Music News

Authorities in Russia's republic of Chechnya have imposed limits on music tempos to abide by strict cultural norms in the Muslim-majority region.

From now on all musical, vocal and choreographic works should correspond to a tempo of 80 to 116 beats per minute, Chechnya's Culture Ministry said in a statement earlier this week.

The new tempo standard, which is relatively slow in the context of popular music, was announced following Chechen Culture Minister Musa Dadayev's meeting with local state and municipal artists.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov had instructed Dadayev to make Chechen music conform to the Chechen mentality, according to the statement.

Local artists were ordered to rewrite their music by June 1 to accommodate the changes. Otherwise, they would not be allowed for public performance, the Culture Ministry wrote on the messaging app Telegram.

Journalist Ella Whelan is arguing that censoring the classic Christmas song, Fairytale in New York is a form of cultural vandalism.

The Spiked Online contributor was speaking to Newstalk Breakfast after BBC Radio 2 became the latest station to censor the song.

She said her biggest problem with the decision is the suggestion it was taken at the behest of a young generation that's 'more sensitive' than those of us horrible old people to questions of gender and sexuality.

Censoring Fairytale of New York has become as much of a Christmas tradition as hanging up stockings and putting the tree up, she said. It's getting ridiculous now.

Meta's oversight board has told Instagram to reinstate a clip of drill music originally removed from Instagram at the request of the Metropolitan police.

The clip, a short excerpt of the song Secrets Not Safe by Chinx (OS) , was removed after the Met flagged the track to Meta, arguing that it could lead to retaliatory violence in the context of the London gang scene.

The force told Meta it contained a veiled threat, referencing a shooting in 2017, and as a result the company manually removed 52 posts containing the track and automated systems removed it a further 112 times.

Now, the oversight board says those removals were a mistake. The track does not break Facebook or Instagram's rules, it argues, and basic principles of free speech, equality and transparency were breached in allowing a police operation to censor a musician in secret.

As part of its investigation into the removal of the track, the oversight board filed multiple freedom of information requests with the Met police, finding that the force had filed 286 requests to take down or review posts about drill music in the 12 months from June 2021, and that 255 of those had resulted in the removal of content.

Sony Music Korea has censored a music video to cover up the braided hairstyle of a K-pop girl band member following ludicrous claims of 'cultural appropriation'.

The controversy started last month when Hani, a member of the group EXID, wore braids in a promotional photo for their new single Fire .

Western K-pop 'fans' piled on to social media to criticise Hani's hair, claiming it's a form of racism for any non-black person to braid their hair.

Sony decided to censor the hairstyle by blurring it.