Hello 2020. TENCENT, of Shenzhen, now owns 10 percent of UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP, of Santa Monica (with an option to double that stake in the next 12 months). HASBRO, the toy company, now owns the entirety of DEATH ROW RECORDS, the onetime dream home of SUGE KNIGHT and DR. DRE. 8TRACKS, the digital mixtape service, is no more, but 8 track tapes, the awkward analog cassette format, are still out there in the wild. Also, everybody now owns everybody. There are no women in the largest font on the COACHELLA poster, and some people are having a hard time identifying everyone in the second-largest font, not to mention the third-largest. You're paying 55 percent more for concert tickets than you did in 2010, which doesn't seem all that shocking, and more than three times what you were paying in 1996, which also doesn't sound all that shocking, and TICKETMASTER thinks you should be paying more, which, well, you probably knew that, too. YOUTUBE streams now count on the BILLBOARD 200, and YouTube uploads appear to count as official releases, even if they're un-uploaded 24 hours later, for the purpose of extending the copyright on recordings that labels have no interest in anyone actually hearing. Political advertising has been banished from SPOTIFY, except in podcasts. R. KELLY is still an awful human, and now we have that much more detail (and while there's no way SURVIVING R. KELLY PART II: THE RECKONING was going to deliver the same emotional gut punch as the original, it's still remarkably powerful television). We'll come back to much of this in the coming days or weeks. Or, y'know, just read through the links below, which is kind of how this works, happy new year... One more time: "Best Music of 2019: The Year in Lists"... And "Alright Alright Alright: The 2010s in Music"... A huge shoutout to NATALIE WEINER for completing this revelatory yearlong project and for the thought-provoking essay that accompanies her final entry. Weiner on how we in 2019 remember the jazz music of 1959: "The stuff that white people listened to is the stuff that we still talk about; the stuff that Black people listened to is generally presented as secondary." She's threatening to turn the project into a book and here's hoping she does... Does anyone have a spare room that can hold 3 million or so records?... It's been a while since the last regular edition of this newsletter and we've lost a lot of unique musical voices along the way. RIP ALLEE WILLIS, a beloved-by-everybody songwriter whose long resume followed a dizzying route from EARTH, WIND & FIRE to the PET SHOP BOYS to the FRIENDS theme to THE COLOR PURPLE on Broadway; VAUGHAN OLIVER, the influential graphic designer whose album covers for 4AD RECORDS are inseparable from the music on those albums; NEIL INNES, the MONTY PYTHON co-conspirator and BONZO DOG DOO-DAH BAND multi-instrumentalist who transcended every conceivable definition of parody with his peerless band the RUTLES; JACK SHELDON, a jazz trumpeter and actor who's probably much better known for singing this; Tuareg guitar master ABDALLAH AG OUMBADOUGOU; up-and-coming Minnesota rapper LEXII ALIJAI; and JERRY HERMAN, SLEEPY LABEEF, BVLLY, DAVE RILEY, VIC JURIS, JULIANO CEZAR, PETER SCHREIER, KELLY FRASER, ELIJAH NELSON, DALTON BALDWIN, LEE MENDELSON, TIM BOYLE and (we shall not speak ill of the dead) DON IMUS. Here's one final look at our list of all of 2019's noteworthy music deaths.