DMX has passed away. He was 50.
His family announced the death in a statement. He had been on life support at White Plains Hospital after suffering what his family called “a catastrophic cardiac arrest” a week earlier.
“Earl was a warrior who fought till the very end,” the Simmons family said. “He loved his family with all of his heart, and we cherish the times we spent with him.”
John Voorhees, reviews the new version of Albums 4.0 at MacStories:
Albums 4.0 is a beautifully designed, feature-rich app with more filtering and discovery tools than any other music app I’ve tried. The app is also opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists. It’s the sort of focused, deep approach to music that Apple’s Music app doesn’t offer because it’s designed to appeal to a wider audience.
If you’re an albums-first music fan, you’ll love Albums. However, even if you prefer singles, playlists, and jumping around the Apple Music catalog as I do, Albums is worth checking out. The app’s powerful filtering opens up brand new ways to enjoy your music collection that any music fan can appreciate.
Nick Statt, writing for The Verge:
Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005, and in the years since its relevance as a meme haven has remained intact while its practicality as a forum has waned during the rise of Reddit, Quora, and other competing internet hangouts.
Lucas Shaw, writing at Bloomberg:
This data is backed up by conversations I’ve had with people who work at Netflix, who’ve said since last year that the first and second quarter of 2021 would be most affected by Covid. Netflix shoots most of its TV shows and movies several months before it plans to release them, which you have to do when you are dropping every episode all at once. As a result, it had shot most of its 2020 material. But we’re now a year into the pandemic, which means we’re seeing the effects of production stoppages from last March. April and May.
This is not unique to Netflix. If anything, Netflix is still in a stronger position than most of it competition.
The Narrative, on Medium:
After enough time, both of us started to feel the burden of not making music, ultimately realizing that it’s something that is core to our identity, and so we’re trying to get back at it as much as we can.
I actually have about a dozen or so songs I’ve written over the last few years (most of them the year right before my daughter was born), and Suzie & I fleshed one of those out recently and plan to release it soon. We also started working on a few other things and are trying to find our way towards a cadence of consistent new music creation.
And so. We’re back. We think…
Rod Wave has the number one album in the country this week:
Rod Wave earns his first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, as SoulFly opens with 130,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending April 1, according to MRC Data. With the arrival, SoulFlyalso notches the biggest week for an R&B/hip-hop album in 2021 in terms of units earned.
I found this conversation over at Complex, talking about the “deluxe album” trend, interesting:
Whenever an artist released a deluxe album last year, there were usually comments like “no one asked for this.” And in theory, I can agree with the perspective that less is more. Artists like Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean have built incredible legacies by being selective with the music they’ve decided to share with the world. But complaining about new music has always been a ridiculous concept to me. No one is forcing you to listen to these deluxe albums if you don’t want to. They serve a purpose. Hardcore fans will be happy to hear new music, and casual listeners can pick through and save their favorite songs to playlists. We always hear stories about rappers like Future and Thug making eight songs in a night, so why not share some of those with fans? During a pandemic when artists were scrambling for ways to make money, this trend makes sense. I will admit one downside, though, is it opens the door for fans to start pressuring artists into dropping more music just moments after the release of a new project. Watching fans hound Playboi Carti to release a deluxe album full of leaks within hours of Whole Lotta Red dropping was a low point. Let him live for a minute. He finally dropped the album!
Personally, I’m more a fan of deluxe albums than I am the “new” EP re-packaging for streaming services technique. (Or just releasing only singles.) I’m always down for more music from the artists I love, but I think letting the album breathe after its release, for fans to sit with and digest, is also important.
Netflix is plunking down an astounding $450 million for the rights to “Knives Out 2” and “Knives Out 3,” the next two follow-ups to the 2019 murder mystery, sources tell Variety. The films will reunite director Rian Johnson and star Daniel Craig, who teamed up so memorably on the first detective story.
Get that 💰
Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch:
Independent music distribution platform and tool factory UnitedMasters has raised a $50M series B round led by Apple. A16z and Alphabet are participating again in this raise. United Masters is also entering a strategic partnership with Apple alongside this investment.
If you’re unfamiliar with UnitedMasters, it’s a distribution company launched in 2017 by Steve Stoute, a former Interscope and Sony Music executive. The focus of UnitedMasters is to provide artists with a direct pipeline to data around the way that fans are interacting with their content and community, allowing them to connect more directly to offer tickets, merchandise and other commercial efforts. UnitedMasters also generally allows artists to retain control of their own masters.
Spotify has invested heavily in prerecorded podcast content, and now, the company is looking to host live audio conversations. The platform announced today that it’s acquiring Betty Labs, the company behind the live sports audio app Locker Room. Spotify didn’t disclose how much it spent on the purchase.
As a result of the acquisition, Locker Room will stay live in the App Store but will be rebranded with a different name in the future on iOS and, eventually, Android with a broader focus on music, culture, and sports content. Spotify says it sees live audio as ideal for creators who want to connect with audiences in real time, whether that’s to premiere an album, host a question and answer session, or possibly even perform.
Mark Savage, writing for BBC:
In an open letter, the writers behind songs like Dua Lipa’s “New Rules” and Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” said “a growing number of artists” were demanding a share of publishing royalties, even if they had contributed nothing to a song.
”These artists will go on to collect revenue from touring, merchandise [and] brand partnerships,” they said, but “songwriters have only their publishing revenue as a means of income”.
They added that composers were often subjected to “bully tactics and threats” by artists and executives who wanted to take a share of the songwriting royalties.
You can read the open letter at The-Pact.org.
Justin Bieber has the number one album in the country this week:
Justin Bieber achieves his eighth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, as Justice debuts atop the tally with 154,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending March 25, according to MRC Data. The album was released via Raymond Braun/Def Jam on March 18.
Ben Sisario of the New York Times talks with Shira Ovide about the economics of streaming music:
Haven’t many musicians always felt exploited and underpaid?
Yes, but the streaming model has exacerbated the divide between superstars and everybody else. It’s also a fallacy to dismiss musicians’ complaints. Economic inequality has been around a long time, but it still should be addressed.
What’s the solution? Can streaming ever work for everyone?
There is talk of changing the payments systems to a “user-centric model” that would allocate payments based on what people listen to. If I listen only to Herbie Hancock on Spotify, my subscription fee goes only to him, after the service takes its cut. Proponents say this system would be more fair, especially to artists in niche genres. But there have been studies that say it’s not that simple. And I wonder if it’s too late to change.
Clickbait-y title aside, that study that shows switching to a payout model based on individual listening habits sure is depressing for indie musicians.
In the seven months since Pitchfork published an article detailing claims of sexual misconduct against Mark Kozelek, seven more women have come forward with similar allegations about the Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters singer-songwriter. These new allegations include nonconsensual nudity and masturbation, unwanted touching, and one claim of nonconsensual intercourse. They span two decades, from Kozelek’s beginnings as a professional musician in the early 1990s with Red House Painters to the peak of Sun Kil Moon’s popularity in the 2010s.
Mala Mortensa, writing at Alt. Press:
It’s been nearly five years since Adam Lazzara, John Nolan, Anthony Green and Ben Homola took to privately closing out their summer tour stops with improvised, instrument-less displays of their far-reaching creative talents. Now, the Taking Back Sunday, Circa Survive, and Grouplove supergroup, Fuckin Whatever, are actively collaborating for the first time ever.