Random music news for Saturday, March 21, 2026

Imagine going to a local strip mall to have this done. No thanks. Let’s just concentrate on music news for March 21, 2026.

1. Afroman is my new free speech hero. He should be yours, too.
2. Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot to the metaverse will go down as one of the worst in tech history. He’s pulled the plug on it after spending US$80 billion. He even changed the name of his company. He now thinks AI is the future.
3. Sony Music says it has removed more than 135,000 deepfakes pretending to be music from their artists.
4. BMG has joined the lawsuit against AI company Anthropic over unauthorized training of its models on copyrighted music.
5. Prediction: Apps on our phones will disappear, and AI will take over. Great. More surveillance and data harvesting.
6. After the Trump administration killed it, Voice of America will be back on the air later this month.
7. Lorde’s deal with Universal Music has expired. She’s now an indie artist. Meanwhile, “Royals” has joined the one billion views club on YouTube.
8. More plans for KISS: A cartoon and a new restaurant in Detroit.
9. How big is ABBA? Let’s ask statistics!
10. And will Tina Turner be the basis for a new avatar show like we saw with ABBA? Maybe.
11. Kingston, Ontario, is getting a new music festival this fall run by the founder of the Polaris Music Prize.
12. And Ottawa is getting History, a new downtown music venue run by Live Nation.
13. Meanwhile, here’s another example of how hard it is for many venues to host live music.
14. A study from Wales says that playing with Barbie Dolls is better for kids than tablets.
15. Alice Cooper loves golf this much.

More music news? Go here.

BONUS: I’m not exactly sure what this is, but I couldn’t look away.