An old friend shared this comic with me yesterday that puts a speech from Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, into the style of the old strip. It’s something I’d seen and read before, but it hit me on a whole new level today.
Dave Wiskus, of Airplane Mode, wrote an open letter to SoundCloud about their new streaming service:
You can slice it, package it, or spin it however you like, but the bare fact is that you’re making money off of songs you aren’t paying for. Worse, you’re doing it while perpetuating an air of exclusivity around the concept of making money. All while you’re pretending to be a friend to the little guy. There’s nothing artist-friendly about this approach.
But wait! There’s more!
Airplane Mode has a SoundCloud Pro account to get access to unlimited uploads and a few other features that make the service useful. This account costs us $15 per month. So not only are you getting our music for free and paying us nothing, we’re actually paying you to take it. What an excellent deal. For you.
Dan Rys, writing for Billboard, on TIDAL’s recently released streaming and subscriber numbers. Apparently Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was streamed 250 million times in the first 10 days of release.
Tidal also finally released numbers for Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo streams for the first time, after West requested the service withhold the numbers when the album first became available in February. According to Tidal, Pablo surpassed 250 million streams in its first 10 days of release. Pablo, which West previously said would only ever exist on Tidal, has been going through some changes in real time of late as the artist updates certain tracks, and just yesterday made the single “Famous,” featuring Rihanna, available on both Apple Music and Spotify, ending his Tidal-only crusade.
Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge, on SoundCloud’s new subscription service.
Though anyone can create a SoundCloud account and upload songs unworthy of your time, some huge artists also use it to publish tracks that you won’t find anywhere else. Kanye West, for instance, posted a new song over the weekend that you won’t even find on Tidal. It’s his fourth track exclusive to SoundCloud.
But bonus tracks only go so far. What matters for a subscription music service is how many paid tracks are available, and SoundCloud Go appears to have far fewer than its top competitors. SoundCloud is advertising a library of 125 million songs, but at least 110 million of those are free, user-uploaded tracks. While Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and the other big streaming services have around 30 million paid songs, SoundCloud Go appears to include closer to 15 million.
This feels like a divergence from what makes SoundCloud unique.
Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! wrote a blog discussing the title of her upcoming book.
But the title fits the book. After we had been working on it for months, and had poured several thousand words into it, I told Dan what I wanted to call it. “Now that I’ve heard it, I can’t imagine it being called anything else,” he said. There is a certain element of expletive present behind the title, sure, but in no way did I arrive at it for the purpose of sensationalism. I’m not attempting to publish a self-aggrandizing piece of writing here. TRANNY is an incredibly scathing look back at my life. There are themes of hatred and aggression, directed at me from other people, but mostly inwardly, from myself. I’ve been called horrible insults and slurs over my career, my reactions to some have even famously landed me in jail. But I’ve learned to adapt by embracing them, and using them as armor, which should be apparent from the subtitle: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout.
Dan Ozzi, writing for Noisey, asks: is the album review dead?
We are living in that age Bangs never got to see. There are enough services competing to offer us streaming music—Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Amazon Prime, Rhapsody, 8tracks, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp, to name a few (and that’s not even mentioning the illegal download market)—that it would take hundreds of thousands of years to listen to it all. So with every new album available at our fingertips completely for free at the instant of its release for our own personal judgment, you’ve got to wonder: Do we still need the album review?
The RIAA has released their report on the state of the US music industry in 2015. Streaming is now the biggest revenue source.
The U.S. recorded music industry continued its transition to more digital and more diverse revenue streams in 2015. Overall revenues in 2015 were up 0.9% to $7.0 billion at estimated retail value. The continued growth of revenues from streaming services offset declines in sales of digital downloads and physical product. And at wholesale value, the market was up 0.8% to $4.95 billion – the fifth consecutive year that the market has grown at wholesale value.
Michael Heilemann, writing for Kitbashed, goes deep on the history of Star Warsʼ Millennium Falcon:
But the Falcon’s conceptual development has always intrigued me because the conceptualization phase is unclear and hard to discern. I’ve researched this subject extensively over years and it’s only recently I’ve been able to make out some sort of sensible process.
So this then is The Complete Conceptual History of The Millennium Falcon or How I Started Worrying and Lost My Mind Completely Over a Fictional Spaceship Someone Please Do Something Send Help Why Are You Still Reading Someone Do Something.
Harriet Gibsone, writing for The Guardian, looks at the pros and cons of social media in the music industry. The article itself is interesting, but this tidbit really stood out:
“I mean I’m not a drinker any more, but when Twitter first came out I was, like, drunk tweeting, and nearly put my foot in it quite a few times,” Adele told the BBC last year. “So my management decided that you have to go through two people and then it has to be signed off by someone, but they’re all my tweets. No one writes my tweets. They just post them for me.”
This is probably something that should be put into place by most bands/labels/management. I wonder if there’s a market for an app like this? One that looks and works just like regular Twitter, but any post or reply gets queued up instead of posted immediately. Combine that with some fancy screening of the at-replies section (to filter out harassment, assholes, and spam), and maybe Twitter would be more attractive to celebrities, sports stars, and other public figures.
Ben Popper, writing for The Verge, looks at how Netflix has revamped their recommendation system to handle a more global audience:
“We were very worried that running the algorithms we knew worked well when we pulled data from a single country and a single catalog, if we tried across places where the catalog differed, the recommendations would be pretty bad,” says Carlos Gomez-Uribe, vice president of product innovation at Netflix, and the leader of the recommendation redesign.
This obsession over the data and delivering the best recommendations for every subscriber is something I think is sorely missing in the music world. Spotify cares more than Apple Music, but imagine if it gets this good?
MTV has been revamping their news and publishing recently and have put out just fantastic content. Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib recently wrote an article on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo and the “myth of rare black genius.”
Assessing The Life of Pablo, like assessing the entire career of Kanye West, means considering the demand for black greatness and the toll it takes on the great. I am not commenting now on West’s mental or emotional state. I have no access to Kanye West, or his life, beyond what he shares through his work. I am talking about the toll it takes on artists in the black imagination, in the spaces where we hold them dear. It is equal parts frustrating and wholly understandable to see the way both white establishments and black consumers hold on to the idea of black genius. The concept is held so tightly and with so little change or evolution in what the black genius can or should represent. This leaves the imagination with so few established and named black geniuses that they must be protected at all costs. I have been guilty of this, both the limited naming and the relentless protection, more with Kanye West than anyone else.
Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has passed away.
People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.
Natalie Angier, writing for The New York Times, looks at how and why we’re drawn to certain music:
Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.
Eli Schiff, writing on his blog, takes a deep dive on the missteps of Uber’s rebranding:
In general, it is not a great idea to put the brand of a company valued in the tens of billions of dollars in the hands of people who readily admit they don’t know what their own intentions are. Uber tore through and rejected the proposals of half a dozen external agencies and eventually made the decision to rebrand internally.
Elspeth Reeve, writing for the New Republic, looks at the secret lives of “Tumblr Teens,” the back alley monetization schemes, and the story of some of the most popular accounts being terminated. It’s an in-depth profile on a faction of the internet, and youth culture, that I seemed to just miss.
Each social media network creates a particular kind of teenage star: Those blessed with early-onset hotness are drawn to YouTube, the fashionable and seemingly wealthy post to Instagram, the most charismatic actors, dancers, and comedians thrive on Vine. On Facebook, every link you share and photo you post is a statement of your identity. Tumblr is the social network that, based on my reporting, is seen by teens as the most uncool.
Grab some pizza, or if you’re my age: a beer, and dive in.