The Salzburg Festival transforms the baroque city with everything from star-studded chamber evenings to experimental theater productions. This year’s program (Friday to Aug. 30) revolves around human passion, both religious and worldly. Krzysztof Penderecki’s modern oratorio “St. Luke Passion” opens both the festival and the concert series “Ouverture Spirituelle,” with Kent Nagano leading the Orchestre…

As online streaming embeds itself into the firmament of music culture, we’re faced with the strange proposition of having new discoveries fed to us by machines. Where once musical discovery was a wholly human endeavour, from digging to chatting to reading to good old-fashioned hearing, now it’s just as likely that a computer algorithm can…

Back in February the Wall Street Journal learned Apple Music was on pace to surpass Spotify in terms of paid US subscribers. Today, five months later, it has reportedly come to pass. Citing a detailed report from “a US-based, major distributor,” Digital Music Newsclaims Apple and Spotify are neck and neck with just over 20…

Sony Music has set out exactly how it will share profits from its Spotify equity with artists and distributed labels – and it’s better news than some might have expected. MBW can reveal all of the details from managers and indie labels who received an official letter from Sony breaking down its payout formula. First, a…

THERE WEREN’T A lot of people online in the early 1990s. Mark Kelly, keyboard player for the English band Marillion, early internet adopter and self-titled “co-inventor of crowdfunding,” was an exception. One night after a concert someone handed him a stack of papers—printouts from an email list of Marillion fans. Kelly went home, cranked up his…

She can’t help herself, Charlotte Aitchison, better known as the musician Charli XCX – she’s obsessed with cars. Not in a Top Gear-quoting, ooh-what’s-under-the-hood kind of way: she couldn’t care less how many miles you get out of your Polo. Aitchison is more taken with the kind of car that comes with a driver and has…

Users can add one of thousands of songs to their photos or videos now Instagram has announced a new feature that allows users to add popular music to their Instagram stories, according to TechCrunch. Users can select from thousands of tracks, including ones from Post Malone, Bruno Mars, Guns N’ Roses, and Demi Lovato. They…

Another giant of digital music is about to float on the stock exchange in the United States. Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), which is majority-owned by massive Chinese corporation Tencent, is reportedly readying an application for an IPO in the US this week. That’s according to an unverified (but seemingly well-informed) scoop from China-based news group Sina….

Drake continues his Scorpion success with yet another milestone. According to the Recording Industry of Association of America (RIAA)’s website, the project was certified platinum on June 29, the day it dropped. That means Scorpion moved at least one million equivalent units in the U.S. in a single day. As a point of comparison, Post…

James Blake has discussed how the pressures of his early career led to him developing “suicidal thoughts”. “I would say that chemical imbalance due to diet and the deterioration of my health was a huge, huge factor in my depression and eventually suicidal thoughts,” said the 29-year-old British songwriter. “I developed [dietary] intolerances that would lead…