Music News and New Releases

1 Saul, HWV 53: Act I, Scene I: How Excellent Thy Name 2:45 2 The Strathclyde Motets: O Radiant Dawn 3:18 3 Song of Songs: Surge amica mea 2:34 4 O Domine Jesu Christe 3:38 5 Remember Not, Lord, Our Offences, Z 50 2:59 6 Miserere (Evolution Version) 11:28 7 Vespers of 1610, SV 206: Deus in adiutorium meum intende The Sixteen, Harry Christophers & Mark Dobell 1:58 8 Salve Regina 4:09 9 Hymn for the Dormition of the Mother of God 4:49 10 The Deer’s Cry 4:21 11 Lay a Garland By Robert Pearsall 3:06 12 O nata lux 1:45 13 2:25 14 Bring Us, O Lord God 3:45 15 Coronation Anthem Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened, HWV 259: Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened 3:06 16 In manus tuas I 3:44 17 Ave Maria (Parsons) 4:31 18 Tota pulchra es 3:36 19 Requiem: Sanctus The Sixteen, Harry Christophers & Academy of St. Martin in the Fields 3:11 20 Cantata 79, Gott der Herr ist Sonn’ und Schild, BWV 79: Gott der Herr ist Sonn’ und Schild 4:53 1 Symphony of Psalms: Part 1 – Exaudi orationem meam Domine The Sixteen, Harry Christophers & BBC Philharmonic 3:02 2 Mass for […]

1 Bomber (Proudly People remix) [Mixed] LondonGround 4:23 2 Black Light (Mixed) Ben Men 3:37 3 Back Again (Mixed) Michel Degen 4:39 4 Smashing Up (Groove Armada Remix) [Mixed] Javi Bora 5:40 5 The Bark Side of the Moog (Mixed) Steve Bug & Clé 6:31 6 It’s Your Love (Dennis Cruz Remix) [Mixed] Sven Tasnadi 5:56 7 (Time to) Put Up (Mixed) 4:08 8 Derober (Mixed) Sizeup 5:02 9 Dam Hot (Mixed) Fauvrelle 2:31 10 House so House (Mixed) Miane 4:23 11 Rebecca (Mixed) Classmatic 4:58 12 I Am Here (Richie Ahmed Remix) [Mixed] Jay Hill & Lazarusman 4:24 13 Chakra (Mixed) Espinal & Nova 3:47

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/when-we-all-fall-asleep-where-do-we-go/1450695723?app=music Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favours chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from The Office on “my strange addiction”, and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny”. “There are a lot of firsts,” says Finneas. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat’, but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you’re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, […]

If nothing else, Logic is a storyteller. If you missed Supermarket, the 2019 novel he authored—or its accompanying soundtrack album—you’d still understand this by the range of characters the MC will embody over the course of an album. He cycles through perspectives so frequently on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the official follow-up to 2018’s YSIV, that it can be difficult to discern whether he is telling his own truth or that of one of his characters. He talks frequently of the lifestyle a successful rap career has afforded him (“Pardon My Ego,” “Icy,” “Still Ballin”), but also takes time to lambaste those lusting after fame (“Wannabe,” “clickbait”) and the facets of popular hip-hop culture he’s subverted (“Cocaine,” “Don’t Be Afraid to Be Different”). The guest list is by and large heavy hitters of rap (Gucci Mane, Wiz Khalifa, G-Eazy, Will Smith), and Logic manages to accommodate all of their varied personas with bars that maintain the vibes while also preserving his reputation as a proud rap technician. There are of course the classic, earnestly aspirational Logic-isms—“Put your ego on the shelf and remember, love yourself,” he says on the title track—but nowhere does the MC sound more comfortable than […]

Spotify claims 100 million paid subscribers, Apple Music reportedly has more than 50 million, Amazon around 30 million, and according to a new report in Bloomberg, Google comes in fourth place at 15 million paid and promotional trial users of its YouTube Music and Google Play services. According to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal for an article published on Wednesday (May 8), the service has been struggling to recruit new subscribers. Google’s head of music communications, Marni Greenberg, told Billboard that “YouTube aggressively disputes the WSJ report stating YouTube Music subscription growth has plateaued, countering that healthy subscription growth continued through Q1 of this year.” Though a spokesperson for YouTube declined to specify subscription numbers to Bloomberg, Greenberg confirmed to Billboard that YouTube Music and Premium-paid subscribers had grown 60 percent between March 2018 and March 2019. Subscribers to YouTube Music Premium can access licensed music and user-generated music content ad-free for $9.99 per month, while YouTube Premium expands those offerings to all YouTube content for $11.99 per month. When YouTube’s premium music service launched across the U.S., Canada, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and several European countries around the world almost exactly a year ago, the initiative looked promising for the world’s biggest video hub, which had […]

Your house parties are about to get a whole lot better, as we have just found a deal online that can get you an Amazon smart speaker for less than a quid. You read that right, Amazon is giving you the chance to get an Echo Dot speaker for your home for just 99p. In case you were wondering if that’s a good deal or not, the Echo Dot normally costs £49, so a big discount all around. To get this deal, you will need to sign up to the Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan, which is fine, because you are going to want to blast some tunes out of your speaker once you receive it. The only proviso is that you can’t get this offer if you are on a free trial – you have to wait until your trial is over and the first payment of your Amazon Music Unlimited comes out of your account. Let us explain. First up, head over to Amazon and sign in. Then you are going to have to sign up to the Amazon Music Unlimited Family Plan, which costs £14.99 a month. You can, of course, sign up to Amazon Prime for […]

Google-owned mapping app Waze has been updated with support for Pandora music streaming, as revealed in a blog post on the Pandora website. The update means Pandora listeners on both iOS and Android can stream songs directly from within the Waze app using its embedded audio player, allowing drivers to navigate and listen to their music without leaving the app. The integration also works both ways, so once users connect Pandora and Waze on their device, the next Waze navigational direction also appears within the official Pandora app. To connect the two apps, simply click the music icon on the top right corner of the Waze app interface, select the Pandora icon, and start streaming your music. Waze can be downloaded from the App Store for free. [Direct Link]

We all need to invest significantly, for that, more competition is good as companies will invest to educate the users and grow the market because that’s the need of the hour, says Agarwal Music streaming app Gaana crossed 100 million monthly active users (MAU) in March 2019 and its CEO, Prashan Agarwal, believes for further growth, targeting tier-2 and 3 cities is the way to go because “the next 100-200 million users will pretty much be from those cities”. Gaana claimed its user growth was the fastest in tier-2 cities (96%), followed by tier-1 cities (84%) and tier-3 cities (78%) in the last year. Here are the excerpts: The competition is rapidly increasing in the music streaming space with the arrival of Spotify and YouTube music. How do you see it? The penetration of music streaming is only 10% in the Indian market with around 150 million users, the market needs to grow to 600 million in the next 2-3 years. We all need to invest significantly, for that, more competition is good as companies will invest to educate the users and grow the market because that’s the need of the hour. Gaana has the lead of at least 1-2 […]

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel Tuesday announced a foray into music video streaming with focus to tap 200 million potential users in tier-II and III towns. “There is a large population in tier-II and III towns and villages who wants to listen to music as well as watch videos. We have developed Wynk Tube to reach out to 200 million users. This includes both Airtel and non-Airtel customers,” Bharti Airtel Chief Executive Officer (Content and Apps) Sameer Batra said while announcing the launch. The music platform of Wynk claims to have 100 million users. “With Wynk Tube, users will have option to switch to video of song that they want to watch and switch back to audio only,” Batra said. Wynk Tube will focus on vernacular content to reach out to users in small towns and cities. “The app will be available to users in 12 Indian regional languages including Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Bhojpuri,” Batra said. This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

Bharti Airtel on Tuesday said that it proposes to sync its music and video apps with its direct-to-home (DTH) offering, so that the content can be watched through television as well. “We will eventually get there (streaming on television through DTH). We have only had Wynk for the last 4-5 quarters, so I don’t think this is a big issue. Technology-wise, any model will work,” Sameer Batra, CEO, Content and Apps, Airtel, told BusinessLine. However, there are no plans for a ‘Live TV’, he said, adding that the company does not have any rights for it. Wynk Tube launched After the success of its over the top (OTT) music streaming app Wynk Music, Bharti Airtel on Tuesday launched its new music streaming app Wynk Tube, which has a collection of 40-lakh songs and related videos. The company is offering a free trial for the first 30 days and then charge Rs 99 from non Airtel customers. For Airtel subscribers, it will remain free. The app will be available to only Android devices right now, and the company would think of iOS devices later. With this Airtel has further expanded its fast growing content portfolio, especially keeping in mind the needs […]

In a Beats 1 interview with Zane Lowe, Philadelphia R&B singer Pink Sweat$ laid out his ambition: “I’m trying to expand people’s palettes of black music.” To achieve this, Pink leans on lonely guitar and natural beats (“Listen to Bobby McFerrin and you’ll understand,” he adds). The spare accompaniment allows his voice to blossom across this five-song EP. The backyard strummer “I Know” shows his ability to get to the heart of a matter without being overcome by it. The genesis and aftermath of a love hangover plays out in the two-parter “Coke & Henny”—”Pt. 1” is playful and strutting, “Pt. 2” is solemn and regretful. “Your Side” and “Body Ain’t Me” reveal the old-school R&B soul—he’s from Philly, after all—underneath those comfy pink sweats. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/volume-2-ep/1457267889?app=music

There’s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of Lemonade—Beyoncé’s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album—and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar. An elderly woman’s voice cuts in: “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her blackness, her husband’s infidelity) and make for Beyoncé’s most outwardly revealing work to date. The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. Billed upon its release as a tribute to “every woman’s journey of self-knowledge and healing,” the project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement from the most powerful woman in music, released without warning in a time of […]

It isn’t just us curled up on the sofa binge-watching Game of Thrones in our trackies; it’s also your favourite artists, cradling a bowl of snacks, streaming away on the tour bus. As this compilation of Thrones-inspired songs makes clear, their fascination with the fabled, now-iconic drama runs deep. On “Too Many Gods”, A$AP Rocky and Joey Bada$$ mull over false prophets while dropping in a GoT reference (“Playing with fire but I’m no Targaryen”). Singer-songwriters like Jacob Banks, Lennon Stella, Chloe x Halle and ROSALÍA imbue their tributes with stern keys and an existential dread that’s so familiar to the show’s fans. And it’s especially fun to hear a pop singer like Ellie Goulding tap into a sinister ruthlessness on “Hollow Crown”: “Making a noose out of your hollow crown/I hold a match up to your paper castle/And watch it all burn down, down, down.” https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/for-throne-music-inspired-by-hbo-series-game-thrones/1458925215?app=music

“Hurts 2B Human was sort of a pebble that rolled downhill and became this boulder,” P!nk told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “It just kept steamrolling.” In 2018, while touring her seventh album, Beautiful Trauma, the singer found herself in spontaneous recording sessions with musicians she’d never worked with before (Beck, Sia, Chris Stapleton, Cash Cash, Wrabel, Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds and many others). Eventually, she realised she’d made album number eight—a lightly political package of sentimental ballads and pre-game bangers that feels like like classic P!nk. The topical numbers speak to the times. “The news will try to make you believe that everybody hates each other, and it’s just not true,” she said about the inspiration behind the title track, which features Khalid and was written by Teddy Geiger (best known for authoring some of Shawn Mendes’ biggest hits). “I am a woman, Khalid is a man, he’s African American, I’m Jewish… Everybody has their own experience and is going through something, so it’s all about the circle you create around you to get through all the bulls**t in this world. That’s where this song came from.” In the EDM-inspired “Can We Pretend” featuring Cash Cash, she asks rhetorical […]

“Jacknife took our brains for a walk,” Catfish and the Bottlemen’s Van McCann tells Apple Music about working with Killers and U2 producer Jacknife Lee. “You’d be surrounded by music all day. Every other day, you’d get a knock at the door and it would be new vinyls he’d ordered to show you new stuff. You’d be buzzing off his excitement.” These brain strolls have helped bring extra adventure and exploration to the band’s third album. The Balance still contains the key ingredients that have taken Catfish from indie-rock tyros to arena-fillers in a few years: exhilarating choruses, pin-sharp melodies and relatable lyrics (on “Basically”, McCann even sings about doing housework). “Don’t write anything that isn’t worth a place on a set list some night,” says McCann. “By the end of the year, we would have done every arena in the [UK] and probably sold them all out. Where’s it go from there? It has to go outdoors, and you’ve got to start writing songs that are big enough for those occasions. It was always about pushing it.” Here, McCann and guitarist Johnny Bond take us through the album track by track. “Longshot”Van McCann: “This is the first one we […]

Universal Music Group has become the first major international label to license its catalog to uduX, a Nigeria-based music streaming service. The service is currently available as part of subscription with music and lifestyle company Habari, but will soon have its own stand-alone app. Effective immediately, uduX will distribute music from UMG’s extended family of labels, giving subscribers access to both Nigerian and global artists including Bob Marley, Maroon 5, Tekno, Lady Zamar, Post Malone, Eminem, Nicki Minaj, Brenda Fassie, World, J. Cole, Mr. Eazi, Lil Wayne, Hugh Masekela, Tamia and others. “This partnership extends our reach and makes our artists’ music even more accessible to Nigerian music lovers,” said Ezegozie Eze Jr., general manager, Universal Music Nigeria. “We are delighted to be the first global music company to partner with uduX and look forward to bringing the extraordinary creativity of our artists to as many Nigerian users as possible.” UMN launched in July 2018 and is based in Lagos. In November the label became the first major to license its catalog to Africa’s biggest streaming platform Boomplay, which recently announced it has raised $20 million in Series A funding to continue its rapid expansion on the emerging continent. In […]

MUMBAI: Even as global biggies like Spotify and YouTube Music have made their entry in India this year, Gaana, the music streaming service owned by Times Internet, has cemented its position on the leader board as the country’s top ondemand music streaming service. The service clocked 80 million monthly active users (MAUs) in February, out of the total market of 150 million users, said Prashan Agarwal, CEO of Gaana. The service, which hosts 2.7 billion songs across genres — Bollywood, non-film, regional and English music — has witnessed 100% year-onyear jump in terms of both, revenue and paid subscribers. “We continue to lead the space with a clear majority. Now we are focusing on taking the product to the next level to give our users best experience. Last year, we launched voice assistant, which is now used by 24% of our users for a lean-back experience,” Agarwal said. The company’s investments in new age technologies have also paid off. A voice assistance service powered by Google’s text-to-speech allows users to search and play music or playlists based on singers/ actors/ mood/time of day and more. “Our machine learning algorithms have now started predicting user behaviour and almost 17% of songs […]

It is easy to get nostalgic for the era when most music lovers bought LPs. They would save their pennies for a Saturday trip to the local record store, before heading home clutching their glorious new vinyl in a plastic bag to drop the needle on the turntable and listen on repeat. This anachronistic ritual will be resurrected on International Record Store Day on Saturday April 13, as consumers queue to buy exclusive limited edition vinyl releases from their favourite artists. Launched a decade ago, this annual event is an industry drive to boost ailing independent record stores in an age when most people stream music online. Ah, the good old days. pxhere, CC BY-SA But is it actually true that earlier generations placed a greater value on recorded music than music fans in the present day? We are loath to succumb to the mythology of a “golden age” for music and lend credence to baby boomers moaning of bygone days when music somehow mattered more than it does now. We decided to investigate the numbers to see if they told a different story. As it turns out, they do – and it’s far worse than we expected. We conducted […]

Qobuz (pronounced koh-buzz), an audiophile-oriented music-streaming service based in Paris, launched in the U.S. today after being exclusive to Europe for the past 10 years. I’ve been enrolled in the closed beta for the past few days, and I absolutely love it. In addition to using the service, I also spoke with Qobuz USA’s managing director Dan Mackta at CES in January, so I’ll sprinkle some quotes from him throughout the review. There are lots of things about Qobuz that make it different from other streaming services, but the most important differentiator is that you can stream high-resolution FLAC files: Up to 24-bit resolution and sampling rates as high as 192kHz. The service validates such tracks with the familiar Hi-Res Audio logo from the Japan Audio Society. That level of fidelity doesn’t come cheap, though, and I was surprised to find some albums bearing the logo that would only play in 16-bit/44.1kHz resolution. I’ll get into the four service tiers later. Qobuz delivers information galore No matter which level of service you sign up for, you’ll get all the rest of the features that render Qobuz tailor-made for music lovers. Chief among these is the metadata and other documentation attached […]

click to enlarge My first car was a silver 1990 Buick Park Avenue handed down from my grandmother, and like all early ’90s cars, it came equipped with a tape deck. It always had a cassette loaded. Most were homemade: I’d buy blank Maxell cassettes, hook up a CD player to my parents’ tape deck and dub my favorite albums — Ziggy Stardust on one side, Hunky Dory on the other. The convenience of digital soon came calling, and I spent my first-ever tax return to swap out that tape deck for a stereo with a CD player. Every paycheck from my first job went almost exclusively to CDs, and I don’t think I’ve listened to a cassette since. In the last few years, though, I started to wonder if I’d been too hasty in throwing them out. I saw touring indie bands selling tapes during their Spokane stops, and fans actually buying them. Friends are proudly posting pictures of their thriftstore cassette finds on Instagram. Artists are collaborating on limited-run cassette releases. But this is not just a local trend. The popularity of vinyl records has been increasing over the last decade: Per Nielsen Music, vinyl sales increased in […]

There it was again, playing through my laptop. It sounded … well, not as good as I remembered it on the radio in the days when music meant listening to a radio. It sounded soppy. I regretted paying a few dollars to discover that. I also retrospectively regretted quoting its lyrics in a tortured note I sent to the poor girl at the time (who sensibly never replied). Many of those early downloads ended up on an iPod, something which – like that first smartphone – was given to me rather than bought. Well-meaning family members nudged me towards technology they thought I would end up embracing. They were right. I hadn’t wanted one. Hadn’t thought I needed one. Why, I still had my portable CD player, a great leap forward from the Walkman it superseded. (Hmm … I still have that also; so, too, the cassettes it played, including the carefully crafted mix tapes, each of which represented hours of play-and-pausing on a tape deck linked to a record player.) That portable CD player used to travel everywhere with me. A crucial prelude to any trip was selecting the six or so discs to bring, perhaps a couple more […]

Major music labels are making millions per day  from streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify. The artists? Not so much. Image: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images By Matt Binder2019-02-25 19:56:22 UTC Streaming services are now paying out big money to the music industry’s gatekeepers. According to a new report by industry news outlet Music Business Worldwide, the three major music labels made $6.93 billion combined from streaming in 2018. The publication poured through recent investor filings from Universal Music Group’s parent company Vivendi, Sony, and Warner and found that the companies are totaling $19 million in daily streaming revenue.  Broken down even further, the trio of labels generate nearly $800,000 per hour just from music streaming services. As Rolling Stone points out, when looking at the combined revenue for the three labels across all formats and commercial endeavors — $13.14 billion — streaming revenue accounts for more than half of that. That’s more than a 10 percent jump when compared to how much streaming revenue accounted for in 2017. Universal (UMG) saw its streaming revenue jump the most with an increase of $864 million a year, or $2.4 million a day, when compared to the year prior. UMG’s 2018 […]