Followup Friday

There's been a change in management of the US government's $16 billion relief fund for live venues. The Small Business Administration's Office of Disaster Assistance, which had been disastrously slow in allocating those dollars, has been "essentially ousted" from administering the Small Venue Operators Grant program, the New York Times reports. The SBA's Office of Capital Access, which oversaw the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program, has taken over, and is promising to speed up the process and correct the bureaucratic errors that have plagued the relief fund. Welcome news for a live music industry that's been as hard hit as any business in the US and that told Congress this week that venues across the country had run out of cash and "we can't hang on any longer." Some cash-strapped venues have reopened anyway, Billboard notes. ADAM HARTKE, whose two Wichita, Kansas, clubs are Priority 1 relief cases, meaning they lost at least 90 percent of their revenue during the pandemic, told Billboard one of them, the WAVE, had a sold-out show Thursday night even though "we’re struggling just to pay the regular show expenses that occur with a sold-out show." The PALACE THEATRE in Albany, N.Y., is one of the few venues anywhere that actually received its grant money, but finance director JULIA ELBAUM told the site, "A road show/act doesn’t just pop into Albany, New York. They need to be able to travel/route to multiple venues in order for things to work, so being the only venue to receive an award doesn’t really fix the problem." Hopefully the real fix is now on the way and the tour routing will follow. Fund it and they will come... With little fanfare and no on-air explanation, country radio's four-month ban on MORGAN WALLEN's music appears to be all but over. "Nobody is saying, ‘Guess what’s coming up next, a guy you haven’t heard in six months!,'" a radio insider told Variety's CHRIS WILLMAN. "It’s a thing that people are going to do quietly and not want to make a lot of noise about." Most of the major radio chains, Willman reports, have left the decision to bring Wallen's music back to individual stations, and in the past week, 121 of 160 country stations reporting to MEDIABASE had spun at least one of his songs. "It just felt like our point was made," one radio exec said. Whether radio listeners understood the point, or even knew one was being made, remains unclear. While Wallen has been a focus of discussion for months in the industry and the media, and while small groups of fans have complained about "cancel culture," radio insiders believe a lot of casual listeners didn't even realize Wallen's songs weren't being played... A day after being sued for $200 million by music publishers who say their songs are being used in games without a license, ROBLOX said it's in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and accused the publishers of "a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Roblox platform operates." NATIONAL MUSIC PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION president DAVID ISRAELITE said that's "like a bank robber caught in the act telling the bank it fundamentally misunderstands money"... On Wednesday, in a rantnrave about APPLE MUSIC's new label search feature, I wrote that SPOTIFY doesn't offer a clear way to search by label. But I was wrong; it does. It's a well-hidden, barely advertised feature, but type "label:labelname" (e.g. "label:Griselda") in Spotify's search bar and the service will return lists of every artist, every album and every song connected to the label. There's still so much more Spotify and other services can be doing to connect the dots within the metadata, but my apologies to the service for not noting what it *is* doing.

It's Friday

And that means new music from Chicago rapstar POLO G, who "dives deeper into his storytelling roots and gives us the kind of from-the-ground commentary that he’s perfected" on his third album, HALL OF FAME... And MIGOS, rapstars of yesteryear (hello 2017), who re-enter the conversation with CULTURE III, their first album in three and a half long and boujee years... Pop-punk revivalist KENNYHOOOPLA gets a vintage 1990s assist from Travis Barker on his mixtape SURVIVORS GUILT... Welsh singer MARINA (formerly "...& the Diamonds) continues to skate around the edges of pop while diving headfirst into both heartbreak and current politics on her fifth album, ANCIENT DREAMS IN A MODERN LAND... PATH OF WELLNESS is SLEATER-KINNEY's third album since reuniting in the mid-2010s and first in a quarter-century without drummer JANET WEISS... Masked non-singer MARSHMELLO is joined by Megan Thee Stallion, TroyBoi, Juicy J on SHOCKWAVE... Nashville (via Chattanooga via the Pacific Northwest) newcomer HANNAH JUANITA is a honky-tonkin' country-rockin' throwback who proves, on HARDLINER, that she's absolutely woman enough to take your man, or whatever she wants to take.

Plus albums from MYKKI BLANCO, LIL GOTIT (released Thursday), DEAN BLUNT, PI'ERRE BOURNE, RUTH B, GARBAGE, MAROON 5, FOLAMOUR, COLD CAVE, LING HUSSLE (released earlier this week), TWICE, SLAYYYTER, LUKAS NELSON & PROMISE OF THE REAL, the OAK RIDGE BOYS, MAMMOTH WVH (aka Wolfgang Van Halen), KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD, SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE, BRAD MEHLDAU & THE ORPHEUS CHAMBER ORCHESTRA, JULIAN LAGE, DAVE KOZ & CORY WONG, DANNY ELFMAN (first non-film-score album since 1994), DIANA JONES, ALESSANDRO CORTINI, LARRY JUNE, KODAK BLACK, SKYZOO, DRO KENJI, BOBBY SESSIONS, YL, AFI, RYAN ADAMS, WRISTMEETRAZOR, GIVRE, CRYPTA, DEAD HISTORY, DUSTIN O'HALLORAN, SANDEEP DAS & MIKE BLOCK, NEFESH MOUNTAIN, JIM WARD (of At the Drive-In and Sparta), ISLANDS, the SCIENTISTS, JESSE ROYAL, RACHEL BAIMAN, KADY DIARRA, DOWNSTAIRS J... And the soundtrack to IN THE HEIGHTS, the movie, which opens today in theaters and on HBO Max.

And—happy Friday—this breezy summer jam, a surprise gift from LORDE. And this campaign contribution from MEGAN THEE STALLION.