Andrew Flanagan

By now, you've no doubt seen Fortnite mentioned somewhere (or everywhere). If you've somehow maintained a peaceful distance from it, the video game is a free-to-play online video game that's become wildly successful as a spectator sport. In it, 100 players are dropped onto a static map with nothing but a pickaxe, which is used to gather materials, like wood from trees, which are then repurposed to construct defenses.

Billy McFarland, co-founder of 2017's disastrous Fyre Festival, was scheduled to be sentenced next week after pleading guilty in March to defrauding 80 investors in that event of $24 million, among other charges.

Today, what would have been his 60th birthday, the people in charge of Prince's storied vault of unreleased recordings have announced a forthcoming album taken from a cassette he recorded at his home studio (Paisley Park did not yet exist), simply titled Piano & A Microphone 1983. The record includes a cover of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" and prototype sessions of "Purple Rain" and "Strange Relationship."

What do you go to Facebook for? Given how many of us use it — 68 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, with 74 percent of them visiting the site at least once a day — it's striking that, anecdotally at least, using the site evokes a sort of dissociative muscle memory, the ritual of dutifully giving posts from family and close-enough friends a thumbs-up.

The New Age composer, rock music producer, entrepreneur and filmmaker Paul Gilman, who produced a film about using music to communicate with ocean mammals, is being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly defrauding 40 investors of $3.3 million over the course of three years.

Clarence Fountain, a foundational American gospel singer and the last remaining co-founder of Blind Boys of Alabama, died June 3 in Baton Rouge, La. at the age of 88, his manager Charles Driebe confirmed to NPR. No cause was given.

It's easy to imagine the rollout of Spotify's "hateful conduct" policy being studied by future students of business as an example of what not to do. On May 16, the leading music streaming service made the bold announcement that it would no longer help raise the profiles of artists whose conduct it deemed particularly egregious, doing so by editing them out of its human-curated playlists and excluding them from its powerful algorithm's suggestions. At the time, Spotify pointed to R. Kelly specifically as the first example of an artist affected by the policy.

The sun's season became official this past weekend — so what do you want to hear? Rooftop bops? Windows-down coasters? Sweated-through squall?

Neil Portnow's next speech at the Grammys will be his last as The Recording Academy's president.

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences — better known as The Recording Academy and the parent organization to the Grammy Awards — announced Thursday that Portnow, who has helmed the organization since 2002, would be stepping down at the end of his current contract, which expires in July 2019.

A title card is the first thing you see in the video for "They Ain't 100," a song by the British rapper Fredo — which reads: Disclaimer: The content in this video is an expression of art and should not be taken literally. K-Trap's "David Blaine" opens with a similar prologue: All characters in this visual are entirely fictional.

As people continue to feed more and more of their interior selves — our likes, dislikes, wants, needs, social cartographies — into digital networks that harvest and parse that information into profiles used to make money, a new frontier of monitoring that hones in on our physical features is ascendant.

Sony announced late Monday that it plans to acquire most of EMI Music Publishing, a deal that would give what is already the world's largest music publishing company control of more than 2.3 million compositions.