The LA Times profiles Qobuz, the French streamer positioning itself as the anti-slop alternative for listeners tired of algorithmic filler and ethically queasy platform investments. The hook is real: per-stream payouts nearly double Spotify's, 45% revenue growth, and a user base of self-described music freaks migrating over values. Whether that model scales is the honest question, but for indie labels watching their Spotify checks flatline, the board seat matters more than the theory.
Jasmine Sun graduated into Covid and now writes for young people graduating into AI — and her advice cuts against the usual "learn to prompt" platitudes. The real risk isn't that AI takes your job, it's that over-reliance hollows out the judgment you'd need to do the job well. Her counsel: develop tacit knowledge and human-centric skills while you still can. The transitional generation doesn't get a do-over.
MBW breaks down H.R. 6028, which would pull the Copyright Office out from under the Library of Congress and change how the Register is appointed. Sounds like bureaucratic housekeeping until you remember the Copyright Office sets the rules on mechanical royalties, DMCA takedowns, and every licensing framework the industry runs on. Who picks the person running that machinery matters — and right now, that decision is quietly moving through Congress while most of the business isn't watching.
Joey Akan's profile of Kcee traces how the Nigerian artist built Ojapiano — a genre anchored in the traditional Igbo Oja flute — by betting on the most local version of himself after a decade chasing mainstream pop crossover. The cultural reach he'd been engineering came only once he stopped engineering it. Three producers said it wouldn't work. The fourth tried it, and the song hit 120,000 TikTok videos daily for a week without a push.
Gary Suarez uses the Knicks' Finals run and the Jennifer Lopez subway controversy as a way into Wiki's Ancient History — specifically what the U.W.S. rapper's record says about who actually gets to claim New York. The piece is sharpest as a native New Yorker's pushback on the ten-year rule crowd, with Ma$e as an unlikely arbiter.
A feature identifying an essential album from each of the 48 countries competing in the World Cup, organized by groups A-F. The piece aims to enhance viewers' enjoyment of World Cup matches by connecting them to significant music from competing nations.
A festival report from Warsaw's Ephemera Festival capturing moments of performance transgression and artistic vision, including performances by Cabaret Voltaire, Armand Hammer, Marta Salogni, and Young Boy Dancing Group. The piece contrasts Ephemera with the larger Unsound festival, noting its smaller scale, younger audience, and distinctive programming that blurs boundaries between concert and club experience.
An essay by Galcher Lustwerk reflecting on formative songs and albums that shaped his musical identity and approach to dance music, including tracks from Culture Beat, The Prodigy, and Ananda Project. The piece traces his musical development from childhood exposure to smooth jazz through discovery of electronic, house, and techno music via magazines and samples.
A tribute to pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who died at age ninety-one in Germany. The piece examines his role as South Africa's greatest musical innovator and composer, his synthesis of diverse musical traditions, and his work as a song of defiance against apartheid.
An exploration of Renato Zero's musical and visual artistry through seven key tracks spanning 1973-1982, examining themes of originality, identity, diversity, resilience, and his playful engagement with disco culture and camp aesthetics. The piece traces Zero's evolution from his manifestolike debut through provocative disco-dance works that challenged social conformity and macho conventions.
POW MAG sits down with Chicago rapper Serengeti to talk KENNYV, his new Kenny Dennis record that started as an accidental freestyle. The conversation covers his unorthodox process — writing without beats, recording blind — and a surprising detour into sync work that quietly reshaped how he thinks about craft. Worth it for how specifically he describes the moment a record reveals itself.
An interview with Miles Shore (Pariah the Doll/Salomé Evangelista), a downtown performance artist and musician, discussing their spiritual practice, creative philosophy, and new alt-classical album Castrato. The piece covers themes of non-conformity, religious faith, performance art, and the artist's provocative public persona.
A feature exploring the creation and backstory of EMF's 1990 hit "Unbelievable," including details about the song's sample origins, its development process, and the band's surreal encounters in Los Angeles with Andrew Dice Clay and Rick Rubin that helped secure sample clearances.
Hypebot breaks down Spotify's Culture Next Gen Z Report, and the most useful finding is the segmentation: a 14-year-old and a 29-year-old are both Gen Z, but their habits diverge sharply. Video podcast streams among the cohort grew 90% YOY, and the report's marketing playbook — match artist promo to life-stage-appropriate podcast formats — is practical enough to act on.
Keith Jopling explains the motivations behind writing his book 'Body of Work: how the album outplayed the algorithm and survived playlist culture', arguing that music comes first and that albums represent something AI cannot easily replicate—an argument, a journey, and a relationship rather than optimized content.
First Floor takes on the inbox problem: artists and labels — especially smaller ones without PR budgets — still don't know how to pitch their music effectively. The piece uses the collapse of electronic music coverage (Resident Advisor near-dormant on reviews, Pitchfork paywalled) as context for why pitching well matters more now, not less, even as written reviews become an endangered species.
A report on Hive Live, a gathering of AI music creators in Kassel, Germany that may represent the first in-person meetup of the AI music community. The event brought together AI artists who typically interact only through Discord and online platforms, creating an emotional and meaningful connection between creators and their work.
Bruce Ramos's dispatch from Standard Innovation's Music Moneyball Hackathon is less a recap than an argument: the build is never the point, the room is. What he found in New York — operators, builders, students, all focused on the unglamorous infrastructure underneath the industry — reads as a quietly optimistic signal about where serious music business thinking is actually happening.
CD Baby President and musician Molly Neuman was a pioneer of '90s riot grrrl music. She recently summarized her advice for musicians in three simple lessons.
Spotify has held talks with festival promoters over rights to carry live concert video on its platform, marking the company's first push into live video content beyond its existing live audio offerings.
A podcast episode featuring an interview with Simon, the founder of End of the Road festival, discussing the challenges of running an independent festival for 20 years, past headliners, favorite sets, and whether it would be possible to start a similar festival from scratch in today's landscape.
Over Mr Porter production with the Karabo yaMorena Choir, Rapsody transforms morning mirror ritual into theology—afro picks, cocoa butter, and a lineage stretching four generations to a continent. Dense with Black cultural memory from Clipse to Diana Ross.
REC 01
Ambrose Akinmusire & Mary Halvorson
Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings
♪ jazz
Trumpeter Akinmusire's breath control is described as 'astonishingly artful, emotive, and articulate,' particularly stunning on ballads. This kaleidoscopic collaboration with guitarist Mary Halvorson showcases the nuanced interplay between two of jazz's most inventive voices.
FSOL's biggest single, reaching #12 in the UK in 1997, described as 'a mixture of ferocious break, metallic rush and pure robotic vocal hook that is almost painful in its heart-pulsing power.' Line Noise calls it 'a Stakker Humanoid for the 90s'—both great pop single and towering dancefloor banger.
Screenwriter Tony Tost argues that a 'breaking-in' script is less a story than a piece of industry currency — bait designed to attract working professionals by handing them a lead role that advances their own careers. If he were starting today, he says, he'd write a female-driven Uncut Gems. A sharp, unsentimental read on how creative work actually moves through Hollywood.
An essay critiquing ageism and sexism in classical music, discussing how women's value is tied to youth and appearance, and the unfair treatment they face throughout their careers, particularly after age forty.
An essay defending violinist Hilary Hahn against critical commentary about her appearance as she ages. The author argues that Hahn's longevity in classical music should be celebrated rather than scrutinized for her physical appearance, and criticizes the gendered double standards applied to female performers.
The Music Week makes the case that heartbreak isn't really about losing someone — it's about realizing you became who you needed to be too late. Built around Lord Huron's "The Night We Met," the piece reframes the song's longing not as a wish to reclaim a person, but a wish to reclaim an earlier, less guarded version of yourself. Quietly devastating.
The Bagatelles runs a muscle memory special built around a door code — shared so widely it became ambient knowledge, then erased overnight when the lock changed. The piece uses that small rupture to trace how shared codes become part of a building's social fabric, and what it means when the body still knows something the world has quietly decided to forget.
The Media Copilot makes a case that's hard to shake: bots are now the majority of your audience, and the gap is widening fast. TollBit data shows scrape-to-referral ratios of 369:1 for Perplexity and 8,692:1 for Anthropic. Cloudflare's CEO puts bot traffic at 57.4% of all requests — 18 months ahead of his own forecast. The SEO playbook was built for humans. That's no longer who's reading.
Jason Koebler reports on Cornell research showing that 13 words of planted text on Reddit or Wikipedia can reliably poison AI search outputs. The implication is blunt: any brand willing to seed user-generated platforms with promotional content can quietly steer what ChatGPT or Google's AI surfaces.
The AI Corner breaks down Jensen Huang's infrastructure argument: agentic AI — systems that reason, plan, and use tools — demands roughly 1,000x the compute of generative AI, which means every workflow built on 2023-era logic is already obsolete. The piece is useful for its hierarchy: value sits two layers below where most attention lands, in chips and infrastructure rather than models or apps.
