| The Manhattan brick-and-mortar chain J&R held on until 2014, but since its final location pulled down the shutters, there hasn’t really been a store in New York City where one could browse all the important new releases in jazz, classical, and pop. If you aren’t online, you’re out of luck. |
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| Kelela at Here at Outernet, London, April 7, 2023. |
| (Burak Cingi/Redferns/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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“The Manhattan brick-and-mortar chain J&R held on until 2014, but since its final location pulled down the shutters, there hasn’t really been a store in New York City where one could browse all the important new releases in jazz, classical, and pop. If you aren’t online, you’re out of luck.”
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- Ethan Iverson, "The End of the Music Business"
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| rantnrave:// |
Algo Rhythms
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the end of so-called monoculture, which raises a million questions, such as was there ever actually a monoculture or did radio and the rest of the media only pay attention to what a couple very specific demographics were listening to, and has there ever been a time in the past 100 years when someone wasn’t complaining about it disappearing? But today’s lead story, a kind of investigative essay by Vulture’s NATE JONES that begins at his local cocktail bar, asks a different sort of monoculture question: What if SPOTIFY’s algorithms and a handful of indie reissue labels are quietly conspiring to create a new one—“an unofficial canon of cool music,” in which everyone is eventually being fed songs by Zambian rock band AMANAZ, ex-YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA leader and chill-out star HARUOMI HOSONO and little-known ‘70s country singer KATHY HEIDEMANN? (You might want to check your DISCOVER WEEKLY playlist right now to see if they’re there.) “Why,” Jones wants to know, “are my secret Spotify songs following me around?”
The top four links in today’s mix—two essays, including Jones’, a podcast and a video set in the early 1950s—are all about how, why and where technology is taking over music and music discovery and why or why not we should be concerned. None of them is about A.I. (unless you want to label Spotify’s long-entrenched recommendation algorithms as A.I., which I’ll leave up to you). All of them have something important to say about the business of finding, and surviving, music, and they all overlap in one way or another.
In a long, thoughtful chat with SAXON BAIRD and SAM BACKER, hosts of the MONEY 4 NOTHING podcast, NICK SEAVER, author of the book COMPUTING TASTE, explores a strangely complicated question: What exactly *is* a recommendation? Like what, literally, does the word mean?... In the Nation, jazz pianist and critic ETHAN IVERSON, who’s been hanging on to his iPod, the last great pre-streaming technology, for dear life, wants to know if music streaming has literally caused “The End of the Music Business.” His final piece of evidence, after running through a century’s worth of music technology: the fact that his local coffee shop is streaming a version of “GEORGIA ON MY MIND” that even he, Ethan Iverson, can’t recognize, by an anonymous Swedish group called the NOUVEAU JAZZ TRIO, straight off Spotify’s “Jazz for Study” and “Lazy Jazz Cat” playlists. “I I feel the same shiver down my spine,” he writes, “that writers feel when they consider CHATGPT”... Of course, as Seaver mentions to Baird and Becker, technology and recommendations have been part of the culture of music for as long as music has existed, and the video podcast POLYPHONIC is here to tell us how the technology behind the long-playing record made the very music on DUKE ELLINGTON’s 1951 classic MASTERPIECES BY ELLINGTON possible. As if to remind us that technology doesn’t have to dictate or limit where music goes. The music can do the dictating, and the improvising. If only we let it.
Gimme Going Gone
Shoutout to my old RHAPSODY colleagues TYLER LENANE and JON MAPLES for the streaming, non-algorithmic, human radio throwback product they and their team built at GIMME RADIO, which Tyler announced Monday is shutting down after a six-year run (and just a year after completing a $3 million raise with investors including IHEARTMEDIA, the ORCHARD and CONCORD). “We wanted to build a venue where fans of genres outside of mainstream hip hop and pop were not marginalized, but catered to,” Lenane wrote in a Medium post. But “even though we proved that engaged communities could generate real money at a higher average revenue per user than other music platforms, we unfortunately find ourselves in an economic climate where we have been unable to raise the financing needed to support the streaming services and grow Gimme to reach all music fans across all genres.” Gimme Metal and Gimme Country will continue streaming through April 28. (And I officially forgive them for canceling my own Gimme Country show after one episode in 2019 for the crime of country impurity—slipping too many pop-leaning currents into the mix. It was an amicable d-i-v-o-r-c-e.)
Rest in Peace
S Club 7 singer PAUL CATTERMOLE, who was found dead Thursday, two months after the British pop group announced a reunion tour... NORA FORSTER, best known as the wife and muse of ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon and mother of the Slits’ Ari Up. She had a been a West German concert promoter who moved to London and became, in the words of her late daughter, “a den mother to all the young punks”... Swedish session guitarist LASSE WELLANDER, best known for his long association with Abba. He played “an integral role in the Abba story,” the group said... Percussionist CHUCK MORRIS of the jam band Lotus. The bodies of Morris and his son Charley were recovered in an Arkansas lake over the weekend, three weeks after they were reported missing during a kayaking trip... New Orleans jazz saxophonist and teacher EDWARD “KIDD” JORDAN... IAN BAIRNSON, a member of the Scottish ‘70s rock band Pilot who went on to a long career as a session guitarist for artists including Kate Bush and the Alan Parsons Project... RONALD COLEMAN, a singer in Asbury Park, N.J., ‘60s R&B kings the Broadways, a major part of what became known as the Sound of Asbury Park... Bassist JOHN REGAN, noted for his work with Ace Frehley and Peter Frampton... GUY BAILEY, guitarist for British rock band the Quireboys... British countertenor JAMES BOWMAN.
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| - Matty Karas, curator |
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Money 4 Nothing |
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| Inside the Algorithm Factory: Music Recommendations (w/ Nick Seaver) |
| By Saxon Baird, Sam Backer and Nick Seaver |
| In the digital economy, recommendation algorithms get...a LOT of attention. But for all the discussion of how these programs are transforming our world(s), there’s surprisingly little analysis of what—exactly—they are, or how they’re meant to work. |
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The Nation |
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| The End of the Music Business |
| By Ethan Iverson |
| A century of recorded music has culminated in the infinite archive of streaming platforms. But is it really better for listeners? |
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Polyphonic |
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| Duke Ellington's Forgotten Masterpiece |
| In 1948, Columbia Records introduced a new piece of technology that would change music forever: the long playing record. These new vinyl discs had a crisper sound than the 10" shellac records that were standard at the time, and more importantly, they fit upwards of 20 minutes a side. |
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Africa is a Country |
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| The new Zimbabwe soundtrack |
| By Liam Brickhill |
| Zimbabwe is not Mugabe, Nkomo, Mnangagwa or Chamisa. A new Afro-electronic music duo is giving the country’s complexity a soundtrack. |
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Tidal |
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| The Secret Literary Life of Sonny Rollins |
| By Aidan Levy |
| Though he has rarely published, the iconic saxophonist has long harbored a private passion for writing. Rollins’ biographer unearths his inspired letters, essays and other prose. |
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Billboard |
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| Is There Money in Metadata? |
| By Glenn Peoples |
| By improving the descriptive data underlying music, streaming services can provide a better user experience and grow the average subscriber’s lifetime value. |
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The New Yorker |
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| The Otherworldly Compositions of an Ethiopian Nun |
| By Amanda Petrusich |
| Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, who died recently, wrote pieces that were elegiac, but suffused with a sense of survival: we are broken, we are wounded, we carry on. |
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PBS Newshour |
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| How Peter One developed a unique style that crisscrosses the ocean musically |
| By Tom Casciato, Peter One and Anne Azzi Davenport |
| May will see the release of a new album by Nashville artist Peter One. But to call him simply a Nashville artist doesn’t tell you the half of it. And though he’s known as Peter One, he’s soon to embark on a most extraordinary second act, playing at the Grand Ole Opry. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “Divorce” |
| Kelela |
| "Why when it's done I keep trying?" From "Raven," out now on Warp. |
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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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