When you say it's gonna happen now, well when exactly do you mean?, ROLLING STONE's ELIAS LEIGHT asks, in so many words, in a reported piece checking in on the music industry's progress two months after BLACKOUT TUESDAY. What he finds is "a deluge of newly created task forces and a torrent of press releases." Press releases, that is, trumpeting task forces which, after a certain amount of time, will "tell a company what is already painfully obvious," which is that action needs to be taken. But when exactly? Is it fair to expect "lasting change" to have already happened? Of course not. Lasting change, by definition, takes a great deal of time. That's what makes it lasting. Is it fair to expect tangible steps toward that lasting change to have already happened? It would be easy to say no to that question, too, as it's only been two months and there's a pandemic going on, but, as Leight notes, "these companies routinely pivot with remarkable speed when they need to, for example, sign a fast-moving TIKTOK hit." The music biz is swimming in pivots these days. As CHERIE HU dryly observes, the industry seems to be able to launch a new livestreaming platform every week in the middle of the pandemic. The best-selling album of 2020 was created from scratch in two months in the middle of the pandemic. MICROSOFT, if all goes according to to plan, will take less than two months in the middle of the same pandemic to buy the US operations of TikTok for tens of billions of dollars. Change, even massive, disruptive change, can happen in two months if the right incentives are in place. So far, in music's push to root out systemic racism, some promotions have been announced, some diversity officers have been hired and some task forces have been put in place. There have been a handful of longterm pledges that Leight doesn't mention, for example LIVE NATION's promise to greatly diversify its upper management and board by 2025. That's a long way off, though. "Make someone Black a chairman, a chairwoman," A&R exec and artist manager CHRIS ANOKUTE tells Leight "Give somebody Black a venture. We want to see proof that the change is happening." Because, as the unspoken subtext says, we've already waited too long. And you know what the next line after that is... Here's something that could have happened in two months but ended up taking more than two years: the decommissioning of GOOGLE PLAY MUSIC. The legacy subscription service will be gone for good by December, with all users migrated to YOUTUBE MUSIC, the company says... "Plaintiff in good conscience cannot allow his music to be used as a 'theme song' for a divisive, un-American campaign of ignorance and hate," declares NEIL YOUNG in a copyright infringement suit against PRESIDENT TRUMP's campaign for playing "ROCKIN' IN THE FREE WORLD" and "DEVIL'S SIDEWALK" at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., without, Young says, a public performance license. It could be a complicated case. ASCAP and BMI, which provide blanket performance licenses to venues, allow individual songwriters to opt out of any political use of their music. But, as the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER's ERIQ GARDNER notes, whether the government consent decrees under which the two performance rights organizations operate allows for that has yet to be tested in court... A bonus message from Neil Young to the prez... Are the NBA's DETROIT PISTONS actually offering J. COLE a tryout? Does the person who operates the Pistons' Twitter feed have that authority? Can J. Cole hit these shots in a game situation? Then again, can any other musician hit those shots even in a Twitter situation?... The pandemic took a bite out of SONY MUSIC's Q2 revenues... RIP MICHAEL SMITH (who among many other things wrote this), FBG DUCK (at least the 11th rapper murdered in the US this year, and I don't blame hip-hop, Chicago or anything else except guns) and TONY COSTANZA (MACHINE HEAD's original drummer, who quit after playing exactly three shows but co-wrote a good chunk of the band's debut album).