The Weeknd Wins Big At ASCAP Pop Music Awards | Billboard
The Weeknd was named songwriter of the year for the first time at the ASCAP Pop Music Awards on Tuesday (April 13). The event was held virtually for the second year in a row.
The pop and R&B superstar also received two most-performed song awards for "Blinding Lights" and "Heartless," both of which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The Weeknd is now a 13-time ASCAP Awards winner. "Blinding Lights" logs a record-extending 57th week in the top 10 on this week's Billboard Hot 100.
Meanwhile, Post Malone 's smash "Circles" was named song of the year. The song spent 39 weeks in the top 10, which was the record-holder until "Blinding Lights" surpassed it. "Circles" also received Grammy nods for record and song of the year. ("Blinding Lights" was famously snubbed by the Grammys.) The award for "Circles" was shared by ASCAP writers Louis Bell, Kaan Güneşberk and Billy Walsh and their publishers Nyan King Music, Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group.
Paul Williams, ASCAP chairman of the board and president; Elizabeth Matthews, CEO; and John Titta, executive vice president and chief creative officer, opened the event with a special video introduction on @ASCAP social media.
The social media events will also include an exclusive performance of "Die From a Broken Heart" from Maddie & Tae . The duo features Maddie Marlow, ASCAP Award-winning songwriter. (Co-writers Deric Ruttan and Jonathan Singleton are also winners).
The 2021 ASCAP Pop Music Awards recognize the songwriters and publishers behind the publisher's most performed songs of the past year. ASCAP will premiere video acceptance speeches, virtual studio tours, stories behind the songs and more on @ASCAP social media.
Starting at 10:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday through Thursday, April 15, friends, fans and peers can tune into the festivities via @ASCAP on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, using the hashtag #ASCAPAwards.
Fueled by BTS and K-pop, South Korea's IP Economy is Thriving
"IP assets related to K-pop and entertainment have been among the most standout investments in South Korea. And overseas companies are investing too?—? Netflix, for example, is investing around $500 million in South Korean dramas."
South Korean pop band B.A.P perform during the K-POP Nation Concert in Macao 2012 in Macao, China, 2 July 2012.
A South Korean company also made huge waves in the global music industry in 2021. HYBE (formerly Big Hit Entertainment), the home of big Korean labels such as Big Hit Music (the label for groups like BTS and TXT), Source Music, and Pledis Entertainment, acquired Ithaca Holdings, bringing worldwide pop stars like Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, J Balvin, and Demi Lovato to its cast in a $1 billion transaction, reported Music Business Worldwide .
Such impressive statistics are no surprise, considering the thriving arts and entertainment culture in South Korea, fueled by K-pop (the country's main industry of pop music and music-related content), the group BTS (which, from their impact in Korean tourism to global music charts, represent an industry of their own) and South Korean movies and series (known as "dramas").
South Korea also has proven itself to be a prolific environment for creating music, film, content, and experiences for fans, and also to be great at making the most of their intangible assets through IP strategies.
A notable example is BT21, a partnership between LINE FRIENDS Corporation and Big Hit, which has its own IP subsidiary to manage license transactions. The BT21 project consists of fictional characters created by the seven members of BTS to stamp stationery, clothes, shoes, food and beauty products, among others. The BT21 brand has partnered with dozens of other brands around the world, such as Reebok Korea, Dunkin' Donuts Korea, Olive Young (South Korea), Converse (USA), Anti Social Social Club (USA), Riachuelo (Brazil), Uniqlo (Japan), NEIGHBORHOOD (Japan), and more.
Usually, a K-pop group will have its own light stick named and designed after particular features of the group's identity. Fans buy the light stick so they can use it when attending the group's concerts, lighting up the place as they chant the idols' names and songs.
In 2020, HYBE acquired rights for three patents from LG Electronics and Kimin Electronics, according to Biz World . The patents are related to lighting devices' synchronization with performances, and it is expected that they will be used in light stick experiences for K-pop fans.
Indeed, IP assets related to K-pop and entertainment have been among the most standout investments in South Korea. SM Culture & Contents, a talent and production company under SM Entertainment (one of the pioneer companies of K-pop), invested ? 8 billion in the course of acquiring IP originals in 2020 and is reportedly investing more in 2021, according to Sports Kyunghyang . And overseas companies are investing in South Korean IP assets too?—?that is the case for Netflix, for example: the streaming giant is investing around $500 million in South Korean dramas, as reported by Forbes .
All The Best New Pop Music From This Week: Doja Cat, J Balvin
This week in the best new pop music saw a handful of exciting collaborations. Doja Cat tapped SZA for a look at her upcoming project, J Balvin and Khalid made a laid-back tune , and Justin Bieber called on some R&B contemporaries for a devout EP.
Doja Cat has been teasing her next album, Planet Her , for several months. She’s since shared a potential list of guest features which included The Weeknd, Ariana Grande, French Montana, Megan Thee Stallion, and SZA. Confirming SZA’s involvement, Doja Cat shared the groovy tune “Kiss Me More” this week, which featured the two singers’ soaring melodies.
Despite releasing two albums in 2020, Taylor Swift is already back in the studio. This time, she’s rerecording her old catalog after a feud with Big Machine Records over her old masters. She’s currently sharing updated versions of her Fearless tracks, including songs that never made it to the record like “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” a heartbreak anthem that Swifties are convinced is about her breakup with Joe Jonas .
J Balvin may have released his well-received concept album Colores in 2020, but it looks like the prolific musician is already gearing up for a new release. He’s shared three new singles in 2021, his latest being the introspective tune “Otra Noche Sin Ti,” where Balvin tapped Khalid to grace the track with his soulful musings.
It’s been a few years since we’ve heard new music from Gwen Stefani but if her recent track “ Let Me Reintroduce Myself ” is any indication, the singer is planning to throw it back to hear early career with an upcoming, nostalgia-inducing project. Calling on Saweetie to infuse her “Slow Clap” single with icy girl swagger, Stefani proves that she’s still as relevant as ever.
Slayyyter is a few months away from releasing her anticipated debut album Troubled Paradise , which she’s previewed with a handful of hyperpop singles. Offering yet another taste of the album’s blown-out sound, Slayyyter shares the fuzzy anthem “Cowboys,” where she sings of an ex that she just can’t quite shake.
Some of the artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
K-pop music companies file complaint over new law they say only benefits BTS | Complete Music
The Korea Music Content Association has filed an official complaint on behalf of a number of K-pop companies over an amendment being made to South Korean law that will allow male pop musicians in the country to defer their mandatory military service by two years. The organisation says that the criteria for benefitting from this rule change are so narrow that it will pretty much only apply to members of BTS, despite initially appearing to be a broader change in favour of K-pop stars as a whole.
In its objection, the KMCA says the amendment is “unrealistic and unfair”, according to Korea JoongAng Daily . The new rule allows any artist who has received a cultural merit from the country’s Ministry Of Culture, Sports And Tourism to defer their military service by two years. This basically means that they need to sign up to do that service before the age of 31, rather than age 29 like everyone else.
However, that cultural merit honour is only usually given to artists who have been active for fifteen years or more – the average age of recipients being 60. A rare exception was made to give the award to BTS in 2018 in recognition of their massive rise to global success.
This, says a spokesperson for the KMCA, “clearly means that no musicians [other than BTS members] will be eligible” to defer their military service under the new rules.
“If a male musician would want to meet the criteria before he turns 28, he has to begin his K-pop career when he’s thirteen years old at the latest”, they went on. “And that doesn’t even mean that they can defer their services. That’s only the requirement to apply for the merit. There’s a separate set of standards to see whether they actually get the chance to defer their services”.
The law that says that all able-bodied men in South Korea are required to enlist in the military before they turn 29, then serving for a minimum of two years, has become international news over the last year because BTS member Jin turned 28 in December.
This is, of course, an issue that has been faced by many other K-pop groups before. Indeed, other popular groups being forced into hiatus while members do their military service has arguably created a gap in the market for each new generation of groups, BTS included, to exploit.
Other acts have tried to keep things ticking along while certain members are doing that military service by having their bandmates embark on solo careers in the gap. But that does not guarantee that the group will simply be able to pick up where they left off when everyone eventually returns – fans having often moved on by then.
Usually this has not been a concern for South Korean politicians and military officials, who have generally been of the opinion that it’s just something that all K-pop stars have to deal with. However, in the case of BTS, the outfit’s global success has been so great that a sudden halt in their career could have a noticeable affect on the country’s economy.
Trip out to Kidä's stylish pop music, inspired by 70s Italian film scores | Dazed
"In order to rise/From its own ashes/A phoenix/First must burn," so says Octavia Butler in her novel Parable of the Talents – a story swirling with themes of spirituality, transcendence, and striving for personal and freedoms.
Burn to Make It Glow , Kidä's debut EP release, parallels that expansive message in both its title and inner guts – pull from your pain, and from it, emerge with wisdom and power. The record, an alchemical concoction of psychedelia, R&B, and retro, villainous-sounding Italian film scores, is a "spiritual release" for the Italian-Egyptian musician and producer. "The Garden" is an aching reflection on growth and goodbyes, the bravery in ending something – a relationship, a creative pursuit – for uncertain but exciting future joys. "Brother" is a ferocious track on the importance of solidarity and fighting for the people you hold dear. It's a surreal, pop astral projection. Though Kidä says assuredly this is nowhere near her final form, Burn to Make It Glow is testament to a dynamic artist's tendriled vision.
This record marks her debut, but Kidä's A Portal To Jump Through project has seen her create original scores for titans of the fashion world, traversing the industrial and psychedelic with Gucci and Prada , among others. Her visual world is a total trip, with hypnotic music videos in collaboration with Luke Jascz that nod to art-rock, The Factory, and B-movies.
Below, Kidä catches up with Dazed: on building her nostalgia-tinged but future-facing identity, her chameleonic personal style and how fashion influences her sound, and hustling a release as an independent artist.
Kidä: It's been odd. I feel like a caged animal. I just really want to take a vacation and swim in the sea.
How did you get into making music? You have a musical family right? When did it become something you wanted to seriously pursue?
My family has a bit of a musical legacy: Ruggero Leoncavallo who wrote the opera "Pagliacci" about a lovelorn clown. This opera is where the trope of the sad clown originated.
How does your work as a Portal to Jump Through intersect with Kidä, and where do the projects diverge?
Kidä: My sound design work under A Portal To Jump Through opened me up to a library of textures that naturally crossed over to Kidä world. But i think in all other ways they are massively different. Kidä World operates in the sensual realm of emotions and instincts, and AP2JT employs a much more strategic, almost utilitarian approach to creation.
Star 94′s unusual dance pop mélange bearing early fruit
Usually when a radio station changes format, it also changes its name, in part to erase its past and forge a new future.
The owners of Star 94 did something different last fall: they dumped its traditional adult pop format and started over with an unusual mix of dance-oriented, upbeat pop music covering five decades. But they kept the Star name.
The new slogan: "The Rhythm of Atlanta," with heavy use of phrases like "feel good" and "throwback."
The format itself is unusual in its intermingling of artists, genres and eras, from Barry White and Lou Rawls, to Jody Watley and UB40, from Britney Spears and Ja Rule to Maroon 5 and Ava Max. There isn't anything comparable nationwide.
In any given hour, you might hear the ridiculous 1992 one-hit wonder Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy," Lizzo's 2019 monster rave "Good as Hell," the Emotions' 1977 disco classic "Best of My Love," 1982 New Wave standard "Situation" by Yaz and 1995 R&B hit "Freak Like Me" by Adina Howard, which the original Star never played 26 years ago.
The cumulative listening audience hit 584,500 last month, sixth highest in metro Atlanta and the most in more than a year. It's also higher than Q (480,100) or Power (518,400), according to Nielsen ratings.
"In the month of January, we popped," said program director Jerry McKenna. "I'm expecting the sound of the station and the feel-good vibe will be conducive for the spring and summer and we'll see a lot more growth."
"I added it back to my presets since day one of the new format," wrote Whitney Cook Martin, a Cumming insurance agent and mom of two. "Great variety, and the fun music just puts me in a good mood. I'm not a fan of any of the newer music so this is perfect mix for me."
Cathy Wheeler, a voice-over and background actor from Peachtree City, noted: "That is all I listen to on long drive! Makes time fly!"
The 10 Best Indie Pop Albums of 2011 | PopMatters
Indie pop seems like a niche but also a broad category. DIY musicians are sprouting up everywhere you turn, on your block and on your Facebook. Pop music is in everything; it is all-encompassing. There are persistent strains of pop in "indie" music of all genres, in your electronic, rock, ambient, singer-songwriter folk, even hip-hop. Yet when I think of indie pop as an entity, it's music that's predominantly pop (versus predominantly rock or folk) that also has an inherent interest in the classic format of a song.
In 2011, the indie pop music that made me stop and take notice wasn't necessarily the high-energy splice-and-dice hybrids or the cutesy, catchy super-melodic stuff, though there still were fetching examples of both. Call it a sign of our (hard economic) times if you will, but in 2011, the most memorable pop songs, while colorful and big and romantic, tended to keep a lot of grey around, to portray the world as one big melancholy ball of confusion.
Some of these bands might not be "indie pop" in a music history way, though most definitely are, in heredity, influence, or spirit; for example, the #2 band on this list just released a heart-shaped 7"-vinyl single dedicated to their hero "Lawrence", of Felt. But that's crucial to the mutability of pop music, the way our most interesting musicians can express themselves within the essential form of a song, while also changing, even upending, how we think about songs, about what they are and what they do to us.
New Zealand's Flying Nun Records and their related bands get written about like something of the past, an influence more than a musical entity worthy of our attention now. Yet here, in 2011, we've got a new, eighth album by the Bats (plus another stellar David Kilgour album). The basics of what they're doing haven't changed much since 1987: melodic guitar-pop, with a lot of atmosphere and feeling, wrapped up in melodies that will haunt you, and keep coming back at you when you aren't paying attention. And yes, newcomers will hear in their songs, the old or the new ones, traces of a lot of bands you've come to love over the last couple of decades. The Bats were here first, and they're still here, and in great form.
Seattle’s Seapony combine in their sound a few of my favorite indie-pop styles of the last couple of decades: amateur songwriting in the Beat Happening tradition, pretty melodies over drum machines (à la forgotten bands like Alsace Lorraine), and a woman's voice sweetly singing about sad things, like — what else? — heartbreak. The album flies by in about a half-hour, like a summertime fling that leaves behind both romantic memories and a bitter aftertaste. They're too sincere about sentimental matters to be fully embraced by the music press; both the PopMatters and Pitchfork reviews were on the low end of the spectrum and they're the likeliest band this year to be derisively referred to as "twee". Yet they're a classically indie-pop band whose minimalist, breezy style puts a fresh face on beloved formulas.
Amor de Días was treated largely as a side project of the Clientele , and maybe it is, but if so it's also a side project of the less famous but equally great band Pipas. Since neither band is making music right now, is it really a side project at all? It has neither the slightness nor the dead-end-road quality that the phrase implies. Musically, it weds qualities from both of the other bands — the melancholy surrealism of the Clientele, the spunky transient pop melodies of Pipas — but also feels like something completely new, taking mystical folk music and dreamy pop wandering, and building off them into something strange and beautiful. The marriage of the two styles would be welcome enough, but there's also a quality here that says much more musical territory is waiting to be explored. There is both depth and openness in this music, not to mention images, melodies, and sounds that keep calling us back to them.
Why Do We Listen to Sad Music? | JSTOR Daily
Even though pop music has allegedly become more upbeat during the pandemic, there's something satisfying about queuing up a sad song and letting the melancholy feelings wash over you. This commonplace experience actually raises “ one of the most intriguing questions in the history of music scholarship ,” according to psychologists Jonna Vuoskoski, William Thompson, Doris McIlwain, and Tuomas Eerola: Why do people enjoy listening to sad music?
"Although people generally avoid negative emotional experiences…they often enjoy sadness portrayed in music and other arts," write Vuoskoski et al. This is the "paradox of 'pleasurable sadness,'" they write, and it has "puzzled music scholars for decades."
To investigate this paradox, scholars have taken many different approaches. One method is simple: by asking people how different music makes them feel. In their 2012 study, Vuoskoski and colleagues asked participants to rate their emotional responses to sixteen pieces of music. The team discovered that sad music didn't evoke only negative emotions. In addition to sadness, such music also produced "a range of more positive, aesthetic emotions," like nostalgia, peacefulness, and wonder.
Emotions aren't just psychological; scientists can also measure physiological reactions to music. In 2015, psychologists Patrick N. Juslin, Gonçalo Barradas, and Tuomas Eerola measured "skin conductance levels and facial expressions” as participants listened to a selection of tunes. The team proposed an evolutionary reason behind our strong physical reaction to somber music: The voicelike emotional expression of the music activates an empathetic response called "the contagion mechanism." That's why violins and cellos sound especially sad: They resemble human voices.
Of course, music and emotion are both incredibly subjective experiences. "This paradox is a complex one that appears to have no single answer,” write psychologists Sandra Garrido and Emery Schubert . Garrido and Schubert argue that enjoyment of sad music is likely based on individual differences in a combination of emotional and evolved traits like “dissociation, absorption, fantasy proneness, empathy, and rumination."
For example: Schubert theorizes that in some individuals, negative emotions in the context of an "aesthetic" experience (like music) trigger a dissociative response that "inhibits the displeasure circuits of the brain." Therefore, "those with strong tendencies to non-pathologically dissociate [can experience sad music] without activating displeasure."
So the next time you feel the urge to listen to Sufjan Stevens or Fiona Apple or one of Chopin's nocturnes, don't fight it. A little sadness might just bring enormous enjoyment.
JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.
London Grammar on Californian Soil? Same lush pop, but with a fresh political edge
Hannah Reid drops the F-bomb on London Grammar's hypnotically compelling third album, Californian Soil. I'm sure that, by now, we're all used to swearing in pop music, but there can still be something explosive about a bit of brutal Anglo-Saxon in the right context. And frankly you don't expect it from London Grammar, an electronic trio whose music has the gently ethereal air of the more polite side of trip-hop; they sound as though Dido threw a chill-out party with Morcheeba and only allowed Massive Attack to come if they left their dirty boots at the door.
Formed in 2009, London Grammar have effortlessly ascended to the status of a major band while making the kind of music that wouldn't disturb the conversation at a dinner party. They've never had a hit single, but their 2013 debut album, If You Wait, reached number two in the UK, then its 2017 follow-up, Truth is a Beautiful Thing, hit number one.
But behind the scenes, all was not as smooth as the band's lushly atmospheric soundtracks suggested. In some frank recent interviews, Reid, their frontwoman and principal songwriter, has been unequivocal about the insidious sexism in the music industry that brought her to the verge of quitting. Instead, with the support of multi-instrumentalist band mates Dan Rothman and Dominic "Dot" Major, she focused her anger, and has brought some extra bite to London Grammar's placid pop.
The only problem I foresee is that, in retreat from the glare of stardom, London Grammar have come up with an album almost certain to bring them more of it. Sometimes it really is the quiet ones you have to watch out for.
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