Ariana Grande shows cancelled following Monday's bomb attack
A representative for Ariana Grande yesterday confirmed that a number of upcoming dates on the singer's European tour were being cancelled following the bomb attack at her show in Manchester on Monday night that killed 22 people.

The cancellations were not unexpected, though London's The O2 - where Grande was due to play this week - had previously said it was still waiting for confirmation one way or another. Those with tickets for the London shows should now contact their point of purchase for a refund.

The official statement from Grande's team said: "Due to the tragic events in Manchester, the 'Dangerous Woman' tour with Ariana Grande has been suspended until we can further assess the situation and pay our proper respects to those lost. The O2 shows this week have been cancelled as well as all shows through 5 Jun in Switzerland".

It added: "We ask at this time that we all continue to support the city of Manchester and all those families affected by this cowardice and senseless act of violence. Our way of life has once again been threatened but we will overcome this together. Thank you".

Grande's manager Scooter Braun also put out a personal statement about this week's events on Twitter overnight. He wrote: "Tonight I got home and took my parents out to dinner. Korean BBQ. We drank and ate and laughed with the tables next to us. I experienced joy for the first time in days. And I remembered... we are free. We are all different but we are free to enjoy each other's company".

"I will honour those that are lost by living each day full: full of fun, full of laughter, full of joy. I welcome the differences of my neighbour. The wish of terrorism is to take away that feeling of freedom and joy. No. That is my answer. No. We can't allow it. Fear cannot rule the day. More people die each year from car crashes then terrorism. Yet I will get in my car. I will choose to live [rather] than to be afraid".

"So... Manchester I stand with you. Jakarta I stand with you. Children of Syria I stand with you. We will honour you by not giving in to the darkness. And I will honour all of you by laughing, loving and living. Living full for every wonderful innocent child whose life was taken to soon. So if you think you scared us, if you think your coward[ly] act made us change how we live... sorry. All you did was make us appreciate every day".

He concluded: "Am I angry? Hell yes. But how will we respond? With everything you think you took from us... love and joy and life".

Earlier in the week the boss of Grande's record label, Universal Music's Lucian Grainge, also addressed Monday night's events in an internal memo to staff. He wrote: "Once again, we try to make sense of a senseless act of violence. Today, our emotions are raw. We are deeply saddened by the awful events last night in Manchester. We extend our thoughts and prayers to all of those affected. And we grieve for all of those lost there, offering our deepest condolences to their families and loved ones".

Confirming that no Universal employees or members of Grande's team had been physically injured in the attack, he went on: "The fact that such an unspeakable act can be committed at a place where innocent people - including so many young people - come together peacefully to enjoy music reflects a level of evil beyond comprehension".

He continued: "This hits home for us as a music company - because so many of us, myself included, spend so much time out seeing our artists perform, let alone attending concerts as fans. That's why we've chosen music as our career - or rather music has chosen us. Today is a day of remembrance, a day to pause and reflect, with thoughts for yesterday's tragedy".

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File-sharing hub ExtraTorrent is still offline
Last week another file-sharing hub went offline and, according to Torrentfreak, reports of a speedy revival appearing online almost immediately are somewhat misleading.

ExtraTorrent had, by all accounts, become the world's second largest torrent site after the good old Pirate Bay, providing users with so called magnet links and torrent files that in turn provide access to digital content, much of it unlicensed.

The site went offline last week with little explanation. Unlike the other big file-sharing hub of recent years, KickassTorrents, which went offline as a result of action taken by the US government on copyright infringement grounds, it seems that the operator of ExtraTorrent shut down his site voluntarily. Though possibly under pressure from the authorities or fearing that said authorities were about to swoop.

As is often the case when key piracy operations go offline, a number of sites soon sprung up claiming to be clones of the now defunct ExtraTorrent site. At least one - Extratorrent.cd - claimed it was being run by former admins at ExtraTorrent who were attempting to restore the platform to its former glory.

But, as it also often the case, the 'clones' are actually pulling in their file-sharing links from elsewhere - principally The Pirate Bay - rather than having access to the old ExtraTorrent database. They are simply using the old ExtraTorrent name and logo.

Reports Torrentfreak: "Aside from its appearance, Extratorrent.cd has absolutely nothing to do with ET. The site is an imposter operated by the same people who also launched Kickass.cd when KAT went offline last summer. In fact, the content on both sites doesn't come from the defunct sites they try to replace, but from The Pirate Bay. ExtraTorrent.cd is nothing more than a Pirate Bay mirror with an ExtraTorrent skin".

Torrentfreak adds that some ex-admins of ExtraTorrent are considering trying to relaunch the piracy site in some form or another, but there would be various challenges to tackle before they could do that.

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Live recordings platform Nugs.net announces tie up with MQA
The latest company to announce a deal with high res audio firm MQA is Nugs.net, a San Francisco-based online platform selling live recordings from mainly rock acts. The site already offers customers high quality audio files like FLAC, but will now also offer MQA files for download. Recordings of concerts from Metallica and Bruce Springsteen will be the first available in the format.

Confirming the deal, Nugs.net CEO Brad Serling said: "Our pursuit of the highest fidelity in our listeners' playback experience led us to MQA. We were intrigued when we first read about the format and were THRILLED with the results when the MQA folks first encoded some of our live recordings".

Meanwhile MQA boss Mike Jbara added: "Nugs.net connects with true music fans like nobody else. Live recordings amplify MQA's mission perfectly and we are very grateful for this exciting partnership. Watch this space!"

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Jon Webster steps down as MMF President
Jon Webster has announced that he is standing down as President of the UK's Music Managers Forum. He took on the role after stepping down as the trade body's CEO at the start of 2016. Webster plans to pursue a number of projects following his departure, including completing his book about the time he spent at Virgin Records, the record company he joined in 1981, and where he become Managing Director in 1988.

The MMF grew significantly in both size and influence while Webster was its CEO, expanding its educational activities and events programme, and more proactively speaking out on behalf of the UK's artist management community. New CEO Annabella Coldrick has continued that expansion since taking over in January 2016.

Coldrick paid tribute to her predecessor yesterday, telling reporters: "Much of the MMF's current success and vitality must be attributed to Jon. The organisation now represents more than 500 artist managers around the UK, and has gained a hard-fought reputation as a body that stands up for artist rights and promotes greater education and transparency throughout the music business. No one has battled harder than Jon to get us to this position and to galvanise the management community - and while we sadly accept his decision to step down, the MMF remains as committed as ever to build on his years of work".

Webster himself said this morning: "This process began in 2015 when I told the board I wanted to stop being CEO. All organisations need change to evolve and my involvement was coming to an end. Annabella was recruited as CEO and has proved to be the exact person that we needed to take the MMF forward in an increasingly policy led environment. I am very proud of what we have achieved in the last ten years, although there is still much to do, particularly in the area of transparency and fairness for artists and managers".

On future projects, he added: "I am not retiring but want to concentrate on writing my memoir about my time at Virgin before taking a long hard look at the world and deciding what lies ahead. I am very happy to leave the MMF in the capable hands of the team and the board. I will try to be available if a temporary extra pair of hands is ever needed as the MMF holds a significant place in my heart".

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CMU@TGE 2017: When Music Gets Synchronised - TV and beyond
Look out for reports on all the key sessions at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape over the next few weeks. Plus, from next Monday, we'll be publishing a series of CMU Trends reports providing more in depth versions of the insight presentations CMU Insights delivered during TGE this year - go premium to access CMU Trends. Today, the new complexities around TV sync licensing as broadcasters evolve their businesses.

In theory the licensing of music for use in television programmes is pretty simple in that - outside the US - TV sync usually goes through the collective licensing system, with the collecting societies offering broadcasters and producers blanket licences. There are forms to fill out and money to be paid, but access to music isn't usually a problem.

Though as the media business changes, not everything is covered by those blanket licences and new complexities are now emerging. Complications can occur when commercial media make content as part of brand partnerships, working more closely with brands than in the past. And there are licensing challenges when broadcasters look to put their content onto social media platforms, something they increasingly have to do in order to reach young consumers. These new complexities make using so called production or library music more attractive, reducing the opportunities for commercially released music to be synced.

These challenges were confirmed by The Box Plus Network's Director Of Commercial & Business Affairs Stacey Mitsopulos and the BBC's Head Of Music Licensing Nicky Bignell when they joined CMU's Chris Cooke and Sentric Music's Simon Pursehouse as part of the CMU Insights Royalties Conference at The Great Escape.

The Box Plus Network operates seven music TV channels which offer a mix of curated music videos and original programming. The company has deals with collecting society PPL to cover the use of recordings in its programmes, and VPL which covers the use of music videos. On the song rights side it has licences with mechanical rights society MCPS to cover the synchronisation of music into its programmes, and with the performing rights focused PRS to cover the subsequent broadcast of those videos or shows.

The BBC has similar agreements with the various UK societies covering its large network of TV and radio stations. And while there will always be tensions between licensees and the collecting societies over rates and such like, both Mitsopulos and Bignell are fans of the blanket licence approach.

Says Bignell: "We pay a lot of money for our blanket licences but we've always felt that a single blanket licence is the way to go. We have so many channels and, of course, as well as TV we've got radio - ten network radio stations, and 40 or 50 regional and local radio stations as well. We use something like 250,000 separate pieces of music every week on the BBC. We couldn't do it without the blanket licence".

But both Mitsopulos and Bignell noted the limitations of the blanket licences. Mitsopulos observed: "If you're creating the content and broadcasting the content, that's fine. But if you are creating content that is going out elsewhere - such as some of our brand partnership work - then extra licensing will be required, which makes using library music an attractive option. We can't give our partners like Netflix and Schwartzkopf content with the commercial music in it, unless they've cleared it themselves".

The BBC also has similar issues, for example with the programmes it sells internationally, and the co-productions it does with broadcasters elsewhere in the world. "We don't just make programmes that we broadcast in the UK", said Bignell. "We make programmes and we sell them abroad through BBC Worldwide, to generate extra revenue to fund future programme making. And with a lot of our big dramas, these days we can't afford to make them ourselves, so we have to have co-production money. And these things can all pose additional issues with music and music clearances".

So while in the UK the BBC would generally rely on library music for creative rather than commercial reasons, with global projects - especially where the US is involved - going that route may be attractive to avoid having to clear lots of individual tracks, either to save money, or simply to save time where you have a production needing a fast turn around.

That is also true where content is going on third party platforms online where the blankets don't apply. At the BBC, this has probably the biggest impact on BBC Three, the youth-focused channel that is now online-only, and which sees social media platforms as being key to reaching its audience. "Since BBC Three has gone online, lots of the people, the kids that are watching that content, do it via social media", explained Bignell. "We have problems with the licences for social media, so all the content that BBC Three makes for social has just library music in it".

Mitsopulos agreed that there were extra challenges using commercially-released music online. "Our licences from PRS and PPL allow us to do certain things online", she said. "But it's like 'two minutes of this, not more than 30 seconds of that'. Sometimes it's just easier to find some library music and put it in there".

"With YouTube, we put artists' performances that we have recorded for our programmes on there", she continued. While Box, having recorded the performance, controls the recording in that case, the separate song rights still need to cleared. "But YouTube has negotiated deals with the collecting societies and the assumption is that we fall under those. Facebook on the other hand is a different matter".

Ah yes, Facebook. Which is busy vying for YouTube's position as music industry enemy number one as it pushes video content ever more to the fore, but without any licences for the music those videos routinely contain.

"For a while we were doing live sessions on Facebook which were super cool", said Mitsolpulos. "Every Friday at 1pm we had a different artist, it was live and it was great. The labels were like 'oh, we're not getting paid by Facebook, but that's fine because this is good promo for the artist'. But the publishers were saying, 'we don't care about the promo, nobody knows who the songwriter is'".

"With a pop artist, the songwriter is often somebody else, and so the publishers took issue with the fact that they weren't getting paid by Facebook", she continued. "They started sending takedown notices to everybody and now you won't see much [professionally produced] music content on Facebook, unless the production company or broadcaster has gone to the music publishers separately and said: 'we want to play this song, here's £2000'".

Of course, while songwriters and publishers should be paid when their music is exploited, the licensing issues around Facebook are denying artists access to what could be their most valuable promotional platform. And in some cases - as Bignell discussed - those issues push back down the supply chain, so that TV content goes with library music to simplify any subsequent online distribution, denying artists both exposure and potential sync income.

Though Mitsopulos noted that recent hires at Facebook indicated that licensing deals were now being negotiated with the record companies and music publishers. However, doing those deals will likely be made more difficult by the fact that the social network has gone without licences for so long. "They should have just done it eight years ago", she said.

Check out all the reports and resources CMU has published around this year's CMU Insights @ The Great Escape conferences here.

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Daphni announces Fabriclive mix
Daphni - aka the other alter ego of Dan Snaith, who you'll also know as Caribou - has announced that he will release a Fabriclive mix later this summer. It stands out among other instalments of the mix series in that it features only music produced by himself - with 23 original tracks and four remixes of other artists.

On his actual mix, he says: "I embarked on it thinking that I could have a mix with lots of exclusive new stuff that would make it unique/justify its existence but as I worked on it I became more and more intent upon making it all my own tracks. A lot of these tracks were recorded in situ in the mix itself - I'd put one track in place and instead of searching through existing music to find the track to follow it I'd just make an entirely new one".

"You'd expect a DJ mix where someone made each track to follow the previous one to be very homogenous", he goes on. "To seem like it was planned out and build in a controlled way. I think the result is almost exactly the opposite! The tracks on here pull from very diverse ends of the spectrum of music that I like/make. In the end, I just sort of charged ahead following my nose as to where the mix should head next. I hope that some of that sense of intuition translates to those listening to the finished mix".

One of those tracks, 'Face To Face', is available on Bandcamp now. The full mix is due out on 21 Jul.

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BadBadNotGood announce LateNightTales compilation
BadBadNotGood have announced that they will curate the next LateNightTales compilation, due for release on 28 Jul. As well as a range of tracks that have influenced them, it will feature their own cover of Andy Shauf's 'To You'. Meanwhile, the traditional spoken word closing track will be delivered by Lydia Lunch.

"We were really excited to have the chance to put together a LateNightTales compilation", say the band. "We decided to use it as a vehicle to show everyone all the amazing music we have gotten to experience by touring and meeting new people. Every track on this comp was either shown to us by an incredible person or made by one of our friends. We also included a little cover of a song by one of our favourite current musicians, Andy Shauf".

"These artists, as well as many, many others, have influenced us to create and kept our deep love of music alive", they continue. "This mix will keep you company on a quiet night by yourself or with friends. You can check it out on the plane, the bus, a long walk, or any situation where you want a soundtrack for reflection and meditation".

Listen to 'To You' here.

Here's the full tracklist:

01. Boards Of Canada - Olson
02. Erasmo Carlos - Vida Antiga
03. Gene Williams - Don't Let Your Love Fade Away
04. The Chosen Few - People Make The World Go Round
05. Esther Phillips - Home Is Where the Hatred Is
06. Delegation - Oh Honey
07. Velly Joonas - Käes On Aeg
08. Stereolab - The Flower Called Nowhere
09. Kiki Gyan - Disco Dancer
10. Admas - Anchi Bale Game
11. Francis Bebey - Sanza Nocturne
12. Thundercat - For Love I Come
13. River Tiber feat Daniel Caesar - West
14. Charlotte Day Wilson - Work
15. The Beach Boys - Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)
16. Donnie & Joe Emerson - Baby
17. Les Prospection - Lido
18. Grady Tate - And I Love Her
19. BadBadNotGood - To You
20. Steve Kuhn - The Meaning Of Love
21. Lydia Lunch - You, Me and Jim Beam

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Enter Shikari announce UK tour
Enter Shikari have announced their biggest UK tour to date, kicking off in November. Support on the tour will come from Lower Than Atlantis and the excellent Astroid Boys.

As previously reported, earlier this week the band released their new single, 'Supercharge', a collaboration with rapper Big Narstie.

Tour dates:

16 Nov: Liverpool, Arena
17 Nov: Cardiff, Motorpoint Arena
18 Nov: Nottingham, Motorpoint Arena
19 Nov: Newcastle, Metro Radio Arena
21 Nov: Manchester, Victoria Warehouse
22 Nov: Brighton Centre
24 Nov: Birmingham, Barclaycard Arena
25 Nov: London, Alexandra Palace

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PRS, Alt-J, The Kills, more

Other notable announcements and developments today...

• Collecting society PRS For Music held its AGM yesterday, which included a big fat vote for some new directors. The result of that is that Imogen Heap and John Truelove are now writer directors, while Jo Smith, Stuart Hornall and Roberto Neri are publisher directors.

• Here's 'Adeline', the third single from Alt-J's new album 'Relaxer'.

• The Kills have announced that they will release an acoustic EP, titled 'Non-Electric', on 2 Jun. It will feature this cover of Rihanna's 'Desperado'.

• Shabazz Palaces have released another new track, 'Since CAYA'.

• Lapalux has released new single 'Flickering', featuring JFDR.

• Pixx has released new single 'Waterslides'. Her debut album, 'The Age Of Anxiety', is out on 2 Jun.

• Denai Moore has released the video for new single 'Does It Get Easier?'

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Sampling is becoming harder to do, says DJ Shadow
DJ Shadow is an artist who built a career by masterfully using samples of other work to create new pieces of music. However, he says that increased litigiousness and greed have now forced him to progressively move away from that manner of working.

"I've always believed in clearing samples, however I believe it needs to be done on a musicologist basis", he tells The Guardian. Which is to say, each sample should be valued
"based on the space that it occupies and the number of seconds that it plays over the course of the track, in relation to other elements that come and go". Using that approach, you can then say, for example, "this sample is worth 16.7% of the composition".

"Now, if that could be done, then I would clear everything", he says. "But the problem is, you go to the first person - they want 75%, whether they deserve it or not. You go to the next person they want 70% - whoops - you can't cut a pie that many times, there isn't enough pie to go around".

"In a strange sense I feel like music has never been worth less as a commodity, and yet sampling has never been more risky", he concludes. "We work in a hyper-capitalist time, where you grab what you can, get everything you can, doesn't matter whether it's right or wrong, it doesn't matter whether it's valid, it doesn't matter whether it's deserved".

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