Good Morning,
At the Houghton festival this summer, clubbers handed out cards reading “The Dance Floor Is For Dancing,” with a diagram of EQ curves on the back showing where vocals sit above the bass. The DJ Jane Fitz had started the argument with an Instagram post asking people to stop chatting through sets (The Guardian).
The conductor John Mauceri and the Columbia linguist John McWhorter argue in Broadway in Black and White that one blue note carries humiliation in Fats Waller’s “Black and Blue” and delighted discovery in the Gershwins’ “How Long Has This Been Going On?” (The New Yorker).
About 60 percent of music streamed in the first half of 2026 was five or more years old, according to the data firm Luminate, and Zara Larsson’s “Lush Life,” from 2015, is the UK’s eighth-biggest hit of the year (BBC). So why are we listening to older music?
The owners of Elvis Presley’s catalog sued Anthropic on Friday over 274 songs, asking $150,000 for each (The New York Times). The Wu-Tang Clan’s one-copy album, sold in 2015 to Martin Shkreli for a reported $2 million, now belongs to PleasrDAO, a crypto art collective that says streaming it would make it “another album” (ARTnews).
All of today’s stories below.