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Apple Music Commissions New Playlist Art

Jason Tate

Apple Music is commissioning new custom playlist artwork:

The artwork is meant to “connect more directly with the communities and the culture for which they were intended,” says Rachel Newman, Apple’s global director of editorial. Before now, Apple’s playlists had a uniform presentation that didn’t necessarily speak to the music. “In many ways, it’s a visual representation of the music that you will find inside that playlist,” said Newman. That includes Hip Hop Hits, Dale Reggaetón, and The Riff, which are all immensely popular.

Foals Talk About Their New Album

Foals
Jason Tate

Foals breakdown their new album, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1., for Consequence of Sound:

I like records where there’s an opening of a space. You feel like you’re going through a wormhole, you’re going through a warp or it’s one of those old, cheesy TV effects from the ’60s where the picture wobbles and you know you’re into this alternate place. I think that this idea of making a record that has a define sense of place to it was important; it’s a very linked landscape. With that track, I just wanted it to be like a cleanser you go into it. The lyrics infer this idea of moving from the past into the future and it felt like the right way to start the record.

Mark Hoppus & Alex Gaskarth Talk About Simple Creatures

Simple Creatures
Jason Tate

Mark Hoppus and Alex Gaskarth sit down with Alt. Press to talk about Simple Creatures:

The first thing we did was like a diet blink-182 or diet All Time Low. It wasn’t great. We listened back and decided it wasn’t what we wanted to do at all. We started off with a completely different mindset. We had this idea of everything opposite: Whatever you’d normally do, try and do something different. If something made us feel like it wasn’t something we wouldn’t normally do, we took it as a good thing. We were trying to get away from traditional recording techniques and embracing strange keyboard sounds and ratty, shitty guitars, buzzy subs and programmed drums.

Sigrid Goes Track-by-Track Through ‘Sucker Punch’

Sigrid
Jason Tate

Sigrid released her fantastic debut album, Sucker Punch, today and breaks down the album for MTV:

“I wanted ‘Don’t Feel Like Crying’ to be a fun song,” she said. “I wanted it to be something to distract people from the sad stuff and just dance, and then when they listen to it at a club or a party with their friends, they’ll be like, ‘Woah! This is such a tune.’ But then when they listen to it alone, maybe on their way home from the party or going for a run or just sitting at home on the couch, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, this is actually really sad.’ I love that — when you can get the song to work in different types of environments.”

Zebrahead Breakdown New Album

Zebrahead
Jason Tate

Zebrahead’s new album is out today and the band did a track-by-track breakdown over at Punktastic:

We recorded this song initially with live instruments and then went back and added some loops in order to create the rap verses. In this album, we experimented more with adding loops as the song writing progressed, rather than having them be an afterthought. I really love how the chorus kicks in and lifts the entire songs. This is one of my favourites on the album.

Spotify, Google, Pandora, Amazon Go to U.S. Appeals Court to Overturn Royalty Increase

Jason Tate

Jem Aswad and Chris Willman, writing at Variety:

Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon have teamed up to appeal a controversial ruling by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that, if it goes through, would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%, Variety has learned. […] Sources say that Apple Music is alone among the major streaming services in not planning to appeal — as confirmed by songwriters’ orgs rushing to heap praise on Apple while condemning the seemingly unified front of the other digital companies.

Keith Buckley Talks About Upcoming The Damned Things Album

The Damned Things
Jason Tate

Keith Buckley talked with Alt Press about the upcoming The Damned Things album:

“There were so many different personalities rearing their head on our last record; it was like we were all trying to represent the bands from which we came, and it ended up not being loyal to any of them,” he continues. “It was a strange mix of styles, and at the time, I appreciated it because I was working with geniuses and icons, but having sat on that album for 10 years, and with it just being Andy, Joe, Scott and I this time around, we’ve come out with something that feels like the stuff [we] should’ve been writing in the first place. This is rawer, less polished and less self-aware than last time. High Crimes is fun music with a cool attitude to it.”

The 1975 on Tape Notes Podcast

The 1975
Jason Tate

The 1975 are on the latest episode of the Tape Notes podcast.

John ventures up to Spitfire Audio to meet with Matty and George from The 1975 to talk about how the album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships was recorded and produced.

Somewhat bleary eyed after a massive night at the Brits (scooping two awards), the boys reveal the inner workings of The 1975’s production methods and writing techniques. We’re treated to demo versions and extensive track breakdowns from their award winning album showing what it takes to create a 1975 hit.

Here’s the Overcast link.

The Japanese House Interview With The Independent

The Japanese House
Jason Tate

Alexandra Pollard, writing at The Independent:

“Most of the songs were written before the breakup, which is weird because it does sound like a breakup record,” says Bain, as we settle on the floor beneath the shade of a tree. “I’ve analysed them retrospectively, and it feels like they’re about a breakup, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking, ‘I wanna break up with Marika’. I guess I was breaking up with a portion of myself as well. And that’s really hard to do. A lot of like, issues that I had… I had loads of anger and lots of weird stuff, like drinking and drug taking.”

The new album came out last week and it gets my full recommendation. It’s damn good.

Fuck You And Die: An Oral History of Something Awful

Jason Tate

Taylor Wofford. writing at Motherboard:

I find Twitter’s situation to be of their own making. They never concretely set out a set of rules. When I first started the forums, I wrote four pages of rules and a catch-all at the end: If there’s something else we don’t like, we’re going to ban you. We have every right to ban you and that’s it. With Twitter, they never defined anything. They never said what’s allowed, what isn’t allowed, what will happen. They just kind of floated around. If something got really out of hand they would get rid of it, but since they had no concrete rules, they had no active moderation, people didn’t know what was or what wasn’t allowed. They dug their own grave and now they’re way too far into it to dig out.[…]

It was an insane amount of work. You’re trying to do your best to make the place better and you’re getting shit on constantly. There’s just no way to win, so you just do your best to enforce the rules that everyone agreed on and hope that some lunatic who got banned doesn’t try to post your address, which has happened to most of them.

I’m not sure how many of you remember Something Awful or the internet in the early 2000s, but as someone that ran a website and forum during that period, I related to a lot of this article. I never spent much time around these specific forums, but faced many of the same challenges at AP.net.