Walk the Moon will release their new album, What if Nothing, on November 10th. Pre-orders are now up.
Walk the Moon Announce New Album
Epitaph to Match TWIABP Digital Sales
Epitaph Records is matching all proceeds from the digital download of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s new album until October 5th. The money raised will be donated to the Immigrant Defense Project.
Rogue Amoeba’s 15th Anniversary Sale
Rogue Amoeba is having a 15-year anniversary sale on a bunch of their fantastic audio software. I record the Encore podcast each week using Audio Hijack, and it comes highly recommended:
We want to celebrate with savings for customers both new and old. For a limited time, we’re matching our 15 years in business with 15% off all our apps! But it gets better: Scratch the card below to save even more! The savings boost you uncover will multiply your discount, with a lucky few saving as much as 60%!
Lauren Williams Is the New Editor-in-Chief at Vox
Vox has announced that Lauren Williams will be their new editor-in-chief:
Replacing me as editor-in-chief will be Lauren Williams. Lauren joined Vox a few months into our existence, and from the moment she walked in the door, I’ve relied constantly on her brilliance, her calm, and her judgment, and all of us have relied on her constant focus on the quality of our journalism, the mechanics of the organization, and the morale of the people within it. She’s the exact right person to lead us in a new phase of growth — to make sure we’re built to handle it, that we’re being conscious of the strains it places on us, and that our work is always deep, decent, and ambitious.
‘Avatar’ Starts Production on Four Consecutive Sequels
Deadline is reporting that James Cameron has begun production on four Avatar sequels:
It is not only unprecedented in number — Peter Jackson shot three of The Lord of the Rings installments together — it also will be the most expensive shoot of its kind, at an estimated collective budget expected to surpass $1 billion.
How the NFL Watered Down Colin Kaepernick’s Protest
Jamil Smith, writing for The Washington Post:
No true protest assuages those who are already comfortable. Athletes, especially those who wear a helmet for a living, must know that they have limited windows for communicating their truths to the American public. Protests during the anthem are their best avenue. They know that there are many people in America who don’t give a damn about black people outside of those three hours when their team is on TV. Last weekend, at least for those linking arms, that time was annexed, repackaged and sold.
And Michael Baumann, writing for The Ringer:
That’s what this debate is about: Some say cops shouldn’t be able kill people of color with impunity, and others want everyone else to shut up and go back to watching football. There aren’t two worthwhile viewpoints here, and there’s no greater condemnation of our culture than the idea that both sides deserve equal consideration.
Foo Fighters Have the Number One Album
The Foo Fighters have the number one album in the country this week:
The set earned 127,000 equivalent album units in the week ending Sept. 21, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 120,000 were in traditional album sales, which also makes the effort the top-selling album of the week.
They Took a Knee
Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic:
The president had, once again, misrepresented the situation. The players are not, as a whole, protesting the national anthem. (There are bodies in the street, Kaepernick had said.) They are not protesting the flag. They are protesting police brutality against African Americans. They are protesting the lack of legal accountability for the officers who enact that violence. They are protesting, more broadly, the ways racism gets codified in America, the ways it is expanded from a personal evil into a societal one.
Lorde on Song Exploder Podcast
Lorde is the latest guest on the Song Exploder podcast where she deconstructs “Sober.”
The Many Lives Of Jack Antonoff
Stereogum have a new feature on Jack Antonoff of Bleachers and his Shadow Of The City festival:
Plenty of festivals claim idiosyncrasy and don’t offer it at all. At Shadow Of The City, you truly feel like you’re at one guy’s event, from seeing his family mill around the festival grounds to those grounds’ intentional proximity to Jersey lore. (Throughout the day, you can escape the sun by going inside the Stone Pony and chilling at its dive bar corner or squinting up at the guitars lining the wall from past performers.) Antonoff’s drawing on experience here, not just from a youth spent in Jersey but from years of the touring grind and playing festivals. There’s an over-saturation in that world, a sameness. And though Shadow Of The City isn’t intended to grow beyond its specific boundaries, to some extent it feels like an antidote to all the rest of it. “The whole point was, what are other festivals doing and let’s do the opposite,” he explains.
Travis Barker Talks Next Solo Album
Travis Barker of Blink-182 recently talked with Music Radar:
A lot of people go, ‘Oh, Travis Barker has a solo album, I hope he’s doing drum solos everywhere.’ Well, unfortunately not every song requires a drum solo. Even with Blink it’s weird if I’m going crazy in every song. There comes a time with musicianship that you have to do what the song is asking for. […]
I am 70 percent done with my new solo album. The next part, the most important piece, is for me to go play drums on it now. We’ve got the programming, I’ve made all of the beats, the second step was to get all of the artists and find out which artists sound great on which beats. The third step is me playing drums on it, mixing it and then putting it out.
Propagandhi Talk With Punktastic
Chris Hannah of Propagandhi sat down with Punktastic to talk about their upcoming album:
Given how bands with members who are seen as marginalized in society are gaining significant traction in various punk circles than ever before, Hannah acknowledges that he’d rather see these groups be bigger rather than expand on Propagandhi’s legacy. “People are tired of hearing a white man spout off about politics and social issues. I’m tired of it too. There are far more interesting perspectives come from those involved in organizations such as Black Lives Matter and The Indigenous Resistance Movement. Whilst they might not be organizations in the traditional sense, they are important forms of social justice. They can channel our efforts of how we might be able to salvage what we call civilization.
2017 Music Sales Are Up
Peter Kafka, writing for Recode:
Music streaming is big, and getting bigger fast. Digital downloads are falling off a cliff.
Oh, and one more familiar refrain: The music industry loves the money it’s getting from subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music, but it wants YouTube to pay them much more. […]
More than 30 million people are now paying for a subscription streaming service in the U.S., which pushed streaming revenue up 48 percent, to $2.5 billion, in the first half of the year. Streaming now accounts for 62 percent of the U.S. music business.
And that’s pushing the overall music business back up again, after a fall that started in 1999, with the ascent of Napster, and didn’t stop until a couple years ago. Retail sales were up 17 percent, to $4 billion, and wholesale shipments were up 14.6 percent, to $2.7 billion.
The Menzingers on Mike Herrera’s Podcast
The Menzingers are on the latest episode of Mike Herrera’s podcast.
The All-American Rejects Debut “Behind the Scenes” Documentary
The All-American Rejects have released a behind the scenes documentary about the making of their recent short film “Sweat.”