Universal Music Group looks likely to have a new part-owner within the next 18 months – but it will not be ‘spun out’ onto the stock market via an independent IPO. That’s the decision of the Management Board of UMG parent Vivendi, which presented its recommendations on the matter to its Supervisory Board at the…

For decades now, mainstream conversations about gender in music have moved relatively slowly, tilling the same ground over and over until it turns fallow. It once felt like rolling a boulder uphill to even get most cis female musicians recognized as musical talents with the depth and breadth of their male counterparts, and it’s not…

Looking at this 18th century castle, it’s hard to imagine that it once housed one of the most well-known recording studios in all of France. From Pink Floyd to David Bowie, from the Bee Gees to even Iggy Pop, several internationally renowned artists chose the Château d’Hérouville for their recordings in the 1970s. Today we…

Crotchets, quavers and staves are the product of centuries of evolution and refinement. But who started it all – and how different did music look a couple of thousand years ago? It all started with the Ancient Greeks. Sadly, there are very few examples of written music from Ancient Greece – but we do know…

Who said it? “We live in a world where the most passionate fans are sitting in the nosebleed sections. The front-row tickets are going to scalpers and platinum credit card holders… a pain point for both artists and the fans. We’re able to give those fans the front rows – and we’re filling entire venues.”…

Though human beings now have instant access to an endless amount of music in every style imaginable, it can often feel like streaming services are hell bent on narrowing our perspective instead of expanding it. Whether their recommendations come from algorithms or actual people, the results merely flatter our tastes, leading us to what Ben…

Science has officially confirmed what we already knew about Freddie Mercury: he had an unequivocally great singing voice, particularly for a rock vocalist. Swedish, Austrian, and Czech researchers took a deeper, more scholarly look at the singer’s voice to come to some empirically-based conclusions. Published in Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology this past Friday, the study “Freddie…

In March, we learned at Spotify’s Investor Day that Daniel Ek’s service is adding around 20,000 new tracks to its library every 24 hours. It was an impressive stat, but for record labels – whose job it is to ensure their artists get noticed above the noise in the marketplace – it was also a…

The words “digital” and “analog” are used so often, we’ve stopped asking what they mean. From the shift to streaming media to the retro resurgence of the vinyl LP, “digital” typically stands in for “the future” while “analog” is seen as a relic of the past. But perhaps there is more to these concepts than…

Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2012 earworm “Call Me Maybe,” Nelly’s 2002 anthem “Hot In Herre,” and Luis Fonsi’s 2017 hit “Despacito” all have at least two things in common: They were each the official song of summer in their respective years, and they were all, statistically speaking, “average.” Humans are attracted to averages, and this so-called…