Robert Smith of The Cure talked with Shaun Keaveny over at BBC Radio 6. He talks a little about the band preparing to record new music and his upcoming Meltdown Festival.
Robert Smith Talks With BBC Radio 6
The Weeknd Tops the Charts
The Weeknd has topped the charts with his surprise release:
The surprise release, which arrived on March 30 via XO/Republic Records, earned 169,000 equivalent album units in the week ending April 5, according to Nielsen Music — the biggest week for an R&B album in over a year, since his own last album. Of that sum, 68,000 were in traditional album sales.
Also:
Singer Kacey Musgraves collects her third top 10 album, as her seventh studio album Golden Hour bows at No. 4 with 49,000 units (with 39,000 of that sum powered by traditional album sales).
The Lawrence Arms Talk Greatest Hits
Brendan Kelley of The Lawrence Arms talked with Dying Scene about their recent release:
Ever the businessman, Fat Mike of course had a method to his madness. Says Kelly: “He made a good point, or at least I’m attributing this point to him. (He said) ‘the way people consume music these days is that they just go on Spotify and check something out. Wouldn’t you like to have a bunch of good songs in one place so everybody can just go there and you can make sure they’re not getting something that’s not that representative of your band? A greatest hits record is a great way to do that!”
mewithoutYou Aiming for Fall Release
Chris Payne of Billboard talked with the bands on Paramore’s Parahoy tour and revealed that mewithoutYou are working on a new album with Will Yip that will see a fall release:
Mazzotta: “We finished a banger with [producer] Will Yip. It bangs! I’m pretty hyped on it. It took a long time to make, too. It took over a year… It’s still not 100% done, I’m going back into the studio the week we get home.”
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What About ‘The Breakfast Club’?
Molly Ringwald, writing at The New Yorker:
I made three movies with John Hughes; when they were released, they made enough of a cultural impact to land me on the cover of Time magazine and to get Hughes hailed as a genius. His critical reputation has only grown since he died, in 2009, at the age of fifty-nine. Hughes’s films play constantly on television and are even taught in schools. There is still so much that I love in them, but lately I have felt the need to examine the role that these movies have played in our cultural life: where they came from, and what they might mean now. When my daughter proposed watching “The Breakfast Club” together, I had hesitated, not knowing how she would react: if she would understand the film or if she would even like it. I worried that she would find aspects of it troubling, but I hadn’t anticipated that it would ultimately be most troubling to me.
‘High Fidelity’ TV Series With Female Lead in Works
Deadline is reporting that a new TV series based on Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity will be coming to Disney’s new streaming service:
I hear a romantic comedy TV series inspired by Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity and the 2000 feature starring John Cusack is in early development for Disney’s upcoming direct-to-consumer service. The project, a gender-swapped take on the classic title, comes from writers Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka (Bull, Ugly Betty), the Midnight Radio producing team and ABC Signature Studios (SMILF), the cable/streaming division of ABC Studios.
The Productive Outs Podcast Returns
Productive Outs, the baseball podcast featuring Riley Brekenridge of Thrice, has returned with a new episode and a Patreon for the podcast.
The History of Pro Tools
Mike Thornton, writing over at Pro Tools Expert, goes through a history of Pro Tools from 1983 up to the present day:
The history of Pro Tools goes all the way back to 1983 with the release of E-MU’s Drumulator drum machine. Evan Brooks and Peter Gotcher, who were high school friends and both graduated from the University of California saw an opportunity and set about creating new sound libraries for the Drumulator and set up Digidrums, and offered upgrade EPROM microchips a year after the release of the E-MU drum machine.
Spotify Goes Public
Spotify went public today. Market Watch has some of the numbers:
The stock’s first trade was at $165.90 at 12:43 p.m. ET for 5.7 million shares, according to FactSet, or 27% above the reference price of $132. The stock then rose to an intraday high of $169, before falling to a low of $148.48. The stock was recently 9.8% below its opening price in afternoon trade.
Tom DeLonge Announces ‘Sekret Machines: Book 2’
Tom DeLonge as announced Sekret Machines: Book 2: A Fire Within. It’ll be out on September 18th and pre-orders are now up. The plot synopsis of this “novel based on actual events” is as follows:
A Fire Within continues the story of heiress Jennifer Quinn, journalist Timika Mars, pilot Alan Young and ex-Marine Barry Regis – four people bonded by the incidents they’ve witnessed and who are being hunted by agents of a wealthy corporate cabal desperate for unimaginable power and possessed of extraordinary abilities they don’t understand, much less control. Now the quartet is on a mission of their own: as Alan and Barry test the limits of their strange gifts inside the military complex known as Dreamland, Jennifer and Timika begin a quest to locate an ancient tablet that may hold the answers to humanity’s greatest question: Are we alone in the universe?”
Cloudflare Announces Privacy-First DNS Service
Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We’re excited today to take another step toward that mission with the launch of 1.1.1.1 — the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service. This post will talk a little about what that is and a lot about why we decided to do it.
Lucas Matney, writing at TechCrunch:
The company says that the new service will help keep some data out of ISPs’ hands and that they won’t keep data in their hands for long either. Cloudflare has pledged to both never write users’ IP addresses to disk and that they’ll purge all logs from their system after 24 hours.
You can find out how to use this service on different devices here.
Amazon’s Music Storage Shutting Down in April
Nick Statt, writing at The Verge:
We’ve known since last year that Amazon Music was planning to shut down its dedicated cloud music locker. Now, we have a date for when that process will begin. In an email to Amazon Music users, the company says uploaded songs will be removed from a user’s library on April 30th, 2018. You can however keep any music in the cloud by proactively going to your Music Settings and clicking the “Keep my songs” button.
The (Not Great) Business of Streaming Music
Keith Nelson Jr. sat down with Pandora’s vice president of global content licensing, Elizabeth Moody, to talk about streaming services, the future of music licensing, and the inherent issues these services are seeing trying to turn a profit:
I think that it’s going to take a shift in the structure of the industry to really allow digital services like Spotify or other competitors to have a fully sustainable business. You see pure-play services like Spotify and Pandora suffering while there are companies like Amazon and Google and Apple that can use music as a loss leader for other services. […] I mean, right now, the record labels (and then the music publishers) are really taking the lion’s share of the revenue. You know, sometimes the artists or others will argue it’s getting stuck at the labels. I think it’s a more complicated problem than just saying, “Oh they’re not paying the artists.”