Disney Announces New Streaming Service

Disney

Peter Kafka, writing at Recode:

Disney+ will launch in the US on November 12, for $7 a month. It will have a very large library of old Disney movies and TV shows — crucially, including titles from its Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars catalog — along with new movies and series made exclusively for the streaming service. It won’t have any ads. And it will allow subscribers to download all of that stuff, and watch it offline, whenever they want.

So much new TV. I’m already looking forward to The Sandlot series.

Event Horizon Telescope Captures First-Ever Black Hole Image

Globe

The Washington Post:

The image was produced by the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of 10 radio telescopes spread across the planet and functioning as if it were a single receiver, one tuned to high-frequency radio waves. It represents a technical triumph for the scientists involved, and inaugurates a new era in the study of black holes, galaxy formation, and the laws of physics under extreme conditions.

The M87 black hole appears as a dark shadow within a doughnut-like ring of hot, glowing material.

I thought this video about the black hole was fantastic.

New Study Finds Digital Music Streaming Has Led to Increase in Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Headphones

Jay Gabler, writing at The Current:

[A]ccording to a new study from European researchers. Today’s recording industry might not put as much trash in landfills, but streaming music has actually increased greenhouse gas emissions. It turns out that it takes way more energy to store and stream music than it took to manufacture and distribute hard copies…which may seem crazy, but think about how often you have to recharge your phone.

That’s not to say the old days were all that great for the environment either. Vinyl production peaked in 1977, using 58 million kilograms of plastic. CD production peaked 23 years later, in 2000, and that required 61 million kilograms of plastic. All that plastic production, though, resulted in only about half as much greenhouse gas emission as streaming causes today.

Oh, fun.

Apple Music’s U.S. Subscriber Count Overtakes Spotify

Reuters is reporting that Apple Music has surpassed Spotify in paid monthly U.S. subscribers:

Apple Inc’s streaming music service overtook rival Spotify Technology SA in terms of paid subscribers in the United States, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.

Apple’s service had 28 million subscribers as of the end of February compared with Spotify’s 26 million paid subscribers, the person said.

Billie Eilish Tops Billboard Charts

Billie Eilish

Billie Eilish has the number one album in the country:

Billie Eilish scores her first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, as When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? storms in atop the tally with 313,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending April 4, according to Nielsen Music, scoring the second-largest week of 2019 for any album. Of the album’s starting sum, 170,000 were in album sales, the second-largest sales week for an album this year.

Alex No Longer Fanboying Out Over Mark Hoppus

Simple Creatures

Alex Gaskarth talks about working with Mark Hoppus in the new issue of Rock Sound:

“I did come up on blink and Mark was very much an inspiration to me, but we’ve had the honeymoon period as it were, become good friends… I’m not fanboying out in front of him anymore, like I used to seven years ago! I don’t think the creative process would be as honest if I was sitting there going, ‘Yeah, whatever you think man, I love you!’ We both keep each other in check, and push each other to do better.”

21 Women Accuse Dahvie Vanity of Sexual Assault

Huffpost

HuffPost:

After speaking to Farrell and her mother, Captain Kurt Romanosky, a detective from the Crimes Against Children squad of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, called 22-year-old Jesus David Torres, the man known on Myspace as “Dahvie the Elite Hair God.” Romanosky informed Torres that he was aware of the sexual contact with Farrell, and that her mother would not ask cops to arrest Torres if he cut off contact with her daughter. Torres claimed he didn’t know how young Farrell was, said he was sorry and promised not to talk to her again.

Warning: This article is extremely graphic.

The Artist Formerly Known as Grimes

Grimes

Grimes sat down with Cultured for a new interview:

“The last album was a piece of crap,” she says. “I feel like people really misread it and it feels like a stain on my life.” She resists the notion that she tried to make a pop record, and considers it more of a genre exercise in which she demonstrated her range as a producer. “I just wish I could make music in a vacuum,” she claims, before retorting, “it’s good to make people mad actually, I retract my statement. If you can make people mad without actually hurting anyone, that’s probably a good thing.”

PUP Talk New Album With BrooklynVegan

PUP

PUP talked with BrooklynVegan about their new album, Morbid Stuff:

Yeah, a lot of the record thematically is about working through depression and working through challenges with mental health, but we tried to kind of take a light approach, a gentle approach to it. I think music and this band particularly is supposed to be fun, fun for us and fun for the listeners. We’re in a band ’cause it’s a good time for us, and there’s this weird sort of paradox of you wanna write about the stuff that’s closest to your heart, the stuff that affects you the most. And for me in the past couple of years, that’s been depression and mental health.

Mark Hoppus Talks About Fyre Festival

Mark Hoppus talked with NME about the Fyre Festival disaster:

“It was pretty shocking,” Hoppus told NME of his first viewing of the documentary. “It was shocking but not entirely surprising. We had indications kind of early on that there were problems. Our production crew was having problems getting even the most basic of answers as to staging, power and things that you would normally have well in advance of the show. That being said, us and our crew have always prided ourselves on being able to put on a good show.

“If you give us electricity and a stage then we will do our best to put on a great show. We continued in good faith, the show got closer and closer. Travis [Barker, drums] doesn’t fly so he was going to have to get on a boat for several days to get there then our production crew just said, ‘I don’t think that this is going to happen, I think we should pull out now’. That’s when we issued our statement.”