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    Study Tracking Women’s Music Credits Has a Surprise: Good News

    The Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s latest report finds that women’s involvement in the biggest hits of 2023 was greatly improved over previous years.Each year since 2018, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has tracked the number of women credited on the music industry’s biggest hits, and the numbers have usually been dismal — year after year, female artists, songwriters and producers have been crowded out by men, sometimes by extraordinary margins.In their latest report, however, the study’s researchers found some good news. Women’s involvement in the biggest hits of 2023 was greatly improved from previous years, and in some measurements reached higher proportions than the researchers have found in more than a decade of data.For example, of last year’s most popular tracks — as defined by Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 singles chart — 35 percent of the credited performing artists were women. That is a higher number than U.S.C.’s researchers have found for any year going back to 2012, and only the second time (after 2022) that the number has been over 30 percent.And for the first time in the study’s research window, a majority of the year’s 100 most popular songs — 56 percent of them — had at least one female songwriter.Stacy L. Smith, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the study’s lead author, was cautiously celebratory of the findings. While the latest numbers are up, she noted, women still represented an average of only about 23 percent of performer credits on all surveyed songs since 2012. (Some years that figure has been as low as 17 percent.)“For the second year in a row, the percentage of women artists on the popular charts has increased,” Dr. Smith said in a statement. “This is a notable milestone and worthy of celebration. However, it is still important to recognize that there is room to grow. Women filled less than one-quarter of artist roles across all 12 years examined, and these figures are still far from representing the 50 percent of women in the population and the music audience.”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?  More

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    Prosecutors in Nashville Drop Charges Against Country Singer Chris Young

    The country singer had been charged with disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest after an altercation at a downtown bar.Prosecutors on Friday dropped all charges that had been brought against the country music singer Chris Young in connection with an altercation with an Alcoholic Beverage Commission agent at a Nashville bar.“After a review of all the evidence in this case, the Office of the District Attorney has determined that these charges will be dismissed,” Glenn R. Funk, the Nashville district attorney, said in a statement.Mr. Young, 38, had been charged with disorderly conduct, assaulting an officer and resisting arrest following the episode on Monday night.“Mr. Young and I are gratified with the D.A.’s decision clearing him of the charges and any wrongdoing,” Bill Ramsey, the musician’s lawyer, said in a statement.The episode that led to the charges occurred as Tennessee Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents were checking IDs at the DawgHouse Saloon, a downtown bar. Mr. Young was accused of hitting one of the agents, according to an arrest affidavit filed with a criminal court in Nashville. Agents handcuffed Mr. Young after he did not comply with their orders, the affidavit says.Mr. Young’s representatives previously shared surveillance footage showing that the singer was standing by the bar when agents walked past him.In the video, as one of the agents walks by, Mr. Young places a hand on him, walks backward with the agent and apparently says something. The agent pushes Mr. Young with two hands, and Mr. Young staggers backward and hits his back on a corner of the bar table, causing him to briefly fall, the video shows.He then gets up, raises both of his hands in the air and walks backward away from the agents.Mr. Young rose to stardom after winning the country-music reality TV competition “Nashville Star” in 2006, and his second album, “The Man I Want to Be,” released in 2009, reached the platinum sales mark in the United States. He has been a familiar presence on the Billboard country charts since.John Yoon More

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    Jo-El Sonnier, Who Sparked a Revival of Cajun Music, Dies at 77

    An accordion virtuoso and a gifted vocalist, he scored country hits in the 1980s by putting a Cajun spin on songs like Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter.”Jo-El Sonnier, a singer and accordionist who revived Cajun music in popular culture with hit versions of Richard Thompson’s “Tear-Stained Letter” and Slim Harpo’s “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and with appearances on recordings by Mark Knopfler and Elvis Costello, died on Jan. 13 after a performance in Llano, Texas. He was 77.The cause was a heart attack, the music promoter Tracy Pitcox wrote on social media. He said Mr. Sonnier had been airlifted to a hospital in Austin, where he was pronounced dead.Recordings by Cajun singers and players of stringed instruments like Rusty and Doug Kershaw and Jimmy C. Newman often reached the country Top 40 in the 1950s and ’60s. But it wasn’t until Mr. Sonnier’s arrival three decades later that Cajun accordion music became more than a regional phenomenon.Mr. Sonnier in 1966, when he was 20 years old. A versatile multi-instrumentalist, he first picked up the accordion when he was 3.via Sonnier familyHis album “Come On Joe,” released by RCA in 1987, contained four Top 40 country singles, including “No More One More Time,” a lovelorn ballad, and the rollicking “Tear-Stained Letter,” both of which reached the country Top 10 in 1988. A two-stepping tour de force, Mr. Sonnier’s version of “Tear-Stained Letter” reimagined Mr. Thompson’s hurtling Anglo-Celtic original as a Cajun romp.“Back then, country music was steel, fiddles, drums and lead guitars, so it was a challenge to put the accordion up front,” Mr. Sonnier said of the making of the single in a 2009 interview with the blog 88 Miles West. “We used everything on that record that people thought you couldn’t get away with, and we did.”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?  More

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    Bill Hayes, Longtime Star of ‘Days of Our Lives,’ Dies at 98

    He logged more than 2,000 episodes on the enduring soap opera. He also rode the Davy Crockett craze to a hit single in 1955.Bill Hayes, an actor and singer whose 2,141 episodes of “Days of Our Lives” over five and a half decades constituted the daytime drama version of an ultramarathon, and whose top-selling 1955 single, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” remains seared into the memories of the baby boom generation, died on Jan. 12 at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 98.His wife and longtime co-star, Susan Seaforth Hayes, confirmed his death.To soap opera fans, Mr. Hayes was a staple of weekday afternoons from the days of rabbit-ear antennas into the streaming era.He began his tenure on the long-running NBC show in 1970. His character, Doug Williams, was a suave and slippery con artist who, after leaving prison, found himself padding through the maze of the plot twists, double-crosses and big reveals that day after day drew viewers back to the fictional Midwestern town of Salem.In 1976, two years after Mr. Hayes married Susan Seaforth in real life, their characters wed on “Days of Our Lives” in an episode that drew 16 million viewers.NBC, via Getty ImagesWe 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?  More

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    How Did Melanie’s ’Brand New Key” Hit No. 1?

    Melanie’s “Brand New Key” is just one of many weird songs that somehow topped the Billboard charts.When Melanie’s “Brand New Key” debuted in 1971, some people were confused. What did the singer, who died on Tuesday at 76, mean when she sang about having a brand-new pair of roller skates and someone else having a brand-new key?Melanie told interviewers that she wrote the song in 15 minutes, after ending a 27-day fast, and that it was intended to be cute. The folk singer said that it did not have a deeper meaning, though many thought its playful lyrics about biking and roller skating were really about sex (“Don’t go too fast but I go pretty far”). It sounded strange, like a song out of time — Melanie said she intended it to hearken to the 1930s — sung with what could now be called a warbling “indie girl voice.” And it somehow hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.The song has lingered in pop culture, from a lip sync battle between Jimmy Fallon and Melissa McCarthy to a post-apocalyptic DJ playing it endlessly on “Kids in the Hall.”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?  More

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    That Spotify Daylist That Really ‘Gets’ You? It Was Written by A.I.

    The music-streaming platform’s new “daylist” feature serves users three personalized playlists a day, with titles ranging from quirky to bewildering.Have your Sunday scaries ever given way to a “Nervous Ocean Monday Morning”? Does the weekend truly begin on Friday, or on a “Wild and Free Chaotic Thursday Afternoon”? How should one dress for a “Paranormal Dark Cabaret Evening”?Those odd strings of words are titles of “daylists,” a newish offering from the music-streaming giant Spotify. The feature provides users three new algorithmically generated playlists a day, each with an ultra-specific title that practically begs to be screencapped and posted.The often baffling titles have recently captured the attention of social media, propelling the service to fresh popularity about four months after its September debut. In post after post, users seem amused by the feature’s ability to see right through them.“Spotify called me out a little bit with this daylist,” one X user wrote of her own playlist. Its title: “Midwest Emo Flannel Tuesday Early Morning.”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?  More

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    Pitchfork, the Early Years

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicLast week, Condé Nast announced that Pitchfork, the taste-making music news and criticism website it had acquired in 2015 — which had entranced and sometimes infuriated fans for more than two decades — would be brought under the editorial umbrella of GQ. Many staffers were laid off.The announcement felt like a death knell for a certain kind of critical posture — progressive but not inaccessible, knowledgeable but also curious — that feels increasingly remote in the current media landscape. Some version of the site will continue, but online, the news was received with dismay and frustration.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation with two of the people responsible for building the site’s editorial and business operations about what it took to develop the company from a one-person organization to a cross-platform publication and festival business, and the challenges that led to its sale to Condé Nast.Guests:Ryan Schreiber, the founder of Pitchfork and its editor in chief for approximately two decadesChris Kaskie, Pitchfork’s first employee and first CEOConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Annie Nightingale, Pathbreaking British D.J., Is Dead at 83

    She was initially told there was no room for her on BBC Radio 1 because a woman’s voice lacked the authority of a man’s. Once she was on the air, she stayed there for 53 years.Annie Nightingale, who became the first female disc jockey on BBC Radio 1 in 1970 and remained a popular personality there until her final show, late last year, died on Jan. 11 at her home in London. She was 83.Her family announced the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.“This is the woman who changed the face and sound of British TV and radio broadcasting forever,” Annie Mac, a longtime BBC Radio D.J., wrote on Instagram after Ms. Nightingale’s death.Ms. Nightingale became well known in music circles in the 1960s as a columnist in British newspapers. And she was a familiar face to stars like the Beatles, whom she interviewed at the Brighton Hippodrome in 1964.“As Derek Taylor liked her, she was welcome at Apple,” the Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn said in an email, referring to the Beatles’ press officer and the company they founded in 1968.In 1967, she applied to be a D.J. on BBC Radio 1, the pop music outlet that had just been started in reaction to the rise of popular offshore pirate stations.But she found herself up against the station’s sexist hiring policy. She was told that its all-male D.J. lineup represented “husband substitutes” to the housewives who were listening, and that a woman’s voice would lack the authority of a man’s.“It came as a huge shock,” Ms. Nightingale told The Independent in 2015. “I was almost amused. What do you mean, ‘No women’? Why not?”But in October 1969, the BBC offered her an on-air trial. Before her first appearance, she told The Manchester Evening News, “I am sure that a lot of girls would make marvelous D.J.s if given the chance.”Before Ms. Nightingale became a D.J., she had become well known in music circles through her columns in British newspapers.Virginia Turbett/RedfernsShe was hired the next year for a weekday record review program, “What’s New,” and two years later she became a host of an evening progressive-rock show, “Sounds of the 70s.” Later in the decade, she became the host of a Sunday afternoon request show and a music interview program. She hosted a variety of other shows through last year.“From Day One, I chose the records I wanted to play and stuck to it ever since,” she said in her autobiography, “Hey Hi Hello: Five Decades of Pop Culture From Britain’s First Female DJ.” (2020). “I preferred the evenings, where I wouldn’t have to introduce playlist tunes I didn’t like. That would have been like lying to me.”Anne Avril Nightingale was born on April 1, 1940, in the Osterley district of London. Her father, Basil, worked in the family’s wallpaper business. Her mother, Celia, was a foot doctor. As a girl, Anne listened to children’s programs on her father’s radio and came to love that it could tune in to distant cities.“I still feel when you’re broadcasting, you don’t know where it’s going and it could be reaching outer space somewhere, and I am still in love with that, completely,” she said in an interview in 2018.After graduating from the Lady Eleanor Holles School, she studied journalism at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London. She began her journalism career soon after, first as a reporter for The Brighton and Hove Gazette and then at The Argus, in Brighton, where she wrote a music column called Spin With Me. She later wrote a music column for a national tabloid, The Daily Sketch.In 1964, she collaborated with the pop group the Hollies on a book, “How to Run a Beat Group.”She found a measure of television fame on BBC’s “Juke Box Jury,” where she was part of a guest panel that reviewed new record releases, and as the host of “That’s For Me,” a record request program on ITV, and the Rediffusion network’s quiz show, “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” both in 1965.But she was best known for her time at BBC Radio 1, which began with some rocky moments because of her inexperience — like the time there was eight seconds of dead airtime when she accidentally pressed an “off” switch while a record was playing.“What I found difficult in those early days was being bad technically,” she told The Western Daily Press of Bristol in 1979. “Every time I made a mistake I thought they’d all say, ‘Oh yes, woman driver!’”She remained the only female D.J. on BBC Radio 1 — the “token woman,” she said — for 12 years. In 2010, when she was more than halfway through her 41st year there, Guinness World Records cited her for having had the longest career ever for a female D.J. (That record has since been surpassed twice, by the Peruvian broadcaster Maruja Venegas Salinas and Mary McCoy, a D.J. in Texas.)“It was not until the 1990s and the ‘girlification’ of Radio 1 with the likes of Sara Cox, Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball that Nightingale’s exceptionality became her longevity and impact rather than her gender alone,” Lucy Robinson, a professor at the University of Sussex, and Dr. Jeannine Baker, who at the time was with Macquarie University, wrote on the BBC website.Ms. Nightingale’s success went beyond radio. In 1978, she was named a host of BBC’s live music television show “The Old Grey Whistle Test,” where she focused on new wave music.After John Lennon was killed on Dec. 8, 1980, Ms. Nightingale and members of the “Whistle Test” staff were trying to round up people to talk about him. During the program, a producer appeared in the studio and told Ms. Nightingale, “Paul’s on the phone and he wants to speak to you.”“I had no idea who he meant,” she recalled on the podcast “I Am the Eggpod” in 2018. It was Paul McCartney.Ms. Nightingale in 2015. Throughout her career she championed new music, from progressive rock to acid house and grime.Graham Prentice/Alamy“He wanted to say thank you on behalf of Linda and himself and Yoko and George and Ringo,” she said. “And that’s what really got me.” She added: “I got back in front of the camera and it’s live and I thought right, right, you’re the messenger. And he said, ‘You know how it was.’”Ms. Nightingale’s survivors include a son, Alex, and a daughter, Lucy, whose name was inspired partly by the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” Her marriages to Gordon Thomas, a writer, and Binky Baker, an actor, ended in divorce.Throughout her career, Ms. Nightingale championed new music — from progressive rock to acid house to grime.She described her visceral connection to new music when she was interviewed in 2020 on the popular BBC Radio 4 program “Desert Island Discs.”“It’s a thrill, it’s absolutely so exciting,” she said. “I actually get a physical sensation. I get shivers up and down my legs when I hear something that becomes very successful.” More