Artists, label heads and industry schemers know that success in pop music today requires racking up plays on TikTok and streaming services. But there's another, unlikely platform that's picking up steam: Roblox.
Last year the platform spawned its own music genre — robloxcore . Mostly made by young teenagers, it's a strain of chaotic, profanity-laden rap that's overloaded with frantic sound effects. Tunes like "Threat," by lieu, a 13-year-old musician, emulate being inside a digital dimension where every bass thud and synth shake is an enemy you're blowing past, every vocal stutter and short-circuited squeak a new obstacle to avoid. The scene has made ripples in the underground music circuit, and earned a nod from Phoebe Bridgers on Twitter.
Music has become such a big part of the Roblox community for one major reason: Starting in late 2013, users became able to upload their own MP3s to the platform, which other players can purchase. Inside worlds, you can equip an item called the "boombox" — a sparkly, golden speaker system — and broadcast the music to players around you. The closer you are to another user, the louder the music is for them.
Lieu, a pioneer of robloxcore and longtime Roblox player whose pronouns are they/their, said whenever they join games, they hear people playing their music. "It's crazy because none of this was ever my goal, I just wanted to make music and be funny," lieu wrote over Discord, the talking and texting app popular with gamers. Without the game, lieu said, they doubted the music would ever be popular, "or at least nowhere near as popular as it is now."
They call themselves Roblox audio makers. Known for their devious bypassing methods and taste for aggressive rap, they gather mostly on Discord in secret groups and chats run by exclusive collectives. Audio makers sell methods of sneaking songs onto Roblox to one another like furtive weapons dealers; some can go for thousands of Robux, or roughly $20-40.
"The community can be very dangerous at times," said a Robloxer known as DigitalCrimes, 14, over Discord, explaining that aggravating the wrong person can lead to nasty consequences — having your personal information leaked or worse, players prank-calling a SWAT team to raid your home.
Largely populated by teens and even younger players, the scene has a reputation for trollish behavior. "A lot of them have egos and are edgy and toxic," explained marty_red, a popular Roblox TikToker, over Discord. "The scene is odd but in a good way — it's interesting how people can bond over something that goes against the terms of service."
Bypassed tunes began to circulate in the mid-2010s, around the same time Roblox's demographics were shifting; the kids who had grown up playing the game in the 2000s were morphing into teens and adults with a taste for restricted content. Suddenly, there was a whole crop of outlaws willfully skirting the Roblox rules to blast blown-out rap music from their boomboxes.
"When I first used to play, there was no distorted rap — the worst you would hear was maybe Eminem's 'Rap God,' and all of it was censored," said mart_yred, who has been playing for over nine years. "You started to hear bypassed audios in late 2015, and then there was a really big spike in 2017."
'Music is for everybody': Le Salon de Musiques to bring the 'essence' of chamber music to La
Performing is "an act of love," according to Francois Chouchan, who is moving his classical music enterprise, Le Salon de Musiques, to La Jolla later this year, hoping to share his passion with a new audience.
Le Salon de Musiques will feature chamber music concerts with musician Q&As and buffet-style dinners at the La Jolla Woman's Club. The season will run monthly on Sunday evenings from Sept. 26 through June 12, 2022, except for October.
The concerts are orchestrated to be an intimate experience, Chouchan said. "We put the musicians in the middle of the audience. We can almost touch them."
"I always wanted to perform chamber music in an intimate venue," he said. "Chamber music is always written for small venues, intimate spaces. Most of the time it's performed in big venues on a stage. The artists are very far away from the audience," which means "you miss most of the essence of chamber music.
"You don't feel the real vibrations of instruments, you miss the interaction between the performers. This is the essence of chamber music."
Le Salon de Musiques is fashioned after "what Marie Antoinette did in Versailles," said Chouchan, who added that the 18th-century French queen gave it the name he uses now. "You have people, friends, who come sit around a piano, sit around a string quartet, piano quintet. They feel the real beauty of chamber music, and it was never done before."
Experiencing chamber music this way, Chouchan said, makes it "difficult for [people] to go back to a regular concert or regular venue, because even if you have a great acoustic, this kind of sensitivity, deep emotions, transmitted by the vibration of each instrument is missed."
In addition to the concerts, the evenings will begin with a musicologist introducing each program and "the composers themselves, all kind of anecdotes," he said. "It's very important for people to know about that because when you listen to the piece after, you don't listen to it in the same way."
Chouchan, a concert pianist himself, plays in some of Le Salon de Musique's performances, though he said he tries "to build a program with all kinds of different ensembles," from string quartets to piano quintets and other combinations of musicians from all over the region.
Sister Duo Aly And AJ Return To Music With New Album : NPR
Sister musical duo Aly and AJ Michalka talk about their fourth studio album - A Touch of the Beat Gets You Up On Your Feet.
The sister duo Aly and AJ Michalka shared the stage in their early teens on the Disney Channel. Aly starred in the series "Phil Of The Future," and AJ joined her in the original movie "Cow Belles." And like fellow Disney vets Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato, Aly and AJ are talented musicians.
ALY AND AJ: (Singing) You're like a tattoo that I can't remove, and it feels good. It feels good. It feels good.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's a bit of "Like Whoa," "Rush" and "Potential Breakup Song," teenage takes on relationships and self-esteem from more than a dozen years ago. Aly and AJ are now in their early 30s, and they've returned with what just may be the soundtrack of the summer - a new album with a title long enough to make up for such a long absence.
AJ MICHALKA: It was 2020. It was probably June or July. And we were like, what are we going to call this record? And Aly was like, I think we should call it "A Touch Of The Beat Gets You Up On Your Feet Gets You Out And Then Into The Sun." And I was like, that's hot.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Even though this is their fourth studio album, the sisters say this one feels like a new beginning. Here's AJ.
AJ MICHALKA: I would describe it as, like, our coming-of-age debut, 100%. It feels like the first time in this weird way. I mean, we've been doing this now for 20 years, and I really feel that Aly and I are just kind of rooted in a style that we knew was in us but just didn't know how to access.
ALY MICHALKA: Yeah, I agree. I would say the biggest difference between the records that we're now making versus the ones we made in the past would be the fact that we're completely in the driver's seat. That was a struggle for us as young females starting out in the industry, having to answer to an older male figure that didn't really know our fan base but kept telling us that they did. And so now, you know, we're able to make this music freely. And I think that by setting all of those things aside, we had our most enjoyable time creating it.
Wall Street Loved Music Once Before, And Totally Changed Its Direction
Bob Dylan performs in Los Angeles. Universal Music Publishing Group is buying legendary singer Bob ... [+] Dylan's entire catalog of songs. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)
It seems like a day doesn't go by without a new story of a song catalog being purchased or a new investment in a fund dedicated to purchasing music publishing. In fact, when you have two of the largest rights acquirers, Primary Wave and Hipgnosis Songs Fund, with backings from some of the leading financial institutions, you know that music has caught its second Wall Street Wave.
Many say that the 1970s were the most fruitful times for music ever. Musicians were not constrained by genre or style, and in fact encouraged to experiment. From that came so many legacy artists that we consider legends today (David Bowie, Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen, to name a few). The music industry was doing well at that point, but after a short sales dip in the disco era around 1980, soon hit heights that no one could have anticipated.
Those gains were a result of the introduction of the CD and what that meant for record label coffers. With the CD as the new hot product, suddenly anyone with a decent vinyl record collection decided to replace it with this new round piece of plastic with better fidelity (allegedly) and random access. For the labels this was a dream come true. An extremely small production cost and zero marketing plus a premium price about double that of the vinyl record, and you now had a cash cow on your hands.
This shot to the bottom line did not escape the eyes of Wall Street. Remember that to that point most record labels were run by industry-bred veterans who, for the most part, loved the music they sold, but that was about to change.
Over the course of the next decade, a major shift in the record business occurred as one by one, record labels were rolled up by big non-music companies. Always the poor stepchild of the entertainment industry, the music business was suddenly every investment banker's darling, with four of the six major labels that were still independently controlled eventually sold to multi-national conglomerates during this period.
This is where the direction of music changed. Now instead of being run by music-savvy music execs who knew their business and audience tastes intimately, corporate accountants and attorneys with no connection to the music industry were now making the big decisions. There was an attempt to decode what makes a hit from a gut feeling from A&R to the bottom line of a spreadsheet (we all know how that works out). With the sudden popularity of MTV, the emphasis was on how an artist looked as opposed to his or her music. Want to know why music today sounds different and less innovative from the way it did back then? The roots of those changes are here.
While the rollups of the 80s had a direct effect on the music and artists of the times, we might find today's changes more subtle. The publishing entities that have scarfed up the catalogs of Stevie Nicks, Neil Young, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain and Shakira will want to exploit those hits to make their investment back. That will mean we'll likely be hearing more of those songs on commercials, television and movie soundtracks in the future, which will make it tougher for today's artists to get a foothold there.
But chances are there are unintended consequences involved here, where present-day music is affected by corporate decisions of today in ways that we can't even imagine. The only thing we know for sure is what history tells us - corporate thinking and artist creatively usually don't mix.
Lossless audio references found in Apple Music web app as company teases special announcement -
9to5Mac has now found more code references to back up the hype. In the source code of the Apple Music web app, we have found new references to ‘Lossless’ and ‘Hi Res Lossless’ music …
The references indicate that tracks in Apple Music will soon be available in a higher-quality lossless format.
This lines up with findings by 9to5Google in the Android Apple Music app. Apple Music for Android is readying support for two ‘lossless’ bit rates: 24-bit/48kHz and 24-bit/192kHz.
The strings in the Android app suggested the highest quality lossless stream will consume up to 36 MB of data for a single 3-minute song.
The lossless references are also next to mentions of ‘Dolby Atmos’ and ‘Dolby Audio’. It its possible that some songs will be authored in this way and enable a 3D soundstage with the Spatial Audio features of AirPods Pro and AirPods Max.
We expect Apple Music to officially announce its new hi-fi tier sometime this week. A previous report pointed to a May 18th date .
Harmony, Hope & Healing provides music classes for individuals dealing with trauma amid
Jennifer Lopez Teases New Music on Instagram
The 51-year-old singer and actress took to Instagram on Saturday to share a post that *seemed* to tease new music on the horizon. The post featured a picture of Lopez belting it out in the studio, captioned "Sexy summer fun coming 🎶💕."
As if a permanent declaration on her grid weren't enough, Lopez shared the same image and message on her Instagram Story, just for good measure:
We can only assume (or at very least dearly, dearly hope) that this means Lopez is preparing to grace our collective ears with a bop that will become the song of the summer for 2021. It wouldn't be a stretch to imagine the iconic performer just strolling into a studio in mid-May and deciding to create the song of the summer on a whim. After all, Lopez is nothing if not driven and hard-working.
"I thought I had a good work ethic, but I was completely humbled and blown away by what she was committed to doing day in and day out, the seriousness in which she took her work, the quiet and dedicated way she went about accomplishing her goals, and then how she would go back and redouble her efforts," Affleck told the magazine. "She remains, to this day, the hardest-working person I've come across in this business. She has great talent, but she has also worked very hard for her success, and I'm so happy for her that she seems, at long last, to be getting the credit she deserves."
MTV Series ‘Behind The Music’ Premieres July 29 On Paramount+ – Deadline
Paramount announced the iconic music documentary series will premiere Thursday, July 29, exclusively on its streaming platform, Paramount+. The series will look into the careers of different artists and explore the hardships they encounter.
The slate of featured artists is set to include Jennifer Lopez, LL Cool J, Ricky Martin, Huey Lewis, Busta Rhymes and Fat Joe.
Sunday Conversation: Counting Crows' Adam Duritz On New Music, ZZ Top And Keeping A Band Together
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - DECEMBER 18: (EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE) Adam Duritz poses at the after party for the ... [+] (Re)Opening Night of Jacqueline Novak's "Get On Your Knees" at A.O.C. L'aile ou la Cuisse on December 18, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Bruce Glikas/WireImage)
Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz admits he waivered at times in the last seven years on his passion for music and writing. But while on vacation in the U.K. country side, Duritz rediscovered that fervor for writing he first found in college.
The result is Butter Miracle, Suite One , a four-song suite coming out this Friday, May 21. That it would take seven years between records is not surprising when you talk to Duritz. He is, like all artists, a perfectionist.
Baltin: I imagine as well the change of scenery was important as that can reinvigorate you in ways.
Baltin: Are there artists or friends you look at for examples of how to evolve and stay interested in music? I think one of the most underrated bands of all time is ZZ Top, 52 years and the same three members. No one else has ever done that.
Duritz: That's exactly what it is. And it's just as bizarre as actually deciding you should start singing in the middle of talking to someone. It is a weird thing to do, writing songs. What a weird idea that you should get in your head, that this would be better set to music, if I rhymed it.
Summer concert series takes professional music to Madison parks | Arts and Theater | madison.com
All three have joined a Zoom call to talk about Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, the longtime series that every summer brings in top musicians, like them, from across the country to perform a series of chamber music concerts in Madison.
Known for its indoor summertime performances featuring wit, humor, musical variety and top-notch musicians, BDDS normally plays in venues such as the Overture Center, the Hillside Theater at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin and Stoughton Opera House .
Musicians who will perform at Penn Park as part of the new "Bandwagon" concerts from Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society include, from left, cellist Trace Johnson, Leotha Stanley of Mt. Zion Gospel Choir, and violinist Leanne League.
But this summer, due to the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, indoor concerts are not an option. So BDDS has come up with three other offerings: Recorded, streamed concerts for ticketed audiences at home; a pay-what-you-wish opportunity to chat with BDDS musicians and hear them play via Zoom; and a new outdoor, family-friendly concert that musicians will perform from May 29 to June 20 in public spaces throughout Madison.
Dubbed "Bandwagon," the free, in-person shows will run just under one hour and maintain the BDDS hallmarks of lighthearted fun and remarkable music.
BDDS' indoor concerts slated for 2020 were canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and "We didn't want to go another season without having concerts for our audience," said BDDS co-founder Jutt.
"We have a very particular kind of style in Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society," said Jutt, principal flute player for the Madison Symphony Orchestra and UW-Madison professor emerita. "We pride ourselves on being very adventurous, and at the same time very accessible. So these concerts are going to have that character."
Serving as emcee and also singing at the Bandwagon concerts will be bass-baritone Jones of the University of Houston.
The program will include music by Black American composers Jessie Montgomery and Robert Owens, Latin American composer Alberto Ginastera, and works by Zez Confrey, George Gershwin and Joseph Bologne.
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