Jem Aswad-Senior: Last News

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor In a telling example of the state of the touring industry in 2022, indie artist Santigold has canceled her upcoming North American tour, citing the “devastating” costs due to inflation, soaring costs and the glut of artists on the road after pandemic restrictions lifted early this year.  “As a touring musician, I don’t think anyone anticipated the new reality that awaited us,” she wrote in a long and impassioned post on Instagram. “After sitting idle (not being able to do shows) for the past couple years, many of us like everyone else, earning no or little income during that time, every musician that could, rushed back out immediately when it was deemed safe to do shows. We were met with the height of inflation — gas, tour buses, hotels, and flight costs skyrocketed — many of our tried-and-true venues unavailable due to a flooded market of artists trying to book shows in the same cities, and positive test results constantly halting schedules with devastating financial consequences.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Orlando Wharton has been named executive vice president of Capitol Music Group and president of Priority Records. The announcement was made by CMG chair & CEO Michelle Jubelirer, to whom Wharton will report.  According to the announcement, in his new position, Wharton will sign and guide artists across CMG’s portfolio of labels, and will relaunch the legendary Priority Records label as a dedicated home for new, developing and established hip hop artists.  Wharton will assume his positions at CMG early next year, and will be based at the company’s offices in New York. The announcement closely follows the company’s hiring of Doja Cat co-manager Gordan Dillard as EVP of A&R and artist development.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Metallica have announced that they will perform a special tribute concert on Nov. 6 to honor Jonny and Marsha Zazula, the founders of their original label, Megaforce Records. The group, which will be joined by fellow Megaforce alums Raven, will perform songs from their early career, dating from 1983 and ’84. The concert will take place at the 7,000-capacity Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla. — an unusually small venue for the band. The Zazulas, for decades an influential and well-respected power couple on the metal scene, passed away within a year of each other in 2021 and 2022.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor In recent years, artists have created a booming business out of essentially putting their archives on tour — the “David Bowie Is” and “Rolling Stones Exhibitionism” — traveling exhibitions of their wardrobes, instruments and multiple other artifacts from their long careers. Well look out, because here comes “Pavements 1933-2022: A Pavement Museum” — a semi-jokingly titled international museum exhibition from the legendary indie-rock band featuring “previously unseen imagery, artwork and ephemera, commendations and commemorations, alongside rumored relics of the band’s real and imagined history (as well as exclusive merchandise and classic museum souvenirs),” according to the announcement. (The “1933” part is a deep reference to Pavement’s debut EP, “Slay Tracks 1933-1969,” which of course was released in 1989.)

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Days after top YouTube exec Robert Kyncl was named as the next CEO of Warner Music Group, the company revealed in an SEC filing that he will earn approximately $15 million in his first year on the job, depending on performance targets. When Kyncl’s name was first mentioned as a potential successor to outgoing CEO Stephen Cooper, who leaves after 11 years in the role, many wondered whether the job would be sufficiently appealing for the executive who led Netflix from DVDs to streaming and has been YouTube’s business chief for much of his 12 years at the company. However, the SEC filing makes clear that the job is financially appealing: He will receive a base salary of $2 million, a target performance-based bonus of $3 million and an annual grant of performance share units with an aggregate, pre-tax value of $10 million.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Pharoah Sanders, an American jazz saxophonist whose career sprawled across six decades, has died at the age of 81. His death was confirmed to Variety by a representative for his label, Luaka Bop. “We are devastated to share that Pharoah Sanders has passed away,” the label’s statement reads. “He died peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends in Los Angeles earlier this morning. Always and forever the most beautiful human being, may he rest in peace.” His soulful playing and leading role in the style often described as spiritual jazz placed him at the edge of the genre’s innovation for many years, initially in bands with such explorers as Sun Ra (who dubbed him “Pharoah”) and John Coltrane and later by leading his own ensembles.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor The Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian art wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the most unique and visually arresting places in a city filled with them, containing the 2,000-year-old Temple itself along with other sculptures and pieces of art, a large reflecting pool and a giant, 25-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling window that extends the entire length of the hall and overlooks Central Park. It also may be the most unique and visually arresting music venue in the city. Over the years the room has hosted concerts by everyone from Interpol to the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, but it’s hard to think of a more fitting artist for such a setting than Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab, who won a Grammy earlier this year for her song “Mohabbat” from her latest album “Vulture Prince,” and was also nominated for Best New Artist.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor When the NFL announced at midnight ET that Apple Music is the new sponsor of the Super Bowl Halftime Show, the Swift-iverse went into overdrive speculating that Taylor Swift will be the performer: The announcement was made at midnight, Taylor releases her new music at midnight (er, like 99% of all major artists in the streaming age) and her new album is called “Midnights.” With no disrespect to the Swifties, there are actually many more-tangible reasons why Swift seems a likely front-runner for the Super Bowl Halftime Show — which, with an estimated 103 million viewers this year, is the single largest platform for a music artist in the entire world.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor There’s been no shortage of neo-R&B albums over the past few years, but so many of them are led by breathy female singers who feel like they’re singing in your ear — very few have had full-voiced singers at the forefront. And although Muni Long isn’t a belter and does put on the bedroom voice on a couple of tracks, her first full-length album is a blast of vintage ‘90s R&B that isn’t trying to be cute: It’s filled with frank lyrics about of love and sex from an artist who’s been around for more than a minute. Working under the name of Priscilla Renea, Muni has long been a songwriter whose soul and pop smarts helped forge hits such as Ariana Grande’s “Imagine,” Fifth Harmony’s “Worth It,” Rihanna’s “California King Bed,” along with tracks for Mariah Carey, Kelly Clarkson, Madonna, Mary J. Blige, Miranda Lambert, Selena Gomez and more.She released strong albums under that name too — 2009’s “Jukebox” and 2018’s “Coloured” — but neither of those records had the sparkle, innovation and warmth that her songwriting catalog contained. A change of name, an independently-released EP featuring the haunting, quirky hit “Hrs and Hrs,” and suddenly, Muni Long is a new artist with a remarkably seasoned and strong debut album.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Compton-based house-music producer-singer Channel Tres has inked a deal that sees him joining RCA Records in partnership with L.A. indie Godmode. The partnership kicks off tonight with the release of the new single “No Limit,” with his debut full-length album “Real Cultural Shit” arriving later this fall. The album will also feature his singles from earlier this year, “Acid in my Blood,” “Ganzfeld Experiment” and “Just Can’t Get Enough.” Channel Tres, who has toured with Robyn, Vince Staples, Disclosure and Toro y Moi and performed at Coachella and New York’s Gov Ball, calls his style of dance music “Compton house”; it meshes the rhythms of Chicago house and Detroit techno with the bite of West Coast rap.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Since the dawn of radio, the United States has been and remains the only major country in the world where terrestrial radio pays no royalties to performers or recorded-music copyright owners of the songs it plays — a situation that is largely due to the powerful radio lobby’s influence in Congress. While the more than 8,300 AM and FM stations across the country pay royalties to songwriters and publishers, they have never paid performers or copyright holders, although streaming services and satellite radio do. On Thursday morning, Senators Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced the bipartisan American Music Fairness Act, which aims to rectify that situation by “ensur[ing] artists and music creators receive fair compensation for the use of their songs on AM/FM radio. This legislation will bring corporate radio broadcasters up-to-speed with all other music streaming platforms, which already pay artists for their music.”

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor After a fast courtship, outgoing YouTube head of business Robert Kyncl has been named CEO of Warner Music Group and will replace Steve Cooper when he steps down next year.  According to the announcement, Kyncl and Cooper will serve as co-CEOs for the month of January 2023. As of February 1, 2023, Kyncl will become sole CEO of WMG and assume Cooper’s board seat on WMG’s Board of Directors. Kyncl brings strong music-industry experience to the job: YouTube is both the world’s largest video-streaming platform and the largest music-streaming platform, and he played a huge role in its negotiations with labels and publishers and generally received high marks (remarkably, considering the often-contentious relations between the two sides). He’s also pioneering force in the streaming business: Before he was chief business officer of YouTube, he led Netflix from DVDs to digital.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor As it did with Taylor Swift earlier this year, New York University’s Clive Davis Institute has introduced a course on Lana Del Rey for this fall. Taught by journalist and author Kathy Iandoli, the two-credit course, “Topics in Recorded Music: Lana Del Rey” runs Oct. 20-Dec. 8. According to an NYU rep, the course will examine Del Rey’s contributions to 21st Century pop stardom, her relationship to feminism, her musical influences and artists she has influenced, and her connection to social justice movements such as  #BlackLlivesMatter, #MeToo and #TimesUp. Del Rey was honored with the Decade Award at Variety‘s Hitmakers event in December.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Influence Media Partners has acquired Grammy-winning Future’s publishing catalog from 2004 to 2020, the company announced. The prolific rapper’s work from those years spans 612 titles, including titles with frequent collaborator Drake (“Life Is Good,” “Jumpman”), Kendrick Lamar (“King’s Dead”), Rihanna (“Selfish”), and the Weeknd (“Low Life”) and his own solo hits like “Mask Off.” A source close to the situation tells Variety the deal was in the “high eight figures.” Rene McLean, Influence Media partner and founding advisor, said, “Future is a cultural icon. He continues to be a blueprint for impact and success in the music industry and has reinvented music in ways that no one has ever expected. It is rare to find someone who moves music and culture at the same speed with his distinct vocal and melodic style. His prolific career and continued popularity more than 15 years into the game is a testament to his undeniable influence on the contemporary music and culture landscape. We’re honored to be partnered with him.”

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Def Jam Recordings has entered into an exclusive worldwide joint venture partnership agreement with the Lagos, Nigeria and UK-based Native Records. The announcement was made by Def Jam chairman/CEO Tunji Balogun and Seni “Chubbz” Saraki and Teni “Teezee” Zaccheaus, co-presidents and co-founders of Native Networks. Native Records is the music division of Native Networks, a black-owned and operated, multi-platform, multi-disciplinary media and content company “dedicated to the discovery and development of young African artists and youth culture” via its Native print and digital magazine, its Nativeland festivals and more, according to the announcement. Founded in 2016 by Saraki and Zaccheaus with Shola Fagbemi, Addy Edgal and Suleiman Shittu, the label has been a driving force in the Afrobeats movement.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor When YouTube chief business officer Robert Kyncl announced late last month that he’ll be leaving the company after 12 years in the job, many observers quickly moved him to the front of the line to replace outgoing Warner Music CEO Steve Cooper, who’d announced just two months earlier that he’ll be stepping down after 11 years in the job. After all, Kyncl knows the music industry  — YouTube is both the world’s largest video-streaming platform and the largest music-streaming platform, and he played a huge role in its negotiations with labels and publishers and generally received high marks (remarkably, considering the often-contentious relations between the two sides). He’s also pioneering force in the streaming business: Before he was chief business officer of YouTube, he led Netflix from DVDs to digital, a transition that was much more complex and fraught with potential failure than he and the company made it seem.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Though she’s just 22, Noah Cyrus has seen some stuff. As Miley’s younger sister, her music and acting careers launched early — at 16 and 2 (!), respectively — and she released several pop-leaning singles and EPs during her teens, opened an arena tour for Katy Perry in 2017 and was even nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 2021. On the less positive side, there was substance abuse, a bad relationship and lockdown isolation — but she overcame all of it, and that battle informs nearly every song on “The Hardest Part,” her long-percolating debut album, which sees her truly finding her voice in a way that her previous recordings only hinted at. Surprisingly or no, the Nashville native did it by returning home, musically speaking. Although her main collaborators here are Northern Irish producer Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, the 1975) and Australian songwriter PJ Harding (Chromeo, Ruel), the sound is country-leaning, heavy on harmonies, organic instrumentation and Music Row-friendly melodies; its big, stacked harmonies recall everything from the Chicks to Boygenius.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor What a long, strange trip the long-lost Creedence Clearwater Revival Royal Albert Hall concert album and film has taken in the half century since it happened. The show and the on-the-road footage were recorded by the BBC during the group’s first European tour in April of 1970, but never broadcast. The recording presumably got hung up in the notorious legal battles between the group and its original label, Fantasy Records, although footage from the concert popped up at various times over the decades (even in a TV commercial for a budget Creedence greatest-hits album in the ‘80s). Even more confusingly, Fantasy released a very similar live album titled “The Royal Albert Hall Concert” before realizing that the tapes had been mistakenly labeled and the album was actually recorded ten weeks earlier and 5,000 miles away at the band’s triumphant Oakland Coliseum homecoming concert (the album was quickly retitled “The Concert”).

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Considering their short lifespan and relatively slim discography, the Velvet Underground may be the most thoroughly excavated and documented rock band of their era: Nearly every studio and concert recording, acetate and demo has been scrutinized, digitized and optimized for the many awesome boxed sets that have been released since the world caught up with the group’s brilliance in the 1980s, a dozen-odd years after they split up. The foundation of that brilliance, of course, is Lou Reed’s songwriting, which combines a novelist’s gritty realism with equally confrontational rock music, but also includes soft, vulnerable songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” — songs that are all the more poignant because you can sense, somehow, that the sensitive soul who wrote them isalso kind of an asshole.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor The first thing to know before seeing “Moonage Daydream,” Brett Morgen’s dazzling, exhaustive and exhausting memoir of David Bowie’s life and career, is that it assumes the viewer already knows a lot about the subject — his relevance, his influence, the brilliance of so much of his music, and the basics of his personal history. Like another recent historical film about an oft-trodden subject — Todd Haynes’ “The Velvet Underground” — it eschews the standard, chronological, done-to-death “Behind the Music”-style template that has become a predictable default for music documentaries and finds a dramatically different way to tell the story. In the case of “Moonage Daydream” — the significance of the second word of the title in this impressionistic film cannot be overemphasized — that different way is to let the man himself do all of the talking: Literally the only voiceovers heard in this 135-minute-long film are from Bowie (presenting real or conveniently fictionalized accounts of his life and work) and various interviewers. While that makes for an unusually free-form approach to structuring a documentary (and was enormously challenging for Morgen, who worked on the film for over four years and suffered a heart attack while doing it), in many ways it’s freeing: Instead of a rigid timeline or forced, overarching theme dictating the narrative, Bowie’s words do.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Rina Sawayama is one of a handful of artists who released an album just as the pandemic was beginning and watched, astonished, as their stars rose during lockdown. The Japanese-British singer’s debut, “Sawayama,” was a wild fusion of Lady Gaga with nu-metal guitars, but also showed a penchant for sentimental ballads amid the power chords and intensity. The album won a co-sign from none other than Elton John, and its videos got her cast in the fourth installment of Keanu Reeves’ “John Wick” series, due in March. In fact, Elton was one of many people who spoke out against Sawayama’s exclusion from eligibility for England’s BRIT and Mercury awards because she isn’t a U.K. citizen, even though she’s lived in England since the age of 5. After #SawayamaIsBritish became a trending topic on Twitter, the British Phonographic Industry changed the eligibility rules to include anyone who lived in the country for at least five years, including her.