Links: Spreading the take at the top, custom ringtones, the Human League.

 

• Spotify: “The Top 40 is over” – the great cultural fragmentation means that 43,000 artists make up 90% of streams in 2020, up from 16,000 in 2015.

• The rise and fall of the custom ringtone industry. And how the ringtone industry created the iPhone app store.

• Brilliantly terrible records: the Terrible Lizards’ heavy metal medley, recorded by Jo Callis and engineer Dave Allen in downtime on the Human League’s Dare.

• Here’s some early demos for Dare — part 1, part 2.

• If you ever wondered what happened to the Human League in the 1980s, and how it all ended up petering out like it did, Ian Burden tells the story. tl;dr Phil Oakey.

 

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