| My sound engineer wrote to me yesterday that he didn't have any water... He cannot go out, it's dangerous. |
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| Ukrainian singer Jamala in Kyiv, May 9, 2017. |
| (Michael Campanella/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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| rantnrave:// |
Lyrical Flow
A US federal appeals court last week upheld a lower court's ruling that GENIUS has no standing to sue GOOGLE and LYRICFIND for allegedly cribbing its transcriptions of song lyrics, on the grounds that Genius doesn't own the copyrights in the songs themselves. This seemingly ends a two-and-a-half-year legal fight over Google search results for lyrics. LyricFind, one of the companies that supplies lyrics for the Google information boxes that trump all other search results for songs, is legally free, it appears, to cut-and-paste all the Genius transcriptions it wants into its own database and then into Google's database, if in fact that's what it's been doing and if that's what it wants to continue to do. I've written about this once or twice before and won't repeat myself except to say it remains weird that music publishers don't routinely supply the actual lyrics to the sites they license lyrics to—they basically license the right for the sites to figure out the lyrics on their own, with occasionally hilarious results—and just because the law says you can copy them from other sites that have already done that work, doesn't mean you should. It's still someone else's work, copyright-protected or not. If I was Genius, I'd start randomly hiding hilarious results like "Google Probably Stole This Lyric" in the html code of transcriptions in a way that makes them automatically show up anywhere they're copy-pasted. (Genius, it should be noted, originally sued for $50 million, which is more than half of what the entire company was worth when it sold itself at a fire-sale price in September to MEDIALAB, and has a few of its own issues to answer for.)
In Other Legal News
Has the tide officially turned in favor of defendants in music plagiarism suits? While high-profile suits against DUA LIPA and ED SHEERAN work their way through courts on both sides of the Atlantic, an appeals court in the US drove the final nail into Christian rapper FLAME's case against KATY PERRY's "DARK HORSE" last week. In a ruling that stunned and alarmed top-shelf songwriters and music publishers, Flame had won a $2.8 million judgment in 2019 over a short, similar ostinato that appeared in Perry's song and his "JOYFUL NOISE." But it was overturned a year later, and on Thursday, the appeals court declined to reinstate the original judgment, writing, "Just as films often rely on tropes to tell a compelling story, music uses standard tools to build and resolve dramatic tension," and what the two songs shared was "a manifestly conventional arrangement of musical building blocks." That's the exact judgment and reasoning Lipa, Sheeran and other prominent plagiarism targets have been seeking—what you might call the "that's how songwriting works" defense. Quote of the week from Sheeran, asked in a British courtroom if his melody for "SHAPE OF YOU" was similar to his accuser SAM CHOKRI's "OH WHY": "Fundamentally, yes. They are based around the minor pentatonic scale [and] they both have vowels in them." The same defense, it should be noted, can be used by the writers of any future songs that sound suspiciously like "Dark Horse" or "Shape of You" or Lipa's "LEVITATING." One hopes the pop stars and their publishers will be as reluctant to raise a fuss when that happens as they were appalled when a fuss was raised against them.
Walking the Floor Over You
I'm pretty sure I've bought more records from the ERNEST TUBB RECORD SHOP on Lower Broadway in Nashville than I have from any other record store I've never lived within 800 miles of, starting, if I'm not mistaken, with these two 7-inch singles. I hate this news. People who do live within 800 miles hate it even more. An American treasure.
Rest in Peace
1970s soul singer (and songwriter and producer) TIMMY THOMAS, best known for the 1972 anti-war classic "Why Can't We Live Together"... Singer and reality show star TRACI BRAXTON... Country singer/songwriter BRAD MARTIN.
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| - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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Trapital |
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| How Quality Control Music Invests in Startups |
| By Dan Runcie and Dazayah Walker |
| Being a 23-year-old venture capitalist is difficult as is. Now tack on being female and black? “It’s been a journey”, as Dazayah Walker, head of investments at Quality Control Music, shares with us in this episode of the Trapital podcast. |
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The New York Times |
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| A New, Stealthy Kind of Protest Music |
| By Carina del Valle Schorske |
| Latin-American artists use images of fruits and flowers to expose the desecration of their homelands and sound out new futures. |
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Saving Country Music |
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| We Need To Discuss The Sale of the Ernest Tubb Record Shop |
| By Kyle 'Trigger' Coroneos |
| We all just need to appreciate that the Ernest Tubb Record Shop on Lower Broadway in Nashville is not just a building, and it's not just a business. It isn't just brick and mortar, any more than the Ryman Auditorium is. It is a cultural institution and landmark. |
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Variety |
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| SXSW Returns In-Person to Stormy Texas Political Climate |
| By Matt Donnelly |
| An unseasonable cold and rainy spell drifted through Austin on Friday, as attendees poured into the SXSW conference in person for the first time in two years. But that's not the only storm brewing as marquee names and business leaders from Hollywood, tech, music, and media step foot in Texas. |
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The New York Times |
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| The Opacity of Earl Sweatshirt |
| By Ismail Muhammad |
| One of rap’s more confounding artists uses his popularity to assert his humanity. |
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them. |
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| The Sapphic Pop Boom Has Been a Long Time Coming |
| By Jill Gutowitz |
| Each passing year has felt like the most Sapphic yet, and 2022 in particular has been off to a deeply lesbian start. Mainstream pop and rock music is growing increasingly, visibly queer, with women like Doja Cat, Adrianne Lenker, Phoebe Bridgers, Brandi Carlile, and Megan Thee Stallion leading the scene. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “1944” |
| Jamala |
| Ukraine's 2016 Eurovision-winning song is about the Soviet Union's ethnic cleansing of Crimean Tatars, including the singer's grandmother, in 1944. |
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| Music | Media |
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Suggest a link  |
| “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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