Tencent Music IPOs at bottom end of expected price bracket
Tencent Music has priced its shares at the bottom end of the expected $13-$15 price range as the music division of Chinese web giant Tencent arrives on the New York Stock Exchange today.

That means the company will raise about $1.1 billion from the initial public offering and will arrive on the NYSE with a market cap valuation of about $21.3 billion. Although still a significant stock exchange debut, the money raised and accompanying valuation is considerably lower than what had been predicted earlier this year.

Tencent confirmed in July that it would spin-off its music division as a standalone business via an IPO in the US. But the listing was subsequently delayed as most publicly-listed tech firms saw their share prices dip and the trade war between the US and China escalated.

There was talk of the IPO being pushed back into 2019, but Tencent announced the listing was going ahead after the stock market responded positively to talks between the US and China at the recent meeting of G20 countries in Buenos Aires.

A further hitch then occurred after it emerged an early investor in a company that subsequently merged with Tencent Music was suing over allegations he'd been tricked into selling his shares in 2013.

Tencent Music, of course, owns China's market-leading streaming service QQ Music, and has a number of other digital, distribution and label operations too. The firm's IPO has been frequently compared to the direct listing earlier this year of Spotify, with which Tencent has a formal alliance.

Spotify arrived on the New York Stock Exchange with a market cap valuation of about $30 billion, considerably more than Tencent. However, Spotify's share price has since taken a hammering, so that its market cap today is just over $23.2 billion, so not that much more than its Chinese ally.

Although there are lots of parallels between Spotify and Tencent Music - other than them both now being listed on the New York Stock Exchange - there is one big difference that has been frequently noted in recent weeks. Whereas Spotify listed while still incurring significant monthly losses, Tencent Music is already profitable.

That's despite the vast, vast majority of QQ Music's users being on its free service, whereas Spotify has impressive premium subscriber figures.

Tencent has achieved profitability partly by having other revenue streams than just ads and subscription sales. And partly by having made lower financial commitments to the global music industry, which was much more flexible when it came to negotiating streaming deals in an emerging market that traditionally brought in very little income at all for the Western record companies and music publishers.

With both Spotify and Tencent now listed on the New York Stock Exchange and therefore obliged to publish quarterly financial reports, the music industry will have regular opportunities to check-in on how two major players in streaming are performing, and to see how growth in the Chinese market compares with the rest of the world.

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Neil Young claims Barclaycard has been dropped as sponsor of his London show
Neil Young has said that his London show with Bob Dylan next summer - part of AEG's British Summer Time programme in Hyde Park - will now be "sponsored by nobody". Although confirming he had been booked to play the show, he had reacted angrily to various things about it, not least that - like all the BST concerts - the event was to be sponsored by Barclaycard.

The musician's Neil Young Archives website announced yesterday: "NYA is happy to announce that the Hyde Park show will proceed without Barclays as a sponsor. We are overjoyed, so happy to be playing the show!"

After the concert was originally announced last week, Young hit out, saying that he had not been told the show would be made public at this time. With tickets being put on sale without his knowledge, he said, a promise to fans that they would always get pre-sale access to his shows via his official website had been broken.

"I learned that the show had a sponsor, Barclays Bank, a fossil fuel funding entity", he also said. "That doesn't work for me ... At the moment, we are trying to rectify the situation and will soon update you on the status of the Hyde Park show. We have been talking about requiring a different sponsor as one option".

Young previously played a British Summer Time show in 2014, which did go ahead with Barclaycard sponsorship in place. This was seemingly not objected to by the musician at the time.

AEG has not yet confirmed that Barclaycard has indeed been dropped as the show's sponsor. Currently the credit card brand's logo remains firmly on the artwork for the gig and in the blurb about it on the BST website.

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Tegan & Sara announce high school memoir
Tegan & Sara have announced plans to publish a memoir titled 'High School'. The book covers, as the title suggests, their formative years in high school in the 1990s and the foundations of their musical career.

They say of the book: "How did you start your band? When did you know that you were gay? What were you like before Tegan and Sara? We have spent twenty years answering those complicated questions with simple answers. Writing 'High School' gives us the opportunity to tell the intricate stories that shaped our relationship as sisters, musicians and queer girls".

Set to be published by Virago in the UK, it is scheduled to hit book shop shelves in autumn next year.

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Amanda Palmer announces new album, There Will Be No Intermission
Amanda Palmer has announced her third solo album, 'There Will Be No Intermission', which she says is her most personal to date.

"I've never been nervous about releasing a record before, but this one is different", she says. "The rise of global fascism alongside the spreading fire of #MeToo has forged a louder megaphone for all women, and we're all seeing that radical truth is infectious. I feel more urgency than ever to share the naked truth of my experiences".

"The kind of stories that I'm sharing on this record - abortion, miscarriage, cancer, grief, the darker sides of parenthood - have been therapeutic and frightening to write", she admits "But every time I play them for my friends and fans, the nodding heads of empathy have lit a fire under my ass to record and release them".

"Most of these songs were exercises in survival", she goes on. "This isn't really the record that I was planning to make. But loss and death kept happening in real-time, and these songs became my therapeutic arsenal of tools for making sense of it all".

The first single, 'Drowning In The Sound', is out now, written using comments from fans posted on her blog. Listen to the song here.

'There Will Be No Intermission' is set for release on 8 Mar.

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Cher announces first UK tour since 2004
Cher has announced her first UK tour for a decade and a half next October, performing tracks from her own back catalogue, as well as some Abba songs, as heard on her 'Dancing Queen' album.

"I'm very excited to bring this show to the UK", she says. "It was the first country to embrace Sonny & Cher, and its where we created and had our first success with 'Believe'. It's really my second home".

Here are the dates:

20 Oct: London, O2 Arena
24 Oct: Manchester Arena
26 Oct: Birmingham, Resorts World Arena
28 Oct: Glasgow, Hydro
30 Oct: Leeds, First Direct Arena

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Maverick Sabre announces new album and tour dates
Maverick Sabre has announced that he will release his third album, 'When I Wake Up', next spring. Ahead of that, he's put out new single 'Her Grace' and announced UK and Ireland tour dates for March and April.

Featuring Chronixx, Maverick Sabre says that the new single is "about the unspoken unheard struggles of women that go unnoticed in society".

Watch the video here. And here are the tour dates:

29 Mar: Cork, Cyprus Avenue
20 Mar: Dublin, Academy
1 Apr: Nottingham, Rescue Rooms
2 Apr: Norwich, Epic Studios
4 Apr: Leeds, The Wardrobe
5 Apr: Manchester, Club Academy
6 Apr: Liverpool Arts Club
8 Apr: Brighton, Concorde 2
10 Apr: Birmingham, The Institution
11 Apr: London, Electric Brixton
12 Apr: Exeter, Phoenix
13 Apr: Bristol, The Trinity Centre

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Fyre Festival, MJ Cole, Suede, more

Other notable announcements and developments today...

• Here's the first trailer for upcoming Fyre Festival documentary 'Fyre', which will appear on Netflix on 18 Jan.

• MJ Cole has teamed up with Freya Ridings for new track 'Waking Up'. A new EP with the same title is due out early next year.

• Aidan Moffatt and RM Hubbert have released another track from their festive album, 'Ghost Stories For Christmas'. Here's their sombre rendition of Mud's 'Lonely This Christmas'.

• She Drew The Gun have released the video for 'Something For The Pain', from their latest album, 'Revolution Of The Mind'.

• Cass McCombs has released new single 'Estrella'. It's taken from his new album 'Tip Of The Sphere', out on 8 Feb.

• The reunited original line-up of the Meat Puppets will release a new album, 'Dusty Notes', on 8 Mar. From it, this is 'Warranty'.

• Suede have announced tour dates in April next year. Tickets on sale this Friday.

• Frankie Cosmos have announced that they will play EartH in London on 1 Apr.

• Check out our weekly Spotify playlist of new music featured in the CMU Daily - updated every Friday.

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Dean Martin's daughter says Baby, It's Cold Outside controversy is "outrageous"
This is turning out to be quite a controversial Christmas when it comes to your favourite festive songs, isn't it? Recently Shane MacGowan responded to complaints about a certain word in The Pogues' 'Fairytale Of New York'. Now the daughter of late singer Dean Martin has said that her father "would be going insane right now" if he were alive to see the controversy over 'Baby, It's Cold Outside', a version of which he recorded in 1959.

Many have recently argued that the call and response song between a woman who says she needs to go home and a man demanding that she stay with him isn't particularly appropriate Christmas listening in the wake of #MeToo. The controversy has become a talking point after various US radio stations banned the song - detractors highlighting one line in particular, where the female character sings "Hey, what's in this drink?"

Appearing on 'Fox & Friends' on Fox News, Deana Martin responded to the controversy, saying: "[The female character in the song] is sweet, she's playing along with him. It's flirting, it's sexy, it's sweet, there's nothing bad about that song, and it just breaks my heart".

As for what Martin Senior would have thought about it all, she added: "I know my dad would be going insane right now. He would say, 'What's the matter with you? Get over it, it's just a fun song'. Cos he was so sweet anyway, he would never say anything bad like that. He was a great guy, a fun guy, nice, and he wouldn't want to do anything offensive, that wasn't Dean Martin".

Asked if she would accept the most controversial line in the song - about the drink - being censored, she adds: "I don't wanna change the lyrics where she says, 'Hey, what's in this drink?'. I don't think she's talking about some pill being put in that drink. I think she's saying, like, 'What's in this drink? Is it punch, is it vodka?' It's nice, it just breaks my heart that people are turning that around ... People have to have a sense of humour about themselves. I understand the #MeToo movement and everything, I'm all for that, but we've gotta relax and have fun again".

Although Dean Martin is particularly known for performing the song, 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' was originally written in 1944 by Frank Loesser. It then featured in 1949 movie 'Neptune's Daughter', going on to win an Oscar. In the original score, the man is named as 'Wolf' and the woman as 'Mouse', which may also be taken as a black mark against it. However, others say that shifts in language over the last 75 years have changed how we view the song and the status of the woman in it.

"I'm so tired of this", tweeted comedian Jen Kirkman earlier this month. She then argued that the song is not about the male character "coercing sex", but rather it's about a woman who "knows her reputation will ruined if she stays". As for 'Say, what's in this drink?', it's "an old movie line from the 30s that means 'I'm telling the truth'".

"She wanted to get down and stay over [and] he is offering her an excuse she can use", she goes on. "She's explaining to him that excuse doesn't work when you're a woman who has to deal with what the neighbours think. The song has a lot to teach us about how society views women's sexuality. But the lesson of this song is NOT that it's about forcing a woman into sex".

She concludes: "If you want to be outraged, be outraged about what the song is actually about - the double standard in regards to sex that women face and how nothing much has changed. And then enjoy the song. It's a delight. The song ends with her joining him in the chorus of 'Baby, It's Cold Outside'. She's staying over. She will deal with her Maiden Aunt tomorrow".

So, anyway, there's something you can argue about over Christmas lunch when you're tired of debating your uncle's views on Brexit.

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