Blink-182 officially have the number one album in the country.
After nine weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, Drake’s Views is dethroned from the top slot by Blink-182’s new set, California. The latter debuts at No. 1 with 186,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending July 7, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 172,000 were in traditional album sales — the third-largest sales week for a rock album in 2016.
Well deserved.
Blink-182 score their first #1 album in the UK.
Blink-182 landed their first U.K. No. 1 album with California (BMG), according to today’s new data from the Official Charts Company. […] California achieved chart sales of 24,000 in the week ending last night (Thursday). It’s Blink 182’s seventh studio album and eighth to chart in the U.K., in a 16-year span that also included 2005’s Greatest Hits. Their previous best showing before the new release was Take Off Your Pants And Jacket, which reached No. 4 in 2001.
Kerry Doole, writing for FYI Music News, looks at a new vinyl pressing plant opening in Ontario. The plant will be the second largest in North America:
The company has been pressing vinyl in Prague since January, filling orders for Universal and Sony Canada plus some independent labels. “In phase one we can do 4.5 million units out of the Burlington plant plus 2 million from the Czech plant,” says McGhee. “We’ve already put phase two into motion and that is adding five new automated presses. That’ll put us over the 11 million mark, making us the second largest plant in North America. We’ve already bought a plant in the US based in the Midwest and there’ll be a west coast plant so we’ll have three in North America.”
Rachel Brodsky of Spin sat down Blink-182 to talk about the band’s latest album, their relationship with Tom DeLonge, and the future of the band:
I think when people are jumping on top of each other’s ideas, it elevates it a lot more than me going into the studio and working on something all by myself for a while. By that point, you become so entrenched with what you’ve written that it’s hard to step back from that. We were working so quickly in the studio that Matt would be seeing something and say, “Is that good?” and I’d go, “Yeah, that’s awesome,” and he’d say, “Is that good?” and I’d say, “That could be better.” I need that feedback, too. Everybody was pushing each other, and it was just a much better result.
Ed Christman, writing for Billboard:
It’s the worst year (so far) for music sales since the 1991 debut of SoundScan (now Nielsen Music). Album sales, including track-equivalent albums (TEA, whereby 10 track sales equal one album unit) are down 16.9 percent in the first half of this year. But sales figures no longer tell the whole story of the record business.
Not great, Bob.
The Flaming Lips are teaming up Few Spirits with to create custom branded whiskey called the “Brainville Rye Whiskey.” The full press release is below.
Beck recently spoke with Rolling Stone about his work on his new album:
The sound, Beck says, was inspired by five years of heavy touring. He played big summer festivals to young audiences, and he soaked up the energy of acts like the Strokes, with whom he toured last year. “It’s a summer night, people have their hands up,” he says. “It’s a communal, celebratory thing. I wanted to take that into the studio, a kind of energy or joy. The thing that wakes you up a little bit.”
Time has announced that Riri Williams will be taking over the Iron Man suit for Tony Stark.
Riri is a science genius who enrolls in MIT at the age of 15. She comes to the attention of Tony when she builds her own Iron Man suit in her dorm. Creator and Iron Man writer Brian Michael Bendis spoke exclusively to Time about the creation of Riri Williams with book artist Stefano Caselli and Marvel’s increasingly diverse cast of characters.
Police Inspector Leif Nystrom said there had been 32 reports of attacks by boys or young men at a three-day festival in the city of Karlstad, 300 kilometers (190 miles) west of the capital, Stockholm. The youngest alleged victim was 12. Police identified seven young men they wanted to question.\
And:
In neighboring Denmark, where the annual weeklong Roskilde rock festival attended by 130,000 people wound up on Sunday, police said they had reports of five cases of alleged rape or sexual assault, which police officer Carsten Andersen described as “nothing out of the ordinary at such a big event, although every single case is too much.”
Zac Farro has confirmed in an interview with Idobi that he’s drumming on the new Paramore album, but at the moment, that’s it.
They’ve asked me to play drums on their album, on their new album. So [Hayley] put it on their Instagram and put it on their website, and it’s no joke that I’m back just playing drums for them on their album alongside with doing my HalfNoise stuff. That’s it, and that’s literally all it is right now. No one’s really asked cause I’ve kind of deterred the question, but I’m doing HalfNoise – that’s my band. They’ve asked me to drum, and it was like, ‘Yeah, of course!’ We’ve always been friends, and yeah, there was a little bit of weirdness cause I left the band for a few years, but all that stuff is not even there anymore and there’s no hard feelings and it’s just been rad and fun.
Drake, again, is at the top of the charts this week. Projections have Blink-182 overtaking Views, which has now been at the top of the charts for nine weeks, when they debut on the charts next week.
Views earned 111,000 equivalent album units in the week ending June 30, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 25,000 were in traditional album sales. The bulk of Views units were driven by streaming equivalent album units (67,000), owed to the album’s popularity on streaming services.
Frank Ocean has updated his website with a cryptic library due-date slip. Some are taking this as a hint at his new album’s release date.
James Vincent, writing for The Verge:
A hacker has pleaded guilty for his role in the “Celebgate” breach of 2014. Edward Majerczyk faces up to five years in federal prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Like fellow hacker Ryan Collins, the 28-year-old Majerczyk used a phishing scam to trick celebrities into entering their online credentials into fake ‘security’ sites. Majerczyk then used this information to illegally access more than 300 personal Gmail and iCloud accounts, retrieving private photos and videos from targets including celebrities. No individuals affected by the hack were named in court documents.
Kevin Durant has joined the Golden State Warriors, basically, on paper, forming an unbeatable basketball team:
But I am also at a point in my life where it is of equal importance to find an opportunity that encourages my evolution as a man: moving out of my comfort zone to a new city and community which offers the greatest potential for my contribution and personal growth. With this in mind, I have decided that I am going to join the Golden State Warriors.
With that new huge contract I’m sure he’ll be able to find a nice one bedroom apartment in San Francisco.
Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:
I have a point of view on all this, but I’m trying very hard not to get mad about something that hasn’t happened. This is a tech unicorn, an unannounced feature on a nonexistent product, and it’s important to keep that in mind. Still, it’s not a bad intellectual exercise to ponder why Apple might make such a move, and what the ramifications might be.
The speculative conclusion at the end about the rumored “AirPods” sounds right to me. What I really hope for is that any wireless headphones that Apple ship don’t use Bluetooth, but instead use a new, maybe proprietary, technology along with Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a massive pain in the ass to use with multiple devices and flaky as hell.
One thing I have seen when I’ve talked about this with some non-techy friends: they either don’t care at all and just use whatever headphones come with their phone or they really care and find this to be an absolute abomination. I don’t see much middle ground. We discussed this whole thing in more detail on this week’s episode of Encore because it really does fascinate me to no end. The tradeoffs seem almost unbearably negative, but yet it seems so inevitable at the same time.