A great summary of the shift in music writing and coverage around 2013 as music publications shifted to covering more pop music (and did it in a more take-based fashion) and pop music itself made a comeback critically.

With more people making lists on BMC since the start of Bandcamp Fridays, the way people are organizing music on the site is expanding, too—from themed lists to collections based around geography or era, all with a natural bent towards the lesser-known. “Over the past year, we’ve seen a lot of growth that we didn’t anticipate,” says Reynaldo. “On Juneteenth, when there was a big focus on finding and supporting music from Black artists, we had a huge influx, hundreds of lists getting made in a single day.” What’s immediately appealing about BMC is how sparse and self-contained it is. You don’t have to make an account to publish a list. There are no social media-style features to speak of—you can’t follow users or individual lists, you can’t track your engagement, and you certainly can’t pay for promoted exposure. Outside of selected homepage picks by the site’s team of volunteers, the only way you can sort new lists (for now) is by “Most Recent,” which can make using BMC feel like sifting through the world’s most egalitarian record shop.

Over the course of three decades and with 80 million records sold, Enya has morphed into more than musician: She's her own adjective. What makes her music — and the mysterious woman behind it — appealing to so many? Anne Helen Petersen visits the reclusive singer in Ireland.

The experimental/ambient label has survived not just due to hard work, but to the depth, breadth, and persistence of their vision.

Your unconscious mind, it turns out, does not care what label a piece of music comes out on. It doesn’t care much about the artistic ethics behind it, either. Which means that the artists having the most fun in this new playground, at least creatively speaking, are the ones like Charli and Vernon—the ones who make the most of collaborative possibilities and don’t ask anyone listening to make distinctions about where any of their influences came from. That may sound jarringly utopian for a mostly dystopic moment, but if there is one thing we still want from pop music, even if the lyrics are downcast, it is a sense of possibility, of endless horizons.

As some of the pro-user-centric arguments hint, which option you prefer is partly a decision about cultural values, not economic cost. When you buy an album, no matter how many times you play it, you are making a conscious choice that it’s worth your hard-earned cash. With the existing streaming model, your money is not a direct investment—it is at the mercy of collective listening habits. Whether we want a system that rewards the conscious choices of individuals—versus, say, algorithms piping in modern-day muzak 24/7—is a question about more than dollars and (fractions of) cents.

The sample clearance expert behind albums by the Avalanches, the Beastie Boys and more on the creative power of sampling.

Ultimately, the problem at hand is greater than the risk of lost royalties. The prevalence of leaks on established streaming services has a significant impact on an artist’s sense of ownership over their life’s work. The lines become blurred as to whether something actually “exists” in an artist’s canon if they never gave permission for it to be released. So while diehards might feel a thrill, circumventing the system and listening to unreleased songs by their favorite musicians, the leaks ultimately hurt those same artists.

Indeed, many of the most pressing issues of the streaming music economy—artist compensation, statistical transparency, sexism—remain untouched, if not deepened, by the rise of the smart speaker. Moreover, as Amazon, Apple, and Google continue to carve out their spaces in the voice marketplace, music consumers and musicians alike will continue to fight against the companies’ preferred walled-garden approach to exclusivity. And though there’s no real reason to sympathize with Tidal or Spotify, the idea that the smart speaker industry might become the exclusive province of massive firms with enough capital to experiment (and huge captive audiences to use as guinea pigs) is significant reason for pause, no matter how little one is interested in owning the devices. A world in which three of tech’s “frightful five” become the equivalent of the major labels, with exclusive holdings in hardware and software, and plenty of incentive to lock competitors’ products and content out of their systems, is a chilling idea, and not as far-fetched as it might seem.

Here in late capitalism, our only real power is as consumers, en masse. We need organizing forces like #MuteRKelly. But can a company that is still making money off the person they are protesting ever really play that role?

A triumph of art over commerce or ruthless, selfish exploitation?

Beyoncé seized the powers of a medium characterized by its short attention span to force the world to pay attention. Leave it to the posterchild of convention to brush convention aside and leave both sides feeling victorious.

Why You Shouldn't Feel Guilty for Using Spotify

I’m saying the current model for sharing and more importantly for publicizing music is detrimental. Here’s what happens: young musicians make okay records that show they’ve got something but haven’t yet figured out what. The music industry then sells the shit out of it while the music press hypes it equally to death.

I’d like to think that, once we mentally calm ourselves and remember that reading a lot about an artist for a couple months is not a very big deal, we can imagine and try to foster a music world where a teenager can make a small splash with an interesting new sound and then, perhaps, grow and develop across his or her career until that first record is the footnote or rarity that only hardcore fans seek out. Today’s climate doesn’t foster that sort of thing very well, but I don’t think the answer is for everyone to woodshed longer. The answer might be to place a lot less importance on the marketing cycle around a record’s release, and keep in mind how unimportant it might look a few years down the line. Given enough time, the narrative of the musician is always larger than whatever people said for a month about a single release.

There’s a certain romance about record stores, an idea that the employees sit around and listen to music they love and meet and have intimate discourse with others who share their passion. Let’s end this horseshit idea.

You have to show up for all the annoying hard work kind of stuff and just dig in, network, play shows that no one is at but make sure the four people who saw you remember your name when they leave. You gotta work all your angles and be a dude that people like helping, and that makes it that much easier and more likely opportunity will come to you.

It's easy to be a little crushed or even consumed by the idea of the next right move and a traditional career trajectory that forever ascends. But very rarely is that the case.

"Part of our mission is to offer opportunities for change," she says as we walk back out into the visiting area near the facility's front gate. "We figure at least 90 percent of our offender population is going to be getting out. Someday, one of these guys will be your neighbor." She smiles. "It's our responsibility to make sure that is a better person leaving here than it was coming in."

I endured repeated listens of a record I could not understand or stand because I had nothing else to do but work out why it mattered to someone I worshiped and not to me. That will never happen again, not the way we’re set up. You will click away the second a song loses you, and you’ll never learn anything about yourself. I mean it: you will never unlock or awaken new neural paths in your brain if you continue to gravitate toward music that satisfies your expectations. That is Easy Listening.

as a listener, and as a fan of music, i feel like my experience is also being fucked up by the way the industry is right now.

Great advice here.

Looking expectantly at the rest of the world to validate your interests, hobbies or art is a set-up to feel bad, to brood and be jaded that you are not understood. You need to reprogram your relationship with money as a creative person, because the one you have is like a hex. You need to grow-up your success dream and stop this focus on how it'll make you feel better.

(UPDATED) By David Macias, president of Nashville based label services company Thirty Tigers. Much of the recent discourse about the music business reminds me of listening to partisan political commentators. Continue reading

for the majority of small bands, touring is a necessary out-of-pocket promotional expense to drive sales for a new release, not a source of profit to offset sales. Not to mention the fact that there’s virtually no radio support for touring acts in all but the biggest cities, thanks to Clear Channel and deregulation leading to the outsourcing of local DJs. I think a lot of musicians love playing live in front of crowds, but hate everything else about touring, which is both financially and emotionally draining.

Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi breaks down the meager royalties currently being paid out to bands by streaming services and explains what the music business' headlong quest for capital means for artists today.

On the NPR intern Emily White and Amanda Palmer and their internet infamy this summer.

COTQ is featured here.

…the way that people have written and talked about the searing physical images of her recent performances—her sinewy muscles and berserk movements and haphazardly-scrunchied hair—suggest that she’s providing [an unexpected jolt of humanness in the ever-churning, willfully plastic cultural machine], that she's a savior for those who need one (and, to be sure, not all of us do) from these airbrush’d, cyborg’d, sea-punk’d times. Because the wild physicality of these performances reminds us of our own muscle and bone.

The label's mission is to make a man out of Bieber. The only person who isn't ready to make a man out of Bieber is Bieber. He wants to be 18. He wants to be a swaggy bro—he seems incapable of being anything else—and that's as it should be. Manhood can wait.