The music industry is in the midst of a vinyl boom, with platter LP sales in 2016 notching a 28-year high. While typical favorites like Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen are popular turnstile favorites, niche recordings of scores for video games and anime films have become collectible, with labels like Mondo, Tiger Lab and Patient Sounds releasing […]
Pitchfork plumbed the depths of playlists, providing a fascinating insight on music marketing and analytics. Record labels are eager to hire those who have established track records of peer-to-peer playlist popularity. “I can see a time coming when the playlist creator becomes just as important an element in the process as the artists being featured,” Spotify […]
The New York Times spotlight on Moogfest, by Jon Pareles, took us way back to the day when Keith Emerson’s playing was genre-bustin’ fun. “Promising ‘Future Thought and Future Sound,’ Moogfest was part music festival, part symposium, part laboratory. One afternoon, Nona Hendryx (of the singing group Labelle) performed a spoken-word piece over chords generated […]
Jem Aswad took us back to the day when music journalism was art with his lively, insightful Variety review of the self-titled debut album from One Direction frontman Harry Styles. Written in the “forward-thinking retro” fashion of the album itself, Aswad’s writing is packed with enough information for a pop history lesson, but way more fun to read […]
A 3,400 year-old melody has been given a tuning-up by music historian Michael Levy, a composer who researches ancient works, recreating them as authentically as possible. In the case of the Hurrian song, that meant plucking on lyres that mimick those that were around in antiquity. Okay, so this happened last year, and we’re late […]
Stevie Wonder intrigued fans with his political views — including a tentative bid for presidency — even as he delighted them with musical reminiscence and impromptu performances at his keynote address at the ASCAP “I Create Music” Expo, Saturday, April 16, 2017. The ASCAP meet was at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, while Wonder held forth next door […]
Billboard runs down synch music in the NFL Super Bowl 51, with license fees ranging from $100,000 to $1 million for a minute and under. The list of artists providing the spot soundtrack include Sia, Justin Bieber, Steppenwolf, Imagine Dragons, Justin Timberlake and Bonnie Tyler, as well as many surprises that won’t be revealed until […]
Jukedeck is one of a number of companies using artificial intelligence to compose music. The New York Times reports. Read about it.
Free streaming and albums are still around, while hi-res audio not so much, according to this pithy account by Forbes columnist Cherie Hu. Read her insightful piece piece 3 Music Predictions That Flopped.
Not to be missed: Billboard magazine’s “Year in Music: Best Original Photography of 2016.” To call this an impressive portfolio is understating it by quite a bit. It is exceptional work, a lovely testament to many talented working photographers, the art directors and editors who paired them with just the right subjects, and of course the artists […]
