NF has the number one album in the country this week:
The set was released on Oct. 6 through NF Real Music/Capitol/Caroline and starts with 55,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Oct. 12, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 38,000 were in traditional album sales — NF’s best sales week yet.
Hit the Lights have posted an update about the status and future of the band on Facebook:
With that being said, Hit The Lights is proud to announce that we have partnered with our good friend and ally Rick King to create King Sound. Through King Sound, we will be releasing a new song each month. Consistently. Because we have the freedom and the means to do it. People will have the ability to download songs early by purchasing special edition items though our online stores and investing money in us to continue this venture. We’ll be working out the kinks as we go, but the beautiful thing is whatever people decide to do – even down to just streaming our songs – you’re LITERALLY investing in us. These sales will go directly to fund awesome things like new music videos, tours, and even fund raising for great causes! No one to answer to, nothing to wait for – just HTL, King Sound and you- our supporters. Doing it our way because we can.
We have songs lined up for the next six months.
Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica:
Researchers have disclosed a serious weakness in the WPA2 protocol that allows attackers within range of vulnerable device or access point to intercept passwords, e-mails, and other data presumed to be encrypted, and in some cases, to inject ransomware or other malicious content into a website a client is visiting.
The proof-of-concept exploit is called KRACK, short for Key Reinstallation Attacks.
This is bad.
Rene Ritchie, writing for iMore:
Apple has confirmed to me that the KRACK exploit has already been patched in iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and macOS betas. As soon as the updates leave beta, they’ll be pushed out to everyone. We’ll have to wait and see how fast other manufacturers are to respond, and how many of our connected devices receive updates.
Sophia Ciocca, writing for Hacker Noon:
The exact mechanisms behind NLP are beyond the scope of this article, but here’s what happens on a very high level: Spotify crawls the web constantly looking for blog posts and other written texts about music, and figures out what people are saying about specific artists and songs — what adjectives and language is frequently used about those songs, and which other artists and songs are also discussed alongside them.
While I don’t know the specifics of how Spotify chooses to then process their scraped data, I can give you an understanding of how the Echo Nest used to work with them. They would bucket them up into what they call “cultural vectors” or “top terms.” Each artist and song had thousands of daily-changing top terms. Each term had a weight associated, which reveals how important the description is (roughly, the probability that someone will describe music as that term.)
Andy Cush, writing for Spin:
In the months leading up to the publication of SPIN’s initial story, we spoke with multiple women who gave accounts of alleged sexual misconduct from Mondanile. In the following days, more women came to us with stories of his behavior. These on-the-record accounts, from seven women in total, largely involve allegations of Mondanile touching, kissing, and groping them without their consent. Two women alleged that Mondanile groped them while they were sleeping, and a third said that he did so while she was trying to sleep.
Kendrick Lamar recently sat down for an interview with I-D:
Kendrick lives a life that befits the king of hip-hop, if you think what truly befits the king of hip-hop is to basically live in the studio looking for the perfect beat and the ultimate rhyme. “I can sometimes cut the whole world off to write a verse that is perfect to me,” he says. “I could be in the studio all day and turn the phone off and completely zone out, because I feel like this was what I was chosen to do. And I can’t let anyone get in between that.”
Matthew Panzarino, writing for TechCrunch:
“We decided to take a more aggressive stance in our rules and how we enforce them,” Dorsey says. “New rules around: unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual nudity, hate symbols, violent groups, and tweets that glorifies violence. These changes will start rolling out in the next few weeks. More to share next week.”
Sure.
Foster the People have released an acoustic and reworked version of their latest single “Sit Next to Me.”
Sorority Noise are releasing a new 7″ featuring two unreleased songs.
Stephanie Prange, writing for Variety:
Five of the six major Hollywood studios have joined forces to make digital movie collecting easier than ever.
Movies Anywhere, a free app and website digital locker service, launches tonight at 9 p.m. PT, backed by four top digital retailers and content from Walt Disney (including Pixar, Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Entertainment — a combined library of more than 7,300 digital movies.
Movies can be redeemed through digital retailers Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu (owned by Walmart).
Substream has confirmed that D.R.U.G.S. are not reuniting next year and someone has taken control of the band’s Twitter account without their knowledge:
According to another person connected to the band that we spoke with, whose name we are protecting upon request, the members of D.R.U.G.S. have not had access to the account in some time. “There was a phishing scheme,” the contact told us. “Something involving a fake charity.” This contact also provided Substream with the name and contact information of the person the believed to currently be controlling the account.
Tegan and Sara talked with Alternative Press about the upcoming 10 year anniversary of The Con:
Tegan And Sara created no guidelines. Artists could record in their own bedrooms, for all the twins cared, as long as they made it their own. “The goal wasn’t to get versions that sounded exactly like the originals, and we spent a great deal of time curating artists with individual songs to avoid that from happening,” says Sara. The effort was worth it, and they fell in love with the result: “It was fascinating to hear how people approached the project so differently from one another.”
Slowdive has released a video for “Don’t Know Why” on Apple Music.