ERYKAH BADU starts her dinner with dessert, at least that's what she did while the NEW YORK TIMES was interviewing her via video recently, it was a "homemade lemon-lime-agave Popsicle," and I now love Erykah Badu a little more than I used to, and I already loved her more than I love run-on sentences. Badu is one of thousands and thousands of musicians trying to figure out how to perform live in a world where the concept of live performance has been canceled, and she's been more creative and ambitious than most, which is why the Times was talking to her for a great series of pieces about the art, business and aesthetics of livestreaming. There's been lots of discussion lately about the future of live music, but as it becomes clearer and clearer, at least in the US, that that future is a long way off, at least some attention has been turning to the strange present of live music. How to stage "absolutely not a rave." How to keep us apart. The logistics and distribution of social media music battles. The research benefits of fluorescent hand sanitizer at German concerts. Why TWITCH might be a better partner than a record company or concert promoter. The technology of quarantine jamming. And, in Badu's case, the specifics of how, for example, you can hire a truck to increase the digital bandwidth of your house ("All the neighbors had high-speed internet for a couple of weeks"), and how you might reimagine a live performance as "a two- to three-hour live music video." I'm fascinated, too, by the news buried deep within this piece that the forward-thinking ticketing startup DICE will eventually let you and your friends have a private chatroom where you can watch livestreams together and talk over the music to your heart's delight without ever being in danger of spilling beer on each other. Which sounds almost as tempting as a lemon-lime-agave Popsicle... A day after awkwardly trying to rebrand itself out of a sexual assault scandal that has enveloped the label, its record store and nine of its bands, BURGER RECORDS announced Tuesday that it's going out of business. Co-founder SEAN BOHRMAN told PITCHFORK the label has already asked its distributor to remove its entire catalog from streaming platforms; the label's artists, who own their masters ("I hate dealing with lawyers so we never signed contracts with bands"), will be free to re-upload them if they want... The NEW YORKER's ALEX ROSS interviewing JOHN WILLIAMS is a fantastic music geek film geek read. Williams on film-music scholar FRANK LEHMAN's cataloging of more than 60 leitmotifs in the nine STAR WARS movies: "Oh, wow. How exhausting"... RIP pioneering concert promoter MITCH SLATER and Cardiacs frontman TIM SMITH.