| He knew exactly what he was singing about. If he was singing about lonely, he knew what lonely was. If he was singing about love, he knew what love was about. |
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 | | Pink Sweat$ at Coachella, April 22, 2022. | | (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images) | | |
| quote of the day |
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| rantnrave:// |
Two Maths You Can Go By
Are 60,000 tracks really uploaded every day to SPOTIFY, as Spotify claims, and as, to quote my friend BILL WERDE, "freaking everyone says it all the time"? Werde's conclusion, based on his own calculations from Spotify's numbers, as laid out in his FULL RATE NO CAP newsletter, is: not a chance. He comes up with maybe 23,000/day, or less than half what the service claims. Even if he's off by, say, a whopping 50 percent because he's not considering factors like how many tracks are removed every day, it would still get the total nowhere near 60,000/day. This probably doesn't affect anyone's day-to-day life or anyone's day-to-day decisions about the tracks they *have* uploaded to Spotify. It's just an example of how a thing, once stated by anyone in a position of authority, can get repeated and repeated by everyone else until it's just assumed to be true—and makes you wonder what else is being announced, disseminated and repeated that might not, strictly speaking, be true. Like, oh, I don't know, how many times those tracks are being played and how much money is owed to the artists and songwriters responsible for them.
In related news: If an artist has fewer than 50 listeners in Spotify or a track has been played fewer than 5,000 times, that doesn't mean the artist is automatically a "hobbyist" or that the track is somehow clogging up the digital plumbing. Maybe the artist gets her listens elsewhere. Maybe the track is three or four Spotify subscribers' all-time favorite pop-punk song. This isn't to say the numbers aren't interesting or worth analyzing within the context of the digital music economy. But it's to suggest the music behind those numbers shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, and that it's quite possible there are a hundred thousand or more tracks with only a handful of plays each, or artists with only a handful of followers, who are exactly what make Spotify interesting to a hundred thousand or more individual subscribers. The breadth and depth are very much part of Spotify's, or any digital library's, value. It's certainly a big part of what I'm paying $9.99/month for.
Etc Etc Etc
The Guardian and BBC teamed up for a major investigation into multiple allegations of sexual assault against popular British radio DJ TIM WESTWOOD across a period of 25 years. Westwood lawyers call the allegations "false and seriously defamatory." A BBC Three documentary about the seven Black women accusing Westwood—who was a longtime BBC presenter—aired Tuesday night and is available on demand in the UK... Music question #1 (there will be more) about ELON MUSK's Twitter: Will it license music? "It's past time to fix Twitter's broken policy of not paying songwriters," NATIONAL MUSIC PUBLISHERS' ASSOCIATION CEO DAVID ISRAELITE says... T BONE BURNETT's company NEOFIDELITY says it has developed a new, LP-like analog format that's "future-proof," "one of one" and "the pinnacle of recorded sound," and he's recorded new sessions with BOB DYLAN to prove it. When you'll be able to hear it, what equipment you'll need to do so and what "one of one" means will all have to be left to your imagination for now... Right wing troll rappers.
Rest in Peace
Philadelphia radio legend SID MARK, who kept Frank Sinatra in almost exclusive rotation for more than 60 years. Mark had four weekly shows devoted to Ol' Blue Eyes—in Philly and New York and the nationally syndicated "The Sounds of Sinatra"—and was a close confidante of Sinatra, whom he met after playing nothing but his live album "Sinatra at the Sands" for a week in 1966. "I love him, and I say that publicly, I love him," Sinatra said from the stage of the Spectrum in Philadelphia 25 years later... R&B songwriter and session keyboardist ALLAN "GRIP" SMITH, who worked with the SOS Band, Jagged Edge, TLC and many others. (Ignore the typo on his age in that link from the usually reliable SoulTracks; he was 61).
| | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | |
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 | | Broken Record |
| | Broken Record: Michael Stipe | | By Rick Rubin and Michael Stipe | | Michael Stipe plays Rick Rubin his new song and also talks about why he decided to record a solo album, and how he always intended to be super famous. | | |
 | | Dada Drummer Almanach |
| | Toward a Community Theory of Value | | By Damon Krukowski | | What has happened to the music community? In my personal understanding of rock and roll history, punk rock tore down the fourth wall, eliminating the barrier between performer and audience. That lack of divide is not without risk for both sides, but it comes with the reward of collective responsibility for everything that transpires in the room. | | |
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 | | The Quietus |
| | Women Of Their Word: The Reality Of Being A Female Music Writer | | By Jude Rogers | | There is more extraordinary music writing by women than ever before, yet female writers are still facing a host of barriers that their male counterparts are not. From online abuse to tokenism from editors, Jude Rodgers recounts the realities of her life in journalism, and her hopes for the future of the industry. | | |
 | | GQ |
| | How Rosalía Became the Queen of the Global Nightclub | | By Laia Garcia-Furtado | | She found stardom by updating flamenco for the digital age. But with her genre-melting, party-starting new album 'Motomami,' the Spanish singer is ready to show just how expansive her music can be. | | |
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| what we're into |
 | | Music of the day | | "Icy (live at Coachella)" | | Pink Sweat$ | | Sounds like summer (lyrics about being "just too cold" notwithstanding). | | |
|  | | Video of the day | | "Brown Sugar" | | Rick Famuyiwa | | Rick Famuyiwa's 2002 rom-com about a hip-hop magazine editor and an A&R exec. | | |
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| Music | Media | | | | | | 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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