So while all these independent artists argue thievery, do you know who’s winning? Major labels. This week, of the top 100 tracks on Spotify, only 6% are on independent labels. Major labels have figured out that the game is about exposure and awareness, two things that they are actually quite good at. It’s not about royalty rates, thievery, or even quality of music.

So that’s the refreshing message I get from the pragmatic imagination of Idler Wheel: to reject the deus ex machina of the fairytale isn’t to give up on dreaming; to love and lose doesn’t have to mean never loving again.

Working on a fishing boat in Alaska sounds so romantic.

This is so, so awesome. Gate-triggered second and third mics on Bowie. Eno and Fripp innovating with feedback and synthesizers.

"Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions," wrote Lindsay Zoladz in her Pitchfork review of their latest album, Bloom. Switch a few words around, and this perfect evocation could have emanated from DDB's pitch meeting to Volkswagen. Which is not to belittle Zoladz's criticism, nor to build up ad-speak as any more than means-to-an-end capitalist labor. Instead, this connection highlights the idea that critics and marketers often seek the same positive criteria in art.

On the collaboration between the Norwegian writer-producers Stargate and songwriter Ester Dean, who have written tons of hits for Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, and others.

On the height of a performer and what it’s like to attend a show as a woman.

Comparing the excellent work and perspective of seminal music writer Ellen Willis and the horribleness of ‘Record Collecting for Girls’ by Courtney E. Smith.

Here’s an alternative hypothesis: Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release?

Rappers are presented as violent, vulgar sexists and homophobes, and then they're not only expected to have fully-formed opinions on social issues, but progressive ones. This is an ugly update on the always implicit, often explicit demand that hip-hop, if it is to be lauded and celebrated, must espouse a strong, left-leaning political message.

Her flow, including the corny hashtag raps and the growls and all the other forms of play that make her simultaneously so old school and so fresh, have already shifted the zeitgeist and inspired a new generation of pop lovers in one short year. Now it's time for her to figure out how to step up to sound like she what she says on the album’s third track: “I Am Your Leader.”

The act of archiving an extensive record collection, whether it's one's own personal set or that of a legend, is founded on the idea that space exists to hold time.

…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.

Our consciousness and memory are moving into the ether, so the need for our senses is diminished. And the interface for this transformation turned out to be text.

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.

This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album.

A dozen years after its release, Fevers & Mirrors, Bright Eyes' defining LP, is reissued by Saddle Creek, along with 2002's There Is No Beginning to the Story EP.

But increasingly, people aren’t sniping about “whiteness” to be funny, or even defiant—at least not entirely. They’re using the term as a form of criticism, meant to be dismissive. “That movie looks very white,” or, “That sounds like music for white people,” is another way of saying, “That can’t be any good.” And I do have a problem with that.

There are millions of cover songs on YouTube, with around 12,000 new covers uploaded in the last 24 hours. Until recently, all but a sliver were illegal, considered infringement under current copyright law. Nearly all were non-commercial, created out of love by fans of the source material, with no negative impact on the market value of the original. This is creativity criminalized, quite possibly the most popular creative act that's against the law.

Limiting himself to one producer, legends-only guest spots, and a real sense that he'd better make this one count, Killer Mike rises to the occasion.

Many musicians express a complex relationship with the term 'riot grrrl'-- a reverence for the movement's origins but also frustrations about the difficulty of escaping the limits of gendered language.

New album from Stephen Agustin and The Fourth Wall strikes timeless chords.

The ability to use “white” to mean “middle-class” to such an overwhelming extent that you actually start to misidentify people—all so that race itself, not class or background or culture or manner, can still remain the difference, the Other. There’s an odd habit here.

Hawaii was always going to be a tricky state to cover, detached from the mainland by some 2000 miles its music scene is naturally very insular. Of course I found the usual Ukulele music, but in my eyes no one plays the Uke as wonderfully as Elsa Rae. I also found a lot of hip hop, reggae, a little bit of indie and of course my Hawaii representative Welwing. The first and only instrumental entry into the State Of Music project, Welwing is a one man show headed by Matthew McVickar, a mainland exile doing his thing in the Pacific Ocean.

In general I’m excited for music to open up spatially, and for younger writers to resist the urge to fill every second with a million sounds. I’m looking for longer, more open lines now, with clear and confident production.

Incase you didn’t get to watch and learn about all of the producers battling we compiled all the videos shot & produced by Hypoetical, big ups.  Enjoy and hope to see you out on Friday Ni…

Beyond Digital assembled a free collection of Moroccan percussion loops for use by musicians & DJs. These are high-quality original recordings of Moroccan percussion instruments such as the bendir frame drum, calabash, darabuka hand percussion, kraqeb metal castanets, and taarija. You’ll find grooves and fills played in the style of chaâbi, reggada, and some hybrid rhythms.

Last night, the Berkeley-bred, Internet-beloved rapper Lil B gave a sold-out lecture at NYU’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. It’s possible that this was a beautiful, inspiring event, at which people rallied joyously around a quirky young entertainer’s timely message of empathy and kindness. It’s also totally possible that the whole thing was an epic tragedy, in which a young man’s urgent plea for basic human dignity was repeatedly laughed at by stoned college kids who preferred to shout catchphrases at him while finding his existence hilarious. I think it mostly depended on where you sat, and who was sitting near you.

His homemade philosophy is such that he can just wander around trying to be honest and respectful of others, and how they react to that effort is entirely their problem, not his. This is why no pockets of ickiness in the audience reaction feel particularly sad.

Good questions.