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Quiksilver, Billabong and Volcom Stores Close

Money
Jason Tate

AP:

Outdoor apparel seller Liberated Brands, which has operated stores for surfer and skater-inspired labels like Quiksilver, Billabong and Volcom, filed for bankruptcy this week — and plans to shutter its locations across the U.S.

Liberated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware court on Sunday. In court documents, the California-based company said it would be winding down and liquidating its North American business after struggling with a series of macroeconomic shocks, supply chain troubles and falling profits due to “fast fashion” rivals.

And a generation of mall cruising pop-punk kids with bleached tips are hit right in the feels.

Spotify Reports First Full-Year Profit

Jason Tate

The Wall Street Journal:

Spotify Technology reported its first ever full year of profitability, fueled by record user growth and austerity measures after years of heavy spending on growth initiatives such as podcasts.

Its fourth-quarter earnings are a sign that the company has been able to wean itself off years of intense investment and transform from a music-streaming service with tough margins to a full-service audio company. 

Shares in the company rose 10%, and are up about 29% on the year. 

“It only took 18 years for us to get here, but we’re here,” Chief Executive Daniel Ek said in an interview.

Bandcamp Announces MusiCares Fundraiser

Bandcamp
Jason Tate

Bandcamp:

On February 7th, from midnight to midnight PST, Bandcamp will donate 100% of its proceeds to MusiCares to aid those affected by the devastating Southern California wildfires. MusiCares provides critical support to the music community, offering mental health counseling, addiction recovery, health services, housing assistance, and more during times of crisis. 

Ground Control to Myspace Tom

Jason Tate

Caitlin Dewey:

In fairness, no one really knows if Anderson would navigate our current social media environment with more or less grace than the current bozos.1 He left the game in 2009, when social media was still widely and unreservedly viewed as a force for social good. His scandals were of the comical and momentary sort; his politics — if he has them — have always seemed wan and vague. 

But the fact that Anderson did retire from tech, and at the tender age of 38, testifies to a political philosophy and a set of values that feel almost radical today. People like Musk and Zuckerberg are hell-bent on amassing unprecedented, indecent stores of power and wealth. Anderson isn’t exactly curing cancer, by comparison … but he’s at least bucked the gospel of infinite extraction.

H/T: Nick Heer

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Her Dad and the 10,000 Records He Left Behind

Jason Tate

Wonderful story over at The Washington Post:

Since September, the 24-year-old Polish Canadian woman has held a daily “listening party” on her Instagram and TikTok pages, @soundwavesoffwax, to explore decades and genres of music that her father, Richard, loved — punk, disco, pop, jazz, techno, new wave and ’60s psych rock. The project has exploded online, resonating with more than 460,000 followers combined so far — and she still has nearly 10,000 records to go.

“I hope to listen to them all,” Jula told me on a blistering winter day from her home in Alberta. “This has been such a beautiful experience for me sonically and emotionally.” Jula spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that only her first name be used out of concern for her safety. Her last name has not been publicized.

Instagram Changes Profile Grid to Rectangles

Instagram
Jason Tate

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Instagram’s profile grids will display content as rectangles instead of squares as part of a change rolling out “over the weekend,” Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said in an Instagram Story on Friday.

“I know some of you really like your squares. And square photos are sort of the heritage of Instagram. But at this point, most of what’s uploaded, both photos and videos, are vertical in their orientation,” Mosseri said. It’s a “bummer to overly crop them,” he added.

Look, there are a lot of things to complain about in regards to social media, so highlighting this one in the grand scheme of things seems a little silly. But still: this change sucks.

Greg Nori and Deryck Whibley Sue Each Other

Sum 41
Jason Tate

Greg Nori and Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley are suing each other.

Court documents reveal the Treble Charger frontman is seeking damages from Whibley for libel, in addition to “breach of confidence, intrusion upon seclusion, wrongful disclosure of private facts, and placing the plaintiff in a false light.”               

Whibley has countered with his own notice of action against Nori, claiming $3 million in damages for “defamation and placing the plaintiff in a false light,” after the prominent Sault musician publicly accused him of being a liar once the allegations of sex abuse against Nori surfaced.  

Guitar Center to Replace Instruments Destroyed in Fire

Guitar
Jason Tate

Guitar Center is offering to replace instruments or gear destroyed by the Los Angeles wildfires.

The Guitar Center Music Foundation and Guitar Center are supporting those affected by the fires in Los Angeles with a special one-time grant replacing instruments and gear destroyed by the fires. We do not offer cash – the grant will only replace instruments and/or gear. Proof of loss or address may be required.

Apple TV+ Is Free This Weekend

Apple TV
Jason Tate

Apple:

Apple TV+ is ringing in the New Year by offering an all-access pass to customers all around the world. Enjoy Apple TV+ for free the first weekend of 2025 (January 3 through January 5), Apple TV+ will be free on any device where Apple TV+ is available. All you need is an Apple ID to see what all the buzz is about.

Severance, Silo, and Shrinking all get recommendations.

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The Disappearing Web

Jason Tate

S.E. Smith, writing for The Verge:

This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be. 

Report: Spotify Filling Playlists with Ghost Artists to Minimize Royalty Costs

Jason Tate

Liz Pelly, writing for Harper’s Magazine:

For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

And:

Another former playlist editor told me that employees were concerned that the company wasn’t being transparent with users about the origin of this material. Still another former editor told me that he didn’t know where the music was coming from, though he was aware that adding it to his playlists was important for the company. “Maybe I should have asked more questions,” he told me, “but I was just kind of like, ‘Okay, how do I mix this music with artists that I like and not have them stand out?’ ”

How Rich Musicians Used Covid Funds

Money
Jason Tate

Business Insider has published a report about how a bunch of very well off artists abused Covid grants. It’s behind a paywall, but there’s a good breakdown on Twitter/X:

Alice in Chains members paid themselves $3.4M from grant the same year they made $48M selling their catalog. Meanwhile, their longtime guitar tech Scott Dachroeden — the exact type of worker this grant was meant to help — had to rely on GoFundMe when he got cancer.

And a summary on Stereogum:

Lil Wayne got a taxpayer-funded $8.9 million grant, and he “spent more than $1.3 million from the grant on private-jet flights and over $460,000 on clothes and accessories, many of them from high-end brands like Gucci and Balenciaga.” Wayne also reportedly used $175,000 of that money on “a music festival promoting his marijuana brand, GKUA” and also used the grant for “flights and luxury hotel rooms for women whose connection to Lil Wayne’s touring operation was unclear, including a waitress at a Hooters-type restaurant and a porn actress.”

Reports: Brand New Perform Live With New Music

Brand New
Jason Tate

NME are reporting that Brand New performed a show in Nashville over the weekend where they played two new songs:

When another fan asked for more details, they went on to explain that Lacey was rumoured to have previously performed “a private family and friends solo show around Christmas”, adding that “this year it was today with the whole band and they played new music”.

There are various other confirmations on Reddit as well.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Talk Scoring Films

Trent Reznor
Jason Tate

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross sat down with IndieWire to talk about scoring films and the state of the music industry:

“What we’re looking for [from film] is the collaborative experience with interesting people. We haven’t gotten that from the music world necessarily, for our own choice,” Reznor said. “You mentioned disillusionment with the music world? Yes. The culture of the music world sucks. That’s another conversation, but what technology has done to disrupt the music business in terms of not only how people listen to music but the value they place on it is defeating. I’m not saying that as an old man yelling at clouds, but as a music lover who grew up where music was the main thing. Music [now] feels largely relegated to something that happens in the background or while you’re doing something else. That’s a long, bitter story.”

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Make Your Own Website

Jason Tate

Gita Jackson, writing on Aftermath:

Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

I didn’t realize how important that was until I started my own website, and I didn’t even learn it from helping to run the damn thing. When I meet people at events, they tell me that they’ve set Aftermath as their homepage. People tell me they love interacting with other people in the comments. They tell me it’s one on a small list of websites, not social media, that they check in on every day. People, it seems, actually like going to a website, and they like that we made one.

This entire article speaks to me.

I’ve recently seen similar sentiments from others, like Louis Manta:

In the last 15 years, many people (myself included) were drawn to third-party solutions for presenting ourselves. For our résumés, LinkedIn. For portfolios, Behance and Dribbble. For blogging, Tumblr, Medium, and Substack. Instead of forums, Discord and Slack. But despite each of these advertising some amount of autonomy, in reality you have very little.

By centralizing not just your content, but yourself, on these sites, you rob yourself the opportunity to be more authentically you. In addition, a peer or competitor might appear next to you. It may not be great for you to have your competitor one click away from your own profile.

As I’ve pulled (way) back from social media over the past few years, I’ve found having a place for my writing, that I control, own, and can present how I want even more appealing.

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