Billboard:

Music instrument retailer Guitar Center, which has been beset by mounting debt for years, says it expects to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after reaching a debt-reduction deal with its key stakeholders.

Zeynep Tufekci, writing at The Atlantic, first with the good news:

The end may be near for the pestilence that has haunted the world this year. Good news is arriving on almost every front: treatments, vaccines, and our understanding of this coronavirus.

Pfizer and BioNTech have announced a stunning success rate in their early Phase 3 vaccine trials—if it holds up, it will be a game changer. Treatments have gotten better too. A monoclonal antibody drug—similar to what President Donald Trump and former Governor Chris Christie received—just earned emergency-use authorization from the FDA. Dexamethasone—a cheap, generic corticosteroid—cut the death rate by a third for severe COVID-19 cases in a clinical trial.

Doctors and nurses have much more expertise in managing cases, even in using nonmedical interventions like proning, which can improve patients’ breathing capacity simply by positioning them facedown. Health-care workers are also practicing fortified infection-control protocols, including universal masking in medical settings.

Our testing capacity has greatly expanded, and people are getting their results much more quickly. We may soon get cheaper, saliva-based rapid tests that people can administer on their own, itself a potential game changer.

And then with the kicker:

The best way to prepare would have been to enter this phase with as few cases as possible. In exponential processes like epidemics, the baseline matters a great deal. Once the numbers are this large, it’s very easy for them to get much larger, very quickly — and they will. When we start with half a million confirmed cases a week, as we had in mid-October, it’s like a runaway train. Only a few weeks later, we are already at about 1 million cases a week, with no sign of slowing down.

Americans are reporting higher numbers of contacts compared with the spring, probably because of quarantine fatigue and confusing guidance. It’s hard to keep up a restricted life. But what we’re facing now isn’t forever.

It’s time to buckle up and lock ourselves down again, and to do so with fresh vigilance. Remember: We are barely nine or 10 months into this pandemic, and we have not experienced a full-blown fall or winter season. Everything that we may have done somewhat cautiously — and gotten away with — in summer may carry a higher risk now, because the conditions are different and the case baseline is much higher.

The New York Times:

For small music venues, the situation is dire. Starved for revenue since March, and with no lifeline from Congress, independent clubs across the country are shuttering by the dozen — devastating fans and artists alike and delivering a brutal blow to the ecosystem that develops tomorrow’s Grammy winners and underground heroes.

One music executive, however, thinks he can save them, through a plan to invest in small clubs and build an indie touring network.

The New York Times:

Guitar Center has begun to prepare for a potential bankruptcy filing that could come as soon as next month, people with knowledge of the situation said. The retailer missed an interest payment of roughly $45 million earlier this month, setting off a 30-day grace period that could end in default, the people said.

The country’s largest retailer of musical instruments has reached out to creditors to discuss a plan that would involve the company filing for bankruptcy this year and emerging from it in early 2021, said the people, who requested anonymity because the talks are confidential. A spokesperson for Guitar Center did not respond to a request for comment.

The New York Philharmonic has cancelled their entire 2020/2021 season:

Today we share news that we did our best to avert, but reality has intervened. Due to mandatory state and city government health regulations, the Philharmonic will not be able to resume live, indoor concerts in January as originally hoped. With deep regret, all previously scheduled concerts from January 6 to June 13, 2021, must now be cancelled. In the 178-year history of our institution, the cancellation of an entire season marks a historic first, and a dreadful one at that. If you are disappointed, please know how devastated we all are by this turn of events. The health and financial challenges, indeed the experiential challenges we all face, are profound.