American Music Tourism Act aims to help struggling venues and musiciansIf you get past the top 5%, dominated by Live Nation and AEG, live music tours and venues in the US are treading water and, in many cases, struggling to survive. The bi-partisan American Music Tourism Act hopes to harness music tourism to change that.....
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Musicians: Don’t Panic, TikTok will NOT be banned tomorrow!Bruce Houghton of Hypebot and Bandsintown joins Michael Brandvold and Jay Gilbert on the Music Biz Weekly podcast to discuss some current events impacting musicians.....
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10 Quick (and powerful) Emails you can send to Fans right now!These ten email ideas will only take you minutes, but can do NUMBERS for your fan engagement. Let's get into it.....
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SSL uncover X-DynEQ SSL's latest software release builds on the concept of their X-EQ 2 plug-in in an effort to provide users with the definitive tool for all their recording, mixing and mastering needs. 

Blackstone strikes $1.6 billion deal with Hipgnosis after tense bidding warThe bidding war for Hipgnosis Songs Fund shows no sign of slowing down, with Blackstone striking a $1.6 billion (£1.28b) deal to take over the company.

READ MORE: Spotify reports record profits amid layoffs and financial changes

As part of the deal, Blackstone values the investor at $1.30 (£1.04) per share, and beats a previous offer from Concord, which valued Hipgnosis at $1.25 (£1) per share. It made the offer on 29 April, just days after Concord outbid Blackstone’s earlier offer by 10 cents.
While Concord’s bid originally won Hipgnosis’ board’s support, it withdrew its recommendation for the offer and went for the offer from Blackstone instead.
Blackstone has acquired the rights to songs by Justin Timberlake and Justin Bieber, but this deal will see another 65,000 tracks added to its catalogue, including hits from Shakira, Ed Sheeran, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Neil Young.
Meanwhile, per Reuters, Blackstone has also invested in US-based performance rights organisation SESAC, which boasts affiliates including Bob Dylan and Adele.
Hipgnosis chairman Robert Naylor said in a statement, “We are delighted that, following competitive interests in acquiring Hipgnosis, our investors now have a chance to immediately realise their holding at an increased premium.”
Blackstone is a majority shareholder in Hipgnosis’s investment adviser, HSM, which manages artists and songwriters for the fund, and holds a call option to make a higher offer for Hipgnosis’s portfolio if the advisory agreement ends up being terminated.
Hipgnosis has been struggling financially since last year, with concerns around valuations, legal battles, and conflict with shareholders over a catalogue sale deal. In December, the fund, set up by Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Merck Mercuriadis, who used to manage the likes of Elton John and Beyoncé, delayed the publication of its half-year results, after concerns that music catalogues and songs weren’t being valued highly enough.
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Shure reveal Nexadyne vocal mics The latest addition to Shure's vocal mic line-up promises to deliver enhanced clarity and feedback resistance thanks to an innovative new dual-transducer design. 

My Forever Studio: SEIDS has one mic to rule them allThe world of music production and technology can be daunting to the uninitiated. And that’s why social media star SEIDS – aka Sabrina Seidman – has made it her mission to make the subject more accessible. And it’s clearly working; at the time of writing, she boasts 189,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 175,000 followers on TikTok.
She obviously knows what she’s talking about, so we invited her to appear on the 68th episode of MusicTech’s My Forever Studio podcast – presented in partnership with Audient – to see how she’d kit out her ideal Forever Studio. For those new here, the Forever Studio has strict rules: guests are only allowed to choose six pieces of gear, beyond a computer, DAW and audio interface.
In this episode, SEIDS details the unexpected products she’s been approached to sell, the “cheeseburger of audio interfaces”, and an affordable mic that, in her opinion, beats $10,000 mics.

Elsewhere, she reveals how she used to think music production was “rocket science”, and how overcoming that hurdle herself inspired her to do the same for others.
The My Forever Studio podcast sees artists, producers and engineers create their dream fantasy Forever Studio, wherever they want in the universe. However, there are strict rules in the Forever Studio. Our guests are permitted a limited number of items in their creative space, so they must choose carefully. There will be nostalgia. There will be anecdotes. There may be gags. But there will be no bundles!
Last week, My Forever Studio hosted Erol Alkan, who talked about programming Nokias, accidentally digging through Soulwax’s record collection, and how he’s able to make any sound unique.
Subscribe to My Forever Studio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and check out all episodes so far via MusicTech. And you can check out SEIDS’ Logic Pro Crash Course – discounted by 30% for MusicTech readers – at seids.co.
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SLANDER, Deorro, NGHTMRE Manager on Selling 400K Tix In a Year, Building Electronic Artists & DJsThis week, Ari is joined by CEO of Prodigy Artists and manager of SLANDER, Deorro, NGHTMRE, and more.

Classical Highlights for April 2024There are many excellent choices for sampling among April's new reviews. Start with Vaughan Williams: A Birthday Garland, a belated celebration of the composer's 150th birthday, put together by baritone Roderick Williams (pictured) and pianist Susie Allen. Discover this and more highlights on AllMusic.

Bitcoin’s ‘euphoria phase’ cools, but a BTC bottom could be near — GlassnodeData suggests that newer investors are behind Bitcoin’s sell-off, but sell-side exhaustion will eventually mark BTC’s price bottom.

Midi is building a digital platform for an oft-overlooked area of women’s healthWhen Joanna Strober was around 47, she stopped sleeping. While losing sleep is a common symptom of perimenopause, she first had to go to multiple providers, including driving 45 minutes out of San Francisco to pay $750 out of pocket, to get that diagnosis and proper treatment. “That feeling of wow, I’ve really been suffering […]
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Arturia release Augmented Yangtze Arturia’s Augmented series offers a combination of sampled acoustic instruments and synthesis, providing music makers with a comprehensive range of sounds that range from authentic to abstract.

The Cheapest USB Blaster Ever, Thanks To CH552Here’s a CH552G-based USB Blaster project, in case you needed more CH552G in your life, which you absolutely do. It gives you the expected IDC-10 header ready for JTAG, AS, and PS modes. What’s cool, it fits into the plastic shell of a typical USB Blaster, too!
The PCB is flexible enough, and has all the features you’d expect – a fully-featured side-mounted IDC-10 header, two LEDs, a button for CH552 programming mode, and even a UART header inside the case. There’s an option to add level shifter buffers, too – but you don’t have to populate them if you don’t want to do that for whatever reason! The Hackaday.io page outlines all the features you are getting, though you might have to ask your browser to translate from Chinese.
Sadly, there’s no firmware or PCB sources – just schematics, .hex, BOM, and Gerber .zip, so you can’t fix firmware bugs, or add the missing USB-C pulldowns. Nevertheless, it’s a cool project and having the PCB for it is lovely, because you never know when you might want to poke at a FPGA on a short notice. Which is to say, it’s yet another CH552 PCB you ought to put in your PCB fab’s shopping cart! This is not the only CH552G-based programming dongle that we’ve covered – here’s a recent Arduino programmer that does debugWire, and here’s like a dozen more different CH552G boards, programmers and otherwise.

The MLC Seeking Suggestions for Board of Directors and Advisory Committee CandidatesPictured: MLC CEO Kris Ahrend

The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) is accepting suggestions of Publisher candidates for its Board of Directors and Unclaimed Royalties Oversight, Dispute Resolution and Operations Advisory committees. Under the Music Modernization Act (MMA), certain governance positions at The MLC are reserved for representatives of Publishers. The terms of several Publisher seats on the Board and the organization’s advisory committees are slated to end later this year.  

Elections to determine who will fill the open Board seats will be held this summer. Board and committee members sit for three-year terms and may be re-elected. Seats are filled pursuant to The MLC’s Bylaws.

There are openings on the Board of Directors for two (2) Publisher representatives. Under The MLC’s Bylaws, a “Publisher” means a music publisher to which songwriters have assigned exclusive rights of reproduction and distribution of musical works with respect to Covered Activities. “Covered Activities” means the making of digital phonorecord deliveries of musical works, including in the form of permanent downloads, limited downloads, or interactive streams, where such activity qualifies for a compulsory license under Section 115 of the U.S. Copyright Act.

The openings on The MLC’s advisory committees are as follows:

Two (2) Publisher seats on the Unclaimed Royalties Oversight Committee, which recommends policies and procedures to The MLC’s Board related to the distribution of unclaimed accrued royalties; 

Two (2) Publisher seats on the Dispute Resolution Committee, which recommends policies and procedures to the Board for the processing of royalties related to works that are subject to disputes over ownership; and 

Two (2) Publisher seats on the Operations Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations to the Board concerning the operations of The MLC, including the efficient investment in and deployment of information technology and data resources. 

The MLC’s Board of Directors and committees meet regularly, and all meetings allow for virtual participation such that travel is not generally required. Members are expected to devote sufficient time to prepare for and participate fully in all meetings. More information on The MLC’s Board of Directors and advisory committees can be found here.

Suggestions should be made no later than May 31, 2024. To suggest a candidate for a Publisher representative seat to The MLC’s Board or committees, please complete the suggestion form available here. 

Possibly The Cheapest Way To Film In Bullet TimeWhen The Matrix hit the cinemas back in 1999 it started a minor revolution with its use of so-called “Bullet time” — a freeze-frame technique in which the action could move round a momentarily frozen subject. It’s filmed using an array of cameras in an arc, something which was pretty expensive back then but is now within the reach of almost anyone. Just how cheaply bullet time can be filmed is shown by [3DSage], who turned nine toy cameras into a budget bullet time rig.
The cameras themselves are what you might expect for the princely sum of nine dollars, but as he points out, their low-resolution video has a certain charm. Some iteration was required to produce the rig without fouling their flip-out screens, and he found that the video quality was far better than their still image quality. But eventually he was able to extract the required array of frames and stitch them together with a video interpolator for the required effect. His cat is a handsome creature from any angle, we can now reveal.
The video below the break has all the details, and while we couldn’t spot quite the same camera he used on our local version of the online shop he used, there seem to be plenty of similar cheap devices should you wish to try it for yourself. Either way, this cost much less than the previous budget bullet time contender.