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Amazon’s Aggressive Anti-Union Tactics Revealed

Jeff Bezos
Jason Tate

Bryan Menegus, writing for Gizmodo:

Amazon, the country’s second-largest employer, has so far remained immune to any attempts by U.S. workers to form a union. With rumblings of employee organization at Whole Foods—which Amazon bought for $13.7 billion last year—a 45-minute union-busting training video produced by the company was sent to Team Leaders of the grocery chain last week, according to sources with knowledge of the store’s activities. Recordings of that video, obtained by Gizmodo, provide valuable insight into the company’s thinking and tactics.

WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind

Facebook
Jason Tate

Parmy Olson, writing at Forbes:

It’s also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? “At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton says. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”

Pinegrove Address “Sexual Coercion” and Announce a New Album

Pinegrove
Jason Tate

Jenn Pelly, writing at Pitchfork:

Since late 2017, both the band and the alleged victim have focused on coming to a private resolution via a trusted mediator. Until that resolution was reached, Hall said, “there was really no way for us to offer any clarification” to their fans. It was the alleged victim’s request that Pinegrove take a year off from touring and that Hall enter therapy. “We wanted to honor that,” Hall said. “She recognized that we’ve honored it, and has since approved our plan to release an album and play some shows later on this year.” (Their mediator confirmed this.)

Instagram’s Co-Founders Leave Company

Instagram
Jason Tate

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of the photo-sharing app Instagram, have resigned and plan to leave the company in coming weeks, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. The exits add to the challenges facing Instagram’s parent company, Facebook.

Mr. Systrom, Instagram’s chief executive, and Mr. Krieger, the chief technical officer, notified Instagram’s leadership team and Facebook on Monday of their decision to leave, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Whoa. This isn’t a good sign for the future of Instagram.

Anti-Flag Talk With PunkNews

Jason Tate

Anti-Flag recently sat down with PunkNews to talk about their upcoming acoustic album:

I think that led into this acoustic piece perfectly because we find ourselves chasing our tail with Donald Trump where the story changes every fucking minute. It’s hard not to be knee jerk reactionary to them because they are all vital and important things that are happening. There are still kids in fucking cages. The narrative has changed. How do we let our art not become just as much static and noise as everything else? This was a way for us to revisit some ideas and themes over the last two records that got lost in the shuffle because we have to talk about so many different things and so many different moments.

My Thanks to Sons of Stereo

Sons of Stereo
Jason Tate

My thanks to Sons of Stereo for sponsoring the website this week. The band recently released their debut single, “West Coast,” to all digital outlets. The song has a breezy catchy quality to it that seems to mix old fan favorites with some of the newer stylings in our music world. It’s good, you should listen to it!

This single was produced by Kevin Gates (Never Shout Never, The Ready Set) and Nashville-based producer Andrew Pacheco and there will be more music from the band coming very soon. The video for the song can be found on YouTube, and you can follow the band’s social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) for tour dates and to stay up to date on when new music is released.

Read More “My Thanks to Sons of Stereo”

A Brief Inquiry Into The 1975

The 1975
Jason Tate

Dan Stubbs, writing for NME:

A Cole Porter-like jazz song sounds like a standard and has the killer lyric “I fight crime online sometimes”; a new wave pop song is outwardly about love but is not so subtly an ode to heroin (“I’ve got a 20-stone monkey on my back”), there’s a fragile, beautiful ballad about guilt, one song employs the kind of plastic piano sound last heard on Glenn Medeiros’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You’; a ‘90s-style alt-rock track, ‘I Always Wanna Die Sometimes’, is a stirringly moving song about depression; a spoken word piece, voiced by Siri, skewers our relationship with the internet in a modern parable. And even in this jumbled up state, it sounds like a masterpiece, a game-changer, a bar-raiser. An absolute stone cold legend masterpiece. It sounds like they’ve done what Matty said all that time ago: they’ve made ‘OK Computer’ for a new generation of kids – ’Snowflake Computer’, if you will.

Streaming Accounts for 75% of Music Industry Revenue

Jason Tate

The RIAA have released their mid-year revenue report for the music industry. Patricia Hernandez, writing at The Verge, has a good rundown:

Turns out, streaming makes more money than physical CDs, digital downloads, and licensing deals combined.

Streaming in this context includes paid subscriptions to services such as Spotify and Tidal, but also digital radio broadcasts and video streaming services such as VEVO. It’s a broad category that nonetheless has made $3.4 billion dollars in 2018 so far, a total that amounts to 75 percent of overall revenue for the record industry.

Ticketmaster Recruits Pros for Secret Scalper Program

Ticketmaster
Jason Tate

CBC News:

Box-office giant Ticketmaster is recruiting professional scalpers who cheat its own system to expand its resale business and squeeze more money out of fans, a CBC News/Toronto Star investigation reveals. […] Company representatives told them Ticketmaster’s resale division turns a blind eye to scalpers who use ticket-buying bots and fake identities to snatch up tickets and then resell them on the site for inflated prices. Those pricey resale tickets include extra fees for Ticketmaster.

Spotify to Allow Indie Artists to Upload Music Directly to Service

Jason Tate

Dan Rys, writing at Billboard:

Beginning today (Sept. 20), Spotify will begin allowing a select group of independent artists the ability to upload their music directly onto the streaming platform through their Spotify For Artists account, the company announced. […] For those artists who control their copyrights and do not have label or distribution agreements in place, they can log into their Spotify For Artists account, upload their music, fill in relevant metadata information, preview how the upload will look on their page and set the song to go live at a pre-scheduled time