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Month: February 2016

Music I Liked Last Month

Jason Tate

One of the things I’d like to do more of is put together playlists. Maybe sometimes they’ll have a theme, maybe they’ll just be a bunch of music I’ve played recently, and maybe I’ll be able to bring in some guests to help out in the future. But, it’s all got to start with the first one. I’ve put together a playlist of a bunch of stuff I’ve listened to, and enjoyed, over the past month or so. The goal was to try to cover a few diverse genres and keep the length right at the hour mark. You can find the playlist on Apple Music and Spotify or via an embed if you hit read more.

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Louis C.K. Responds To Five Dollar Gate

Louis CK
Jason Tate

Louis C.K. released a new show on his website last week, he charged five bucks for it, the internet reacted rationally and didn’t get mad at all about this. He’s posted a blog explaining this decision.

Now, I’m not complaining about this at all. I’m just telling you the facts. I charged five dollars because I need to recoup some of the cost in order for us to stay in production.

Also, it’s interesting. The value of any set amount of money is mercurial (I’m showing off because i just learned that word. It means it changes and shifts a lot). Some people say “Five dollars is a cup of coffee”. Some people say “Hey! Five dollars?? What the fuck!” Some people say “What are you guys talking about?” Some people say “Nothing. don’t enter a conversation in the middle”.

Anyway, I’m leaving the first episode at 5 dollars. I’m lowering the next episode to 2 dollars and the rest will be 3 dollars after that. I hope you feel that’s fair. If you don’t, please tell everyone in the world.

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Behind Spotify’s “Discovery Weekly” Playlists

Jason Tate

Nikhil Sonnad, writing for Quartz, looks at the technology behind Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” playlists.

“We now have more technology than ever before to ensure that if you’re the smallest, strangest musician in the world, doing something that only 20 people in the world will dig, we can now find those 20 people and connect the dots between the artist and listeners,” Matthew Ogle, who oversees the service at Spotify, told me recently. “Discovery Weekly is just a really compelling new way to do that at a scale that’s never been done before.”

Although I am a professed album lover, I think these playlists are the best thing Spotify has been doing recently. It’s the kind of personalization that is only going to get better, and the trick of finding someone that next band they love is going to put me out of business.

Albums in Stores – Feb. 5th, 2016

Jason Tate

Ah, Friday … album release day. I’m still not really used to albums coming out on a Friday, it’s just not totally built into my bones yet. The biggest album release this week, in our corner of the world, has felt like Say Anything dropping I Don’t Think It Is. Personally, it’s not doing much for me. If you hit read more you can see all the releases we have in our calendar for the week. An open thread has been made in our forums to talk about what came out today, what albums you picked up, and to make mention of anything we may have missed. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

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Tell Your Mom About Our Show (Episode 115)

Jason Tate

This week’s episode of Encore starts with a discussion about fostering creativity and how we try to stay sharp and inspired and not fall into a rut. It’s hard. We want to be better at it. Then we look at the RIAA changing up how they certify albums, Brand New selling out MSG and announcing some kind of release this year, and looking at the difference between huge stadium like shows versus the small venues we’re used to. We then answer some questions about favorite movies about music, the idea that bands should feel obligated to play “fan favorites” on tours, favorite bands from the UK, and the first albums we ever really anticipated. This week once again (fingers crossed) has chapter marks, so if you subscribe in a podcast player that supports those you should be able to jump right to a topic you want to hear about — if you so desire.

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The Website Obesity Crisis

Jason Tate

Maciej Cegłowski has posted up a transcript and slides from a talk he gave last year at the Web Directions conference. It looks at the “Website Obesity Crisis” and lays out an argument against the growing trend in giant, and I mean giant, homepages.

Let me start by saying that beautiful websites come in all sizes and page weights. I love big websites packed with images. I love high-resolution video. I love sprawling Javascript experiments or well-designed web apps.

This talk isn’t about any of those. It’s about mostly-text sites that, for unfathomable reasons, are growing bigger with every passing year.

While I’ll be using examples to keep the talk from getting too abstract, I’m not here to shame anyone, except some companies (Medium) that should know better and are intentionally breaking the web.

A number of websites have become almost unusable. The cruft, trackers, and garbage is packed on top of social dialog pop-ups, sinful scroll-jacking javascript, and page sizes that are bigger than mp3 files we used to share.

Uber’s New Icon and Logo

Jason Tate

Armin Vit, writing for Brand New (not the band, sorry), looks at the new Uber logo and app icon:

The new one fixes the usability of the logo by going bolder and tighter. On that aspect alone, the logo evolution is a success. Beyond that, there is nothing else nice to say about it but also nothing negative. Okay, well, maybe a couple of things: the inner curves on the bottom halves of the “B”, “E”, and “R” are very awkward and the elliptical (because they are far from rounded) corners are also strange and give the sensation that the letters have been stretched. Overall though, it’s fine. It could be a lot worse, it could be a lot better.

I mostly agree — the wordmark is better, the app icon is shit.

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RIAA Adds Streams Into Certifications

Jason Tate

The RIAA has announced that they will be counting streams as part of certifying albums and singles Gold or Platinum:

After a comprehensive analysis of a variety of factors – including streaming and download consumption patterns and historical impact on the program – and also consultation with a myriad of industry colleagues, the RIAA set the new Album Award formula of 1,500 on-demand audio and/or video song streams = 10 track sales = 1 album sale. Also effective today, RIAA’s Digital Single Award ratio will be updated from 100 on-demand streams = 1 download to 150 on-demand streams = 1 download to reflect streaming’s enormous growth in the two plus years since that ratio was set.

I think this move was inevitable. There’s a good chance that in our lifetime album “sales” will be rendered irrelevant. The full press release can be found below.

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