My girlfriend’s new album is up for pre-order on Amazon.
Hannah’s Album Up for Pre-Order
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FEATURES, BLOGS, & REVIEWS
A Conversation Adam Silver
Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, talked with Strategy Business:
We promote the posting of our highlights. The highlights are identified through YouTube’s software, and when ads are sold against them, we share in the revenue. We analogize our strategy to snacks versus meals. If we provide those snacks to our fans on a free basis, they’re still going to want to eat meals — which are our games. There is no substitute for the live game experience. We believe that greater fan engagement through social media helps drive television ratings.
This is a really good interview that dives into how the NBA is using data and the internet to grow their product. Very forward thinking.
In the Spotlight Playlist (2018)
Earlier this week we unveiled our “In the Spotlight” feature with a bunch of artists we think are worthy of your time. In the feature we’ve got blurbs and “recommended if you like” hints to try and convince you to listen to the bands, but sometimes just having all the recommended tracks in a playlist to churn through is the way to go.
The playlist is available on Apple Music and Spotify.
In the Spotlight: 50 Bands You Need to Hear in 2018 (Part Two)
Today we’re happy to bring you part two of our “In the Spotlight” feature. We’ve got another group of artists that we think are worthy of your time and ears. Our contributors have made their picks, put together blurbs, and pulled out recommended songs.
If you missed part one, you can find that here.
Read More “In the Spotlight: 50 Bands You Need to Hear in 2018 (Part Two)”
Download Streaming Media
This question was originally answered in the Q&A Thread in the forums.
How do you rip audio from YouTube? I’ve been meaning to rip a Bellows acoustic session from YT for a while now but I want to make sure the audio quality is good, I figured you know the best way of doing this haha.
So there’s the easy way, and then the way I do it.
Getting Out of a Creative Funk
This question was originally answered in the Q&A Thread in the forums.
Jason how do you get out of a creative funk? I’m working on a project I can’t motivate myself to finish. Always looking for new ways to cope.
Most of the time when I find myself in a creative funk it boils down to me not feeling inspired. There are times where there’s just something I don’t really feel like doing, and so I end up procrastinating.
How Do You Use Drafts?
This question was originally answered in the Q&A Thread in the forums.
[D]o you have any sort of organizational system in Drafts? My issue seems to be putting something in there and never remembering to go back to it/act on it. Also, do you have it open a new draft every time you open the app? I can’t decide if I like that or if I want it to just go to the last used/opened one.
And what type of stuff do you usually put in there? I’m hoping to mainly use it for when I get recs from someone, article ideas, and things like that.
So by and large what Drafts is for me is the starting place for everything, and not the end. Where things end up and how I store most of my text files/notes is a much longer post (combo of flat text files and Ulysses). But what I use Drafts for is a way to quickly get things down and then do something with it. I’ll dive into that process a little more.
In the Spotlight: 50 Bands You Need to Hear in 2018 (Part One)
Last year we brought back, and re-branded, one of my favorite features from the AbsolutePunk days: the “Absolute 100.” And as we enter May and the weather finally starts to turn around a little bit, it’s the perfect time to once again team up with our contributors to bring you a whole bunch of new music to check out.
Just like years past we’ve compiled a list of 50 artists we think are worth your time. Some of the artists recently released their debut albums and some have been around for a while now but have flown under the radar. However, the one thing they all have in common is that we think they should be in the spotlight and are worthy of your ears. You’ll find the first group of 25, along with blurbs, recommended songs, and sounds like comparisons, below.
Read More “In the Spotlight: 50 Bands You Need to Hear in 2018 (Part One)”
Artists of Chorus.fm Playlist
One of our community members (teebs41) has put together a playlist featuring songs from bands and artists that are regular members of our forum community. You can find the playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.
Arrogance Peaks in Silicon Valley
M.G. Siegler, writing on Medium:
There’s something that has been in the back of my mind for some time now. And while it pre-dates the Facebook fiasco, that situation certainly brings it to the forefront. Increasingly, it feels like people in our industry, the tech industry, are losing touch with reality.
You can see it in the tweets. You can hear it at tech conferences. Hell, you can hear it at most cafes in San Francisco on any given day. People — really smart people — saying some of the most vacuous things. Words that if they were able to take a step outside of their own heads and hear, they’d be embarrassed by.
Bohemians – “Start Creating” (Video Premiere)
Today we’ve got the premiere of the new video for “Start Creating” from the band Bohemians. The band reminds me a little bit of Bad Suns mixed with Spitalfield-like melodies. It’s an upbeat and relaxed sound. Describing the video the band said:
We loved the idea of a video where the audience sees from the perspective of a piece of art, as if it were staring back and studying it’s creator and the people who interact with it. We’re quite closely acquainted with the feeling of putting our work out into the world and wondering how the folks who receive it react. So this video became the literal manifestation of that curiosity.
What Did the Stoics Think About Fame?
Much of Stoicism has to do with reacting to what comes at us with equanimity and poise. But this, too, is important: Quelling and quieting that voice in your head that becomes seduced by the desires for accolades and applause. You don’t need them. You think you want them but that’s because you don’t actually understand what they are. In truth things are nothing by themselves. In practice, they are liabilities and not assets.
A Gentleman’s Guide to the NBA: When Players Agree to Take Plays Off
Thanks to Jokic, Bell learned earlier than most this important lesson about NBA life: In a sport in which games can last nearly three hours and seasons almost nine months, it becomes essential to save strength for the more important moments. After all, 100 percent effort on 100 percent of plays would sap even the greatest of deities of their godly gifts and transform contests into stumbling slogs.
And so to avoid this descent into the mud, many players strike unofficial pacts with their opponents. Possessions are punted, secrets are traded, game plans are passed along. It’s not that these players don’t care about the outcomes of games. Think of it, instead, as a sort of gentleman’s pact between players, one governing action across the NBA.
I found this article fascinating.
Watch MLB TV in Picture in Picture on a Mac
It’s baseball season again, and there’s some good news for people who use MLB TV to watch out-of-market games on their Mac: This is the year that Major League Baseball has finally ditched Flash or Silverlight or whatever they were previously using for desktop streaming. This is nice, because it means I can use Safari (my preferred browser) rather than Chrome (which I keep around for sites that aren’t compatible with Safari or require Flash). But there’s a great side effect: It finally gives Macs the ability to do what iPads have been able to do for a couple of years, namely pop a baseball game into Picture in Picture mode, so it floats above other windows on your screen without any browser chrome getting in the way. […] Still, I was able to enable the Picture in Picture mode by using PiPifier, an app in the Mac App Store that adds a picture-in-picture button to the Safari toolbar.
You can grab the extension here. It works great.
The Second Anniversary of Chorus.fm
Today marks the second anniversary of Chorus.fm. Sometimes it feels like the world is stuck in slow motion with so much news and chaos surrounding us and the days making the weeks feel like months. But then I also can’t figure out where the last two years went. It feels like it was just yesterday that I was saying goodbye to AbsolutePunk.net, and hoping that some readers would follow me here to Chorus. I want to thank all of you that have been reading the website the past two years. I’m finally coming to the point where I don’t feel like everything I’ve done has been defined by AP.net, and where what I’m doing now, this website, this community, can be something that at the very least fulfills me in a way that AbsolutePunk never really could. It’s like looking at pictures of what you wore in high-school and wanting to yell through time to buy clothes that fit. Chorus.fm feels like it fits me. And every day I feel lucky that it’s something that I get to do. So, thank you, all of you. Especially those that have become supporters and helped make this website everything that it is.
Here’s a run down some of the numbers from the last 12 months:
- 4,257 new articles posted on the main site. (9,402 total.)
- 1,420,222 words have been published on Chorus.1
- 1,002,023 new forum posts. (1,897,160 total.)
- 47,191 new registered accounts. (81,957 total.)
- 1,779,477 likes given out since last April.
- 5,106 private message sent per month (average).
I’ve got a lot of things planned for this year. The goal is to improve the website and try some new things. As always, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, email, or in the forums with thoughts, ideas, or concerns about the website. And if you like what we’re doing, please give our supporter options a look. If you can swing $3 a month to help us out, it would mean the world to me. It’s with the support of readers like you that we’re able to keep publishing and stay online.
I’m using a new tool to calculate the number of words published this year. It should be more accurate going forward. 730,299 of these words were written by me.↩