There’s no more predictable pile-on in music culture than the backlash to festival lineup announcements. Within minutes of any given festival poster’s release, critics are comparing font sizes to make the usual points. Too similar to other festivals. Too predictable. Too many reunions. Not enough diversity. Weak headliners. And who the hell are these bands…

US reissue label Numero Group has criticised Record Store Day for becoming a “marketing event designed to generate traffic by pushing manufactured rarities that scrape off the chaff from deluxe edition CD bonus material and flaunt their first-time-on-wax status while remaining no less unessential.” Sharing the essay in a recent Numero Group newsletter, the label…

Swedish DJ and producer Avicii has died. He was 28. His publicist, Diana Baron, confirmed the news to Billboard in a statement that has also since been provided to Pitchfork. “It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii,” it reads. “He was found dead in Muscat,…

Cardi B blasts in at #1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with her debut studio album, Invasion Of Privacy. The set, which was released on 4/6 through The KSR Group/Atlantic Records, earned 255,000 equivalent album units in the week ending 4/12, according to Nielsen Music. That’s the second-biggest week of 2018, trailing only the…

Nine Simone was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this past weekend, and several artists took the stage to celebrate her legacy. Lauryn Hill, the Roots, and Andra Day performed a medley of her music, while Mary J. Blige officially inducted her. Backed by the Roots, Day sang “I Wish I Knew…

Kendrick Lamar has won a Pulitzer Prize for music for his album “Damn.,” the organization announced Monday afternoon. It was the first win for a non-classical or jazz musician since the awards began including music some 75 years ago. The Pulitzer board deemed the album “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and…

The Talking Heads’ 1984 Stop Making Sense is one of the all-time great concert movies. At the peak of their powers, the New York band choreographed a visual performance that matched the set list in that it was strange and quirky and compelling — and it had never been done before. In that movie/at that…

Beyoncé was supposed to headline Coachella last year. That didn’t end up happening. Instead, she got pregnant with twins, and Lady Gaga ended up filling in for her as the first woman to headline Coachella in 10 years. But Beyoncé promised she would be back in 2018, and Beyoncé always keeps her promises. So she…

Spotify has acquired another music tech business. The streaming company has bought San Francisco-based Loudr for an undisclosed fee. Loudr, which was founded in 2013, creates products and services that ‘help content creators, aggregators, and music services identify rights holders, secure mechanical licenses, and pay royalties to music publishers’. It does so via proprietary technology…

Now this is Peak Mac. Could this happen to any other band? Fleetwood Mac, the crew that loves breakup drama more than any other six or seven bands combined, topped their own standards on Monday, with the announcement that they’d fired Lindsey Buckingham. This split is more than one of the year’s strangest headlines –…