For music stars, Las Vegas is a welcoming destination. It's where you go to be validated for a job well done, to rest on a strong legacy at a time when the future may have grown less assured and any timid steps towards it may jeopardize that legacy. Once her struggles, it seemed to be […]

The late pop musician Prince's estate, including his song collection, has been appraised at $156.4 million (£114 million), almost double its previous estimate. Comerica Bank, the estate's administrator, reached an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Prince's heirs on the amount. The artist died without a will in 2016, and his fortune will […]

In Ronnie Spector's 1990 book Be My Baby, there's an interesting chapter about her singing voice among the jaw-dropping allegations of brutal torture. She claims she was intimidated by the other female vocalists in Phil Spector's stable: she didn't have Darlene Love's or Fanita James's huge, gospel-trained voices. The producer, on the other hand, had […]

In the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 swept the globe, Mo'min Swaitat, a Palestinian actor and filmmaker based in London, found himself stuck in his birthplace of Jenin, West Bank. He was lured to the shuttered Tariq Cassettes, a music store and record label he knew from his boyhood that had closed down years ago, […]

How can a song by an unknown band acquire 6.5 million listens? It was difficult to tell in the days before streaming, when we still used "popular" instead of "viral," and it's much more perplexing today. Facebook would have created an algorithm for it if they had known. That hasn't prevented reviewers from spinning their […]

If Chan Marshall's 11th album included all of Cat Power's songs in their original form, it would be a fantastic playlist. It would be genre-spanning, taking in everything from forgotten classics (country superstar Kitty Wells' It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels) to beloved classics (Nico's These Days), from obscure numbers by obscure artists […]