Harry Styles has the number one album in the country this week.
Harry Styles’ fourth solo studio album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart (dated March 21) with 430,000 equivalent album units earned in the United States in the week ending March 12, according to Luminate
Zach Bryan purchased Jack Kerouac’s original On the Road manuscript for $12.1 million.
Previously owned by Jim Irsay, the iconic 120-foot typed scroll was offered as part of a major Christie’s auction that also included David Gilmour’s “Black Strat” and Jerry Garcia’s “Tiger” guitar. Irsay, the late owner of the Indianapolis Colts, originally purchased the On the Road manuscript in 2001 for $2.43 million, which at the time set a record for a literary work sold at auction.
It’s an annual tradition to have a NCAA bracket challenge over on ESPN. (And the community is a great place during games.)
Make Do and Mend have announced they’ll release their new album On Going later this year.
Over the past year or so, we started to bat around what being creative together again might look like. We began sharing ideas, which led to a collection of new songs that will make up the fourth Make Do and Mend album. We humbly regard it as our best.
We’ll have more to share soon about when and how this new album will find its way to you. For now, we’ll let you know, the album is called On Going.
Walden Green, writing for Pitchfork:
The conversations are between Ben Baker, now head of ticketing for Venue Nation, and Jeff Weinhold, currently a senior director in the ticketing department. Baker and Weinhold joke about overcharging and price-gouging fans—“Robbing them blind, baby,” Baker brags in one exchange pertaining to a Kid Rock show in Tampa Bay—as well as being able to raise prices on ancillary services such as parking seemingly at will. “These people are so stupid,” Baker writes. “I almost feel bad taking advantage of them BAHAHAHAHAHA.”
Apple Music has signed an exclusive partnership with TikTok to bring full-songs to the platform:
Apple Music subscribers will officially be able to play full-length tracks they discover on TikTok without leaving the social app, following the launch of a new integration between the two platforms.
TikTok says that the feature, called ‘Play Full Song,’ is rolling out globally over the coming weeks and is available exclusively to Apple Music subscribers.
When a user discovers a song on TikTok’s For You Page or Sound Detail Page, a button prompts them to open an Apple Music player within the app.
A “term sheet” spelling out details of the pact said Live Nation had agreed to let venues reach deals that would let a certain portion of tickets be sold by entities other than Ticketmaster. It also would let up to 50% of all tickets to be sold through any ticketing marketplace at amphitheaters that Live Nation owns, operates or controls.
The term sheet also called for Ticketmaster to cap its service fees at those amphitheaters at 15% and to divest ownership or control of 13 amphitheaters, including venues in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Syracuse, New York, and Austin, Texas. It said Live Nation will create a $280 million settlement fund to settle claims or pay civil penalties to states.
The Wasserman Agency is rebranding as “The Team.”
The name change is the first concrete move away from the company’s namesake, who last month agreed to sell the agency, which is among the largest sports and music agencies in the business. While the music division was roiled by turmoil as several artists, most notably Chappell Roan and Laufey, left in the wake of the Epstein revelations, sources say things inside the division have calmed down, as executives (nearly all of whom are bound by contracts) and many of the artists (who are not) take a wait-and-see approach while the company’s name change and sale move forward.
Molly Mary O’Brien, writing about the iPod:
I was imputed upon. The first song I played on my iPod was “Anthem Part 2” by Blink-182. It was a favorite song from middle school, and it felt right to begin with a sentimental choice. But it wasn’t long before I was approaching mp3 collecting with an almost deranged reverence for eclecticism. I needed to max out the hardware’s potential. I needed representation from as many genres as possible. Some of this desire came from the UX itself—when I used my thumb to rotate the pale gray click wheel, I felt a strong desire to scroll through a long list of artists, with each letter of the alphabet represented many times over. So Blink-182 got nestled between Black Sabbath and Bloc Party, followed by Billy Joel and Blonde Redhead.
Some days I really miss the iPod. The simplicity of it. Heading out for a walk with just music, no social media, no communication apps, just some headphones and an empty road.
And when music is pulled from Apple Music … even more so.
The Format talked with the Last Donut of the Night newsletter:
Nate: It’s tough, and this harkens back to our conversation about how America is eventually going to burn down, and that’s when new and good stuff will start up. As far as bands, Sam has his ear to the streets way more than I do. But I’m encouraged now more than ever—and I sound like a fucking old guy—but I just like seeing guitars. If that’s not your thing, cool. I’m fine with that. But I remember the community that we had as pop-punk kids growing up in Phoenix, going to see shows, and what that meant to my life. I wouldn’t be here without any of that, and I couldn’t be happier with where I ended up in my own personal life—and those formative years of going to see bands played such a huge part.
MC Lars has launched a Kickstarter for a vinyl pressing of The Graduate.
The record came out of a specific moment: early Myspace, the height of the RIAA lawsuits, cheap laptops, long van drives. I was making what I called “post-punk laptop rap” in bedrooms and studios from Oxford to Long Island to San Francisco, trying to connect literature, punk energy, and hip-hop in a way that felt natural.
A Wilhelm Scream talked with New Noise Magazine about their new album.
Read More “A Wilhelm Scream Talk New Album”Usually, I know that I’m done with a song when I feel like it’s gotten as close as it can to the idea’s potential. That’s good, but also bad. You can spend 12 years writing an album, because every song has to be the best song that’s ever been written. Once I let go of (perfection), the songs came out so much cooler—more me, in terms of just spitting insults nonstop in a song. It’s like 90s rap beef. That was our biggest fucking influence (back in the day), before they called it hip hop! The writing boot camps came into play because everybody’s busy. Like, Nuno has a job and a family! So to be able to dedicate the time and focus that it takes, Ben had the idea, “Hey, let’s go out to the desert.”
American Football were featured in the latest issue of GQ.
Read More “American Football Talks With GQ”The “this” is the extraordinary and uncanny story of American Football, who became one of this century’s most influential rock bands in part because they no longer existed. In the weeks after Polyvinyl released the band’s album in September 1999, 21 college radio stations added its tracks to rotation—very respectable, Lunsford remembers, given that the expectations were essentially nil. But as the album seeped onto file-sharing services like Napster and Limewire, the kids who first downloaded it often bought a copy themselves. I worked in a college-town record store right as LP1 entered that growth curve, and I must have slipped hundreds of CD copies into Schoolkids Records paper bags before I finally listened and bought one myself.
ProducerAI, an AI-powered music-making platform, is joining Google. As part of the deal, Google will fold ProducerAI under the Labs umbrella and power the tool with a preview version of its new Lyria 3 music-making AI model.
ProducerAI is a music-making platform that allows users to work with an AI agent to generate sounds, workshop lyrics, remix songs, and even create new instruments based on a prompt.
Chris DeMakes talked with RockSound:
We all grew up loving metal, and it wasn’t a schtick with us. We were always very proud of that. It was a play on words about how we judge each other, though. You don’t know what’s going on in someone else’s head, and you don’t know what they’re feeling. Someone may put all their faith in religion, and that might work for them even if it doesn’t work for the next person. Someone may only listen to disco or rap music, but does that make them any less? Often, we don’t take the time to discover what people are all about. They might be wearing different clothes to you or giving you a funny look, but have you tried to discover what they’re about?