Music News

By Carrie Brownstein And it's naptime. (courtesy of The Patton Veterinary Hospital) It's hard to believe that we've reached the end. For the past two weeks, all of us — the NPR Music Team, a handful of outside contribut...

Bon Jovi is at the top of the album charts this week, riding an unprecedented publicity push. His record label struck a deal with the conglomerate NBC Universal for an exclusive presence on their many TV networks, including appearances on Today, Inside the Actors Studio and The Tonight Show.

Back in 2001, I sat in a San Francisco federal courtroom and watched a judge order Napster to shut down. The record companies won their battle against the world's first peer-to-peer file sharing service. But, as everyone now knows, it was a Pyrrhic victory; to reference another Greek myth, Napster turned out to be a Hydra.

How will we listen to music in the next decade? How will we acquire it? What will it sound like?

Music critic Tom Moon discusses NPR Music's list of "The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings" — a roundup of the albums that changed the musical landscape in the last 10 years. Moon is the author of 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die.

Indie isn't a genre any more than alternative was, but it denotes something important about the music in its tent — where it came from, where it might go.

By Lars Gotrich It's been a good 10 years, Music Internet. At first, our love was forbidden — all your MP3 blogs were illegal. The RIAA would shut 'em down, and we'd keep making out in the backseat of our Napster sedan like hormonally addled teena...

British music blogger Everett True ponders his place as a critic in the online space.

Anne Midgette, classical music critic from the Washington Post, and NPR's Tom Huizenga look back over a decade of changes in the world of classical music.

In Rainbows was first released on Oct. 10, 2007, as a digital download from the band's Web site. Fans were encouraged to "pay what you wish" — even nothing — and a "digital tip jar" was set up to collect voluntary payments. On Dec. 4 of that same year, an $80 deluxe box set was made available to order online; finally, on Jan. 1, the physical CD and digital album hit retailers. Those are the facts. But what did "the Radiohead experiment," as it would come to be known, mean?

By Carrie Brownstein Visual representation of our illustrious roundtable participants today. Last week, I had the opportunity to chat — and, by chat, I mean "chat via the Internet" — with a handful of independent recor...

America is used to exporting its culture. It's called soft power, this ability to dominate the tastes of people in other countries. So it's not such a big deal for an American band to tour in China. But a Chinese rock band taking the stage in New York? That's new.