Pitchfork Folded Into GQ

Pitchfork

Pitchfork is being folded into GQ:

Condé Nast is merging Pitchfork, the digital music publication it bought in 2015, with men’s magazine GQ — a move that will result in layoffs at Pitchfork, including the exit of editor-in-chief Puja Patel.

According to Wintour, “Both Pitchfork and GQ have unique and valuable ways that they approach music journalism, and we are excited for the new possibilities together.” She added with the organizational changes, “some of our Pitchfork colleagues will be leaving the company today.”

A rep for Condé Nast did not have information on how many Pitchfork staffers are being let go. Wintour’s memo about the Pitchfork changes was first reported by Semafor’s Max Tani.

Music Streaming Fraud Costs Musicians Millions

The New York Times

David Segal, writing for New York Times:

The guys in Bad Dog, a folkie duo from Washington, D.C., weren’t hoping to get rich off the album they recorded this summer. David Post and Craig Blackwell have been devoted amateurs for decades, and they’re long past dreams of tours and limos. Mostly they wanted a CD to give away at a house party in December.

But not long after “The Jukebox of Regret” was finished in July and posted on SoundCloud, nearly every song on it somehow turned up on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and at least a dozen other streaming platforms. This might have counted as a pleasant surprise, except for a bizarre twist: Each song had a new title, attached to the name of a different artist.

And:

Despite their backgrounds, both men were stymied by the vast and arcane world of music streaming fraud, a realm where anonymous pirates are constantly devising new ways to steal from the $17 billion a year pool of royalty money intended for artists.

That’s a giant, tempting pot of gold for scammers around the world. Beatdapp, a Vancouver company that detects fraud for industry clients, estimates that a little more than 10 percent of that pot, about $2 billion, is swiped annually.

First Grammy 2024 Performers Announced

Grammys

Olivia Rodrigo, Dua Lipa, and Billie Eilish are the first round of Grammy 2024 performers.

Both Eilish and Rodrigo are among the most-nominated artists on the bill (and, at 22 and 20 respectively, among the youngest) with six nods each while R&B star SZA leads the list with a total of nine nominations. Following SZA, tied with seven nominations apiece, are Victoria Monét, Phoebe Bridgers (six of those for her work with Boygenius, one for a collaboration with SZA) and mixing engineer Serban Ghenea.

Mike Dirnt Talks With Rolling Stone

Green Day

Mike Dirnt of Green Day talked with Rolling Stone:

Well, it’s funny you say that, because [the Saviors track] “The American Dream Is Killing Me” was written by Billie almost four years ago. But we all knew it was just low-hanging fruit. We’re not a parody of who we are, and songs like that need time to be fleshed out. If that means just sitting back and letting life happen, so be it. And it was one of the last things we recorded. Rob’s like, “What else do you got?” As we get towards the end of recording, it was two songs. It was that one and “Father to a Son.” And those two songs, Rob’s like, “Oh, you’ve got to record those.”

And then Billie had to go in for “American Dream” and just deep dive on the lyrics, and just tweak a few things here and there. But “The American Dream Is Killing Me” was the line a while back ago. We were like, “Yeah, it’s just not the right time.”

Bruce Springsteen Developing Film

Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen is reportedly working on a Nebraska feature film:

Sources say that Springsteen has been consulting on a possible feature film about the making of his watershed 1982 album, “Nebraska.”

I’m told Bruce has been collaborating with director-writer Scott Cooper, whose six terrific films include “Crazy Heart,” about a washed up country singer. Jeff Bridges won the 2010 Oscar for starring in that one, the movie also won Best Song. Maggie Gyllenhaal was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

New Interview With Turnstile

Turnstile

Brendan Yates of Turnstile sat down for a new interview with Anti-Matter.

Putting out every record, there’s always a certain level of discomfort that comes with it. Or the tours we do. We’ve done tours before where we see an opportunity for something new, but we also know that it’s not necessarily the perfect hardcore tour—with comfortable venues, reactions, people, or that kind of thing. It’s placing ourselves in environments where we are the fish out of water, which I think we’ve done continuously in our time as a band. And it’s not always “the bigger thing.” Like, we did an arena tour last year not because it was the “biggest” thing we could do, but as an experience thing. It’s always gotta feel right, but it’s about finding that perfect sweet spot where it’s going to be uncomfortable, but it’s also going to be a totally new eye-opening experience in different ways. Sometimes you take away things that are negative from it, and sometimes you take away things that are positive, but that’s kind of a theme with our band. We’re always looking for that sweet spot of feeling like it’s something that feels true to us, but also feeling a level of discomfort that’s going to teach us something new or give us a new experience so that we’re never doing the same thing over and over.

Taylor Swift Breaks Elvis Presley’s Record as Solo Artist With Most Weeks at No. 1

Taylor Swift

Variety:

Taylor Swift has broken Elvis Presley‘s longstanding record for the most weeks spent atop the Billboard 200 album chart by a solo artist. She set a new mark of 68 total weeks, as “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” landed on top of the chart for a fifth time in the final full tracking week of 2023.

Although Swift set a new record for an individual, the ultimate high-water mark among all artists is still held by the Beatles, whose albums have spent 132 weeks on top of the Billboard 200. Presley’s 67 weeks now puts him in second place among solo recording artists and third place among all acts.

Merch Company SCP Owes Millions

Legal

Chris Eggertsen, writing for Billboard:

Illinois-based merch company SCP owes more than $4 million to over 300 clients including Mitski and Brent Faiyaz after abruptly shutting down operations last week, according to internal documents obtained by Billboard. And with plans to file for chapter 7 bankruptcy on Friday, it’s unlikely those clients will ever recover all the money they’re owed. 

Some of SCP’s other clients included Father John Misty, Chappell Roan, T-Pain, Finneas, Brand New and Carly Rae Jepsen; record labels Loma Vista Recordings and Triple Crown Records; Pharrell Williams‘ Something in the Water music festival; and online content creators such as the Dungeons & Daddies podcast and YouTubers Team Edge.  

Amazon Prime Video Will Start Showing Ads on January 29th

amazon

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th. “This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

Big loser energy.

The NYT Sues Open AI and Microsoft

Legal

New York Times:

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.

The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

Bluesky Posts Now Open to Public

Technology

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Bluesky remains an invite-only decentralized Twitter alternative, but now, you don’t need to have an account and log in to be able to see posts on the platform, according to a blog post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Now, anyone can easily see posts from both the web and from the Bluesky app — like this one.

If you want to prevent people who aren’t logged in from seeing your posts, you can “discourage” that by clicking a toggle in settings. But Bluesky notes that “other apps may not honor this request” and that the toggle doesn’t make your account private.

I have an account on Bluesky, but I haven’t found myself using it much. In fact, as Twitter/X have gone up in dumpster-fire flames of Oppenheimer proportions, the more I’ve started to think about if I even want or need this kind of service in my life. There’s a real lack of joy, and besides the Absurdist Twitter thread, I am finding less an less value in any of them. I’ve been spending more time curating my RSS feeds and have replaced the Mastodon/X/Threads space on my home screen with my RSS reader. Kicking social media off the first screen of my phone, so far, has felt like a net positive.

Spotify Protests New Tax in France

Paul Sawers, writing for TechCrunch:

Spotify is pulling support for two music festivals in protest against a controversial new tax directed at music-streaming platforms operating in France, and threatened more action will follow in the coming months.

Antoine Monin, managing director for Spotify in the France and Benelux regions, took to X this week to decry a new tax that will impose a levy of what is expected to be between 1.5 and 1.75% on all music-streaming services, with the proceeds going toward the Centre National de la Musique (CNM), which was established in 2020 to support the French music sector.

SCP Merchandising Closes Down

Billboard

Billboard:

SCP Merchandising, an Illinois-based merch company used by artists including Mitski, Father John Misty and Carly Rae Jepsen, has shut down, according to a member of SCP leadership still on-site after the company laid off its staff over the weekend. 

Based on accounts from multiple former SCP employees on LinkedIn, the company’s employees were abruptly laid off on Sunday evening (Dec. 17). The source tells Billboard that the company will most likely file for bankruptcy and that there is no process yet for clients to retrieve their merchandise, but that those with outstanding balances will not be able to do so until they pay those off with SCP or a potential bankruptcy trustee. They add that priority will be given to clients who have no balance due as well as those who are arranging for payment of unpaid bills.

New Interview With Jack Antonoff

Bleachers

Jack Antonoff recently talked with Vulture:

There’s a song called “Tiny Moves,” which no one’s heard yet. The real story there is I started writing music when I was 14 or 15, and my younger sister was sick then. She died when I was 18, so all my formative experiences with writing music were writing about this massive, heavy, big loss and grief. Then, obviously, that grief grows and changes. It’s such a fertile place to write from, and I’d felt a little bit resigned, not in a comfortable way, just like, Okay, my place in life as a writer is to write about loss through the lens of age. And don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of that on this album. But I met my now-wife, and it feels like a lot of the mythology and armor that I wore — we all say, like, “I can’t get relationships right,” “I don’t do this,” “I’m bad at this.” And when you have a big shift like that, which was really meeting my person, it’s brilliant and amazing, but it’s also destabilizing ’cause you have to deal with all of the past, where you lived by this code that was bullshit. And within that, I found myself writing more conversationally, very deep and very intense. How do you have such a great loss and then also explore other parts of life? I wasn’t able to do that in the past, because I felt like it was not honoring my loss to write about anything else. So, this is the first album where I explore other things, and there’s presence to it that I haven’t had.