The Wolf Parade member talks about his new solo album, parenting during COVID, and adjusting to livestreams.

Fans can now donate to their favourite artists via Spotify, but this feature is a tacit admission that the firm undervalues the musicians that make it viable. --- Spotify’s method of generating the premium subscriptions that will turn it a profit was canny: draw people in with an excellent user experience and relatively light advertising in the free version during its early years, then ramp up the advertising to near-intolerable levels and wait for users to cave in to spending a tenner a month. Many casual music fans are now spending money more regularly on music than they did in the download or CD era. But the nature of the exchange has utterly changed: people are not paying for music but for a lack of advertising. The music is available either way. This is why the inclusion of the “tip jar” button is such a slap in the face for artists: it’s being initiated by the very service that helped to break the link between art and money. By paying royalties via both ad-funded and paid-for streams, Spotify has taken the onus off the consumer to pay the artist, and then, via low royalty payments, quietly eroded the monetary value in music that consumers and labels once propped up. The tip jar, while helping to replace lost touring earnings, is a tacit admission that artists are not being paid enough by the very service offering it – a similar admission was made by Amazon on Thursday in revealing that it paid £250,000 to a coronavirus hardship fund for authors. […] For consumers, Spotify’s staggeringly vast and high-quality library remains one of the greatest things to have ever happened in music, but it is nothing without the artists who add to that library every day. Maybe subscriptions should cost more – the competitiveness between the streaming companies has forced down the value of music, and this now perhaps needs correcting. That would require a recalibration of how we value music, and it would need Spotify and its competitors to lead it. For now, donate to your favourite musicians, buy their T-shirts, cherish their artistry, and never let the company that built an empire from their labour off the hook.

Independent music: • Listeners rent music for pennies on streaming platforms • Artists rent listeners for ad dollars on ad platforms • Isolated artists make tunes in their bedrooms for isolated listeners in their bedrooms • “Hustle” myth makes a virtue of being selfish and finessing others • Trickle up attribution (lone genius myth) and compensation models (star makes all the $) • Irreverent of institutions and the archive in favor of individual freedom and ahistoricity • 20th century kitsch individualism • Fracking / short termist Interdependent music: • Listeners pay artists directly on Bandcamp/Patreon/Mixcloud/Currents.fm • Artists own and nurture their contacts and supporters • Artists and audience contribute to global scene ecosystem where the sum is greater than the total of its parts • Humble ethos makes a virtue of being considerate and supporting others • Artists attribute and pay their collaborators • DJs pay the producers whose music they use • Respect the archive and understand strong institutions actually make it possible for individuals to thrive • 21st century democratic socialism • Permaculture / long termist

With rappers recording at a nonstop clip, and sampling more difficult than ever, hip-hop producers are increasingly outsourcing their melodies to a global network of loopmakers. --- These loops are snippets of original music that Prasad composes at his computer, melodic ideas that might serve as the instrumental hook of a song—but without the rest of the song attached. They range in length and complexity: some incorporate one or two different sounds, while others are multi-layered miniature compositions. Every two weeks, he packages around 40 of his best loops to send to established producers he connected with on Instagram. If everything goes perfectly, a producer will use one of his loops in a beat—they might change the tempo, adjust the pitch, chop it up and rearrange it, or just drop it in as-is—and an artist will record a song over it. In recent years, these melody loops, and the musicians who create them, have become a fundamental part of the way rap music is made. For up-and-comers like Prasad, supplying well-connected producers with packs of pre-made melodies has become the most effective method to get a foot in the industry’s door. And for producers working with prolific rappers, outsourcing the time-consuming work of writing a melody to a pool of dedicated loopmakers is the most efficient way to keep making hits. […] The popularity of loops, on some level, is a reaction to the increasingly complex legal and financial barriers placed on sampling pre-existing recordings in new songs, a cornerstone of early hip-hop production. In the past three decades, from pivotal court cases around samples in De La Soul and Biz Markie records in the early ’90s to more recent copyright battles over “Uptown Funk” and “Lucid Dreams,” incorporating references to other songs in your music has become a risky and expensive proposition. […] Within this collaborative spirit, there’s also an inherent power imbalance. When unknown loopmakers—often geographically removed from rap’s centers of industry in Atlanta, New York, and L.A.—send material to big-name producers with connections to artists and labels, the latter have far more leverage than the former for negotiation, a dynamic that can leave loopmakers vulnerable to exploitation. […] Though loops have already become a music industry standard, there’s still a stigma attached to them, according to Jetsonmade. “People have a lack of respect for the loopmakers,” he says. “Some producers don’t want people to know they’re using loops.” For more traditional producers, there’s a prevailing sense that using loops is a sort of cheat code. The separation between clicking through a folder of loops and making a beat from scratch can seem like the difference between ordering from Seamless and cooking a meal. It also suggests a depressing reality for many of the most in-demand rap producers, who may simply lack the time or bandwidth to work from a blank slate on all of their beats.

Billie Eilish has done everything right in her career so far, but that’s not enough for a celebrity industry fixated on sex. --- But being anointed a liberating force in the body-image stakes is its own kind of prison, one that preserves physicality as the ultimate measure of a female star’s worth – and the standard by which they can be undermined. The music industry and the media like to pat themselves on the back for making stars of Eilish and Lizzo, who often joins her in headlines about body positivity, though if these women one day wish to change their physical presentation, they will be accused of betraying fans and squandering their authenticity.

In this landscape — where songs are interchangeable, indistinguishable commodities, and artists are unrecognizable to the average ear — it’s arguably larger content aggregators and curators, not artists, who are at the top of the food chain. And now several companies, some with venture-capital funding behind them, are racing to claim their own share of the lo-fi aggregation market.

Musical trends produced in the streaming era are inherently connected to attention, whether it’s hard-and-fast attention-grabbing hooks, pop drops and chorus-loops engineered for the pleasure centers of our brains, or music that strategically requires no attention at all—the background music, the emotional wallpaper, the chill-pop-sad-vibe playlist fodder. These sounds and strategies all have streambait tricks embedded within them, whether they aim to wedge bits of a song into our skulls or just angle toward the inoffensive and mood-specific-enough to prevent users from clicking away. All of this caters to an economy of clicks and completions, where the most precious commodity is polarized human attention—either amped up or zoned out—and where success is determined, almost in advance, by data.

In the latest “Diary of a Song” episode, Lil Nas X is joined by the producer YoungKio — who didn’t even know he was a part of “Old Town Road” until he heard it in a video meme — and Billy Ray Cyrus, who lent the song another layer of novelty and outlaw credibility. The video also features cameos by the influencers @nicemichael and @elitelife_kd, who were crucial to the track’s early rise.

A new type of Payola is taking place on Spotify, with artists using third-party services to get added to influential playlists, and the company is inadvertently paying for it.

You would go into a listening booth and peruse 3,000 popular songs dating as far back as the ’50s before purchasing individual singles (each priced from 75 cents to $1.50) for your own custom mixtape up to 90 minutes long, made in just five to ten minutes. … The music industry was fearful that the service would cannibalize album sales at a time when illegal home-taping reportedly accounted for $1.5 billion in revenue losses. But Garvin says there was evidence of much more business to be had from people who weren’t ready to shell out $20 for an album but would pay a dollar for a single; the iTunes Store, particularly when paired with the iPod, proved this.

One minute he was a hip-hop sensation starting a viral dance craze, the Shmoney Dance, and rhyming about guns and drugs and murder. The next he was locked up, indicted on a slew of charges involving… guns and drugs and murder. The government’s case against Bobby Shmurda, now heading to trial, raises all kinds of nagging questions, but none more troubling than this: Does the justice system fundamentally misunderstand the world of rap?

Our staff marks the 30th anniversary of the compact disc with stories of second-hand triumphs, pesky scratches, insidious CD burning schemes, and more.

COTQ is featured here.

‘The reaction to Jobs' death-- his full transformation into one of the era's most prominent secular deities-- reveals that we want more than anything to believe in the benevolent, progressive, and humane powers of technology.’

“Still, for the Cool Kids, it comes down to one thing: Mountain Dew provides them with a fair opportunity to usher their music into the world. ‘Any other label, any other situation … you do all the work and they take all the money. I can’t sleep comfortably with that,’ explains Rocks. ‘I would take Mountain Dew any day of the week over that. Money comes and goes, you spend it stupid and it’s gone. But what we are doing, what we’ve made — no one can take that away from us.’”

"For every Vampire Weekend or Arcade Fire that goes beyond this point, spinning online buzz into big success, there's an M's, or a Thrills, or a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah — take your pick of any blog-hyped band that once generated copious heat only to cool off considerably, partly victims of a zippy online impatience that, as Matthew Johnson, founder of Fat Possum Records, put it, 'can devour bands whole, and be done with them.'"

1. PR companies are liars and are out to fuck you. 2. Music blogs are run by human beings and should be treated thusly. 3. Make no concessions.

Humanizing and well-written. Spoiler: she doesn't have a penis.