Anduril might build a weapons factory in the UKAnduril might build a factory in the U.K. as it expands beyond U.S. defense contracts.

PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER: A CELEBRATION OF PATTI SMITH AT CARNEGIE HALLINITIAL ALL-STAR LINEUP FOR 20TH ANNUAL MUSIC EDUCATION BENEFIT CONCERT AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK CITY MARCH 26, 2025; PATTI SMITH UPCOMING TOUR TO THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF HER ALBUM HORSES."Horses was like the first cannon blast in a war—frightening and disorienting. I mean, she was so unlike the FM radio terrain in every way. She was literate, aggressive, intense. From that point forward you couldn't comfort yourself with the old, safe sixties myths. The revolution was on." -Author and novelist Daniel Weizmann.Michael Dorf Presents just unveiled the initial artist lineup for the 20th annual Music Of tribute concert, celebrating the iconic career of Patti Smith. Taking place at the historic Carnegie Hall on March 26, 2025, this evening will bring together some prominent names in music to honor Smith’s indelible influence. The lineup of People Have the Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith includes Michael Stipe, Matt Berninger of The National, Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten, Alison Mosshart of The Kills, Kronos Quartet, Ben Harper, Karen O, Kim Gordon, and Angel Olsen.The evening will also feature a house band led by Tony Shanahan (a longtime member of Patti Smith’s band), joined by Flea, Steve Jordan, and more surprise guests. As the Music Of series reaches its 20th anniversary, this year’s concert coincides with another milestone: the 50th anniversary of Smith’sgroundbreaking debut album, Horses. Widely regarded as a seminal work in punk rock and recorded at Electric Lady Studios, Horses has left an enduring legacy, inspiring generations of artists and fans.“Celebrating two decades of the Music Of series at Carnegie Hall with Patti Smith’s extraordinary songbook is a deeply meaningful milestone for me,” said Michael Dorf, founder of Michael Dorf Presents in a media announcement. “This series has been about more than music—it’s been about creating opportunities for kids through the power of music education. To gather this remarkable lineup of artists, all influenced by Patti’s legacy, is a testament to her impact.”For 20 years, the Music Of series has raised over $2 million for nonprofit organizations focused on music education. Every dollar of net proceeds benefits organizations such as Music Will, Young Audiences NY, Save the Music, D’Addario Foundation, Church Street School of Music, and many more. These efforts provide transformative opportunities for children nationwide to experience the joy of music. VIP tickets for People Have the Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith are on sale now at musicof.org. Stay tuned for more updates about this event. “Established by Michael Dorf in 2003, founder of the Knitting Factory and City Winery, MDP has been presenting the Music Of series at Carnegie Hall for 20 years. Working alongside Michael for the last 16 years has been Shlomo Lipetz, President of Venues at City Winery.”Patti Smith’s upcoming 50th Horses anniversary tour is expansive, with the European leg kicking off on July 1st. The United States leg starts November 10th in Seattle and concluding November 29th in Philadelphia. Smith will be joined by Horses musicians Lenny Kaye and Jay Dee Daugherty, on guitar and drums, respectively, both of whom recorded with Smith on the 1975 LP. Smith’s live band will also feature bassist and keyboardist Tony Shanahan, and guitarist Jackson Smith, Patti’s son.Patti last played Horses in 2005 at London’s Meltdown Festival, which she curated that year. Each 2025 show will include all eight tracks from the 1975 album. Before Horses was released in November ’75 to retail outlets, during 1974, Patti contributed to The Whole Thing Started with Rock and Roll Now It's Out of Control, the second studio album by keyboardist and Doors’ co-founder, Ray Manzarek. Smith is listed as “poetess” on the track “I Wake Up Screaming.” She also recited Jim Morrison’s “Ensenada” from The New Creatures. "Jim was a big influence on Patti,” Manzarek told me in a 1974 interview for the now defunct U.K. music weekly Melody Maker. “Punk rockers, those people loved Morrison. Loved his poetry, loved the fact that his words, and the songs, were dark and ominous.”I first encountered Patti Smith in 1975 at a Blue Oyster Cult concert after-party Epic Records had in 1975 at the Forum in Inglewood, California. Patti introduced me to her boyfriend at the time, Alan Lanier who was in BOC. Smith co-wrote tunes with BOC members on Tyranny and Mutation in 1973, and their 1974 Secret Treaties. Lanier helped write and played guitar on “Elegie” from Smith’s Horses. It’s Lanier’s horse pin gift to her on the album cover. I liked the cover of Horses. Last decade at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood, I sat with Nancy Sinatra at a Patti Smith Group concert. Nancy, like Patti, has roots in New Jersey. Patti told us the Horses LP cover was inspired by Frank Sinatra and the way he held his jacket. In 1976 and 1995, I watched a couple of Smith bookings with photographer and journalist Heather Harris. “It was must-see, must-photograph music performance: the Patti Smith Group at the Roxy, 1976,” reminisced Harris in 2025. “Her incredible band (she had surrounded herself with pretty damn good songwriters to match her unique lyrics sense) also included her debut album Horses producer John Cale sitting in on bass, as in my shot. A total vindication of punk rock as timeless art as well as timely rebellion. Plus, literary to boot. “My next shot documented her appearance at When Words Collide festival of spoken word and music in Long Beach, California, 1995. It was a major coup booking one of her first returns to the music world after the tragedy of her youngish husband's (Sonic Smith of the MC5) death at age 46. She was joined onstage by her then teenage son Jackson Smith and she appeared happy (a new look!) throughout. My favorite parts: she paused the show to allow a large beetle to cross the stage threshold and then reviewed its personal trek, and secondly her band and she actually played 16 or so bars of Deep Purple's metal anthem "Smoke on The Water" at the request of her son Jackson. “Flash forward to her memoir Just Kids, her most successful book for truly blending her feelings, her lyrical language and fascinating documentation of her own youth among the soon to be famous in New York City's 1970s zeitgeist.” I’ve followed Patti Smith’s “career” for half a century. In 2000 I telephoned Patti in New York and we conducted an interview. We discussed her current album Gung Ho.Q: This December 2000 marks the 25th anniversary of your debut Arista Records album Horses. Can you talk a bit about your quarter of a century friendship and relationship with label head Clive Davis, who signed you to the label?A: The thing about Clive is that he believed in me when I was a total fledgling, you know, really knew very little about music, knew nothing about the music business, didn’t care, I just wanted to do work. And in the last 25 years he has allowed me to do my work. I’ve done eight albums. It’s taken me 25 years. I don’t have much of a sales record. Yet he never dropped me. Although we’ve had words and not always agreed on things, he never tampered with my work, never insisted that I change anything and I can look at this time in my life and a body of work that I’m proud of you know, and I didn’t compromise and I’m grateful for that. I had forgotten that one of the titles I was going to call this record early on was Grateful. Just because I felt, well it’s my last record on Arista, you know, I’ve fulfilled my contract and sort of wanted to say that. That I was grateful. We have very little in common in some ways. We don’t always see eye to eye. But he’s really been sort of a patron which is unique in the music business.Q: Tell me about Gung Ho? The song and as an album title?A: Well, I knew that the song “Gung Ho” was gonna be a long one. The title was between “One Voice” and “Gung Ho.” And I usually traditionally, or I will often take the last song on the record to be the title song, or the long improvisation like “Horses” or “Radio Ethiopia.” So, when “Gung Ho” shaped up to be such a monumental song on the record, that’s the one I decided to use.Q: Listening to your album, Ho Chi Minh and Viet Nam are examined.A: Oh yeah… I’ve really struggled for years trying to understand the whole Viet Nam experience. You know, I was a teenager and a lot of my classmates in high school were from low economic situations. They all got drafted, and a lot of them got killed in Viet Nam and I didn’t understand Viet Nam. My artist friends, my friends in New York City were protesting Viet Nam and it took me all this time to comprehend. I always knew the war was wrong, but I didn’t know a lot of the facts or really comprehend, you know, what kind of person he was. And really, what he just wanted was freedom for his people. I mean, Oliver Ray and I just went to Viet Nam in November after the record was done, and we went there to really see Viet Nam ourselves. When you are in Viet Nam and you meet these people and you see their country and listen to their language and it’s absurd to think why would the French, or why would we even be in Viet Nam? It’s a real country. I mean it’s a people with their own heritage, their own history, and philosophies, their own body language. You know, the absurdity of it is beyond comprehension. And they’re all such aproud, sturdy, friendly people. Gung Ho was the result of like a year and a half study. I’ve got a whole notebook filled with notes about Ho Chi Minh, about his life, from his writings to his biography, my own observations. I would have pages of clusters, and when we went in the studio to do the piece, it was a field. An obviously long field that was gonna tell this story. So, I had various sheets of paper taped to the music stand, the walls, whatever that I could look at as the music was goin’ by and just grab at whatever. But I had no end of the song even when we went in to do it. I didn’t know how I was going to end it. So, as the band played, I kept grabbing and emotionally was carried into the end of the song. I wrote all the words, but in terms of the music, it was really a perfect organic situation. And it’s perfectly named because I found out afterwards that the word "gung-ho" means, in its purest form, a Chinese phrase, “working together.” Which I didn’t know. I thought it meant like my mom always said about my dad, you know, “Your dad was really gung-ho in the war.” You’re gung-ho if you’re full of heart or enthusiasm. But the actual, real meaning is “working together.” We were supposed to have practice. I walked in and they were jamming. Oliver started this guitar phrase, and then Lenny introduced another guitar phrase and then Tony and Jay fell in, and I was mesmerized by this music. There was no plan. They were jamming and I sat there listening to it and couldn’t take it anymore. I just went up to my microphone, because they set me up a mike, and started rapping some of the stuff that was in my notebooks and in my head about Ho Chi Minh. And I just stopped this after a while and said “this is gonna be the ‘Ho Chi Minh’ song” and let’s not work on it anymore. Let’s remember it and when we go in the studio we’ll improvise it.” ‘Cause I didn’t want us to keep going. I wanted it to be really fresh. So, I wanted it to be really birthed in the studio and it was. We’ve done it three times live and each time it’s totally different. A little scary ‘cause it’s long.Q: There’s a song on Gung Ho called “Grateful,” which I’m sure has some link to The Grateful Dead or Jerry Garcia.A: I can tell you exactly where “Grateful” came from. I wrote it all by myself. I was in Michigan. It’s the oldest song on the record. Jerry had died and I was in Michigan. I was feeling a bit blue and somebody was teasing me about my gray hair. My hair is graying. It’s not totally gray but getting grayer. I don’t care if my hair is getting gray. But for that particular day I was feeling sensitive or something and I was feeling blue generally. And I went off by myself and like, burst into tears. And I was just standing there trying to compose myself and just shut my eyes and I saw a vision of Jerry Garcia smiling at me. It really happened. I saw him, he smiled at me and he tugged at his hair. His hair of course was long, silvery and wiry. And I don’t know Jerry. I met him. I just stood there and felt better and all of a sudden, this little song came in my head, and I don’t write many songs by myself. I don’t write much music or don’t hear much music. But I heard the whole thing and went and got my acoustic guitar and wrote the little song down. That was one of the easier songs I ever wrote. I didn’t struggle or edit. I wrote it and called it “Grateful,” as a salute to Jerry.Q: What about your work in different mediums. Writing and then recording.A: Well, I think they inform each other. Sometimes I find it really hard to write when I’m performing, or working on records. I just put myself in whatever form I’m using. When I’m working on a record, every record reflects a lot of study. This record reflects Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh, Mother Teresa, all kinds of things.Q: I know you write by longhand. Do you utilize a typewriter?A: I’m a longhand…I don’t really type lyrics. The only time, for instance, “One Voice,” I wrote longhand as a poem and I might have typed working on it ‘cause I wanted the lyrics for “One Voice” to be very economic but yet dense in a certain language. I struggle a lot writing lyrics.Q: What are your feelings about the internet? It’s text driven and a chance for cross pollination.A: I think there’s obviously a lot of possibilities of cross pollination as you say and global communication. I’m seeing the web sites basically taking you on a ride for some marketing things. Arista gave me and my band a web site, gungho2000.com. All it is unpublished poetry, manifestos, photographs, suggestions, helpful and environmental alerts. Fun stuff, but the idea is that it’s a world that extends from the work from the albums. It doesn’t like lead people into the world of T-shirt sales. It’s going to be a place to get information or to give ideas, like learning about Ho Chi Minh, giving you places you can go. Or checking out The Declaration of Independence. Or giving people some cool stuff to see.Q: What is the difference in making a record, and then doing those songs in person? Are they two different endeavors?A: They are different responsibilities. Doing a record, one is doing something that hopefully will endure. And one is doing it in a very intimate situation. Just with one’s band members and a few technicians And so it is very intimate, but one is mentally projecting toward the future and the people who’ll listen to it. Playing live you are right there with the people. I don’t think of live performance as enduring. It’s for the moment, somebody might bootleg it or tape it for themselves, but basically, I think of performance for the moment and it’s often more raucous, flawed, and you know, totally done for the people thatare there.(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon, 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972, 2015's Every Body Knows: Leonard Cohen, 2016's Heart of Gold Neil Young and 2017's 1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love. Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In 2021 the duo wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble. Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. His Screen Gems: (Pop Music Documentaries and Rock‘n’Roll Television Moments) is scheduled for 2025 publication. Harvey wrote the liner notes to CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival. During 2006 Kubernik spoke at the special hearings by The Library of Congress in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices andaudiotape preservation. In 2017 he appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in their Distinguished Speakers Series. Amidst 2023, Harvey spoke at The Grammy Museum in Los Angeles discussing The Last Waltz music documentary).The post PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER: A CELEBRATION OF PATTI SMITH AT CARNEGIE HALL first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Turning a Kombucha Bottle Into a Plasma TubeKombucha! It’s a delicious fermented beverage that is kind to your digestive system and often sold in glass bottles. You don’t just have to use those bottles for healthy drinks, though. As [Simranjit Singh] demonstrates, you can also use them to create your very own plasma tube.
[Simranjit’s] build begins with a nice large 1.4-liter kombucha bottle from the Synergy brand. To make the plasma tube nicely symmetrical, the bottle had its original spout cut off cleanly with a hot wire, with the end then sealed with a glass cap. Electrodes were installed in each end of the tube by carefully drilling out the glass and installing small bolts. They were sealed in place with epoxy laced with aluminium oxide in order to improve the dielectric strength and aid the performance of the chamber. A vacuum chamber was then used to evacuate air from inside the chamber. Once built, [Simranjit] tested the bottle with high voltage supplied from a flyback transformer, with long purple arcs flowing freely through the chamber.
A plasma tube may not be particularly useful beyond educational purposes, but it does look very cool. We do enjoy a nice high-voltage project around these parts, after all.

From UMG’s motion to dismiss Drake’s lawsuit to Mariah Carey’s copyright win… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpThe biggest stories from the past week – all in one place…
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Sonuscore release THE PULSE Sonuscore's latest composition tool draws inspiration from iconic scores such as Tenet, Blade Runner 2049, The Social Network and Stranger Things.

“At that moment, I thought only an idiot would say no”: How an invitation from Pharrell Williams ended Hans Zimmer’s fear of performing liveFor a musician as venerated as Hans Zimmer,  you might not suspect him of being susceptible to fear of live performance. But until some friends helped him snap out of it, he was exactly that.
Those friends were none other than Pharrell Williams and The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, and they were insistent that he needed to get out of his head.

READ MORE: Brian Eno hates how Auto-Tune “turns a voice into every other voice” – but feels it can be useful for this one reason

“[They] are really my best friends,” Zimmer tells Tom Power in a new interview with Q [via CBC]. “[They said] it came to the point now where I have to look the audience in the eye, where I can’t hide behind a screen anymore, and I need to get out there and confront humanity.”
Hans Zimmer’s decades-spanning career is about as decorated as can be. A two-time Oscar winner, the German composer extraordinaire has created scores for movies like Interstellar, The Lion King and Pirates of the Caribbean, to name just a few.
But it wasn’t until 2015 that Zimmer finally overcame a deep fear of performing live, thanks to an invitation from Pharrell Williams, where he was asked to play guitar for him during his 2015 Grammys performance.
“At that moment, I thought only an idiot would say no,” Zimmer says. “That sort of started the whole thing up.”
He later went on to perform two years later at Coachella, delivering his iconic Lion King, Gladiator and Inception scores accompanied by a full orchestra.
“I said, ‘Well, this is a festival. We’re not going to do The Lion King,’” Zimmer recalls. “And Nile Marr, Johnny Marr’s son, said, ‘Hans, get over yourself. That’s the music of my childhood!’… We played The Lion King and suddenly I’m looking out and there are 80,000 people crying – I mean, crying in a good way.”

Elsewhere, Hans Zimmer recently revealed that “90 percent” of what he does is “done on one software synth”.
“I was one of the first people to really get into computers and music and there came a point where there’s a new operating system every few months,” Zimmer recounts. “I just gave up and I just went ‘I need to concentrate on my music.’”
He continues, “So I started to subtract things out of my life and I started getting very good at the things that I kept. For instance software synthesizers, 90 percent of what I do is done on one software synth.”
The post “At that moment, I thought only an idiot would say no”: How an invitation from Pharrell Williams ended Hans Zimmer’s fear of performing live appeared first on MusicTech.

Spotify debuts Concerts Near You playlist: How To Add EventsSpotify debuts Concerts Near You, a new personalized playlist that surfaces upcoming area concerts and links to buy tickets.
The post Spotify debuts Concerts Near You playlist: How To Add Events appeared first on Hypebot.

Live Music Industry News: Wasserman hires • new UTA CEO • GSPS sneak peak • Venu to share financials • Live Nation • MoreIn the latest live music industry news, global music agency Wasserman Music has added three key executives across its growing Fairs & Festivals, Tour Marketing, and worldwide agent teams.
The post Live Music Industry News: Wasserman hires • new UTA CEO • GSPS sneak peak • Venu to share financials • Live Nation • More appeared first on Hypebot.

Noisebud Purr-LUFSPurr-LUFS is a LUFS-based gain compensation plugin designed to provide accurate loudness compensation for any plugin, hardware, or effects chain. Our perception is easily influenced... Read More

“There’s no reason why DIY artists can’t do this for themselves”: Melody Rights may have a simple solution for music royaltiesFor most musicians, the process of registering a song for royalties summons a bespoke blend of boredom and dread. There’s metadata to be sorted out, a host of different regional copyright bodies to consider, and a number of different royalties and rights to get your head around.
For Bobby Cole, founder and managing director of Melody Rights, the intricacies of music royalties are like bread and butter. With some two decades of experience writing stock music, and thousands of credits to his name, it’s a subject that, out of necessity, he’s had to learn an awful lot about. His expert opinion? The current system is confusing, complex, opaque, barely fit for purpose, and ripe for disruption.
READ MORE: As AI fakes proliferate, we need to draw a clear distinction between human-made music and AI-generated content
“We’re trying to shake things up,” says Cole. “Melody Rights exists to make this side of the industry a hell of a lot easier.”
Launched in January of this year, Melody Rights operates similarly to platforms like DistroKid, CD Baby, and Tunecore, enabling users to manage and distribute their music easily. Crucially, however, the service that Melody Rights offers is aimed at entirely different targets. Rather than focusing on streaming platforms, the company specialises in the less flashy, but lucrative, world of library music — getting users’ tracks onto platforms where they might be synced for video games, film and TV, and other media.
“We don’t touch anything that platforms like DistroKid do, and they don’t touch anything that we do,” Cole emphasises. “We don’t upload to Spotify. We don’t send music to the DSPs. We’ve removed ourselves from that conversation simply because there are so many people already doing it, and they do it faster, better, and cheaper than we ever could.
“But those services don’t do computer game marketplaces,” Cole continues. “They don’t register your royalties, they don’t do neighbouring rights, they don’t do mechanical royalties. We can’t find anyone else that does the full list of things that we do.”
The number of services that Melody Rights can provide is expansive, to the point where it’s hard to characterise the company succinctly. This is something Cole doesn’t shy away from. “Is Melody Rights a distributor?” he asks rhetorically. “Is it a publisher? Is it an administration company? Is it a record label? I don’t think you can pigeonhole us, because there are elements of all these things.”

On the distribution side, the company connects with game asset stores like Game Dev Marketplace and Itch.io, and more traditional music licensing platforms such as Pond5 and AudioSparx. While you can’t send your music to DSPs like Apple Music and Spotify, you can upload to platforms like Bandcamp and Soundcloud. On the publishing and administration side, Melody Rights advertises its capacity to register for and collect various royalty types and to manage YouTube’s Content ID system.
By liberally pulling together a diverse range of services into one hybrid platform, Cole says Melody Rights can offer a simple but powerful hub for managing music. “You’ve got one dashboard,” he says of the user interface. “You can upload all of your content to us and then pick and choose where you send the music to. If you don’t want your music in gaming marketplaces, that’s fine, it’s just a matter of ticking a checkbox.”
The service operates on a subscription basis, with the lowest pricing tier of $5 allowing you to upload five tracks per month. From there, it increases in steps up to 50 songs for $50 per month. Cole defends the pricing, saying: “For most people, opening a Music Publishers Association account costs around £400 and that’s just one account of many. For a DIY musician to open all the accounts that we have would cost them roughly £1,200. So, this is a tool that enables musicians to get all their registrations done correctly, quickly, and cheaply.”
At launch, Melody Rights took a percentage of any royalties generated through the platform — however, this policy was quickly dropped in favour of a model that leaves the full amount of royalties with the creator.
“Places like CD Baby take around 8% [of royalties],” Cole offers as a comparison. “Some of the traditional administration companies can take between 15% and 20%. They have to do that because their system is more manual – ours is completely automated, and this means we can give the artist 100% of whatever money is found.”
Having only launched a few months ago, Cole says the team is still acutely focused on building Melody Rights’ user base. At the same time, he isn’t shy about his future goals for the platform. “We’d like to have our own ecosystem,” states Cole. “We’d like to have tools within the Melody Rights platform that let you automatically master or remix the songs you upload. We’d love to make our dashboard feature rich at no expense to the user.”
Regardless of whether Melody Rights eventually becomes a one-stop shop, what it offers right now is undeniably intriguing. Few musicians are in a position to ignore potential sources of income, yet the world of stock music has remained stubbornly niche even as there has been an explosion of bedroom producers.
This can partially be explained by the huge administrative overheads that come with the territory. A career, or even a side hustle, composing stock music depends on scale. Creators need to be able to make and upload large amounts of music to a wide range of markets and platforms – yet each song requires a painful number of bureaucratic steps before you can ever hope to get paid.
Simplifying and streamlining this notoriously complicated aspect of the music business would not only make the lives of established stock music composers easier – it would help musicians access an often overlooked sector of the industry at a time when traditional streaming platforms deliver a living wage for only a slim minority of artists.
“There was a time when if you signed to a label they’d take care of all this stuff,” Cole reflects. “For most people, those kinds of deals don’t exist anymore. But with these tools, there’s really no reason why DIY artists can’t do this for themselves. Melody Rights is like having the power of an automated record label in your back pocket for $5 a month. We think it’s quite revolutionary.”
Learn more at Melody Rights.
Read more music technology interviews. 
The post “There’s no reason why DIY artists can’t do this for themselves”: Melody Rights may have a simple solution for music royalties appeared first on MusicTech.

“The first synth that made dreaming big accessible to a schlub like me”: Rush’s Geddy Lee teams up with Moog Music on a special-edition, red-finish Minimoog Model DMoog has teamed up with Rush’s Geddy Lee on a special edition of the Minimoog Model D.
This custom-built version of the legendary analogue synth stays true to its classic sound while incorporating modern upgrades and a striking design inspired by the Rush frontman’s stage instruments back in the day.

READ MORE: “The SEM is nothing but a copy of the Odyssey or a copy of the Minimoog, or a little mixture. But I loved it, and so I wanted to do it”: Tom Oberheim on designing synths

To start, the Geddy Lee Minimoog Model D arrives in a lovely custom, satin red finish with metallic flecks that brings to mind Lee’s keyboard rig from Rush’s Grace Under Pressure tour. The synth also sports a special ‘Starman’ logo on its front and back, making it a true collector’s piece.
Image: Moog Music
Features wise, the new Minimoog Model D delivers all the rich, analogue circuitry that made the original a household name. Though it does contain several upgrades, including a hot-rodded VCA circuit, dedicated LFO controls, and modern MIDI integration.
Each purchase also comes with a Rush-themed merch bundle, which includes an exclusive 10” red vinyl featuring Xanadu and Jacob’s Ladder, a collectible poster, commemorative manual, gift box, as well as a certificate of authenticity that’s individually numbered and hand-signed by Lee.

Image: Moog Music“It’s a thrill to see the Minimoog Model D in that stunning red, so representative of one of the most fertile periods in Rush’s creative history,” says Lee of the new release. “I’ve always been mad for custom colour instruments, many inspired by automotive hues, and I’m thrilled with how it turned out — it’s just so beautiful.”
“The Minimoog Model D was the first synth that made dreaming big accessible to a schlub like me. Its intuitive design lets you learn waveforms, blend sounds, and experiment with the modulation wheel. That’s its legacy: a fat, sophisticated sound in a package that’s not daunting to get your hands on.”
In a video accompanying the launch, Lee speaks about Rush’s introduction to synths back in the 70s, saying: “For me I graduated to the Minimoog as a natural part of evolution from the tease that was that little squeaky sound you could get out of the Taurus pedals.”
“I wanted a more substantial tone and then we were writing songs that were quite adventurous like Xanadu and A Farewell to Kings and by the time we were going to write Farewell to Kings I knew I wanted a Minimoog. And I wanted to see if I could figure out how to get a noise out of it.”
Priced at $5,499, the Moog Music Geddy Lee Minimoog Model D is now available exclusively at Reverb (US), Andertons (UK) and Thomann (EMEA/Germany).

Learn more at Moog Music.
The post “The first synth that made dreaming big accessible to a schlub like me”: Rush’s Geddy Lee teams up with Moog Music on a special-edition, red-finish Minimoog Model D appeared first on MusicTech.

Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”Brian Eno has never been one to shy away from conversations about technology’s role in music and society. From pioneering ambient music to his latest generative AI-powered feature film Eno, he’s always found ways to push boundaries. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, the producer says his biggest concern’t isn’t the tech itself — but who controls it.

READ MORE: Brian Eno hates how Auto-Tune “turns a voice into every other voice” – but feels it can be useful for this one reason

Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Eno says [via Stereogum]: “The biggest problem for me about AI is. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people, and I have less and less interest in what those people think, and more and more criticisms of what the effect of their work has been.”
For Eno, AI is part of a broader issue: the concentration of power in the hands of a few tech giants.
“I think social media has been a catastrophe and mildly useful at the same time,” he says. “It’s possible for both things to coexist, but I think in terms of what it’s done to societies, it’s been a catastrophe.”
“Again, that could have been avoided, I think. If it had started out in a not-for-profit regime, it would’ve been different, because ‘maximise engagement’ wouldn’t have been the headline of the whole project,” Eno continues. “Maximising engagement is just another word for maximise profit. If that’s your intention, then you get what we got, just like in the American food industry is maximise profit, which is why you have a lot of very, very unhealthy people.”
Despite his concerns, Eno admits he’s always been fascinated by the creative potential of new tools, and AI is no exception. He sees it as part of a long tradition of musicians repurposing technology in ways its creators never intended.
“Talking about AI itself, I’ve always been happy to welcome new technologies and to see what you could do with them that nobody else thought of doing with them, and what things they could do, other than those that they were designed for,” he says.
“Because with all music technology, it’s always very interesting that stuff is designed for one reason, and then people start to find new things they could do that are completely beyond what the designer was thinking about.”
He points to distortion as a perfect example of this phenomenon: “Distortion is, in a way, the sound of popular music,” Eno explains. “A lot of the things that we find uniquely exciting has to do with equipment kind of going wrong. That’s quite a bizarre thought, isn’t it? That you design equipment to do this. Then, you start using it to do something else, which it doesn’t do very well, and you get to like the sound of the not very wellness.”

Brian Eno’s new ambient record Aurum is now available exclusively on Apple Music.
The post Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people” appeared first on MusicTech.

Moog announce Geddy Lee Minimoog Model D The latest iteration of Moog’s ever-popular Minimoog Model D has been developed in collaboration with Geddy Lee, the bassist, vocalist and synth pioneer of the legendary band Rush.

UMG strikes partnership with HEAT to bring Lil’ Wayne, CG5 music to game developersUMG labels and artists will be 'the first to effectively distribute new tracks into gaming development tools and platforms'
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BMI & White Bear PR to Present "The Art of Music in Horror" at WonderCon 2025WHO: BMI®& White Bear PR are excited to present “The Art of Music in Horror” panel at WonderCon 2025. The discussion will feature BMI composers Charlie Clouser (Saw), Bobby Krlic (Midsommar), Harry Manfredini (Friday the 13th) and Dara Taylor (The Invitation), and will be moderated by White Bear PR’s Chandler Poling. BMI’s Director of Film, TV & Visual Media Louie Stephens will introduce the panel. WHAT: “The Art of Music in Horror” panel will feature an ensemble of renowned BMI composers who will discuss the unique challenges and creative process involved in scoring horror films and television. Discover how music elevates the fright factor and plays a key role in shaping iconic scenes that haunt audiences long after the credits roll. WHERE: Anaheim Convention Center (800 W Katella Ave. Anaheim, CA 92802)                Panel Room: 213CD       WHEN: Saturday, March 29, 2025TIME: 7:00 P.M. - 8:00 P.M. ***Press is invited to conduct one-on-one interviews with panelists prior to the panel, upon request. Contact Chandler Poling (chandler@whitebearpr.com) for more details.*** ABOUT THE PANELISTS:Charlie Clouser is a composer who specializes in dark and moody scores for film and television. He is best known for his intense scores for all ten of the SAW horror movie franchise and has also scored action films like Death Sentence, Dead Silence, Unhuman, and Resident Evil: Extinction, as well as over 250 episodes of television series like Fox’s Wayward Pines, CBS’s Numb3rs, NBC’s Las Vegas and the fan-favorite main title theme for Fox’s American Horror Story.Bobby Krlic is a British musician, producer and composer. In addition to his work collaborating and scoring both film and television with Atticus Ross, Krlic has been releasing his own often harrowing electronic music for the better part of the past decade under the moniker of The Haxan Cloak. Harry Manfredini has scored nearly 250 films and television shows to date. He is best known for his iconic scores on horror films like the Friday the 13th franchise, Wishmaster, Swamp Thing and House. Manfredini’s multi-faceted catalog also includes comedy films like Spring Break, and action films like Deep Star Six, Aces, Iron Eagle, and The Omega Code. Additionally, he’s scored numerous TV dramas for Lifetime and Hallmark, as well as many award-winning children’s films like Corduroy and A Boy, A Dog, And A Frog.  Dara Taylor has emerged as a fresh voice in the world of scoring music to picture. Her credits include Amazon Studios’ The Tender Bar, Universal Pictures’ Strays, Amazon’s The Boys: Diabolical, Warner Brothers’ Scoob! Holiday Haunt, the Lionsgate comedy Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar, which she co-scored with Christopher Lennertz, Netflix’s and Shondaland’s Black Barbie, and Netflix’s Meet Me Next Christmas, The Noel Diary, and Bookmarks.Taylor has received recognition for her works in the Karen Allen-starred drama Colewell, for which she won a 2019 Hollywood Music in Media Award. In 2023, she received an SCL Award nomination for Sony Pictures/Screen Gems’ The Invitation. Next up for Taylor is Tyler Perry’s Straw starring Taraji P. Henson.ABOUT BMI:Celebrating over 80 years of service to songwriters, composers, music publishers and businesses, BMI® is a global leader in music rights management, serving as an advocate for the value of music. BMI represents the public performance rights in over 22.4 million musical works created and owned by more than 1.4 million songwriters, composers, and music publishers. The Company negotiates music license agreements and distributes the fees it generates as royalties to its affiliated writers and publishers when their songs are performed in public. In 1939, BMI created a groundbreaking open-door policy becoming the only performing rights organization to welcome and represent the creators of blues, jazz, country, and American roots music. Today, the musical compositions in BMI’s repertoire, from chart toppers to perennial favorites, span all genres of music and are consistently among the most-performed hits of the year. For additional information and the latest BMI news, visit bmi.com, follow us on Twitter and Instagram @BMI or stay connected through BMI‘s Facebook page. Sign up for BMI’s The Weekly and receive our e-newsletter every week to stay up to date on all things music.ABOUT WHITE BEAR PR:White Bear Public Relations specializes in PR for composers, music supervisors, and film & music festivals around the world. The company is built on relationships and creativity, thrives on innovation, and gets results. Since its inception, White Bear PR has produced award-winning campaigns, represented clients at all major film festivals, and created popular composer-focused panels at Comic-Con and WonderCon. More at www.whitebearpr.com or follow us on social media @whitebearpr.The post BMI & White Bear PR to Present "The Art of Music in Horror" at WonderCon 2025 first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.