Drake’s Views is at the top of the Billboard Charts for the sixth straight week. Beyoncé comes in at number two, and Paul Simon is at three.
Of the album’s 135,000 units earned in the latest chart week, 81,000 of those were in streaming equivalent album units. The rest were in traditional album sales (32,000) and track equivalent album units (22,000).
Hamilton ended up winning eleven awards at the 2016 Tony Awards.
The Tony Awards on Sunday night were a bonanza for “Hamilton,” as Broadway’s wildly popular hit musical collected an impressive 11 prizes, including the coveted one for best musical. While the results reflected the widespread audience and critical acclaim for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop biography of Alexander Hamilton, they did not quite match the record 12 prizes bestowed on the musical “The Producers” in 2001.
Laura Jane Grace, of Against Me!, spoke with Rolling Stone about the horrific shootings that occurred in Orlando over the weekend:
You’d ideally want to think that venues and shows and clubs, places where people are going to dance and celebrating and enjoying life would be the safe place, but it’s clearly not. To think that whatever crazy fucking religious wars or whatever wars are happening out there are leaking into those areas, it’s so fucking terrifying.
Reuters is reporting that Amazon is preparing to launch their own, standalone, streaming music service:
The service will be offered at $9.99 per month, in line with major rivals, and it will offer a competitive catalog of songs, the sources said. Amazon is finalizing licenses with labels for the service, which likely will be launched in late summer or early fall, the sources said.
The gunman who opened fire inside a crowded nightclub here early Sunday morning, launching a rampage that killed 50 people and injured 53 others in the deadliest shooting spree in the country’s history, had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State before the attack, according to U.S. law enforcement officials.
Over the next few days, if you’re able to give blood, please consider donating.
The Washington Post, reporting on the death of The Voice singer, Christina Grimmie:
“Words cannot begin to describe the pain I am feeling,” Grimmie’s manager, Brian Teefey, said in a statement. “I learned this business through the eyes of a father, and Christina was like a second daughter to me. All I wanted to do was assist her in achieving her musical dreams while protecting her from the pitfalls associated with the business.
Blink-182 will be playing Bethesda’s E3 this year:
That’s right, the punk rock band famous for “What’s My Age Again” and “All the Small Things” will perform following Bethesda’s E3 showcase on Sunday. It’s part of a post-showcase event called “BE3 Plus” that’s for the showcase’s attendees. In addition to the concert, attendees can check out demos and interviews about the games the company is presenting.
New Found Glory will be releasing a coffee table book called, Stories of a Different Kind, a visual history of the band. Pre-orders are now up and the first 500 sold will be signed.
When New Found Glory first started, a messy photocopied piece of paper was the way in which we would tell people about our shows. Never could we have imagined that such a simple, lost concept would now serve as the visual spark to reignite a lost memory. Stories Of A Different Kind is a storybook, but not a beginning-to-end narrative. It’s a journey through a time period that pre-dates social media: a time that newer fans might not know had existed and older fans can look back on. We are very excited to share it with everyone. You’re just as big of the reason why it exists as we are.
mewithoutYou have started a GoFundMe campaign and are selling some t-shirts to help buy a new bus after their old one broke down.
This week marks the 30th anniversary of The Smiths’ classic album The Queen is Dead. Life is very long, when you’re lonely, so give this one a spin today if you haven’t in a while.
Mackenzie Hall, writing for Alt Press, talks with Jack Barakat of All Time Low about opening his new bar, The Riff, in LA.
I mean, I’m pretty biased to the pop punk, pop rock genre. My [birthday] playlist, I’m doing Green Day, Blink-182, Jimmy Eat World, Good Charlotte, you know the stuff I grew up on. But, the coolest thing about The Riff is that we’re going to play Muse, we’re going to play harder rock, we’re going to play hip-hop. It’s really going to be all over the place, and it’s not going to be a club. There are a lot of clubs in LA, where it’s all about who you know to get in and you’re standing on a table to buy a bottle. We just want a whiskey-inspired bar. There’s no cliques, there’s no anyone kind of looking down on you. It’s just going to be very kind of chill spot.
Nathan Hubbard (former CEO of Ticketmaster), writing for The Ringer, on why trying to get tickets to major events is a pain in the ass:
The other way these held-back tickets weasel their way into the secondary market: The individuals who get the tickets realize that, ostensibly, someone just handed them cash. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but attending a concert or a game can be a pain in the ass. Industry insiders fortunate enough to obtain these tickets are just jaded enough that they don’t need to go like true fans do. And so they think about the traffic, and the parking, and the hassle, and they check prices on the secondary market. And they realize that whatever true fans are willing to pay sounds better than the work of actually going to the event. So they sell (out).
Blink-182 performed “All The Small Things,” “Bored to Death,” and “The Rock Show” on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. You can also go to about the 18-minute mark on the Radio 1 All-Dayer player for performances of “What’s My Age Again?,” “Down,” and “I Miss You.”
Blink-182’s “Bored to Death” has hit #2 on Billboard’s top alternative songs chart.
Nick Bilton, who wrote Hatching Twitter, a book I’ve recommended in the past, writes for Vanity Fair about the current state of Twitter:
If these expulsions sound like murders, that’s likely because many of them were committed with the same behind-the-scenes planning and mastery. In every instance, the man who was knocked off had no idea who was behind the coup that led to his demise. In 2013, after the publication of my book Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, I was greeted with effusive (or enraged) phone calls, text messages, and e-mails from co-founders, board members, and senior employees who were excited to finally learn the true identities of their tormentors. I still occasionally receive calls from people inside the company asking me for information about a recent firing.