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Music News: 'Avengers' puts the Spinners back on the charts

The Spinners in Las Vegas, 2010.
The Spinners in Las Vegas, 2010.Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for ATI

by Jay Gabler

May 09, 2018

Veteran pop R&B vocal group the Spinners are back on the charts, thanks to the new blockbuster Avengers: Infinity War. "The Rubberband Man," a Spinners nugget from 1976, features in an Infinity War scene involving the Guardians of the Galaxy. The track, which reached number two on the Hot 100 back in its bicentennial heyday, has now cracked the top ten of the R&B digital song sales chart. (Billboard)

Today's Jay-Z news

Jay-Z has been ordered to testify in a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of a company that was formerly involved with his Rocawear fashion brand. The Iconix Brand Group paid the mogul over $200 million in 2007 "for assets including some related to the Rocawear brand," reports the New York Times. Jay-Z was resisting calls to testify, arguing that the expected daylong testimony would be burdensome and not highly relevant to the S.E.C. investigation. A federal judge has now ruled that Jay-Z doesn't get to decide what's relevant and what's not.

Meanwhile, Jay-Z's streaming service Tidal is assiduously denying a Norwegian newspaper investigation that alleges the service artificially inflated streaming numbers for Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, which were both initially released exclusively on Tidal in 2016. The newspaper says it possesses a hard drive with data proving that listening data were inflated, but Tidal says that "the information was stolen and manipulated and we will fight these claims vigorously." (Pitchfork)

33 1/3 books coming to Spotify

Bloomsbury Publishing says that it's cut a deal to make its 33 1/3 series of books available on Spotify. It remains to be seen exactly how users will read books on a music app, but the experience may be comparable to the Genius integration that offers written commentary on certain lyrics while songs are playing. Each volume in the series, which now numbers 131 books, spotlights a single classic album. "We look forward to bringing this amazing series to our global music-loving audience," says the head of Spotify Studios and Video. (Billboard)

BSB dress as Spice Girls

Performing on their custom cruise, Backstreet Boys gave fans a little taste of cosplay when they dressed up the Spice Girls. Just imagined if this had happened in 1997. (Billboard)