Music

Live Nation Entertainment, the global concert giant that owns Ticketmaster, announced a program on Friday to offer refunds and coupons for canceled and postponed shows, after weeks of criticism online and growing pressure from lawmakers.According to Live Nation’s plan, which starts May 1, people can obtain refunds for canceled or rescheduled shows. Like another plan instituted this week by AEG Presents, Live Nation’s biggest corporate rival, refunds for postponed shows will be available for 30 days once new dates have been set. For events that already have new dates, customers’ 30-day refund window will start May 1.Live Nation has also offered incentives for its customers to hold on to their tickets — and therefore let the company to hold on to revenue. For canceled shows, Live Nation is offering its customers credits worth 150 percent of their tickets’ value to use on future events.Customers who decide to go to shows when they are rescheduled will also receive credits, but for lesser amounts that may vary for each event. Live Nation’s program applies only to events in the United States.News of Live Nation’s new program was first reported by Billboard.After the concert world ground to a halt last month, Live Nation and Ticketmaster came under intense criticism for their slow response to refund requests. Ticketmaster was also attacked for changing the language on its website about its refund process, although the company said its underlying policy, in effect for years, had not changed.This week, a New York state senator, James Skoufis, announced an investigation into the business practices of ticketing companies, including Ticketmaster, and asked the New York attorney general to open an investigation into the company.On Friday, two Democratic members of Congress — Katie Porter, of California, and Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, a longtime critic of Ticketmaster and Live Nation — called on the companies to refund fans’ money.“With Americans weathering the brutal and continuing impacts of this global crisis, your decision to confiscate their money is reprehensible and should be reversed immediately,” the Congressmen wrote in a letter to Live Nation and Ticketmaster officials.In response, Jared Smith, the company’s president, told the legislators that Ticketmaster “intends to honor our longstanding practice of allowing refunds on canceled or postponed shows,” according to a copy of the letter that Ticketmaster furnished to the news media.In his letter, Mr. Smith also shared some data about the scale of the problem facing Ticketmaster. For some 30,000 events that have already been postponed or canceled as a result of Covid-19, Mr. Smith wrote, Ticketmaster has already sent more than $2 billion in ticketing funds to its clients, like venues and concert promoters, “making it impossible to issue refunds to fans before recouping sales receipts from the organizers, as we’ve done in the past.”Those numbers will likely grow, however, as more tours are pulled. On Friday, Taylor Swift announced that she would move all her concerts for this year to 2021, and talent agents and industry executives say that many more are expected to follow in coming months. More

JON PARELES Traumas and obstacles confront Fiona Apple all the way through “Fetch the Bolt Cutters.” It’s her first album since 2012 and by far her noisiest one, aimed not for radio or for inoffensively curated singer-songwriter playlists — but for catharsis. Apple has never been timid; even on her 1996 debut album, released when she was a teenager, her songs explored psychological minefields and spared no one. But “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is daring in a new way, scrambling and shattering the pop-song structures that once grounded her.Apple’s new songs face down both past and present injuries: bullying, sexual assault, destructive mind games, romantic debacles, her own fears and compulsions and the people who have taken advantage of them. At times it’s a meta-album, grappling with the insecurities that prolonged its own recording process; “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is only her fifth release. More often, it’s an artfully unguarded anthology of one woman’s ongoing battles against depression, mendacious lovers and toxic memories, offered not with self-pity but with self-awareness and flickers of rage. It’s no wonder Apple ends up growling and walloping things.[embedded content]Percussion defines the sound of the album: standard drum kits, handclaps, foot-stomps and a warehouse full of accessories from sleigh bells and wood blocks to what sound like giant, booming parade bass drums. Apple has toyed with percussion-centered arrangements before, in songs like “Daredevil” from “The Idler Wheel…,” but on “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” she commits.Yes, vestiges of Apple as a meticulously presented, piano-playing singer-songwriter are still there, particularly in the album’s opening songs. And whether she’s cooing with sarcastic solicitousness or rasping close to a scream, she articulates every word clearly, emoting but never losing control. But her piano recedes and sometimes disappears over the course of the album, while clatters, clanks and thuds throng around her.Meanwhile, she warps the expectations of verse-chorus-verse forms, talk-singing or chanting as long as she wishes, sometimes letting choruses of overdubbed Fionas — dulcet ones, jabbering ones — completely hijack her tunes. Some people may hear those tangents as self-indulgence, but I hear them as freedom.WESLEY MORRIS So do I, Jon. She sounds let all the way out. But I have to tell you guys that whatever I’m typing today about this album is raw, unprocessed (I’ve listened only twice) and certain to be riddled with typos — because my hands are shaking. LINDSAY ZOLADZ First of all, I would like to thank Fiona Apple, the patron saint of not leaving the house, for dropping such a rich, itchy record in the middle (hopefully?) of our communal quarantine. “Fetch the bolt cutters, I’ve been in here too long” is definitely a lyric I will be muttering to myself with increasing urgency in the coming weeks.I am floored by this record. I hear freedom, too. These songs make some breathtaking hairpin turns, like the sudden sweep into the gorgeous, plinking chorus of “I Want You to Love Me” that ultimately splinters into wild yelps that, to my ears, conjure Yoko Ono. It’s the first glaring indicator that the rest of these songs are not going to conform to patriarchal ideas of propriety — most of the time they seem to be aiming to directly defy them.One of the album’s unifying themes is women and Apple’s relationships with them, not in a rah-rah #empowerment sense but in a much more complicated and often very raw manner. A standout is “Shameika,” named for a schoolmate of Apple’s who — in a eureka moment for the artist that she admits Shameika probably doesn’t remember — told our antsy, tortured, self-doubting future songwriter that she “had potential.” The verses are chaotic torrents of piano and percussion, and then the world suddenly stops as Apple sings, in an almost hammy, Elton John kind of way, “But … Shameika said I had potential.”This record is so casually wise about formative trauma and the ways our early experiences ripple outward, not just in our own lives but in those closest to us: “Evil is a relay sport when the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch.” My therapist would love this album. More