Month: June 2016

Drake Continues Run at Top of the Charts

Jason Tate

Drakespends his seventh week at number one on the Billboard charts. Nick Jonas debuts at number two and the Hamilton soundtrack rises up to number three.

At No. 3 on the Billboard 200 is the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton, which zooms from No. 13 to No. 3 following its huge night at the Tony Awards on June 12. (The set earned 62,000 units — up 119 percent, with 45,000 of that in traditional album sales — up 164 percent). This is Hamilton’s first week in the top 10, as it had previously topped out at No. 11. It debuted at No. 12.

Blink-182 Talk the Scrapped Songs

Jason Tate

Blink-182 talk with Gigwise about the songs they scrapped from California:

“It’s not that we scrapped the other 30, we just forgot about them. They’re still on a hard drive, there are some great ideas in there, but I feel like they’re sketches – they’re us practising, throwing ideas around and getting comfortable playing music with one another.”

180 Artists Sign Petition For Digital Copyright Reform

YouTube
Jason Tate

Rob Levine, writing for Billboard, on how 180 musicians have signed a petition to close some of the loopholes from the DMCA:

In an ad that will run Tuesday through Thursday in the Washington DC magazines Politico, The Hill, and Roll Call, 180 performers and songwriters are calling for reform of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which regulates copyright online. A range of big names from every genre signed the ad — from Taylor Swift to Sir Paul McCartney, Vince Gill to Vince Staples, Carole King to the Kings of Leon — as did 19 organizations and companies, including the major labels.

I think this is good, but also hope they don’t go too far in the other direction. As someone that runs a forum where anyone can sign up and create an account, some of the safe harbor protections of the DMCA make a forum of that size possible.