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      Taylor Swift Sells a Rainbow of Vinyl Albums. Fans Keep Buying Them.

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      Artists across pop genres are finding success with colored vinyl and different variants of their releases. For Swifties, the urge to collect them all is strong.When Taylor Swift released nine vinyl editions of her album “Folklore” in 2020, Tylor Hammers, a fan in Florida, took notice. But it wasn’t until “Midnights” two years later that he became a true collector, scouring the internet and retail shops for every variation of her albums he could find — spending about $1,000 in the process — and cataloging the technicolor expanse of Swift’s LP output in an online discography.“I get enjoyment out of being a completionist,” Hammers, 24, said in a recent interview.He’s not the only one.Although streaming remains the dominant music format, physical media has been a growing niche where the industry can cater to so-called superfans, who express their dedication to artists by shelling out big bucks for collectible versions of new releases, sometimes in multiple quantities. K-pop acts like BTS pioneered this strategy by putting out an array of elaborate CD packages, often featuring goodies like postcards and photo booklets, which helped the boy band repeatedly go to No. 1.But nobody does it quite like Swift, or at least at the same scale. Last year she sold 3.5 million LPs in the United States, thanks in part to five pastel-hued variants of “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” a rerecording of her 2014 album, and the popularity of Swift’s entire catalog during her record-breaking Eras Tour.When Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out on Friday, it will be available in a portfolio of different versions — on vinyl, CD and even cassette — with bonus tracks and, on certain “deluxe” editions sold through Swift’s website, trinkets like magnets, photo cards and engraved bookmarks. Some items, like a standard CD, go for as little as $13. But last weekend, Swift’s site offered a limited run of autographed LPs for $50, which, according to fans on social media, vanished in 20 minutes.“The Tortured Poets Department” comes out on Friday in a number of different versions and formats including CD, left, and cassette. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Taylor Swift’s Music Returns to TikTok Despite Ongoing Dispute With UMG

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      Songs by the pop singer reappeared on TikTok despite the platform’s ongoing licensing dispute with Universal Music Group, which releases Swift’s music.When Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company, went to war with TikTok earlier this year over licensing terms, songs by hundreds of its artists were removed from the platform, and have remained absent.But on Thursday, music by one very special Universal artist returned: Taylor Swift.A number of songs by Swift — whose new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” comes out next week — have reappeared in TikTok’s official music library, where they are available for the service’s millions of users to place in the background of their own videos. Those videos have become one of the music industry’s most important promotional vehicles, with the potential to mint new hits or breathe new life into old tunes — even as many artists and labels complain about low royalties from the service.The available songs from Swift appear to be from the period since she signed with Universal in 2018, including hits like “Lover,” “Anti-Hero,” “Cruel Summer” and “Cardigan.” Also available are her “Taylor’s version” rerecordings of older hits like “Style,” “Love Story” and “Shake It Off,” which were originally released by her first label, Big Machine. After Big Machine was sold in 2019 without her participation, Swift announced plans to rerecord her first six studio albums, and has already released four of those. Each went straight to No. 1.It was not immediately clear how Swift’s songs made it back to TikTok while Universal’s ban remains in place. When the company announced its plans to remove music earlier this year, it said its licensing contract with TikTok expired Jan. 31. By the early hours of Feb. 1, Universal’s music began to disappear from TikTok, and millions of videos that used the label’s music went silent.While Swift is part of Universal’s roster of artists, she owns the rights to her own recordings, as well as her songwriting rights, which are administered by the Universal Music Publishing Group, a division of the company.Representatives of Swift, Universal and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Universal, whose hundreds of artists include stars like Ariana Grande, Drake, Lady Gaga and U2, said it was withdrawing permissions for its music after it was unable to reach a new licensing deal with TikTok. The company accused TikTok of being unwilling to pay “fair value for the music,” despite its importance to the platform. Universal also voiced concerns that TikTok was “allowing the platform to be flooded with A.I.-generated recordings,” diluting the royalty pool for real, human artists.In response, TikTok accused Universal of putting “their own greed above the interests of their artists and songwriters.”The dispute has been one of the most dramatic clashes in years between the music industry and a tech platform, and it has drawn a mixed public response. While many music industry groups have supported Universal, artists have expressed worry about the loss of such a valuable promotional platform. More

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      Lost Tapes From Major Musicians Are Out There. These Guys Find Them.

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      For decades, recordings left at studios have languished in storage rooms and basements. Master Tape Rescue, a company of two industry vets, is coming to save them.In late 2020, Brian Kehew was working at the venerable Hollywood studio Sunset Sound when the owner asked him to help identify some tapes the Who had left behind. It was not an unusual request for Kehew, who has done tape transfers and mixes on hundreds of archival recording projects over the last 30 years, and serves as a tech and sometime backing musician for the band. He expected to find some overdubs or a safety copy of a master, nothing particularly important.When he got his hands on the reels, he was shocked: The studio was sitting on all the original two-inch multitracks of the group’s 1975 album, “The Who by Numbers,” as well as previously unreleased songs from those sessions.“I immediately contacted Pete Townshend, and we arranged to send the tapes back to England,” Kehew, a blond-haired Southern California native, said in a recent interview at his North Hollywood studio, which was lined with rare, vintage and obsolete tape machines. “The band had been looking for the tapes for years, but this was one place they hadn’t thought to check.”For Kehew, a producer of Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” and an expert on both the Beatles and Moog synthesizers, the recovery of the Who recordings underscored the fact that significant tapes “might be sitting in someone’s attic or barn or basement” and not where they belong, in a record company vault or an artist’s archive. “The obstacle to getting these tapes back in the right hands has always been the time and effort involved,” he said. “But what if there was a facile way to connect everyone that doesn’t involve a lot of hassle or red tape?”The answer may be Master Tape Rescue, a company recently started by Kehew and his partner, Danny White, a fellow music industry veteran. The company acts as an archival matchmaking service of sorts, cataloging recordings from studios or private collections and then vetting and connecting rights holders with tape holders.Shelves of recordings in an archive room above Sunset Sound, a studio in Los Angeles.Tag Christof for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Khruangbin’s Sound Became the New Mood Music

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      The Texan trio’s vibes have spawned countless imitators, but their magic isn’t so easy to replicate.I worry that the word “vibes” is overused, but in what follows it is unavoidable: The band Khruangbin, a trio from Houston, has become so popular that there now exists an entire subgenre of music broadly known as “Khruangbin vibes.” If you have walked into a relatively hip coffee shop in a major or even minor city lately, you have probably encountered Khruangbin vibes. They’re marked by low-key, reverb-heavy, often guitar-forward instrumentals — music that’s groovy and pleasant, bewitchingly exotic yet comfortingly familiar, inoffensive and instantly graspable as existing within a particular sonic space. A vibe, as it were.Listen to this article, read by MacLeod AndrewsOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.That such music has come to have a real toehold on the culture says as much about the way music is listened to today as the sound itself. Music now exists primarily within the stream, which is to say passively: We turn it on, like a faucet, and out pour songs representing some mood, or emotion, or any of the other words we used before we had “vibes.” Perhaps it’s an aura, like “chill.” Or a vague, evocative mind-set, like “always Sunday.” The tap turns and out pour songs we already liked, along with burbles of what is a little new and different yet fits in beautifully. This is the arrangement in which “Khruangbin vibes” excel. Such music is extremely slippery, genrewise. (Is it psychedelic lounge dub? Desert surf rock? The sound you hear inside a lava lamp?) As such, it pairs well with a huge span of music, across genres and eras; it has a kind of algorithmic inevitability to it. But this slipperiness also means that quite a lot of the bands now producing Khruangbin-vibesy music are entirely forgettable.Fortunately, being the three musicians who popularized a sound that so many others are chasing is not the same thing as chasing that sound yourself. To the members of Khruangbin — pronounced krung-bin, and featuring Laura Lee Ochoa on bass, Donald Johnson on drums and Mark Speer on guitar — that sound is not so much a goal as a result: It is what happens when they play music together. And while many others have tried, and are still trying, to identify and replicate what is so particular about Khruangbin’s sound, this is not really possible, because what happens among people when they play music together cannot really be quantified. Often, when it works, it is more — well, it’s more vibey than that.Khruangbin onstage in London in 2022.Jim Dyson/Getty ImagesSteve Christensen, Khruangbin’s longtime producer, explained it to me like this: Just about every day, he gets hit up on Instagram by folks asking how to achieve a particular Khruangbin sound. He responds, keeping no secrets, readily giving away everything, because Ochoa, Johnson and Speer have used pretty much the exact same setup for well over a decade now. Their gear and their instruments are simple and straightforward to the point of being borderline ascetic. (Ochoa, for example, has not changed the strings on her bass since 2010, when the group first formed.) When people write back to Christensen, which they often do, they will tell him that they now have all the same gear, and have learned all the songs perfectly, and still cannot get quite the same sound. “Well, I’m sorry,” he tells them, “but that’s just how they play.” Someone might copy Speer’s rig down to the last knob setting, and play his guitar melodies note for note, but without Ochoa and Johnson playing, too, the Khruangbin sound cannot be duplicated. “I know it sounds so simple,” Christensen says, “but if they’re not playing as a trio, it just doesn’t sound like KB.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Did Matt Farley Put a Song About Me on Spotify?

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      I don’t want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?I guess probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.When I did stumble on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did I realize it actually was about me. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, I called.It’s possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was! I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” After one ring, a male voice answered.I said: “This is Brett Martin. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call.”The man had no idea who I was. More

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      Maurizio Pollini, Celebrated Pianist Who Defined Modernism, Dies at 82

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      His recordings of Beethoven and Chopin were hailed as classics, but his technical ability sometimes invited controversy.Maurizio Pollini, an Italian pianist of formidable intellectual powers whose unrivaled technique and unwavering interpretive integrity made him the modernist master of the instrument, died on Saturday morning in Milan. He was 82.His death, in a clinic, was announced by the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he performed frequently. The announcement did not specify a cause, but Mr. Pollini had been forced to cancel a concert at the Salzburg Festival in 2022 because of heart problems and had pulled out of a number of subsequent recitals.Mr. Pollini, who performed for more than half a century, was that rare pianist who compelled listeners to think deeply. He was an artist of rigor and reserve whose staunch assurance, uncompromising directness and steadfast dedication to his ideals were evidence of what his colleague Daniel Barenboim called “a very high ethical regard of music.”Whether he played Beethoven, Schumann or Stockhausen, Mr. Pollini was almost unmatched in his capabilities. He took perfect command of his instrument, a prowess that came across “as neither glib facility nor tedious heroic effort,” the critic Edward Said once wrote, but instead as a technique that “allows you to forget technique entirely.”There were, however, many listeners who could not forget that technique, and Mr. Pollini was long a subject of controversy. Detractors heard only cold objectivity, accusing him of being too distant, too efficient or too unyielding when compared with the great characters of the piano; one of his few equals in sheer ability, Sviatoslav Richter, privately complained of hearing Mr. Pollini play Chopin on the radio with “no poetry or delicacy (even if everything’s impeccably precise).”“It was not a very imaginative performance,” Harold Schonberg of The New York Times said in his review of Mr. Pollini’s Carnegie Hall debut in 1968, eight years after the pianist had stormed to victory in the sixth International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw — the first Westerner to do so, and at only 18. “With all his skill,” Mr. Schonberg continued, “Mr. Pollini failed to suggest that he was deeply involved in the music.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      7 Artists Shaping the Sound of 2024

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      Hear songs from Tanner Adell, Bizarrap and Young Miko, and more.Young Miko.Mauricio Duenas Castaneda/EPA, via ShutterstockDear listeners,It’s Jon — I’m filling in for Lindsay today for a very special installment of The Amplifier. By way of introduction, I’ve been a pop music critic at the Times for … around 15 years? (Let us not speak of that further.) I am also the host of Popcast, our weekly music podcast, and the co-host, with Joe Coscarelli, of Popcast (Deluxe), our YouTube conversation show. Like and subscribe!The primary reason I’ve enjoyed this job for so long is that it’s never boring. Surprise lurks around every corner and in every online wormhole. New artists with novel twists on old ideas — or, from time to time, wholly new ideas — emerge constantly. Pop is centerless and ambitious and forever mutating. If you think things are stagnant, you’re not listening hard enough.And so here’s a list of seven emerging artists who I think have real potential, from a range of genres and styles: People you might want to pay attention to in order to get a taste of what this year, and probably the coming ones too, will sound like.P.S. Or alternately, listen to what I was listening to when I compiled this list: one of the best posse cuts of 1994.Listen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Apple Music Removes Ye’s “Vultures 1” Amid Distributor Dispute

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      On Thursday, the streaming platform took down “Vultures 1” after the LP’s distributor, Fuga, said its upload violated a service agreement. The album, which is on pace to hit No. 1, later returned to the service.Ye, the rapper, producer and provocateur formerly known as Kanye West, has what will likely be the No. 1 album on next week’s Billboard chart, with “Vultures 1.” But on Thursday, the LP briefly disappeared from Apple Music, one of the world’s top streaming platforms.Apple gave no explanation for the removal. But since its release, the album has been dogged by accusations of unauthorized samples, and earlier on Thursday an independent distribution outlet complained that its system had been used to release the music in violation of its service terms.“Vultures 1,” a joint release with the R&B singer Ty Dolla Sign, was set to be Ye’s comeback after a series of antisemitic remarks in 2022 made him a pariah in music and fashion — without a record label or booking agent, and with his lucrative partnership with Adidas canceled. In December, he apologized for those remarks in a social media post written in Hebrew.After listening events last week at arenas in Chicago and on Long Island — where young fans flocked to hear his new music, and some shrugged off his past controversies — Ye released the 16-track “Vultures 1” last Friday.It quickly became a hit at streaming platforms, despite problems like another brief disappearance online shortly after release, and accusations from Ozzy Osbourne and the estate of Donna Summer that songs on the album used those artists’ music without permission.One track, “Good (Don’t Die),” used a portion of Summer’s 1977 song “I Feel Love,” a pulsating classic of early electronic dance music. That track had been removed from Ye’s album on Spotify on Wednesday, according to reports.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More