Music news. Beyond the headlines.
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Mara Ellis has a weakness for R&B records that sound better after midnight. The kind with warm basslines, expressive vocals, and lyrics that reveal a little more than the singer probably intended. She's equally happy revisiting an old Motown favorite or getting lost in a contemporary soul album that hasn't found its audience yet.
Her listening habits are driven by curiosity more than nostalgia. She notices the background harmonies, the unusual phrasing, and those little moments when a singer's voice cracks in exactly the right place. A beautifully imperfect performance will usually win her over faster than a technically flawless one.
Mara has a particular affection for overlooked album tracks and artists who never received quite the recognition they deserved. She's also willing to admit that some classics haven't aged as gracefully as their reputations suggest. For her, the pleasure of discovering music never really wears off.
Radio is finding an unexpected new role with younger music listeners: helping them escape the predictability of their own algorithms. A new MIDiA Research study finds that 42% of live-radio listeners ages 20 to 34 use the medium for music discovery, compared with 32% of live-radio listeners overall. Human DJs,…
Orville Peck has released Mule, a 13-song country record that follows one year of his life in chronological order, beginning around the collapse that led him to treatment and moving through sobriety, reconciliation and rebuilding. Released September 18th through Warner Records, Peck’s fourth studio album is considerably more direct than…
Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are suing Suno again, targeting the AI music company’s newly released v6 models and alleging that information derived from its earlier technology helped shape the new generation. Filed September 18th in federal court in Massachusetts, the second lawsuit alleges infringement involving 60,202 sound…
Drake has finally revealed what FOMO is. Fear of Missing Out, the project he spent weeks teasing through cryptic images and CD-style artwork, arrived September 15 as an hour-long film filled with new music, elaborate videos, cameos and scenes from his summer. Drake had described the project as a “not…
The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards have added LISA, RAYE, Shaboozey, Gunna, Sienna Spiro, GENER8ION and Yung Lean to a performance lineup already anchored by Madonna’s first live VMAs appearance in 23 years. CBS and MTV announced the additions September 17. Snoop Dogg will host the ceremony live from Peacock…
Spotify is expanding Fresh Finds from a discovery playlist into a yearlong artist-development program that offers emerging independent musicians everything from recording time and production software to tour opportunities and six months of therapy. Called Fresh Finds Forward, the program launched September 17 and is expected to support roughly 10,000…
Noisia are back. The Dutch electronic trio of Nik Roos, Martijn van Sonderen and Thijs de Vlieger have reunited, are making new music together again and will play their first comeback show December 4 at Amsterdam’s Melkweg. The return comes seven years after Noisia announced plans to end the project…
Grand Theft Auto VI is getting a soundtrack built to exist well beyond the game. Rockstar Games and Atlantic Records have announced Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, a 34-song collection of original music featuring Travis Scott, Keith Richards, PinkPantheress, Yung Lean, Morgan Wallen and more. Six songs arrived on…
A modern pop song can sound remarkably simple from the outside. There is a lead vocal, a beat, some chords, a bass line, and perhaps a few sounds that seem to appear around the edges. Open the production session behind that same song, however, and the apparent simplicity may be…
A final chorus can use the same chords, melody, lyrics, and tempo as the first chorus and somehow feel twice as large. That difference rarely comes from one spectacular production trick. More often, the producer has spent the entire song controlling what the listener hears, and just as importantly, what…