Music

The New York Times:

The fire moved quickly. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York City streetscape. It burned two sides of Courthouse Square, a set featured in “Back to the Future.” It spread south to a cavernous shed housing the King Kong Encounter, an animatronic attraction for theme-park visitors.

And:

The fire moved quickly. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York City streetscape. It burned two sides of Courthouse Square, a set featured in “Back to the Future.” It spread south to a cavernous shed housing the King Kong Encounter, an animatronic attraction for theme-park visitors.

And:

Eventually the flames reached a 22,320-square-foot warehouse that sat near the King Kong Encounter. The warehouse was nondescript, a hulking edifice of corrugated metal, but it was one of the most important buildings on the 400-acre lot. Its official name was Building 6197. To backlot workers, it was known as the video vault.

And that’s the core of this story. The video vault was home to a “repository of some of the most historically significant material owned by UMG, the world’s largest record company”.

Remarkable story. A tragic loss for the music industry. Riveting read.

Rolling Stone:

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is home to an overwhelming collection of historical art objects, including a mummy mask from 60 A.D., Greek bronzes from the 8th century B.C. and the original “Washington Crossing the Delaware” painting. Starting April 8th, it will also welcome a different type of antiques — from the guitar Chuck Berry used to record “Johnny B. Goode” to the knives Keith Emerson would stab into his Hammond organ during the crazier Emerson, Lake & Palmer days.

And:

We can now see Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar in almost gruesome close-up; with its pickups and modifications resembling open wounds, it looks like guitar surgery gone bad. A small curvy chunk under glass, with a bit of wire protruding from it, turns out to be a piece of the Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix played — and burned — at the Monterey Pop festival in 1967. A guitar owned by Joe Strummer comes with a set list for a Clash show still taped to its side.

And:

Five and a half years in the making, “Play It Loud” includes contributions from a wide range of sources. Many of the pieces were donated by collectors. Others come from estates: Yoko Ono donated the 12-string Rickenbacker that John Lennon played on tour in 1964 and on the A Hard Day’s Night album, and Jake Clemons contributed the Selmer Mark VI sax his uncle Clarence used on “Thunder Road” and “Jungleland” and onstage with the E Street Band. A closer look reveals a loop welded onto the horn in two different areas so Clemons could hold the sax with a guitar strap.

And so much more. This is a must see for me.

The list of winners (and nominees) is posted in lots of places, but this is the official list, published by the Recording Academy, the people behind the Grammy Awards.

BBC:

Mysterious musicians have cropped up on Spotify, racking up thousands of listens and (perhaps) hundreds of pounds. It’s a phenomenon that experts say could indicate a security flaw.

But while Spotify denies that accounts have been hacked, the music streaming site has not explained in detail how the playlists of some users indicate they’ve “listened to” musicians that nobody’s ever heard of.

And:

Many listeners (including this reporter) never actively searched for or played tracks by bands like Bergenulo Five, but found that their music ended up being logged in their listening history anyway.

The BBC asked Spotify for contact details for the artists in question. It declined, and all of our attempts to contact the bands were met with silence. But within a few days of our query, most of the mystery artists had disappeared from the music streaming site.

Amazing story. This does sound like account hacking or, at the very least, hacking of Spotify’s master database. How else to explain non-existent artists mysteriously appearing on people’s listening history?