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Amnesty International Announces Sofar Sounds

Jason Tate

Sofar Sounds:

Musicians, refugees and communities are coming together in homes all over the world to recognise the things that unite us: the shared love of music… and the need for a place to call home.

Sofar Sounds and Amnesty International welcome you to join us at small, intimate gigs taking place on a huge global scale in support of 20M+ refugees worldwide.

A thousand artists are taking place in this. I’ve seen tweets from Julien Baker, The National, Frightened Rabbit, and Anti-Flag. Definitely worth a look to see what’s in your area.

Apple Music Adds $99 Annual Plan

Jason Tate

Apple Music now offers a $99 a year plan:

This setting is quite buried as Apple doesn’t want you to know that you can pay less than what you’re actually paying. We tried different scenarios, and it was quite hard to find the new annual plan — but it’s real.

If you’re not a current Apple Music subscriber, the Music app only lets you subscribe to a normal monthly plan as pictured above. But if you’re an existing subscriber, you can go to your membership settings and switch to an annual plan. So new users will have to buy a monthly subscription first and then switch.

Quick way to save $20 bucks a year.

The Backstory of Amazon Buying Whole Foods

amazon
Jason Tate

Texas Monthly:

As he stepped off the American Airlines flight at JFK (Whole Foods doesn’t own a jet, and Mackey flies coach), his phone lit up with urgent text messages and voice mails. A hedge fund in New York called Jana Partners had snatched up almost 9 percent of Whole Foods’ stock and announced that it would pressure the company to either overhaul its business or sell itself—perhaps to another grocery giant, such as Kroger, or to a less traditional player, such as Amazon. Mackey and other leaders might have to be replaced. A media frenzy ensued, and the PR team who had carefully staged what should have been a traveling celebration of their boss as a thought leader shifted into immediate crisis mode.

“From that moment on, I was drowning in it,” Mackey says.

This whole story reads like an episode of Billions. Fascinating stuff.

Morrissey is Mad Again

Morrissey
Jason Tate

Morrissey is mad that HMV put “one per customer” stickers on The Smiths’ “The Queen Is Dead” vinyl single:

This sticker was not requested by ​t​he Smiths, and cannot be found on any other HMV stock, and therefore exists for “The Queen Is Dead” only.

But why is it there?

An attempt to freeze sales is, of course, an overwhelming insult to the Smiths … as if artistic freedom must struggle in our current culture of banality … as if only counterfeit emotions ​may ​apply.

Or maybe it’s so someone doesn’t buy a bunch and put them on eBay and fans can’t get them in stores? I dunno, just a guess.

Father John Misty’s New Yorker Profile

Father John Misty
Jason Tate

Father John Misty was profiled for The New Yorker:

“If you can’t hold two ideas in your head at the same time, you’re not going to get what I do,” he said in April. He’d picked me up on Second Avenue in a livery cab, for a trip out of town. He had on black stovepipe jeans with a small hole in one knee, brown suède pointy zip-up boots, a black T-shirt, and a gray Lemaire overcoat. (“I don’t like sports, I don’t fix cars, so I just buy clothes,” he said.) He was pretzeled in back, a tall man in a small car. From time to time, he cracked his knuckles. “I try to avoid talking about the perception of me in the press,” he told me. “It creates this feedback loop.”

Katy Perry Has Number One Album

Katy Perry
Jason Tate

Katy Perry has the number one album in the country this week:

Katy Perry claims her third No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, as her latest release, Witness, debuts atop the list. The set, which was released on June 9 through Capitol Records, earned 180,000 equivalent album units in the week ending June 15, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 162,000 are in traditional album sales.

Rise Against came in at number nine:

Rock band Rise Against clocks the fourth and final debut in the top 10, as its new album Wolves arrives at No. 9 with 29,000 units (27,000 in traditional album sales).

Lorde Goes Track-by-Track Through ‘Melodrama’

Lorde
Jason Tate

Lorde sat down with The Spinoff to go track-by-track through her latest album, Melodrama.

I wanted to [give the feeling of] just like the big sun-soaked dumbness of falling in love and it’s like your whole head is like glue, it’s amazing. It is like drugs. It’s like ‘I just want to be by you all the time, I just want to listen to you talk and look at your face do all those dumb things that it does when you talk. It’s just like this big dumb joy and it’s intense – and I feel like the instrumentation in that song kind of helped it get there.

Amazon Buys Whole Foods

amazon
Jason Tate

Amazon is buying Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion:

“Millions of people love Whole Foods Market because they offer the best natural and organic foods, and they make it fun to eat healthy,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO. “Whole Foods Market has been satisfying, delighting and nourishing customers for nearly four decades – they’re doing an amazing job and we want that to continue.”

“This partnership presents an opportunity to maximize value for Whole Foods Market’s shareholders, while at the same time extending our mission and bringing the highest quality, experience, convenience and innovation to our customers,” said John Mackey, Whole Foods Market co-founder and CEO.

I see that not even Jeff Bezos can get out of Whole Foods without overspending.

PUP Talks With Stereogum

PUP
Jason Tate

PUP’s Stefan Babcock talked with Stereogum:

It’s probably a bit early to say, but my mentality with this band is always, keep it quirky, keep it loud. Just try really hard to be a no-bullshit kind of band. We’re actually making the music that we want to make. We’ve all fallen into the trap with other bands that we’ve played in, that it’s easy to start writing music that maybe you aren’t stoked on just because you feel like that’s the logical next step.

David Bendeth Talks 10-Year Anniversary of ‘Riot!’

Paramore
Jason Tate

David Bendeth, who produced Paramore’s Riot!, sat down with Billboard to talk about the album’s 10-year anniversary:

It’s funny, when we started the record, all of the songs that we thought were going to be singles, never were. “When It Rains,” I thought for sure was going to be a smash at radio. In fact, John Mayer heard it and said, ‘If that’s not a hit song, I quit the business.’ “Hallelujah,” we thought that was going to be the first single at some point when we were making the record. Even with “That’s What You Get,” which I think was the third single, the song was in 6/8. It’s very difficult to make something in 6/8 sound like a normal sound for Top 40. So, I felt like the risks that had been taken paid off.