In the last couple of months, United Talent Agency (UTA),which represents artists including Post Malone and Chance the Rapper, has closed 165 brand partnership dealsfor its artists. Co-heads of UTA’s music brand partnerships division Alisann Blood and Toni Wallace say they expect to close twice as many deals as in …
Read More »Billy Strings Plots Streaming Strings 2020 Tour
Bluegrass favorite Billy Strings has announced the Streaming Strings 2020 Tour, which will take him to the stages of several Nashville venues during the month of July. The flatpicking ace’s shows will be streamed on a variety of online platforms, depending on the date. Performances get underway July 16th with …
Read More »Protests and Plague in the Lone Star State
Interstate 35 is a six-lane scar that runs through the middle of Austin. To the south, the highway runs all the way down to the Mexican border. To the North, it zig-zags up to Minneapolis, where, on May 25th, Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, handcuffed and asphyxiated a black …
Read More »Doobie Brothers Tour Postponed Due to COVID-19
The fate of one of the last major summer tours in the lurch has been decided: The long-awaited Doobie Brothers 50th-anniversary tour, which would have reunited the band with its former keyboardist and singer Michael McDonald, has been rescheduled for 2021. “This decision has been made with the health and …
Read More »Stephen Colbert Tackles Trump's Attempts to Undermine Whistleblower Rick Bright
Stephen Colbert highlighted the worrying testimony of ousted public health official Rick Bright — and President Donald Trump‘s attempts to drag the spotlight away from his depiction of how the government has handled the COVID-19 crisis — on The Late Show Thursday. Bright, the former director of the Biomedical Advanced …
Read More »OK Go Premiere New Song for Frontline COVID-19 Workers
OK Go released a new song on Wednesday in honor of frontline health care workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic, inspired by both the nightly cheer for essential workers at 7 p.m. and by a recent Rebecca Solnit essay in The Guardian. The track, “All Together Now,” was written and recorded …
Read More »Are People Really Having 'Coronavirus Parties'?
With baseball season effectively over, Americans have a new favorite national pastime: shaming people on the internet for not properly socially distancing. Whether it’s a viral (albeit arguably misleading) photo of a crowded park on a sunny day or people wagging their fingers at joggers on the street, the narrative …
Read More »Anti-Vax Doctor Promotes Conspiracy Theory That Death Certificates Falsely Cite COVID-19
In the midst of an unprecedented global coronavirus pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, it can be hard to make sense of the destruction COVID-19 has wrought. In this context, the proliferation of conspiracy theories downplaying the dangers of the virus is sadly unsurprising, though disheartening …
Read More »The Week the Music Stopped
I t was the beginning of March when Don Smiley started planning for the worst. As the chief executive of Milwaukee’s Summerfest — which calls itself “the world’s largest music festival,” attracting 900,000 people over 11 days each year — Smiley was confronting a tidal wave of reports about the …
Read More »Joe Satriani on Postponing Tour, Releasing New Album in the COVID-19 Era
Last month, Joe Satriani decided to postpone his European tour due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “I was pretty adamant about getting the ball rolling early,” he tells Rolling Stone from his home in San Francisco. “Because it was obvious. Some folks, maybe they were just frightened and didn’t want to …
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