~Music
Screamo legends Saetia pulled their entire catalog from Spotify. If you're expecting another thinkpiece about artistic purity and the death of albums—surprise. This story is messier and more interesting. Saetia's taking a stand on ethics and politics. Veteran rockers Tesla are making different calculations about
Lars Ulrich is talking to a bunch of kids who weren't even born when St. Anger dropped, and this isn't some meet-and-greet bullshit where rock stars sign autographs and pretend to care about your demo tape. This is Ulrich—the same guy who took on Napster
The first time I heard Protomartyr's The Agent Intellect, I was standing in a record store on Cass Avenue, the kind where the vinyl still smells like cigarettes from the '80s and the owner keeps a baseball bat behind the counter. The album came on over the
The Federal Trade Commission just dropped a lawsuit on Live Nation and Ticketmaster that reads like a greatest hits album of corporate bullshit. Hidden junk fees, secret deals with scalpers, artists getting screwed while fans get fleeced—it's the same song the live music industry's been
The best rock and roll I ever heard wasn't at Madison Square Garden or some corporate-sponsored amphitheater with $18 beers and VIP sections. It was at a 200-capacity shithole in Detroit where the ceiling leaked, the PA system had more feedback than a Twitter argument, and the bartender
The American music market is a meat grinder that chews up foreign bands and spits out their bones. Ask any European metal act trying to crack the States, and they'll tell you horror stories about empty venues in Omaha, promoters who vanish with the door money, and radio
~Music
The death rattle of another indie label echoes through the gutted warehouses of American music, and this time it's Chicago's Trouble in Mind Records pulling the plug after nearly two decades of fighting the good fight. They announced their closure with the kind of resigned dignity
~Music
The Metal God is pissed off again, and thank Christ for that. Rob Halford didn't spend fifty years fronting Judas Priest to bite his tongue now. At 73, the man who practically invented the leather-and-studs metal aesthetic is still catching shit for who he loves, and he'
~AI
Wolfgang Van Halen isn't pulling punches. When AI-generated music started creeping into the sonic landscape, he dropped a digital sledgehammer: "I think generative A.I. is really stupid. I just think it's dumb. I think it's a waste of time. I think A.