Amazon has launched a section of their store dedicated to products that were launched on Kickstarter:
Getting a creative idea off the ground is often just the first step. Amazon Launchpad is a chance for creators to be discovered by new audiences, and to serve those audiences well by using Amazon’s retail expertise and infrastructure. The program offers custom product pages, comprehensive marketing support, and access to Amazon’s global fulfillment network.
Drake is once again at number one on the charts, Gucci Mane comes in at number two, and Twenty One Pilots are sitting at number three:
Trailing Drake on the latest Billboard 200 at No. 2 is Gucci Mane’s Everybody Looking, which debuts in the runner-up slot with 68,000 units (of which, 43,000 are in traditional album sales). It’s the highest rank ever for the rap artist, who previously peaked at No. 4 in 2010 with The Appeal: Georgia’s Most Wanted.
Alison O’Brien, writing for Pretty Famous:
PrettyFamous, an entertainment research site by Graphiq, found the most famous band formed each year since 1951. To do this, they created a customized Band Score on a scale of 1 to 100 based on a weighted average of a band’s Wikipedia page views in the last 30 days, page views of album releases and total number of Spotify followers.
Some fun ones: Brand New (2000), Fall Out Boy (2001), ABBA (1972), and Pink Floyd (1965).
A new study by the University of Pennsylvania looks at how Kickstarter impacts the economy. The Kickstarter blog has a run down of the findings:
- Employed 283,000 part-time collaborators in bringing creative projects to life.
- Created 8,800 new companies and nonprofits, and 29,600 full-time jobs.
- Generated more than $5.3 billion in direct economic impact for those creators and their communities.
Peter Sterne, writing for Politico, on how Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, has filed for bankruptcy:
“Gawker Media Group’s resilient brands and people will thrive under new ownership, when the sale closes in the next few weeks,” he wrote. “On this bitter day for me, I am consoled by the fact that my colleagues will soon be freed from this tech billionaire’s vendetta.”
Hogan sued Denton, Gawker and Daulerio in 2012, after the news site published a short excerpt of one of Hogan’s sex tapes. Peter Thiel, a billionaire technology venture capitalist who dislikes Gawker, secretly funded Hogan’s lawsuit against the company.
Twenty One Pilots’ Blurryface has gone platinum.
Twenty One Pilots celebrates its first million-selling album in the U.S., as Blurryface crosses the million sales mark. The album sold another 13,000 copies in the week ending July 21, according to Nielsen Music, bringing its total sales to 1.005 million.
Alex Morris, with a fantastic profile of Halsey for Rolling Stone:
She’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, really good at getting into stuff. A little more than two years ago, Halsey was not actually Halsey, she was Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 19-year-old community-college dropout, couch-surfing between basements in her native New Jersey and the Bed-Stuy/Lower East Side hovels of a badass, tatted-up crowd of “degenerate stoners” she met through her boyfriend two years before that, back when she was an arty, misfit high school kid taking AP classes and roaming the halls covered in paint. She’d gotten into the well-regarded Rhode Island School of Design, and then learned that she couldn’t afford to go. She’d found the college she could afford a waste of time.
The NPD is reporting that bluetooth headphone revenue has overtaken non-bluetooth headphone revenue for the first time:
According to The NPD Group’s Retail Tracking Service, Bluetooth headphone revenue overtook non-Bluetooth for the first time in June accounting for 54 percent of headphone dollar sales and 17 percent of unit sales in the U.S.
The joy of not having a cord attached to my pocket is amazing. But Bluetooth still sucks, a lot. Trying to use multiple devices, not looking ridiculous with that behind-the-head cord, and the sound quality is still not there. Oh, and every time my phone doesn’t want to connect to the headphones I’m sure it’s punishing me for all the times I set it next to the charger instead of actually plugging it in because, what?, it’s not the boss of me.
We’re currently booking up our sponsorship spots for the next few months, so, if you have a product or service you’d like to put in front of our audience, please reach out to me and let’s talk. We’ve been seeing some fantastic results with display ads and our feed sponsorships. I asked Creep Records’ owner William Angelos how the campaign we put together worked for him, and he had this to say:
I reached out to Chorus.fm when we signed JANK and I could not be happier. The new format has made ad space prominent and the click-through rate has been amazing. At the end of the day, we believed that if people heard JANK, they would love them. Chorus.fm helped immensely through their ads in getting people to give a new band a try. We will be using Chorus.fm for all future releases.
Our wonderful sponsors and amazing supporters have made the first four months of running Chorus feasible and exciting. Almost all of September is already booked up, but we have some openings in August and October and I’d love to get those filled up as well. I hope everyone is having a good day, I’m off to edit this week’s episode of Encore.1
Supporters should check the Encore thread in the supporter forum for a special announcement.↩
The Hollywood Reporter, with news of a Rocketeer revival:
The new take keeps the story in a period setting and offers a fresh view on the characters. Set six years after the original Rocketeer and after Secord has vanished while fighting the Nazis, an unlikely new hero emerges: a young African-American female pilot, who takes up the mantle of Rocketeer in an attempt to stop an ambitious and corrupt rocket scientist from stealing jet-pack technology in what could prove to be a turning point in the Cold War.
Comicbook.com spoke with Gerard Way and Jon Rivera about “Young Animal” the DC Comics imprint he’s in charge of. There is a small mention at the end about the whole teaser ordeal from the past week.
The video, I don’t really like to talk about just because we’re not that involved in it, and to be honest we didn’t realize that there wasn’t additional information coming out with that, which is why we asked the label to clarify.
Anna Maria Barry-Jester, writing at FiveThirtyEight, on all the rancid olive oil we probably use:
“We call the U.S. the world’s dumping ground for rancid and defective olive oil. We don’t know the difference,” said Sue Langstaff, a sensory scientist who consults for the beer, wine and olive oil industries, among others. Studies have shown that even frequent olive oil consumers in the U.S. don’t know what the extra virgin or cold pressed designations mean, let alone have the ability to taste the difference. And in blind taste tests, consumers often prefer lower-quality olive oils.
Elias Leight, writing for Rolling Stone:
MTV plans to rebrand VH1 Classic as MTV Classic starting on August 1st. According to a statement from the company, the new channel will focus on “an eclectic mix of fan-favorite MTV series and music programming drawn from across its rich history, with a special focus on the 1990s and early 2000s.”
All of our childhoods one day become “classic.”
Halsey is featured on a new episode of Autobiographies.
From recording a commercial jingle in a basement in New Jersey to selling out Madison Square Garden. In a personal conversation with VICE, Halsey talks about her childhood, growing up bi-racial and the time she spent in NYC that lead to a break that changed everything.
A data scientist decided to look through 22,000 metal albums to find out what words are the most “metal.” Turns out “burn” is the most metal word. And then “cries,” “veins,” “eternity,” and “breathe.”
In the face of this complexity, it is not surprising that understanding natural language, in the same way humans do, with computers is still a unsolved problem. That said, there are an increasing number of techniques that have been developed to provide some insight into natural language. They tend to start by making simplifying assumptions about the data, and then using these assumptions convert the raw text into a more quantitative structure, like vectors or graphs. Once in this form, statistical or machine learning approaches can be leveraged to solve a whole range of problems.
I haven’t had much experience playing with natural language, so I decided to try out a few techniques on a dataset I scrapped from the internet: a set of heavy metal lyrics (and associated genres).