This Week In Music: Prince, Kanye West And A Bunch Of Indies Vent

It was a week filled with likes and dislikes, both undiscovered, unnamed and underscored. Prince revealed that he couldn’t stand how radio kept pushing artists he didn’t like, while Kanye West indicated he was no fan of a certain social media service.

Meanwhile, indie musicians indicated their displeasure with Amazon, and the Recording Academy vowed to disclose the unsung heroes of the biz in a new campaign.

This week in music:

PURPLE PASSION: Notes discovered this week by the Prince estate indicate he was no fan of Katy Perry or Ed Sheeran. The notes, which the estate discovered as it poured through his archives, indicated that radio was “trying to ram Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran down our throats. We don’t like it no matter how many times they play it.” Prince died in 2016, before K-pop was a thing.

KANYE WEST LIKES TWITTER: Kanye West has a new movie and album out, so he’s making the rounds to tout both. In one interesting tidbit, he likened social media apps to cigarettes, even while labeling Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey “a visionary” for his work in driving that company forward. He doesn’t like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and blamed Instagram for its triggering effect on his sex addiction.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: The Recording Academy has launched Behind The Record, a campaign designed to spread awareness of various musicians, engineers, and other artists who contribute to popular music but often go unrecognized by the broader culture. The campaign includes creating a “credit cover” that artists are encouraged to share on social media that provides the recognition that album jackets used to provide. The Academy has also partnered with Australian music company Jaxsta, which compiles full song credits.

AMAZON UNDER FIRE FROM INDIES:A group of more than 380 musicians, including Ted Leo, Deerhoof, Damon & Naomi, Zola Jesus, Downtown Boys and Sheer Mag, have pledged in an open letter to cut all business ties with Amazon over its Amazon Web Services subsidiary.The movement was in response to AWS plans for a music festival called Intersect. The letter calls on AWS to cancel all contracts with independent businesses and government agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over alleged human rights abuses. Amazon is the largest web serving service and is connected to ICE through the database services it provides to Palantir, a data analytics company.

NICK TOSCHES DIES: One of music’s best writers passed last Sunday. Nick Tosches, whose biographies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis rank as the seminal works on those artists, died of undisclosed causes, leaving behind an enormous body of work that included early rock criticism.