Ever since the Beatles first crossed the Atlantic, in 1964, major concerts have largely taken place at venues built for sports, even though that often means poor sight lines for many fans, and less-than-optimal sound for most everybody. But a new era of live entertainment begins in late September, when …
Read More »Tequila Toasts and Manicures: The Wild New Landscape of Music VIP Packages
It’s 3.44 a.m. in the Strait of Dover and I’m lying awake on the top bunk of a tour bus parked on a ferry headed from France to the U.K. It’s been a day my 16-year-old Backstreet Boys-loving self could only have dreamed of — lunching with Howie Dorough, watching …
Read More »Nashville's Radical Reinvention
Tennessee’s cosmopolitan capital has been going through seismic changes, both musically and demographically. As new personalities flock to Nashville, fresh sounds and surprising trends are emerging, providing clues for what the city could look like in 10 years. Here are the musical, cultural, and even political developments we’re watching as …
Read More »Independent Venues Have Found New Ways to Survive — They Hope
Things were supposed to be looking up. It was the fall of 2021, and live music was finally coming back after 18 months of a pandemic death spiral. Indie venues had banded together to secure a historic federal funding package. Musicians were racing to schedule shows and fans were once …
Read More »U.S. Girls' Meg Remy Isn't Sure About the Future
THE FUTURE OFMusic Interviewis a Q&A in which our favorite artists and producers share their vision of what’s next, weighing in on everything from AI to emerging scenes to the artists inspiring them the most. Meg Remy has been imagining radical new futures in her music for more than a …
Read More »AI Reviewed a Record — We Had Some Notes
Here at Rolling Stone, we’re always looking for new music reviewers, young hot shots fresh off the street who are ready to blow us away with their innovative style and fresh insights. We also have a soft spot for terrible ideas. So we figured hiring a supersmart robot to write …
Read More »Unhearable Music: A Sci-Fi Tale
W hen she wakes up in the recovery room, Maurice hears nothing. It’s not like hiking in the redwoods, where the lack of city sounds creates an illusion of silence. This is a complete audio void. Still groggy from the drugs, she closes her eyes and dreams of the tiny …
Read More »Ready to Sing Elvis Karaoke … as Elvis? The Weird Rise of AI Music
F or Benoit Carré, the future revealed itself in six notes. In 2015, Carré, a cerebral, bespectacled songwriter then in his mid-forties, became the artist-in-residence at Sony’s Paris-based Computer Science Laboratory, headed by his friend Francois Paçhet, a composer and leading artificial-intelligence researcher. Paçhet was developing some of the world’s …
Read More »Snippetcore Is the Post-Genre at the End of the Internet
I n the summer of 2021, as the vibes shifted around us, 20-year-old musician Wolfacejoeyy uploaded a 19-second clip from a song called “Miss Me” to his TikTok page. Joey, who started making beats at 14, says he was encouraged in an Instagram group chat with rappers Sofaygo and Dom …
Read More »Kevin Spacey's Celebrity Not an Issue for Jurors Seated in Sexual Assault Trial
Kevin Spacey’s sexual assault trial in London is set to begin later this week after jury selection wrapped Wednesday, June 28. As The Associated Press reports, 14 jurors (including two alternates) were seated without objections from the prosecution or defense. Interestingly, for such a high-profile case, it seems as if …
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