My preferred album to sleep to—the only one I've ever tried specifically for that purpose—is composer MAX RICHTER's eight-hour somnambulant opus SLEEP, whose 31 pieces are spread across eight CDs and chopped up into 204 tracks on streaming services. In the latter format it plays continuously, as if it were a single eight-hour track, while you ideally work your way through your sleep cycles and while Richter and his label, DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON, get credit for 204 streaming plays (assuming you make it all the way through). It's a beautiful piece, composed in consultation with a neuroscientist and orchestrated in successive waves meant to score a dreamy night. It works during the day, too, as an unusually detailed ambient epic (which is, for obvious reasons, the only way I've heard most of it). It also works, thanks to those 204 digital tracks, as an accounting masterstroke, turning your nightly rest into the equivalent of 17 full album plays. Respect. Classical composer solves SPOTIFY. And then there's this, in which SONY MUSIC appears to have found a shortcut to the same 200-plus streaming plays while cutting out the composer, the orchestrator and the artist—unless you want to be believe there's an actual person named SLEEPY JOHN who makes sound-effect library albums called THUNDERSTORMS FOR SLEEP and THUNDERSTORM & RAIN (SLEEP & MINDFULNESS) and that Sony signed him. Which maybe you should believe, I don't know anything anymore. These super-long albums, packaged by Sony's playlist brand, FILTR, into even longer playlists with SEO titles, are, I have to admit, incredibly soothing. I'm sure I could fall asleep to them. There's some evil genius at work here. But I'm voting no with my streaming wallet... Here's one of many reasons why musicians might want to consider unionizing. And here's why they're generally not doing so, even though there are two unions standing by waiting for them to join. More historical context here... After 40 years, MORNING EDITION changes it tune... WOODSTOCK 50 producers accuse old investors of "improperly" taking a hell of a lot of money from their bank account, and reportedly need to come up with a hell of a lot more from new investors by Friday... A few decades ahead of their time, the RAMONES were a microcosm of the current American political bubble, with right-wing guitarist at stage right and left-wing singer to his immediate left. Both wore their views on their leather sleeves and neither liked the other all that much. "When I came into the band," bassist and self-professed centrist CJ RAMONE remembers, "I had to walk the line with JOHNNY and JOEY because they would each get upset at me if I talked to the other one too much or if I sided with one over the other on a particular political view." But he swears there was always respect and never any animosity, which would be a good lesson for the America of 2019 if there weren't at least some evidence that it isn't quite true... RIP BETH CARVALHO.