Hi. My top genres in 2019 were "art pop" (ANGEL OLSEN appears to be responsible for that), "soul" and "contemporary post-bop." And yours? Current mood: Wrapped... SOUNDCLOUD's announcement that it's reversing a plan to sharply reduce the number of songs its free users could upload to the site, which had been announced three days earlier, is a convenient reminder of the competing forces at work in the online music universe (and the online everything universe, more or less). ROLLING STONE's ELIAS LEIGHT described the original plan as "another step down the [major label] path, a move that was focused on the bottom line at the expense of the reckless artistry that once made the platform so exciting." SoundCloud positioned it as a simple tradeoff: For the first time, it was offering lossless HD storage to free users, and it would compensate by tightening the limits on the amount of music they could upload before they had to start paying. But users, including artists who have relied on SoundCloud as a crucial platform for releasing music, saw an altogether different tradeoff: a luxury gained and a basic necessity lost. So they revolted. And won. "We’ve spent the last few days... listening to you, learning from what you’ve said, and reflecting about what makes SoundCloud special as an open platform that helps creators of all types express themselves," the site wrote in an email to users. "And we heard you." That's a good, maybe even unexpected, corporate response, an acknowledgment of both the importance of the community that SoundCloud has fostered and of the leverage the community holds over its host. Openness and access win. But then what? The reversal doesn't make those competing forces disappear, and the host has leverage, too. So the status quo holds—"at least for now," as Leight dryly put it... CMJ is re-launching next year, according to the brand's first tweet in three and a half years. Re-launching as what, it isn't saying. Music festival? Magazine? Chartmaker? It also isn't saying who's doing the re-launching, beyond claiming that "we are completely different people" from the ones who ran the original brand into the ground and that these different, unnamed people "bought the assets—such as they were." Plan accordingly... "They Finally Fixed the Jukebox": NEW YORK TIMES theater critic JESSE GREEN on JAGGED LITTLE PILL, which opened on Broadway Thursday night... A buyer’s cartel can be "equally destructive of competition as a seller’s cartel," the US Justice Department said Thursday, siding with IRVING AZOFF's GLOBAL MUSIC RIGHTS in a long-running price-fixing dispute with US radio stations. The two groups are suing each other and the government's opinion gives a boost to the songwriters' suit, the LOS ANGELES TIMES reports... The ARCHIVE OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC's always amazing holiday sale of LPs, CDs, books and promo items begins Saturday and runs through Dec. 22 at its warehouse on 54 White Street in New York. It's promising "as usual a slew of Jamaican and Brazilian LPs + CDs PLUS promo items donated by Mute Records + Atlantic records and so many others." Threatened by rising rents, it isn't promising that it will still be on White Street, its home of 34 years, the next time this happens. It's an invaluable, enormous, unique archive. Go and buy stuff if you can... It's FRIDAY and that means new music from BLUEFACE, CAMILA CABELLO, RODDY RICCH, COURTNEY BARNETT, YANN TIERSEN, BURIAL, the CHAINSMOKERS, XXXTENTACION, LIAM PAYNE, the WHO, GEORGIA MAQ, the GO-BETWEENS, LEE "SCRATCH" PERRY, MAX B, FAT JOE, MOONBEAM TERROR, DIGITALISM, ANNA NALICK, the Broadway cast recording of JAGGED LITTLE PILL and a limited-edition BILLIE EILISH live acoustic album recorded a month ago at THIRD MAN RECORDS in Nashville (vinyl only, of course)... Oh, and Taylor Swift Wrote a Christmas Song Over the Weekend and here it is... RIP GLENN BRUDEN.