Annik Lafarge has written a fascinating book about Chopin's well-known 2nd piano sonata (the one with the funeral march), discussing not just the music, but also the social and cultural context of the

Neither Doug nor Kirk cares about ABBA very much, but we were interested by a letter from music industry insider Bob Lefsetz about "ABBA's Failure in the Marketplace." Did ABBA really fail? Has Bob Le

We don't do a Christmas gift guide every year, but we decided we'd select some trinkets and tchotchkes that we'd recommend as gifts this year. Our only constraint was that we don't choose music.

Doug and Kirk both have large music libraries. They discuss some of the problems of having too much music, and how to wrangle a large library of music files.

We first spoke with TJ Connelly, who scores live sports events for the Boston Bruins and New England Patriots, last year, early in lockdown. He started a project called UncertainFM, which has now expa

Chris Connaker, our resident audiophile, likes complicated projects. Whether he's putting together a purpose-built audio streaming computer, or building and tuning a listening room, he always wants to

This is the third time we discuss headphones on The Next Track. Both Doug and Kirk have found that they use fewer headphones, and use headphones differently than in the past.

The recording industry doesn't just make money from new releases, but regularly reissues older releases to exploit their back catalog. Some of these are just repackaged, and others are remixed or rema

Pianist Sholto Kynoch founded the Oxford Lieder Festival in 2002, and it has become the most important festival for lieder and song in the UK. We discuss the festival, and how listeners around the wor

In episode #2 of The Next Track, we discussed streaming versus owning music. That was five years ago. We decided to revisit the topic, to see if we've changed our minds.