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Month: June 2018

Apple Music Rolling Out Update With ‘Coming Soon’ Section

Jason Tate

Mitchel Broussard, writing at MacRumors:

Apple appears to be rolling out a series of updates for Apple Music today, including a small but useful new section called “Coming Soon,” which allows subscribers to check out new albums about to be released over the next few weeks. […] In another addition, Apple is now making it possible to easily see album launch dates on their respective pages on iOS and macOS. In the Editors’ Notes section, following the traditional encouragement to add the pre-release album to your library, there’s a new line that begins “Album expected…” followed by the album’s specific release date.

Some nice updates, but what I really want is one feed/section that simply gives me a chronological listing of newly released albums from people already in my collection. On Friday morning I should be able to look one place and see all the new albums from people Apple Music already knows I like and listen to. I’m cool with a smaller scattering of recommendations for new music I may like under that main list as well, but finding the newly released albums from artists I already love should be easy. Half the time I’ll forget I pre-added an album that’s out today and this kind of reminder would be great. Hell, so many of my friends don’t even know their favorite band released new music over the past five years. This is a solvable problem.

Update: I was just looking around in the new Apple Music, and I don’t know if this is new or not, but if you go to the “For You” section and scroll to the very bottom, there’s a “New Releases” section. Clicking “See All” seems pretty close to what I’m talking about. However, it’s definitely missing things from artists in my collection with new albums. For example, that Lykke Li album released today isn’t in my listing even though all of her albums are in my library.

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Spotify Offers Managers, Artists Advances to License Music Directly

Jason Tate

Hannah Karp, writing for Billboard:

Under the terms of some of the deals, management firms can receive several hundred thousand dollars as an advance fee for agreeing to license a certain number of tracks by their independent acts directly to Spotify. Then, in at least some cases, the managers and acts stand to earn 50 percent of the revenue per stream on those songs on Spotify. That’s slightly less than the 54 percent of revenue the major record labels in the U.S. get per stream, on average, according to Billboard’s calculations, but major-label artists and their managers typically receive only 20 percent to 50 percent of the label’s share, depending on an act’s individual royalty rates, and don’t usually get to own their master recordings.

It’s KD’s Fault

Basketball
Jason Tate

Craig Fehrman, writing at Slate:

The NBA has been bad for two years, and it’s Kevin Durant’s fault.

If the Warriors beat the Cavaliers on Friday night, they’ll clinch a second straight title, compiling a playoff record of 32–6 along the way. This team has erased two seasons of potentially exciting basketball as thoroughly as Ted Williams’ military service erased several years of his prime.

The Warriors aren’t the ’96 Bulls. The Warriors were the ’96 Bulls—a 70-plus-win team with a superstar and a championship-level supporting cast. Then they added the second-best player in the league. It’s as if David Robinson decided to join Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago and coast his way to some mid-’90s titles.

I love the NBA and have hated this year’s playoffs and finals. It’s not fun to watch. This article really gets to the why and how an un-competitive league is bad for basketball.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Film
Jason Tate

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the documentary about Fred Rogers, is now out in select cities. The director was recently interviewed for MEL Magazine and shared this great tidbit:

There’s one detail that I really liked that’s not in the film, which is he felt like the shows should be evergreen. As he often said, the outside world of the child changes, but the inside of the child never changes. So he thought his shows should play the same to two-year-olds now or 20 years ago. But as the years would go on, he would find things that had happened in old episodes that didn’t feel current, where maybe he used a pronoun “he” instead of “they” — or he met a woman and presumed that she was a housewife. So he would put on the same clothes and go back and shoot inserts and fix old episodes so that they felt as current as possible, so that he could stand by them 100 percent. I’ve never heard of that happening — it’s kind of amazing.

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‘Stranger Things’ Books Set For Fall Debut

Stranger Things
Jason Tate

Deadline:

Penguin Random House will partner with Netflix on a worldwide publishing deal for books based on the critically acclaimed Netflix original series Stranger Things. The first two titles, set for a release this fall, will be a behind-the-scences companion book and a hardcover gift book for young readers.

Those two books will be followed next spring by a Stranger Things prequel novel, written by author Gwenda Bond, about Eleven’s mother and the MKUltra program. Additional titles for both adults and young readers will arrive later in 2019.

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