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Amazon Prime Video Will Start Showing Ads on January 29th

amazon
Jason Tate

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th. “This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

Big loser energy.

The NYT Sues Open AI and Microsoft

Legal
Jason Tate

New York Times:

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.

The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

Bluesky Posts Now Open to Public

Technology
Jason Tate

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Bluesky remains an invite-only decentralized Twitter alternative, but now, you don’t need to have an account and log in to be able to see posts on the platform, according to a blog post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Now, anyone can easily see posts from both the web and from the Bluesky app — like this one.

If you want to prevent people who aren’t logged in from seeing your posts, you can “discourage” that by clicking a toggle in settings. But Bluesky notes that “other apps may not honor this request” and that the toggle doesn’t make your account private.

I have an account on Bluesky, but I haven’t found myself using it much. In fact, as Twitter/X have gone up in dumpster-fire flames of Oppenheimer proportions, the more I’ve started to think about if I even want or need this kind of service in my life. There’s a real lack of joy, and besides the Absurdist Twitter thread, I am finding less an less value in any of them. I’ve been spending more time curating my RSS feeds and have replaced the Mastodon/X/Threads space on my home screen with my RSS reader. Kicking social media off the first screen of my phone, so far, has felt like a net positive.

Spotify Protests New Tax in France

Jason Tate

Paul Sawers, writing for TechCrunch:

Spotify is pulling support for two music festivals in protest against a controversial new tax directed at music-streaming platforms operating in France, and threatened more action will follow in the coming months.

Antoine Monin, managing director for Spotify in the France and Benelux regions, took to X this week to decry a new tax that will impose a levy of what is expected to be between 1.5 and 1.75% on all music-streaming services, with the proceeds going toward the Centre National de la Musique (CNM), which was established in 2020 to support the French music sector.

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SCP Merchandising Closes Down

Billboard
Jason Tate

Billboard:

SCP Merchandising, an Illinois-based merch company used by artists including Mitski, Father John Misty and Carly Rae Jepsen, has shut down, according to a member of SCP leadership still on-site after the company laid off its staff over the weekend. 

Based on accounts from multiple former SCP employees on LinkedIn, the company’s employees were abruptly laid off on Sunday evening (Dec. 17). The source tells Billboard that the company will most likely file for bankruptcy and that there is no process yet for clients to retrieve their merchandise, but that those with outstanding balances will not be able to do so until they pay those off with SCP or a potential bankruptcy trustee. They add that priority will be given to clients who have no balance due as well as those who are arranging for payment of unpaid bills.

New Interview With Jack Antonoff

Bleachers
Jason Tate

Jack Antonoff recently talked with Vulture:

There’s a song called “Tiny Moves,” which no one’s heard yet. The real story there is I started writing music when I was 14 or 15, and my younger sister was sick then. She died when I was 18, so all my formative experiences with writing music were writing about this massive, heavy, big loss and grief. Then, obviously, that grief grows and changes. It’s such a fertile place to write from, and I’d felt a little bit resigned, not in a comfortable way, just like, Okay, my place in life as a writer is to write about loss through the lens of age. And don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of that on this album. But I met my now-wife, and it feels like a lot of the mythology and armor that I wore — we all say, like, “I can’t get relationships right,” “I don’t do this,” “I’m bad at this.” And when you have a big shift like that, which was really meeting my person, it’s brilliant and amazing, but it’s also destabilizing ’cause you have to deal with all of the past, where you lived by this code that was bullshit. And within that, I found myself writing more conversationally, very deep and very intense. How do you have such a great loss and then also explore other parts of life? I wasn’t able to do that in the past, because I felt like it was not honoring my loss to write about anything else. So, this is the first album where I explore other things, and there’s presence to it that I haven’t had.

Rome Ramierz Departs Sublime

Sublime With Rome
Jason Tate

Rome is leaving Sublime with Rome.

Briefly, in 2009, Wilson and Ramirez toured under the name Sublime but were sued by the Nowell family and eventually reached a legal settlement and license agreement with Nowell’s wife, Troy Dendekker, to tour under the moniker Sublime with Rome.

While Wilson and Ramirez were touring and performing, Jakob was developing his own musical talents, forming the Long Beach band LAW in 2013. Earlier this year, Jakob and his mother agreed with Wilson and Gaugh to relaunch Sublime with Jakob at the helm under the management of Kevin Zinger and Joe Escalante.

What this development means for Rome Ramirez is not totally clear. In a statement, the singer announced that “after almost two remarkable decades, I am announcing my departure from Sublime with Rome at the close of 2024. The upcoming performances over the next year will allow us to reflect on countless incredible memories together!”

Read More “Rome Ramierz Departs Sublime”

Apple Offers Reward for Musicians to Use High-End Audio Format

Jason Tate

Ashley Carman, writing for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is offering incentives to artists and record labels to produce music using a spatial-audio technology that surrounds listeners in sound.

Starting next year, the company plans to give added weighting to streams of songs that are mixed in Dolby Atmos technology, according to people with knowledge of matter. That could mean higher royalty payments for artists who are first to embrace the technology made by Dolby Laboratories Inc., said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change hasn’t been announced.

I’m not a fan of this as long as many Dolby Atmos mixes remain subpar and rushed. I’ve talked to multiple artists in the genre we cover that never even knew their songs were remixed for Atmos and had no say in the matter (and often disliked the mix). I don’t personally turn the setting on for this very reason.

New Paramore Interview

Paramore
Jason Tate

Uproxx:

Now that Paramore has spent the year touring behind This Is Why (and making sure to take better care of themselves while they’re at it), a chapter of the band’s career has come to a close. They’ve now fulfilled all label obligations and are effectively free agents. As for the future of Paramore, all three members agreed that there’s a level of uncertainty. But one thing’s for sure — they’re still going to be together, and they’re still going to keep having fun. “The only thing that matters is we will still get to be each other’s community,” Williams says. Farro agrees: “I just hope we can keep building the Paramore empire and then rule the world.” And wherever they end up, the massive community of fans Paramore has cultivated will be here for them, too.

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New Fall Out Boy Interview

Fall Out Boy
Jason Tate

Billboard:

Now we just live in this time — and it’s not music; I look at my kids and they curate their own thing. They just go, “I like this and I like this,” and put it together. I think that that benefits a band like us because you know, we love Jay-Z, and then we’re referencing Metallica. We’re just a little bit all over the place, and I think we put out an album that felt free. And also when we put it out, it was coming out of living inside for a year and a half or whatever that was. So, I think this could be this niche Fall Out Boy record. It is what it is; I think there was some freedom in doing that, when we weren’t on the timetable of a label or the timetable of culture saying that you gotta do this (at) this time or whatever. I think the record benefited from the time.

Weezer Talk ‘Blue Album’ Anniversary

Weezer
Jason Tate

Weezer will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the their Blue Album with a tour and deluxe album reissue.

“We’re putting ideas together,” Cuomo says, adding that the band didn’t do anything exciting to celebrate the album’s 20th anniversary, so they want to do it this time. “It’s just this tidal wave of passion,” the singer and guitarist says of the fans’ obsession with the record, “So, we are going to give it its due respect and come out with a really amazing deluxe package with a bunch of additional material, and of course, we’ve gotta do some kind of epic tour.”

Deryck Whibley Talks with GQ

Sum 41
Jason Tate

Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 talked with GQ in a wide ranging interview:

It’s partly the same reason that, last August, Whibley decided to sell the rights to Sum 41’s entire publishing-and-recorded-music catalog to an investment fund called Harbourview Equity Partners for an undisclosed sum. For a long time, despite several approaches, “I was so against selling it,” he says. “My songs are my babies, and I didn’t need the money.”

Then he started to question what he was so afraid of losing. He decided to conduct a thought experiment: “I told myself, Okay, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and act like I’ve sold it. What does that feel like? I woke up scared shitless. I had no songs. And I felt so excited and I picked up a guitar just naturally. Almost right away I wrote “Landmines”. And then I wrote another one, and then another one, and then I had another riff, and it was like, holy shit.” Letting go of his songs—much in the way he’s letting go of the band entirely now—unlocked a vital hunger inside of Whibley. “I felt the way I did when I first got signed. I felt the pressure and the need to create something.”

What he wound up creating was Heaven :x: Hell, a double album slated for early 2024 that should serve as the perfect capstone to the band’s two distinct eras: one side entirely All Killer–style pop-punk jams, the other full of the scorching metal headbangers they’ve favored lately. “I feel like there’s no other band in our genre that can just so easily pull this off,” Whibley says. “We have our own lane. It’s a great last record.”

Spotify Announces More Layoffs

Jason Tate

Spotify has announced they are laying off 1,500 people:

This brings me to a decision that will mean a significant step change for our company. To align Spotify with our future goals and ensure we are right-sized for the challenges ahead, I have made the difficult decision to reduce our total headcount by approximately 17% across the company. I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us.

Meanwhile, the stock spiked on the news so the CFO cashed in.

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Pale Waves Working on New Album

Pale Waves
Jason Tate

Pale Waves are working on a new album:

So all of my attention and energy is going into writing and recording our best album yet. Ultimately, that’s about building a world that feels like Pale Waves, while also feeling completely different to anywhere we’ve inhabited before. We’re creating another universe for our fans to explore, and for us to live in for a moment.

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