It’s a typical scene at summertime music festivals across Europe. But in England this summer, for the first time, revelers can have their illegal drugs tested before they take them. It’s part of a new project to prevent overdoses.

“I’ve been doing festivals for three to four years now. I like my Ecstasy pills,” says Rio Brown, 29, from Manchester, England. “If I want to chill out, I have my weed. If I want to party, I’ll have some cocaine or a pill or whatever.”

Brown just bought a bag of Ecstasy pills from a dealer who somehow smuggled them past the police and sniffer dogs at the festival gate. Ecstasy is the same psychoactive drug a teenager suffered a fatal overdose from at this same festival last year. That has Brown concerned.

So he and his friends take their baggie of drugs over to a festival tent labeled The Loop. It’s a nonprofit that conducts forensic testing of drugs, and it’s set up shop at U.K. music festivals for the first time this summer.

“[It’s] just to make sure we’re getting the right thing, really, to make sure it’s not harmful,” Brown explains. “We don’t want to kill ourselves, you know what I mean?”

Brown breaks off a fragment of one of his Ecstasy pills and hands it to Chris Brady, who works full-time as a drug counselor and educator for Britain’s public National Health Service, and volunteers on weekends with The Loop.

“We’re very realistic that people do take drugs, and what we want is to keep people safe,” Brady says. “We don’t want any mothers getting a call at 4 in the morning, saying that their son or daughter is ill, or even worse.”

In a tiny trailer behind the tent, volunteers conduct chemistry tests on pink and purple pills that look like children’s vitamins. It only takes about 15 minutes. The volunteers are professional chemists, Ph.D students and pharmaceutical researchers — all here on their own time.

“They give us one pill or a small scoop of powder, and they won’t get that back,” explains Fiona Measham, co-founder of The Loop. “Normally the substance is destroyed in the testing process. So there isn’t really anything left in our possession.”

That’s how they get around drug possession laws. In the U.S., similar groups give out self-testing drug kits.

Measham is a professor of criminology at Durham University in northern England, and a drug policy adviser to the British government. She has worked for decades with police, as a forensic drug expert, testing drugs found on overdose victims, to help paramedics know how to treat them.

But then Measham had an idea: Why wait until after the drugs are taken, to find out what’s in them?

She co-founded The Loop in 2013, and convinced police of the benefits of looking the other way, so that drug users can avoid being poisoned or suffering an overdose.

“One of the key things is to win the trust of people who are giving us illegal drugs. This isn’t an undercover police sting. Genuinely, it’s a health and welfare issue,” Measham says. “The police have been very supportive of that. So they don’t stand anywhere near the tent. We don’t want them to scare off potential customers.”

On this particular day, Measham has been testing for MDMA, the active ingredient in Ecstasy and another popular drug called Molly.

“We had some Ecstasy tablets that were 20 to 25 mg of MDMA, right up to 250 mg of MDMA. So you’ve got a 10 times range,” she explains. “If people have two of the lowest strength, they probably would barely feel the effects. If they had two of the highest strength, that could potentially kill them.”

Among hundreds of samples tested at this festival, Measham and her staff also have found ground-up cement, anti-malaria medication and pesticides — all sold as party drugs.

Behind a curtain, a drug counselor sits down with Rio Brown, to explain what his Ecstasy pills are really made of. It turns out he overpaid. His drugs contain traces of MDMA, but also quite a lot of cellulose and chalk — harmless fillers.

Brown decides to go ahead and take his pills. But The Loop says that about a quarter of people who use their service, decide to dump their stash in the end.

The grounds at the Kendal Calling festival are dotted with drug amnesty bins — like municipal mailboxes, for dumping drugs.

Drug counselors here hope those bins and drug-testing tents could become a fixture at music events around the world — perhaps even part of the licensing requirements for festival organizers.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“There was a large concern about the album being sort-of released via grainy video and leaked out online,” said Wesley Schultz, the band’s lead singer.

So the band decided to lock up people’s phones — not take them away, exactly, but just lock them up for the show. Like a timeout.

At the concerts, The Lumineers started working with a company called Yondr, which created a locking pouch for people to hold their phones in during performances. Audience members keep the pouches with them, and they stay sealed as long as they’re inside an established “phone-free zone,” but unlock outside of that.

Schultz said he was surprised at how well it works.

“If you can set it up so that people can’t get to their phones as easily or are deterred, people actually really welcome that,” he said. “It’s just such a strong force of habit in our lives right now.”

Schultz has taken it a step further and adopted the mentality in his personal life: At his wedding, he and his wife asked guests to check their phones at the door.

“It wasn’t because of any sort of a, ‘I don’t want photos of anyone at the wedding’ — it was more, we wanted people to be present,” he said.

That’s become somewhat of a mantra for entertainers these days.

As Beyonce herself told fans at a recent show, “Y’all gotta put the camera phones down for one second and actually enjoy this moment.”

Adele, too: “Yeah, I want to tell that lady as well, can you stop filming me with a video camera? Because I’m really here in real life — you can enjoy it in real life.”

Smartphones may be ubiquitous, but there are still limits to common courtesy. Recently the movie theater chain AMC backed off a proposal to allow texting in cinemas after it garnered enormous public backlash.

Schultz thinks that sense of decency should extend to live music.

“I think of it like, if we had that same attitude and you went to see Hamilton, people would be totally up in arms about that,” Schultz said. “But for some reason it’s completely acceptable to do at shows.”

(That said, Hamilton isn’t immune to cellphone faux pas either. As The New York Times reported, the musical’s star Lin-Manuel Miranda once chastised a certain celebrity on Twitter for incessant texting. Meanwhile, Patti LuPone grabbed a phone away from one audience member in the middle of Shows for Days.)

In this environment, Yondr has found fans of its own in artists like Alicia Keys and comedians like Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K. and Hannibal Buress.

It’s not just about cutting the distractions of glowing screens and, worse, ringing phones. For some, there’s also a concern of creative security.

According to a Washington Post article, Keys hired Yondr for a concert where she planned to premiere new songs from her first album since 2012’s Girl on Fire. Louis C.K. did the same when he was trying out a new set at the Comedy Store in West Hollywood.

A new patent granted to Apple — for infrared technology that could disable smartphone cameras remotely from the stage — might make those pouches obsolete one day. But the idea is the same.

Not everyone has reacted positively to the idea of a “phone-free zone,” however.

“Even at one of the shows, a guy brought in a knife with him — just, he usually carries a knife, I guess — and he tried to stab through the case,” Schultz said. “And it’s got steel, I think, woven into it. So his knife got stuck in the thing, and then when he had to leave, he had the embarrassing deal of having to tell the people that he tried to open it, and they had to pry his knife loose.”

Will Yondr, or methods like it, eventually become the norm in entertainment? Schultz thinks so: “Something tells me in a little while we’ll kinda look back and say, ‘We were a little out of control with our use of phones — we didn’t really know boundaries. We were sort of working it out.’ ”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“It is with profound sadness that I am confirming that the legendary, iconic performer Prince Rogers Nelson has died at his Paisley Park residence this morning at the age of 57,” publicist Yvette Noel-Schure said. “There are no further details as to the cause of death at this time.”

Reporting from Paisley Park on Thursday, Andrea Swensson tells Minnesota Public Radio that she was among a few dozen people who had gathered at Prince’s estate after hearing of a death there — and that “even the journalists are hugging each other” after hearing that Prince died.

Swensson, who had met Prince and spent time with him as part of a retrospective about his film Purple Rain, described him as being “shy, sensitive — and flirtatious.”

News of Prince’s death emerged after police said Thursday that they were investigating a death at his compound in Chanhassen, Minn., with the Carver County Sheriff’s Office saying that deputies were on the scene.

The department said via a statement, “When deputies and medical personnel arrived, they found an unresponsive adult male in the elevator. First responders attempted to provide lifesaving CPR, but were unable to revive the victim. He was pronounced deceased at 10:07 am.”

The sheriff’s office later released a transcript of the 911 call that brought personnel to the scene. The dispatcher had to press the caller — who was on a cellphone — for a street address, which the caller didn’t know. Eventually the caller said it was Paisley Park, and the dispatcher knew where that was and was able to send an ambulance. Authorities have given no indication that any delay affected the outcome.

TMZ reports that Prince had recently had health problems:

“The singer — full name Prince Rogers Nelson — had a medical emergency on April 15th that forced his private jet to make an emergency landing in Illinois. But he appeared at a concert the next day to assure his fans he was okay. His people told TMZ he was battling the flu.”

Prince was just 19 when he released his first album, putting out For You in 1978. In the decades that followed, he went on to develop a unique sound and style that endeared him to generations of audiences — all while exploring new ground as an artist.

Anthony Valadez, a Los Angeles-based DJ and producer, tells NPR’s Here and Now that Prince also endeared himself to those he encouraged: “African-Americans rocking out.”

“You had to be stuck in a box,” Valadez says of 1980s music culture. “Even Michael [Jackson] faced a lot of that, trying to get his videos on MTV. And you had this African-American man standing with a guitar, and, man, it was just powerful, you know? It was just really powerful.”

Prince’s fifth album, 1999, exploded onto America’s music scene. Released in 1983, it included such hits as “Little Red Corvette” and “1999.” It also set the stage for Purple Rain, the 1984 movie and soundtrack packed with songs such as “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy” that became fixtures on the radio and established Prince as a pop culture icon.

As Swensson wrote for MPR about Purple Rain for the film’s 30th anniversary in 2014, “it grossed $7.7 million in its opening weekend, beating out Ghostbusters — and racked up comparisons to movies like the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night and Citizen Kane in glowing reviews from major media outlets.”

Prince also won two Grammys and an Oscar (for original song score) for Purple Rain. In 2007, he won a Golden Globe Award for best original song, “The Song of the Heart” from Happy Feet.

From 1985 to 2007, Prince won a total of seven Grammy awards — most recently for “Future Baby Mama.”

Praising Purple Rain and other Prince projects, Jesse Carmichael of the group Maroon 5 told NPR in 2009, “The reason Prince is an inspiration to me is that he’s obviously writing from the heart, and somehow he’s able to take these personal feelings, turn them into poetry and present them in a way that’s accessible and weird at the same time.”

Prince’s career was marked by a famous standoff with Warner Bros., the music company from which he split in 1996. Changing his name to a symbol, he was referred to for years as “the artist formerly known as Prince.”

In a sign that the rift had finally healed, Prince made a deal with Warner two years ago that gave him control of his own music catalog (during his career, Prince recorded well over 30 studio albums).

When he changed his name, Prince rejected the major-label system. In an interview with reporters last August, he echoed that idea again, saying “Record contracts are just like — I’m gonna say the word — slavery,” as NPR’s Eric Deggans reported.

As Eric wrote, Prince urged artists to get paid “directly from streaming services for use of their music, so that record companies and middlemen couldn’t take a share.”

News of Prince’s death spread on social media, sparking tributes from fans, fellow artists, celebrities and even President Obama, who released this statement:

“Today, the world lost a creative icon. Michelle and I join millions of fans from around the world in mourning the sudden death of Prince. Few artists have influenced the sound and trajectory of popular music more distinctly, or touched quite so many people with their talent. As one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of our time, Prince did it all. Funk. R&B. Rock and roll. He was a virtuoso instrumentalist, a brilliant bandleader, and an electrifying performer.

” ‘A strong spirit transcends rules,’ Prince once said — and nobody’s spirit was stronger, bolder, or more creative. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, his band, and all who loved him.‎”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

“David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer,” it read.

Bowie’s death was confirmed by his son, Duncan Jones, who tweeted, “Very sorry and sad to say it’s true. I’ll be offline for a while. Love to all.”

The singer released his latest album, Blackstar, on his birthday on Friday. The New York Times described the album as “typically enigmatic and exploratory.”

In a career that spanned decades and incorporated various personas, including Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, Bowie was known for his innovative and wide-ranging musical styles and his highly theatrical stage presentation.

John Covach, director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Rochester, highlighted Bowie’s influence on rock in the 1970s, singling out the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust for the “Ziggy Stardust” persona that Bowie adopted.

Covach adds:

“Jim Morrison had flirted with the persona of the Lizard King already in the late 1960s, and the donning of a persona in UK pop singing could be traced back at least to Screaming Lord Sutch in the early to mid 1960s. Like Alice Cooper and Peter Gabriel at about the same time, Bowie’s performances became theatrical in ways that focused on the persona, and these shows took rock performance to new production levels, with greater emphasis on staging and costumes.

“Bowie’s creative and performing persona would change from album to album and from tour to tour, permitting him to transform his music in ways that fans might not have embraced in other artists (Madonna would adopt a similar strategy beginning in the 1980s).”

The New York Times reports:

“Mr. Bowie was his generation’s standard-bearer for rock as theater: something constructed and inflated yet sincere in its artifice, saying more than naturalism could. With a voice that dipped down to baritone and leaped into falsetto, he was complexly androgynous, an explorer of human impulses that could not be quantified.

“He also pushed the limits of ‘Fashion’ and ‘Fame,’ writing songs with those titles and also thinking deeply about the possibilities and strictures of pop renown.”

Bowie’s popularity hit another peak in the ’80s with the release of Let’s Dance. Hit singles from that album included the title track as well as “Modern Love” and “China Girl.”

In addition to his musical career, Bowie was an actor, appearing in films including The Man Who Fell to Earth and Labyrinth.

Bowie is survived by two children and his wife, the model Iman.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Leading the way with 11 total nominations is Kendrick Lamar and his album To Pimp A Butterfly. But Taylor Swift racked up seven nominations, including three out of the four biggest categories — Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Song of the Year. But R&B singer, songwriter and producer The Weeknd matched Swift’s total tally.

For those looking for a “Swift vs. Lamar” narrative, however, things aren’t so simple: the Best Pop Group/Duo Performance and Best Music Video nominees include their collaboration “Bad Blood.” (Lamar also has another nominated video in the latter category, for his anthemic “Alright.”)

Especially among the four major categories — Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist — many of the nominees were nearly a forgone conclusion, considering the rapturous response they’ve already received from critics and fans alike.

Nominees for Album of the Year are Alabama Shakes‘ Sound & Color; Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly; Traveller, by Chris Stapleton; Taylor Swift’s 1989; and The Weeknd‘s Beauty Behind the Madness.

The Song of the Year prize is a songwriting award. This year’s nominated songs are Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” Little Big Town‘s “Girl Crush,” Wiz Khalifa‘s “See You Again” and Ed Sheeran‘s “Thinking Out Loud.”

The Record of the Year award is what fans are likely to think of as the vote for the year’s best single. This year’s nominees: D’Angelo and the Vanguard’s “Really Love”; “Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson, featuring Bruno Mars; Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud”; Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”; and The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face.”

The Best New Artist category was a little more of a stylistic grab bag, with the nominees including Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett, English singer-songwriter James Bay, country artist Sam Hunt, former American Idol contestant Tori Kelly and pop star Meghan Trainor.

Even so, certain artists may be surprised by their omission from this year’s roster altogether. For example, Rihanna‘s single “FourFiveSeconds,” featuring Paul McCartney and Kanye West, would have seemed tailor-made for Grammy judges who generally love cross-genre — and perhaps even more importantly, trans-generational — collaborations. In fact, the trio even performed the song at last year’s televised Grammy ceremony. However, Rihanna failed to receive any nominations at all this year.

The odd timing of the Grammy schedule also means that this year’s monster-hit album — Adele‘s freshly issued 25 — won’t be eligible for nomination until the awards’ 2017 edition. In order to qualify for the 58th annual awards, recordings must have been released between Oct. 1, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2015.

The Grammy Awards are voted on by members of NARAS, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. The full list of nominees, across all 83 categories, is available on NARAS’ website.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

According to the statement, Weiland died in Bloomington, Minn.; other details, such as the cause of death, were not revealed, citing his family’s desire for privacy.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

“Jamie Weiland, the singer’s wife, confirmed the news of his death to The Times in a brief conversation Thursday.

” ‘I can’t deal with this right now,’ she said, sobbing. ‘It’s true.’ ”

Weiland, whose career was marked by both Grammy Awards and drug and alcohol abuse problems, was the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots, which had numerous hits in the 1990s, and of Velvet Revolver, a supergroup that paired him with former members of Guns N’ Roses.

Weiland’s hits with Stone Temple Pilots include “Interstate Love Song,” “Creep,” “Plush” and “Big Empty.”

At the time of his death, Weiland had been touring with his new band, The Wildabouts. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the band’s Thursday night show “was canceled nine days ago because of slow ticket sales.”

It was a far cry from the heights of Weiland’s career, when he became famous both for reeling off chart-topping rock songs and for his wide-ranging fashion sense — from shirtless to shirt-and-tie. Over his career, Weiland sold tens of millions of records worldwide.

His struggles with heroin and other drugs often derailed Weiland over the years, even as he kept performing. Visits to rehab and police stations were also a distraction from the singer’s powerful voice, a gravelly bass that he tamed to sing rock ballads such as Velvet Revolver’s “Fall to Pieces” — a song about a singer struggling with demons, and whose video includes the depiction of a seeming drug overdose.

Stone Temple Pilots broke up in 2003 and got back together in 2008 — only to split for good in 2013.

During Stone Temple Pilots’ hiatus, Weiland found success again with Velvet Revolver, with the single “Set Me Free” from the Hulk soundtrack and the aforementioned “Fall to Pieces” and “Slither” from the band’s album Contraband.

In 2012, Weiland published a book called Not Dead & Not for Sale, in which he described being the victim of rape as a schoolboy, and in which he detailed his struggles with addiction.

From the prelude:

“Every time I try to catch up to my life, something stops me. Different people making claims on my life. Old friends telling me new friends aren’t true friends. All friends trying to convince me that I can’t survive without them.

“Then there are the pay-for-hire get-off-drugs professionals with their own methods and madness. They help, they hurt, they welcome me into their institutions … and, well, their madness.

“Welcome to my life.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Filmed Entertainment Inc., which owns Columbia House, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday in a Manhattan court after more than two decades of declining revenues, according to a company statement.

Although Columbia House moved exclusively to DVDs in 2010, it could not stay afloat in an industry crowded with streaming services. The company’s annual revenues peaked in 1996 at $1.4 billion, but by 2014, revenues had dwindled to just $17 million.

Columbia House “started in 1955 as a way for the record label Columbia to sell vinyl records via mail order,” according to the A.V. Club, which adds that it “continually adapted to and changed with the times, as new formats such as 8-tracks, cassettes, and CDs emerged and influenced how consumers listened to music.”

Columbia House once set the bar for the music-club subscription business model, becoming a household — or at least high school — name through its famous deal: piles of CDs and tapes for a penny.

But with giving away CDs nearly free, how exactly was Columbia House turning a profit?

“The phrase you want is ‘negative option,’ ” Piotr Orlov said, referencing the idea of hooking people with a good deal and then roping them into a contract. (Orlov is a contributing editor for NPR music and former Columbia House director of A&R and marketing between 1996 and 1999.)

“You had a contract that was over a short period of time — two, three or four years — you had to buy a number of titles under regular prices,” he said. “And these regular prices put CD store prices to shame. Like $19.99 [instead of] $11.99. It was an enormous markup.”

Orlov also said Columbia House signed multimillion-dollar contracts with companies such as Sony, Warner Music and others that allowed it to obtain the raw materials and produce its own CDs.

“[Columbia House] was partially owned by major music distributors. [It] would get the music parts — the art and the master tape — and manufacture it themselves.”

Columbia House, however, wasn’t the only one cashing in. Because the CDs came in the mail and customers could pay with cash or check, Orlov said the subscription process lent itself to what he called “low-grade mail fraud.”

“People would fill out a real address with fake names and get 12 free CDs,” he said. “The punch line to this joke is that everybody who worked at Columbia House had done this too [earlier in life]. It really was like an inside joke.”

For another NPR music denizen, Stephen Thompson, Columbia House also represented more than mere music.

“For generations of people, Columbia House was a huge rite of passage — your first foray into maybe wrecking your credit rating, or at least running afoul of an authority beyond your hometown. I was never a member myself, because my parents filled my head with horror stories, but I always look back on Columbia House as, like, Baby’s First Mail Fraud,” he said.

Its business model wasn’t perfect, Orlov said, but Columbia House was valuable in its time.

“What it did do was serve a purpose. If you didn’t have a record store, this was the closest you got to having a good music selection. It put in front of you the ability to buy CDs and send them to your house even if you lived in [the middle of nowhere].”

The FEI statement said the decline was “driven by the advent of digital media and resulting declines in the recorded music business and the home-entertainment segment of the film business.” While streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify surely cut into Columbia House’s profits, Orlov said the main reason for the company’s downfall is something else entirely.

“No one cares about owning CDs anymore,” he said.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Price was known for taking no prisoners when he got on the microphone. His was principled aggression and his presence was alpha. His rhymes were often dazzling, and he was impatient with mediocrity, though he did have a soft spot for puns.

“He was really one of the most genuinely funny people that I knew,” says the New Jersey born producer known as Just Blaze, who was cracking jokes with Price on Twitter the day before he died. He remembers Price’s very dry humor, his inclination to say outlandish things in a way that was so witty you couldn’t help but laugh. “You know a lot of rappers have fake charisma? Where they can turn it on when the cameras are on, but that’s not really them? He was just the same dude all the time.”

He was the same dude from the early ’90s through today. Sean Price got his start in hip-hop as half of the duo Heltah Skeltah, which produced two classic albums. They were also part of the supergroup of New York rappers called the Boot Camp Clik. And Price made a name for himself as a solo artist who collaborated with the contemporary generation of rappers and producers.

“Aside from what I feel,” says Just Blaze, “the hip-hop community in general, we’ve lost a legend. I mean, this man did what he did, did it over the span of almost two decades, and consistently got better.”

Sean Price’s writing and character were widely admired — the hip-hop community flooded social media with tributes and personal stories this weekend.

“Obviously, he’s a street dude, came from a rough environment. But at the same time, still kind of had those same nerdy or geeky tendencies that I had. You know what I mean? There’s actually a lot of dudes like that, but you would just never know because they keep that guard up so much. There’s plenty of dudes who come from the street who are the hardest of the hardest street dudes, who go home and read comic books.”

Sean Price leaves behind his wife and three children. His latest project, Songs in the Key of Price, is due out later this month.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The letter, from a law firm representing Universal, was addressed to the antitrust bureau of the attorney general’s office. It stated that Universal currently has no deals with Apple or companies such as Sony Music that would “impede the availability of free or ad-supported music streaming services, or … limit, restrict, or prevent UMG from licensing its recorded music repertoire to any music streaming service.”

The letter did not specifically say Apple was among the targets of the investigation. But Universal’s attorneys did say the company was not colluding with Apple or its two major rival labels, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group.

A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had this response:

“This letter is part of an ongoing investigation of the music streaming business, an industry in which competition has recently led to new and different ways for consumers to listen to music. To preserve these benefits, it’s important to ensure that the market continues to develop free from collusion and other anti-competitive practices.”

The investigation centers on whether Apple may have urged the labels to drop support for free, ad-supported streaming services such as Spotify and Google’s YouTube. Such a move could be seen as anti-competitive.

Albert Foer, the founder of the American Antitrust Institute, says the current investigation may have been sparked in part by Apple’s history. The company was found guilty last year of conspiring with book publishers to raise the price of e-books when it launched its online book store. Among those who brought the charges were 33 state attorneys general, including Schneiderman.

There are some parallels between the music industry and the publishing business. At the time Apple entered into the e-book market, publishers were upset by the prices Amazon was forcing on them. Apple had a business model that let publishers set the prices higher. In the case of music, the labels have been unhappy with the money paid out by free, ad-supported services. Most famously, Taylor Swift withheld her latest music from Spotify over the issue.

“The suspicion would be of the corporate culture and how they operate,” Foer says about why the attorney general would investigate Apple Music. “It’s just that investigators will have suspicions in some cases because of what happened in the past.” But he says the investigation could also have been triggered by complaints from someone inside the music industry.

Chris Castle, a music industry attorney, finds it hard to believe that Apple would follow the same road that made it the target of an investigation that resulted in a $450 million settlement, along with supervision by an antitrust monitor. “The idea that these guys would blindly walk into this is crazy,” says Castle. “It just doesn’t seem plausible.”

In fact, Connecticut State Attorney General George Jepsen, who is also focused on music streaming, told Reuters that his office was satisfied that Universal did not have anti-competitive agreements to withhold music titles from free services. However, Jepsen did not say he’d stopped investigating Apple. And European Union officials are also investigating Apple Music.

But Castle says he will be surprised if this goes anywhere. Apple, he notes, has a lot of competition in the streaming music space: Spotify, YouTube, GooglePlay, Amazon. “There are inquiries all the time” he says. “They ask a few questions. You send a response and that’s it.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Coleman was an American icon and iconoclast — a self-taught musician born poor and fatherless in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1930, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, the Japanese Praemium Imperiale, two Guggenheims, a MacArthur, honorary doctorates and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master honor.

Ornette Coleman played his alto saxophone the way someone whistles to themselves walking down the street, unconcerned with rules about how a song is supposed to go. In 1997, Coleman told NPR that he believed in the unfettered, imaginative, original, expressive powers of melody.

“As a music, it allows every musician to participate in any form of musical environment without them changing their own personality, their own tone or their way of phrasing,” Coleman said.

And he put that belief into practice when he could. Coleman was raised by his single mother and sister. He learned music on his own and left home as a teenager to tour the deep south with a minstrel show. On the road, he faced rejection and even assault for an unorthodox, free style built on Texas blues. He wound up in Los Angeles, working as an elevator operator and trying to get a hearing in jam sessions. He finally made his first recording as a leader in 1958, Something Else.

Some praised Coleman for returning jazz to the kind of collective improvisation its earliest players used. Others heard only cacophony.

“In jazz before Ornette Coleman,” New York Times writer Jon Pareles told NPR in 1985, “people would devise solos that were designed to fit on top of the tune. If the tune was 32 bars long, the improvisation was 32 bars long, and it fit into whatever 32 bars of chords were in the tune. Ornette came along and said, ‘We don’t have to do it that way, we can take an improvisation that tells its own kind of story, that elapses according to the freedom of the song.’ He basically showed people a new kind of freedom. He broke them out of the maze of harmony.”

Coleman himself described his system as “sound grammar” or “harmolodics.”

“It’s the scientific form of sound based upon the human emotion of expression,” Coleman said. “That’s basically what it is and what it does.”

Coleman’s principle idea — that anyone can make music with anyone, and they don’t have to know much about each other to do it — made him able to retain his cry of the blues even while jamming with the Master Musicians of Jajouka from the mountains of Morocco. Musicians flocked to Coleman like he was the Pied Piper — and he played with them: Yoko Ono, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, not to mention the many jazz musicians who graduated from his bands. Yet Coleman himself was unfailingly modest. He was shy about cameras and might be oblique in conversation. It wasn’t that his vocabulary was peculiar, but his point of view was unique, coming from all directions, seeming to take in everything, imagistic and fundamental. But his musicians understood him.

“It was very easy for me to follow him,” said longtime bassist Charlie Haden in 1997. “And it’s always been easy for me to follow him because he’s very articulate, just in his own language, just as he is in his music.”

In December of 1960, Haden was part of Coleman’s radical experiment in collective improvisation — two quartets playing simultaneously — titled Free Jazz.

The recording inspired, licensed — or provoked — many better-established jazz musicians of the ’60s. But his experiments didn’t stop there.

“I never have classified music as being in different categories, so I started writing music which consists of violins and stuff like that,” Coleman said. “I think most people classify you as what you do when they see you in the contents of drums and things like that everybody they call that jazz. But when they see a violin or French horn something they call that classical music. And I really believe that any instrument can become the soloist instrument in any kind of contents.”

Skies of America, too, was scorned until 1986, when conductor John Giordano of the Fort Worth Symphony worked closely with Coleman on a revision. Performances by orchestras in Europe and the New York Philharmonic followed.

Ornette Coleman said that he liked to tell people, “‘I’m a composer who performs.’ Whenever I would hear a band with guitars and bass the melodic line sounded so full, it sounded like a full orchestra. So I said, well, if I could expand the melodic writing into a much fuller sound, I would be able to express more music.”

In the mid-1970s, Coleman re-invented himself again, forming an electric band that often included his son, Denardo. In a 2008 interview, Denardo Coleman explained that his father’s philosophy suffuses his art, is part of his bands’ rehearsals and comes to fruition in performance.

“I think it’s beyond just scale, key, all that,” he said. “Everything he’s talking about is what he always talks about, with us, as well. So we’re bringing everything — the performance is everything.”

It was Ornette Coleman’s life to express feeling freely and directly, in music, and also to ask the big, confounding questions.

“Does music have life?” he asked. His many fans and followers answer in the affirmative.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.