"Music is the second most important thing," I say. That was something my mother would always say. We've stopped saying it out loud, but I think it all the same. The most important thing is love. From the author of the New York Times and USA Today Bestselling If He Had Been With Me comes a captivating novel about navigating—and protecting—the loves and friendships that sustain us. Ramona fell for Sam the moment she met him. It was like she had known him forever. He's one of the few constants in her life, and their friendship is just too important to risk for a kiss. Though she really wants to kiss him... Sam loves Ramona, but he would never expect her to feel the same way-she's too quirky and cool for someone like him. Still, they complement each other perfectly, both as best friends and as a band. Then they meet Tom. Tom makes music too, and he's the band's missing piece. The three quickly become inseparable. Except Ramona's falling in love with Tom. But she hasn't fallen out of love with Sam either. How can she be true to her feelings and herself without losing the very relationships that make her heart sing? This Song is (Not) for You is perfect for readers looking for: Contemporary teen romance books Unputdownable & bingeworthy novels Complex emotional YA stories Novels that explore monogamy, polyamory, and asexuality Characters with a passion for music Performance art

In this picture book, a girl’s gift of a Valentine to a boy prompts a tale with an enduring message of friendship. This book is not a valentine. It doesn’t have lacey edges or sugary hearts. But it is full of lucky rocks, secret hiding spots, and gumball machine treasures. This is a book about waiting in line and wishing for cinnamon buns. About recognizing that if you care so much about someone not thinking you care, maybe you really do. But wait—isn’t that exactly what love is about? Maybe this book is sort of a valentine after all. A testament to handmade, wacky, bashful, honest love—sure to win over the hearts of all readers—this offering from debut picture book author Carter Higgins and children’s book veteran Lucy Ruth Cummins is the perfect gift to celebrate every relationship, from parent to child, sibling to sibling, partner to partner, crush to crush. Praise for This Is Not a Valentine “A perfect book for kids who find the whole Valentine's Day holiday icky and overrated.” —Book Riot “A beautiful celebration of love and how different that may look to others celebrating Valentine's Day.” —ReaderTotz “[Cummins’s] cartoon cast is a diverse one, and refreshingly, this is more about deep friendship than romantic love; her kids are definitely just that: kids. . . . A sort of anti-valentine for those who want to show the ones they love they care without being all mushy (or spending any money).” —Kirkus Reviews

Worship Quest serves as a guide to understanding foundational questions about worship and leading in worship. Worship Quest offers a practical perspective on four roles of worship leadership and how they are to be fulfilled within various worship gatherings. For those called to lead in worship as well as those tasked in hiring worship leaders, it is important to understand the roles of worship leadership. Worship Quest helps readers come to understand the different worship gatherings and the various roles of worship leadership, and thus successfully fulfill God's call of leading in worship.

‘If you want to know anything about how music surfaces today, how to find it, or how to create it, you will find what you need right here.’ Joseph Menn, Washington Post writer For the first time in history, almost every song ever recorded is available instantly. Everywhere. This book charts what music’s dazzling digital revolution really means for fans and artists. As a former data guru at the world’s biggest streaming service, Spotify, Glenn McDonald reveals: What the tech giants know about you How they serve up your next song Whether fans can cheat the algorithm Whether jazz is dead and ASMR is the new punk Your chances of becoming a rock star Having analysed the streams of 500 million people, McDonald explores what the data tells us about music and about ourselves, from the secrets of russelåter in Norway to Christmas in the Philippines. Statistically, you have not yet heard your lifetime’s favourite song. This book will take you on a voyage of discovery through music’s fast-flowing new waters. 10 bonus playlists of wonder included! About the Author Glenn McDonald is expertly placed to provide a comprehensive picture of the global music industry in the 2020s. Growing up in 198Os and 1990s America, he was an obsessive collector of physical music – CDs and vinyl albums. But he soon realised the revolutionary power of digital media to make songs more widely accessible. He started doing data work at the US music-intelligence startup The Echo Nest, which was soon acquired by Spotify. He became Spotify's 'Data Alchemist.' His website Every Noise at Once (everynoise.com) is an unprecedented computational map of the world’s music genres. Reviews 'If you want to know anything about how music surfaces today, how to find it, or how to create it, you will find what you need right here. And you will be highly entertained and amused in the process.' – Joseph Menn, Washington Post staff writer and author of All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster. 'We used to sell CDs by the weight of pallets, thanks to streaming we know how our content is consumed. In this immersive book, Glenn has demonstrated what we can do with this knowledge, so other industries facing their Napster Moment can learn from his unrivalled first mover advantage' – Will Page, author of Pivot and former Chief Economist of Spotify 'I'd say that reading this book is the next best thing to having an in-depth, impassioned, hours-long fika with Glenn McDonald about music and culture and all of the most burning topics of our time... but, I'd be lying. It's even better. This book is a true behind-the-scenes examination of our culture and our industry from the perspective of someone who was in the thick of it from the beginning. It's a history of the streaming era, written by someone who made history in the streaming era." Meg Tarquinio, PhD, Spotify/Twitch/Nettwerk Music Group 'Throughout McDonald's book, personal anecdotes and his own love of music spill out in witty, conversational prose. Even chapters that delve into streaming's complex finances – unsurprisingly, your £15 monthly fee does not go directly to your favourite artist, but is split between that month's "most streamed," meaning that megastars such as Swift and Ed Sheeran stay at the top of the pyramid – are told in layman's terms.' Poppie Platt, The Daily Telegraph Extract CHAPTER 9. MERCENARIES AND FAN ARMIES Where there's an 'economic system,' there's probably fraud. This is not a proud truth to admit about humanity, but it seems to me to have been consistently historically true. Money is supposed to be a bookkeeping mechanism, but it becomes a goal. Fraud and cheating existed in the music business, like any business, long before streaming happened. Back when charts were based on people reporting sales numbers on phone calls, those people could be bribed to say different numbers. Radio DJs could be paid to pretend they were playing a song more because they just liked it. Accounting could be manipulated. Streaming doesn’t necessarily make cheating easier, overall, but it definitely makes it more accessible to introverts. Instead of making phone calls, you can write computer programs that pretend to be streaming-music listeners. Piracy maintains a certain dastardly allure. Streaming music fraud is not, to be brutally honest, the most glamorous or profitable form of dastrardry. Streaming rewards accumulate in tiny micro-transactions, and the software necessary to laboriously accumulate micro-royalties illegitimately isn’t any easier to write than legal software for which you can get paid normal salaries. It only really scales if you become a service-provider selling fraud as a service, and then you’re a business with business problems, instead of a pirate with a rakish eye-patch and the sea air in your hair. If you want to cheat your way to riches, you’re better off trying to do it in junk stocks or cryptocurrencies, where there’s way too much money sloshing around and the distinction between “legitimate” behavior and cheating is fuzzy. So you might have thought that fraud wouldn’t be a big issue in streaming... Buy the book and carry on reading

A debut collection of moving and darkly witty stories from an "admirably fearless" (New York Times Book Review) writer whom critics have compared to Michael Chabon, E.L. Doctorow, and Dennis Lehane When marriages, friendships, and families come undone, to what lengths do we go to keep it all together? That question lies at the heart of Brendan Mathews's buoyant and unforgettable debut story collection. A young mother watches as her desperate husband, convinced a hidden poison lurks inside their walls, tears their home apart. Two journalists bruised by romance and revolution, one a survivor of the Bosnian war, trade tales of lost lovers. A father and his sons haggle over the family business during a high-stakes round of golf. And a lovesick circus clown tries to explain the accidents that bound him to a trapeze artist and a witless lion tamer. If Mathews's novel The World of Tomorrow was an "outsized" entertainment, a "big, expressive debut" (Wall Street Journal), then This Is Not a Love Song, two stories from which have been included in The Best American Short Stories, is glorious proof that he excels equally as a miniaturist. From rock-star flameouts to church burnings to ordinary people trying not to fall out of love, these stories are packed with vivid detail, emotional precision, and deft, redemptive humor.

Ramona fell for Sam the moment she met him. It was like she had known him forever. He's one of the few constants in her life, and their friendship is just too important to risk for a kiss. Though she really wants to kiss him... Sam loves Ramona, but he would never expect her to feel the same way-she's too quirky and cool for someone like him. Still, they complement each other perfectly, both as best friends and as a band. Then they meet Tom. Tom makes music too, and he's the band's missing piece. The three quickly become inseparable. Except Ramona's falling in love with Tom. But she hasn't fallen out of love with Sam either. How can she be true to her feelings and herself without losing the very relationships that make her heart sing?