Kraftwerk have lost a copyright case in Germany’s highest court, the BBC reports:
Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hutter sued Moses Pelham, alleging that his use of the clip, without asking, infringed the band’s intellectual property rights. But the German Constitutional Court decided that the impact on Kraftwerk did not outweigh “artistic freedom”.
The dispute centres on a short drum sequence looped repeatedly in the song Nur Mir (Only Me) by Sabrina Setlur.
Drake remains atop the Billboard charts this week. Ariana Grande comes in at number two and Blake Shelton is at three.
At No. 2 on the new Billboard 200 chart is Ariana Grande’s third full-length studio album, Dangerous Woman, which debuts with 175,000 equivalent album units (of which 129,000 are in traditional album sales).
Matador’s head of sales Rusty Clarke revealed to the A.V. Club that the situation where Car Seat Headrest’s album had to be recalled cost the label over $50,000.
“This is definitely an unprecedented situation,” Clarke told The A.V. Club. “We’ve never had to actually recall an album from retail before.” And while the physical loss is huge, as no part of these recalled products are salvageable—which pushes the album’s physical release to July—fans that pre-ordered digital copies were also put out. “We’d had it up for pre-order since March, so it had accrued a fair number of pre-orders at iTunes and Amazon and Google Play,” says Clarke. “We were able to switch out the audio that the artist re-recorded and we had mastered in a 48-hour turnaround, which was kind of amazing… but we had to redeliver it elsewhere. That means that we lost our pre-orders. So that was a little bit sad, too. And, of course, it’s not a great customer experience for those people who had pre-orders. Now they’ll be essentially confused as to why they’re not getting their album delivered.”
Ian Cohen, writing for Noisey, about The Hotelier’s new album:
The second path, surprisingly, was that of Brand New. Not in the sense that the Hotelier had become a band welcomed at any variation of Emo Night or that they’d even one day headline Madison Square Garden. Here was my friend’s explanation of the Brand New model: “They’ll make every wrong move that turns out to be the right move.”
Yes, the artwork is at the top.
The Weeknd and Belly canceled their appearance on Kimmel last night because Donald Trump was set to appear on the same episode.
I’m here on a campaign of positivity and love and to contribute what I can to music. I create songs people go to sleep and wake up to, songs that they fall in love to. For me, being Muslim and being somebody that appreciates my access here in America, I love the fact that I’m able to be here. To play my part in this business is a privilege and a beautiful thing. The fact that I could lose that ability through the actions of someone such as Donald Trump isn’t right to me. At all.
Good for them.
One of the more interesting stories in the journalism space over the past week has been the revelation that billionaire Peter Thiel has been secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. I think, not surprisingly, I agree most with John Gruber’s take:
It’s free speech on both sides. Thiel was free to secretly back (and apparently strategically steer) Hogan’s case against Gawker. But Gawker founder Nick Denton was free to air his suspicion that Hogan had a billionaire Silicon Valley backer, and Forbes was free to out Thiel as said backer. And now commentators who are appalled are free to express their outrage at Thiel, perhaps embarrassing him and making it less likely that he or others of similar super-wealth will do this in the future.
You’re free to do stupid shit under the banner of free speech, and I’m free to say so.
Miles Raymer, writing for MTV, looks at some ideas on fixing copyright law in how it relates to musicians and clearing samples:
Menell’s solution is to apply something called a compulsory license to sampling, remixing, and other derivative works. Compulsory licenses replace the process of gaining a copyright holder’s permission to make use of their original work with a flat royalty structure and a set of rules for how the work can be reinterpreted. We already have this kind of setup for cover songs: Under U.S. copyright law, anyone can perform and record any song that anyone else has written and recorded without getting their prior permission, as long as they pay a royalty to the copyright owner. This is why pop-punk bands can cover Top 40 songs, why iTunes is full of sound-alike cover versions of hit songs by artists it doesn’t have deals with, and why hip-hop producers often hire instrumentalists to play “interpolations” of musical passages they want to sample but can’t clear.
Aleen Mean, writing on her blog, on how in spite of the new features Twitter keeps rolling out, it remains broken in one glaring way: it’s too easy to abuse people on the service.
Time and time again, we’ve been told that the company is working on making things better for targets of harassment. What we see, however, are half-baked enhancements designed to make the service more appealing to advertisers and attempts at enticing new users. Many people have suggested changes they could implement to curb abuse. For example, Randi Lee Harper’s list of suggestions from earlier this year is still on-point.
Ben Popper, writing for The Verge, looks at just how big of a hit Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist has been:
According to the stats Spotify released, more than half of Discover Weekly users listen to 10 tracks a week and save at least one of those songs to their favorites. The company is trying to highlight the boost in listening this feature has given to small- and medium-sized artists, and noted it will be sharing data from Discover Weekly with bands to try and help them connect with their newest fans.
Brendan Manley, writing for Diffuser, remembers Bradley Nowell, the Sublime frontman, on the 20-year anniversary of his death:
After the album was released, it became a runaway success and spawned four hit singles (“What I Got,” “Santeria,” “Wrong Way” and “Doin’ Time”) on its way to multi-platinum status. It also helped define the ’90s third-wave ska scene (which also featured genre-bending bands like No Doubt and 311) and the album placed a global spotlight on Nowell’s evocative lyrical imagery and his unflinching portraits of the seedy side of SoCal.
Laura Jane Grace, writing for Vulture:
The nerves started as soon as I got to North Carolina. Just driving into the state, stopping at gas stations, going where you go — I was on edge all day. I always wait until there’s a unisex restroom, because I’m afraid. I also don’t want to make people uncomfortable — my desire is to feel comfortable, but I don’t want to make other people feel uncomfortable either. If it’s a crowded public restroom, I know I don’t pass, and I know that if I walk into a women’s restroom, someone would possibly take offense. Maybe scream. Who knows? In North Carolina, with it being illegal, it was like, Okay, well, we’re going to wait until there’s a Starbucks, since Starbucks has single-unit bathrooms, and that’s where we usually stop. Which is ironic because I’m someone who wrote a song about throwing bricks through Starbucks’s windows.
SoundCloud has teamed up with LANDR to offer a free “mastering” service to their members. From the SoundCloud blog announcing this partnership:
Driven by the smartest algorithms in the game, LANDR’s all-in-one, drag and drop interface makes mastering your tracks easier than ever. For this partnership, LANDR has created a new format specifically optimized for SoundCloud streaming.
Really I’m just excited I can now make jokes about how algorithms can do a better mastering job on albums than some bands end up with.
Peter Kafka, writing for Re/Code, on how Spotify lost a lot of money last year, but revenue grew:
Filings show that Spotify, based in Sweden and the U.K., generated revenue of $2.12 billion last year, up about 80 percent from the $1.18 billion it brought in the prior year (all prices in the story converted from euros to dollars at the exchange rate from December 31, 2015). Losses, meanwhile, hit $188.7 million — but that number was only up 6.7 percent from the previous year’s total of $176.9 million.
It looks like their paid subscribers hit 28 million.
Twitter has announced some changes to how they’re going to be handling tweets, media, and @-replies on the service.
[Y]ou can already do a lot in a Tweet, but we want you to be able to do even more. In the coming months we’ll make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters.
Snapchat is currently raising more money at around a $20 billion valuation.
TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources that Snapchat is raising yet more financing at around a $20 billion valuation. Sources with knowledge of the deal say the social media giant is in the process of a round of about $200 million.
I didn’t really get Snapchat until I started to use it more. There’s something freeing about the app that separates it from the other social apps I use. I think knowing that things you post aren’t forcing themselves into your followers’ feeds (freeing you from being worried about spamming them), and knowing it’ll disappear within a day (freeing you from feeling embarrassed something is up forever), and being able to post quick random videos, makes the app oddly more sticky than I would have expected.