Random Music News for Wednesday, December 21, 2016

It’s now winter. Only three months to go. And now, music news…

1. Apparently, Andrea Bocelli will NOT perform at the Trump inauguration. Too much backlash from fans.
2. Remember Richard Marx? He took down a deranged passenger during a flight between Hanoi and Seoul. He was, er, right there waiting. (Via Tom)
3. Here’s how the 1% of 1% will spend New Year’s Eve in the Caribbean.
4. Prince died without paying his divorce lawyer. Complications? Maybe.
5. The investigation into the secondary concert market in the UK has turned up some interesting things.
6. How would you like your secret Santa to be Snoop Dogg? That’s what happened to this woman. (Via Larry)
7. Here’s another purported solution to the perfect sound of a Stradivarius violin.
8. This smartass parrot thinks it’s Google Voice.
9. Facebook’s upcoming AI assistant will be called Jarvis. Its voice will be supplied by Morgan Freeman. That’s awesome. Seriously, it is.
10. Interesting: we can now search Apple music by composer.
11. Nielsen has bought Gracenote, the digital data business. This means they’ll now incorporate tracking of 200 million songs. That’s a lot of data.
12. Here’s a great look back on David Bowie’s awesome final year.
13. This new book by drummer Kenny Aronoff (John Mellancamp, Smashing Pumpkins, plenty of others) looks great. Love the title, too:  Sex, Drums and Rock’n’Roll.
14. These dystopian music videos pretty much sum up the shittiness that was 2016.
15. We don’t get Pandora in Canada, but here is the service’s top 100 songs of 2016.