| Nobody knows royalties; even people [who work in] royalties don’t understand it... [They're] so convoluted and crazy so artists don’t understand it. Of course heirs don’t understand it, and most people in the music business don’t even understand it. |
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Maya Jane Coles in the Soma Tent at Outside Lands, San Francisco, Oct. 31, 2021.
(FilmMagic/Getty Images)
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“Nobody knows royalties; even people [who work in] royalties don’t understand it... [They're] so convoluted and crazy so artists don’t understand it. Of course heirs don’t understand it, and most people in the music business don’t even understand it.”
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Collection, Agency
The season for complaining about Christmas songs seems to have started early this year, but the season for getting paid for having written one of those Christmas songs is still a long way off. "What's it like getting those royalty cheques every Christmas?," the late GREG LAKE asked a few years back, echoing one of the most common questions he gets about his perennial, PROKOFIEV-quoting holiday standard "I BELIEVE IN FATHER CHRISTMAS." "I wouldn’t know," he answered. "They don’t turn up ’til bloody August." Which sounds frustrating until you read a story like this one, by Rolling Stone's JONATHAN BERNSTEIN, about the decade-long fight by the children of R&B singer JOHNNIE TAYLOR to get any royalties at all from SONY MUSIC. Different circumstances, different kind of royalties, these for the performer of the first song ever to be awarded a platinum record, the 1976 hit "DISCO LADY." And a worse result: Years and years of emails to royalty managers and record company lawyers who insisted that decades after recording his masterwork, and long after his death, Johnnie Taylor was still, improbably, in debt to his record company. Bernstein's piece is a good read into the day-to-day and year-to-year frustrations of artists and their families trying to navigate record company accounting departments. It has a sort of happy ending. In 2020, Sony agreed to wipe out Taylor's unrecouped balance and sent the family a $97,000 check to square the account. A year later, with the music industry under pressure to make amends for decades of mistreatment of Black artists, Sony said it would waive unrecouped debts for all of its legacy artists. But deep frustrations, and resentments, remain. The last paragraph of Bernstein's story is an angry one, a message from FONDA BRYANT, one of Johnnie Taylor's nine children, that after a year of record company reflections and attempts at reparations, everything is still, in her words, "not OK... I think they're lying through their teeth."
Etc Etc Etc
A list of 182 musicians available on CAMEO to make personal videos for you or anyone on your holiday list, including TOMMY LEE ($500), FLAVOR FLAV ($400), NE-YO ($325) and TAYLOR DAYNE ($149)... An Australian music publicist is spearheading a campaign to make hold music better by replacing royalty-free instrumental loops with songs by local bands... Kashmiri protest music... LET IT BE director MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG defends his controversial, long-out-of-print BEATLES film, whose footage is the basis of PETER JACKSON's upcoming redo, GET BACK... TOBY KEITH, AMY GRANT, STEVE EARLE and seven others inducted into the NASHVILLE SONGWRITERS HALL OF FAME.
Rest in Peace
RONNIE WILSON, who co-founded the Gap Band with his brothers Charlie and Robert and primarily played trumpet and keyboards... Influential British rock and metal journalist MALCOLM DOME, who co-wrote the early metal reference "Encyclopedia Metallica" and coined the term "thrash metal"... SABAH FAKRHI, Syrian tenor and ambassador for Arabic classical music.
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| Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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| take care of your homework |
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Billboard |
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| Mitski Went on Hiatus For Two Years -- And Still Became a Streaming Sensation |
| by Mia Hughes |
| The indie singer-songwriter’s prominence on TikTok doesn’t seem to be linked to any one track. And TikTokers aren't just using Mitski as backing music, they’re discussing her artistry or highlighting lines that resonate with them. |
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Black Music and Black Muses |
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| Endangered Musics |
| by Harmony Holiday |
| Some thoughts on the risk of saying nothing. |
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Engadget |
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| I wish anyone other than Kanye made the Stem Player |
| by Terrence O'Brien |
| This fascinating pocket-sized remixer can be fun, but is clearly pushing the limits of its technology. |
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Music x |
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| What’s cooking in Music DAOs? MusicFund, Dreams Never Die, Water & Music, FWB Gatekeeper, Polly, XYZ & Club BPM |
| by Bas Grasmayer |
| There are probably a dozen or two experiments every month that may contribute to the reorganising of music’s digital value chain in a way that benefits creators, fans and their surrounding communities more directly. |
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Vulture |
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| New ABBA, Just Like the Old ABBA (and Then Some!) |
| by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding |
| Figuring out what makes the band tick on the occasion of their first album in 40 years. |
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Music Business Worldwide |
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| YouTube’s ads business is now bigger than the entire global record business |
| by Tim Ingham |
| MBW predicts that YouTube's ad revenues could breach the $30 billion mark this year alone. |
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The New York Times |
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| How Esperanza Spalding and Wayne Shorter Realized His Dream: an Opera |
| by Giovanni Russonello |
| “Iphigenia,” an update of the ancient Greek myth eight years in the making and decades in the dreaming, will begin a run of performances this month. |
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Broken Record |
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| Broken Record: Pastor T.L. Barrett |
| by Justin Richmond and T.L. Barrett |
| Pastor T.L. Barrett has been known on Chicago's South side as a religious and community leader for 50 years. But it wasn't until recently that people started to uncover Barrett's trove of gospel music. |
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Guitar World |
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| Yola: 'It's unfortunate that patriarchy plays a big role in the story of guitar playing. But the guitar, to me, means freedom' |
| by Amit Sharma |
| The four-time Grammy-nominated guitarist and singer-songwriter on her duty to claim the guitar, playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic, and tracking down fuzz tones with Dan Auerbach for her sophomore album, "Stand For Myself." |
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Dada Drummer Almanach |
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| An Economic Argument for Piracy |
| by Damon Krukowski |
| What I want to set out here is a positive economic argument for piracy. Not a reason it should be tolerated, but the way it actually contributes to industries based on digital intellectual property. And to make that argument more dramatic… I’m going to put the rest of this essay behind a paywall. That means fewer will read what follows – unless, of course, it is itself pirated. |
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Jacobs Media Strategies |
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| If Radio Won't Reinvent Itself, Maybe Someone Else Will |
| by Fred Jacobs |
| Amazon's "Project Mic" is the latest big tech approach to "reinventing radio." |
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Holler |
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| Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats: Hell of A View |
| by Nathan Mclaren Stewart |
| Ahead of the release of their new album "The Future," via Stax Records, Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats sit down with Nathan Mclaren Stewart for Holler. |
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The FADER |
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| DJ Premier on Gang Starr, ’80s synth pop, and Biggie’s comedic side |
| by Mark Ronson and DJ Premier |
| Mark Ronson sits down with the legendary DJ Premier. |
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Music Business Worldwide |
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| ‘What we’re building at Downtown has never been done before’ |
| by Murray Stassen |
| Andrew Bergman and Justin Kalifowitz on Downtown Music Holdings, present and future. |
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Variety |
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| Grammy Awards: When Will The Recording Academy Take Video Game Scores Seriously? |
| by Jazz Tangcay |
| In the history of the Grammy Awards, only one video game score, Austin Wintory's "Journey," has been nominated in the best score soundtrack for visual media category - and that was in 2012. |
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Vulture |
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| Dissecting Genesis’ ‘Jesus He Knows Me’ With the Coolest Pastor I Know |
| by Devon Ivie |
| “I probably took Phil Collins more seriously than he took himself on some of his songs.” |
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The Guardian |
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| They shoot, he scores! The composer who set a legendary Arsenal match to music |
| by Mark-Anthony Turnage |
| It was one of the most thrilling nights of his life. Composer Mark-Anthony Turnage explains why he wrote a soundtrack, full of terrace chants, to a legendary Gunners victory over Liverpool. |
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PopMatters |
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| Recorded Music Is Everlasting and That's a Problem Argues Decomposed |
| by Ryan Blakeley |
| Kyle Devine’s book 'Decomposed' is a landmark contribution to musicology, offering a sobering but sorely needed account of recorded music’s environmental consequences. |
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AL.com |
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| Acclaimed Southern-rock band’s complete saga told for first time |
| by Matt Wake |
| New book chronicles Drive-By Truckers, including band’s Jason Isbell era. |
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4Columns |
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| Review: 'The Velvet Underground' |
| by Geeta Dayal |
| In Todd Haynes’s documentary, a limited view of the noted band. |
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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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