The imminent demise of YAHOO GROUPS and the erasure of all (or most of) its content are a useful reminder that your online music, like your online everything else, is an impermanent collection with a shelf life almost completely out of your control. The GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA? Still here five millennia later. Your collection of vinyl from the '50s, '60s and '70s? Still good after a half-century-plus as long as you took reasonable care of it. Your early 21st century MP3s? Life span unknown (your laptop can still read them, for now; whether your laptop can retrieve them from the fancy hard drive you backed them up to six or seven years ago is a question for the nearest IT person). Your SPOTIFY and APPLE MUSIC playlists? They're not even yours. They're proprietary code on someone else's property. Maybe VERIZON buys Spotify next year (this is completely hypothetical, imaginary, not based on anything) and merges it with something else it just bought or relaunches it with radically different features or—shudder—shutters it, and maybe you'll be able to move your carefully curated playlists and collections and favorites to another platform and maybe you won't, it's kind of impossible to know before it happens. Maybe Verizon makes it hard to do so for reasons known only to its own management (this is not completely hypothetical). Maybe that one 15-year-old hip-hop song with weird rights on a tiny label will be there waiting for you on the next platform, but no guarantees there either. You just have to trust the system. But do you? Wouldn't it be nice if the music and programming staffs at your favorite streaming services were planning for that imaginary future right now, just in case? Building systems to permanently archive your playlists and favorites and metadata and everything else that you've been curating and updating for the last decade, just in case? Creating systems to archive its own editorial and programming content, also just in case? Planning now for unknown futures? Maybe there are underpaid heroes in dark offices already doing all that. If not, consider this my plea, my note in the suggestion box. Just in case... There's been an ongoing discussion over the past few years of whether the music business is doing enough to address mental health and other particular needs of young stars suddenly thrown into the glare of fame and the speed and temptations of the road, often with no built-in support system. Progress seems—slow. Or, as the NEW YORK TIMES' JON CARAMANICA puts it in a thinkpiece on the third death of a SOUNDCLOUD rap star in two years, it's "awful to know that there are systems in place to quickly extract maximum value from the art produced by its creators, but essentially none designed to protect them from the challenges that quick success can bring." As tragic details begin to emerge from Juice WRLD's final hours, CHERIE HU picks up on Caramanica's piece and shifts the question: What does this say about the health of the very business whose name is invoked in Juice WRLD's genre?... In 2019, we've also lost mainstream stars like RIC OCASEK and JAMES INGRAM, cult heroes like DAVID BERMAN and DANIEL JOHNSTON, pioneers like JESSYE NORMAN and JOÃO GILBERTO and industry legends like JOE SMITH and ELLIOT ROBERTS, among many many others. We call the roll of those who left us in the REDEF ORIGINAL "Music Deaths 2019"... Longtime DETROIT FREE PRESS writer BRIAN MCCOLLUM's explains KID ROCK's most recent foray into indecent public behavior this way: It's Kid Rock basically being Kid Rock. McCollum argues that 1) KR hasn't changed at all from when he was a (somewhat) beloved pop star but 2) the cultural rules of the road have shifted and therefore 3) maybe we shouldn't be so hard on KR. I agree with #1. But I'm pretty sure that 2) what's offensive now was exactly as offensive back then but 3) it's way harder for a celebrity to hide that behavior in 2019 and maybe therefore 4) it's high time for KR and others to start being a little bit harder on themselves. IMHO... Music's GOLDEN GLOBE nominees... Music's not-gonna-be-OSCAR-nominees... RIP MURRAY BOWLES.