Music industry

Global music revenues were up 10.2 percent last year to $28.6 billion, according figures released on March 21.

The biggest artist in the world was, no surprise, Taylor Swift, according to the annual report by International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents global record companies.

Spotify paid out $9 billion in streaming royalties to artists last year, the streaming giant said yesterday in its latest "Loud and Clear" report.

Spotify's fourth annual report, which originally launched in 2021 following criticism over its lack of transparency, noted record accomplishments, including the highest annual payment from any retailer to the music industry.

Vinyl records continued to translate their retro appeal into a steady resurgence, outselling compact discs last year in terms of units in the United States for the first time since 1987.

Revenues from the sale of physical records jumped 4 percent in 2022 to $1.7 billion, according to the latest report from the Recording Industry Association of America released on March 9.

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market. Even worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking

The arrival of the compact disc nearly killed off record albums, with vinyl pressing machines sold, scrapped and dismantled by major record labels.

Four decades later, with resuscitated record album sales producing double-digit annual growth, manufacturers are rapidly rebuilding an industry to keep pace with sales that reached $1 billion last year.

In this file photo, American singer Lana Del Rey is seen on stage at the Velodrom in Berlin, Germany, 15 April 2013. Photo: BRITTA PEDERSEN/DPA/Alamy Live News

"People say I'm controversial," Madonna, who turns 60 on Wednesday, told an audience of music-industry peers in 2016. "But I think the most controversial thing I have ever done is to stick around."

From a career spanning decades, these are just a few of her most inconic, her most controversial and her most inventive moments.

Battling ageism

Montreal model and artist Rick Genest, also known as Zombie Boy, has died, police sources have told Radio-Canada. Genest was 32.

Genest came to the public's attention after tattooing his body from head to toe, including images of a skull and brain on his head. He holds a Guinness World Record for most insect tattoos (176) and another for most human bone tattoos (139).

Funerals for victims of Greece's lethal wildfire have begun, with the burial of an elderly priest who drowned as he sought safety from the flames in the sea off the Mari coastal resort.

Hundreds attended Father Spyridon Papapostolous funeral Saturday in his parish of Halandri, a northern suburb of the Greek capital, AP reported.

Greek singer Despina Vandi performed at an international music festival in Turkey's northwestern province of Bursa.