echo And The Funnymen? Where the hell did he get that from? |
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Audacy |
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| Breaking Waves: Seattle, Episode 4: Can You Hear Us? The New Puget Sound |
| by Ryan Castle |
| In the finale of Breaking Waves: Seattle, we look at the collapse of the scene in 1997, and how Seattle struggled to find a new musical identity. From the ashes of grunge, a new scene began to form. |
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Salon |
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| 'Feminist AF' author on hip-hop and feminism today: 'We're not playing nice anymore' |
| by Kylie Cheung |
| A new feminist handbook explores how "movements like feminism that are seen as no fun" can coexist with hip-hop. |
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The Guardian |
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| Locked down in Cornwall, the sea brought me energy and spiritual healing |
| by Tori Amos |
| Grieving my mother and the ceremony of playing live, I collaborated instead with the land, water and muses of Cornwall - they helped me reboard my sonic spaceship. |
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KQED |
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| SF Officials Got Free Tickets to Pricey Outside Lands Fest Through Ethically Questionable Loophole |
| by Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez |
| Between 2015 and 2019, the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, which is in charge of the contract for the event space, distributed more than 1,800 free tickets to its staffers and other city officials, according to a recent San Francisco Ethics Commission report. |
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Billboard |
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| Why 'White Christmas' Struck a Chord In WWII: 'Hollywood Victory' Book Excerpt |
| by Christian Blauvelt |
| An excerpt from 'Hollywood Victory' delves into why "White Christmas" is the most enduring cultural work to come out of America during World War II. |
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Mashable |
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| Why Gen Z is plugging in wired headphones and tuning out AirPods |
| by Elena Cavender |
| The must-have accessory for fall? According to Gen Z, it's a $30 pair of wired headphones. "Wired is an attitude," says Shelby Hull, the 24-year-old creator of the Instagram account @wireditgirls. |
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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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