The Daily Chord Weekly Recap – Friday, December 21

This week the Daily Chord highlighted end-of-year lists on music industry stats, record sales, best albums, best concerts, best box sets, and music trends that have outstayed their welcome. Retrospective editorials on the state of the music industry also made the rounds in abundance. With all this effort spent looking backward, we at the Daily Chord are energized to come back in January to start anew. Subscribe to the email blast to forge on with us in 2019!

The Daily Chord is taking off for the year, so you are fully deputized to search for music news on your own until 2019. Thanks for reading, subscribing and clicking through to the stories in 2018. We hope everyone's holidays are peaceful.

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Monday, December 17

• Music industry influencers debate blockchain's business impact in 2019
  Post from Forbes
• Paul McCartney teamed up with Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood - watch
  Post from Billboard
• Lil Uzi Vert flees Nardwuar interview: Watch
  Post from Pitchfork
• Putin on rap music: It's the drugs that really bother him
  Story from NY Times
• The best pop and R&B records of 2018
  List from AV Club
• Latest version of Article 13 will fail to fix YouTube value gap, warns Vivendi and the record industry
  Post from Music Business Worldwide

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Tuesday, December 18

• Year-end special features: Top tours, ticket sales charts, industry pros weigh in on 2018
  Post from Pollstar
• Lil Pump under fire for 'anti-Asian slurs' in new song 'Butterfly Doors'
  Item from NME
• 2018 year-end
  Features from Tiny Mix Tapes
• How the Rolling Stones' 'She's A Rainbow' got a seven-figure synch renaissance
  Story from Variety
• In 2018, corporate monotony seized San Francisco music venues
  Post from KQED
• Honoring the vanishing musical culture of Wicker Park
  Post from Chicago Reader

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Wednesday, December 19

• The best concerts of 2018
  List from Uproxx
• The best box sets of 2018
  List from Rolling Stone
• 9 music trends that need to die in 2019
  List from Stereogum
• Tanzania's Diamond Platinumz banned from performing
  Post from BBC News
• Is online ticket touting almost over?
  Post from Music Business Worldwide
• Couldn't he just tell-all? Todd Rundgren reveals enough in candid, funny new memoir
  Interview from Variety

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Thursday, December 20

• UK Music boss says Home Office's 'clueless' immigration blueprint threatens to 'pull the rug from under Britain's world-leading music industry'
  Post from NME
• Why the mainstream music industry is still struggling to address #MeToo
  Feature from Pitchfork
• Black Sabbath, George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic among Recording Academy lifetime achievement award recipients
  Post from Billboard
• A (brief) history of music censorship in America
  Story from Paste Magazine
• Jerry Chesnut, 87, country songwriter with blue-collar hits, dies
  Obituary from NY Times
• Death, drugs and destruction: The troubled year of SoundCloud rap
  Post from The Guardian

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Friday, December 21

• How a new kind of pop star stormed 2018
  Feature from NY Times
• The five numbers that say everything about the music industry in 2018
  Post from Rolling Stone
• Spotify settles copyright feud with Wixen
  Post from World Intellectual Property Review
• Neil Young Archives launch app, subscription service: 'This is a life's work'
  Post from Billboard
• Gold and Platinum awards from 2018
  List from RIAA
• The 50 best albums of 2018: The full list
  List from The Guardian