Are subscription music services a little too safe, comfortable, boring? "When one company innovates, all of the others [launch a similar] innovation," laments WARNER MUSIC GROUP CEO STEVE COOPER. "What that has done, in certain respects, has been to commoditize the delivery of music." Random case in point: Here's APPLE MUSIC trumpeting REPLAY, a feature that lets subscribers hear their favorite music of 2019 or any year, which reads as a mildly improved copy of something SPOTIFY already does, or, from another angle, a mildly inferior copy of Spotify's ever-growing suite of personalized algorithmic playlists. Not to pick on Apple. Everybody copies the best of everybody else. And it's hard to believe a lot of subscribers, or any subscribers, are going to switch services just for a playlist like that. Cooper told an audience at the PALEY CENTER in New York that streaming consumers need more choice: price structure, sound quality, genres, etc. I'd add that even if they all have more or less the same catalog of tracks—which, as I've repeatedly argued, they probably should—there are tons of options for differentiation in editorial, programming, product, social, etc. And in how those tools are used to create different kinds of communities. What are dance/electronic fans looking for? What do hip-hop fans want? Metal fans? Jazz fans? They shop—or shopped—at different record stores. Why should they subscribe to the same streaming service? I have no idea if BYTEDANCE, the Chinese company behind TIKTOK, will crack the Spotify/Apple/AMAZON/TENCENT stranglehold with the streaming service that the FINANCIAL TIMES says it could launch as soon as December (paywall) in markets including India, Indonesia and Brazil. But give it credit for reportedly designing a service with built-in TIKTOK-like features and a low price point, both of which might suggest a specific (and potentially large) community of users. "The music market," writes analyst MARK MULLIGAN, "needs Bytedance to do something transformational... something that builds on the ethos and use cases of TikTok rather than becoming a cookie-cutter 'all you can eat' service." I'd kind of like to see both: an all-you-can-eat back-end and a highly differentiated front-end. Open to anyone, but made with someone particular in mind... BIG MACHINE, which initially said it didn't have the power to prevent TAYLOR SWIFT from performing on this weekend's AMERICAN MUSIC AWARDS, announced on Monday it had "come to terms on a licensing agreement" that will allow her to do exactly that. Read that sentence again. BILLBOARD's STEVE KNOPPER has a good explainer of the complicated rights in play here, while the LA TIMES' RANDY LEWIS zooms out to a deeper and potentially more controversial issue that Swift subtly raised in her latest crusade: the role of private equity in the music business... What happens, and what are the consequences, when a magazine like, say, NME switches to online-only publication? A lot, it turns out... GRAMMY nominations to be announced at 8:20 am today... BILLBOARD's Digital Power Players (shoutout our old friend NICK LEHMAN)... OXFORD AMERICAN's music issue is here; the focus is on the music of South Carolina. This essay (and response) by an artist who refused to license a track to the magazine is an important read... CARDI B answers VOGUE's 73 questions... Songs that shook America: QUEEN LATIFAH's LADIES FIRST... BURNA BOY at the TINY DESK... Philly rapper AR-AB convicted of running a violent drug ring... RIP TONY CALHOUN.