Random music news for Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Flying back from CES in Las Vegas today. I used to like the fact no one could reach me via email while I was in the air–a little respite, you know? Now I’m annoyed when I’m on a plane without WiFi. All that lost productivity…

Here’s some music news for January 8, 2019, from 35,000 feet over the US midwest.

1. Interesting: The biggest-selling physical album of the first week of 2019 is the soundtrack for The Greatest Showman. It sold a grand total of 24,195 copies.
2. Canadian music sales and streaming stats from last week vs. this time in 2018: Total album sales -21.1%; digital albums, -18.3%; physical albums, -22.7%; CDs, -26.7%; vinyl LPs, +28.7%; on-demand audio streams, +32.1% (1.266 billion streams last week).
3. This punk band deserved to be yanked offstage.
4. Yep. That was Axl.
5. Rough Trade’s Carol Pope is having some health challenges. You can help her here.
6. Here’s a good article on the return of The Pursuit of Happiness.
7. SpongeBob is helping to launch the careers of some young rappers in a weird sort of way.
8. Smart speakers show tremendous year-over-year growth. Over a billion devices have Google Assistant and 100 million are powered by Alexa (link).
9. Netflix’s Bandersnatch allows people to choose their own story paths. What if you could choose your own soundtrack for a movie or TV show?
10. Great. Now my houseplants will judge me.