With apologies to my favorite political talk show, KCRW's LEFT, RIGHT & CENTER, from which I'm shamelessly sampling this, here are my tweets of the week past... #1: "APPLE understands they’re in the artist business," IRVING AZOFF tweeted Thursday. "Clearly, GOOGLE, PANDORA, SPOTIFY and AMAZON don’t." That was Azoff's, and pretty much the entire songwriter/publisher community's, response to the latter four companies filing a court challenge to the US COPYRIGHT ROYALTY BOARD's January decision to raise songwriters' streaming royalty rates by 44 percent. Compared to artists and labels, songwriters and publishers are significantly underpaid in the streaming economy, and the increase, while a big one, still leaves them well behind. But it also cuts into the streaming services' narrow profit margins, which makes the court challenge perhaps inevitable even while it adds a discordant note to the recent harmony between the streaming companies and the rest of the music biz. The NATIONAL MUSIC PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION joined Azoff in praising Apple, while directing its anger at Spotify and Amazon. NMPA president DAVID ISRAELITE gave Google and Pandora a pass, saying they "didn't want to appeal and are only doing so to protect their interests because Spotify and Amazon decided to appeal." With the music business booming and with the streaming services providing nearly all the dynamite for that boom, there are plenty of voices out there suggesting labels and publishers are biting the hand that feeds them when they call out the likes of Spotify. But the counter argument, which is as old as the phrase "music business," is that music creators are simply asking for what they believe is theirs... #2: "Music is still mostly a force for good," wrote NPR MUSIC's ANN POWERS after ROBYN fans, on their way home from her MADISON SQUARE GARDEN show Friday night, turned PENN STATION into a midnight version of the lunch scene from FAME. Never forget that. Music has power that no industry, no government, no critic and no bad men can ever diminish, no matter how hard they might try. Music, like knowledge, is good... #3: "Ew why do we normalize gun violence in our music so much?," asked QUEER EYE star JONATHAN VAN NESS, in a probably well-intentioned but definitely clumsy attempt to complain about the pervasiveness of guns in pop songs. Clumsy because he proceeded to single out—and misquote—a metaphoric usage by exactly one artist, a black female rapper, as if hip-hop in general and NICKI MINAJ in particular is responsible for a century-plus's worth of gunplay in pop culture. Worse, he did this on International Women's Day. I'm not into guns either. But before you bring your fight to Nicki Minaj, you might want to start with, say, the BEATLES, or NIRVANA, or IMAGINE DRAGONS. Which is to say, if you want to fight the power, you have to start with the actual power. You might also want to learn how metaphors work... RIP JACQUES LOUSSIER, JEANIE PATTERSON, PETER HURFORD and GERRY STICKELLS.