Music

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Music news from every genre: album releases, tours, charts, and the artists and industry deals defining the sound of right now.

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About Music

Two businesses sharing a beat

Music news covers recorded music and live performance, and the two make money in almost opposite ways. Recorded music earns small amounts an enormous number of times, mostly through streaming, and rewards catalog depth and longevity. Live performance earns large amounts a limited number of times, and is where most working musicians actually make a living. Touring economics turn on venue size, ticketing fees and costs that rise with the production, which is why a sold-out tour is not automatically a profitable one. Stories about ticketing platforms, venue ownership and festival cancellations belong to this beat as much as album releases do, and the consolidation of promoters, venues and ticketing under common ownership is one of its longest running arguments.

Who owns a song

Every recording involves at least two separate copyrights, and conflating them causes most of the confusion in music coverage. The composition is the song itself, the melody and lyrics, and it is handled by publishers. The master is the specific recorded performance, and it is usually owned by whoever financed the recording, which historically meant the label rather than the artist. An artist can own one and not the other. Catalog sales, re-recordings and disputes over who may license a song to an advertisement all come down to which of those two rights is in play.

What the charts actually measure

Charts are formulas, and the formula decides the outcome as much as listener behavior does. Streams are converted into notional sales at a ratio set by the chart compiler, with paid subscription streams counted more heavily than free ones. Bundling a download with merchandise or a concert ticket has at various points counted and then been disallowed. Genre classification is a further judgment call, made by committees whose decisions about which chart a record belongs on have repeatedly become news in their own right. A chart week is a fixed tracking window, so release day is chosen strategically, and a record arriving a day late competes in a different week against a different field.