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Rome Ramierz Departs Sublime

Sublime With Rome
Jason Tate

Rome is leaving Sublime with Rome.

Briefly, in 2009, Wilson and Ramirez toured under the name Sublime but were sued by the Nowell family and eventually reached a legal settlement and license agreement with Nowell’s wife, Troy Dendekker, to tour under the moniker Sublime with Rome.

While Wilson and Ramirez were touring and performing, Jakob was developing his own musical talents, forming the Long Beach band LAW in 2013. Earlier this year, Jakob and his mother agreed with Wilson and Gaugh to relaunch Sublime with Jakob at the helm under the management of Kevin Zinger and Joe Escalante.

What this development means for Rome Ramirez is not totally clear. In a statement, the singer announced that “after almost two remarkable decades, I am announcing my departure from Sublime with Rome at the close of 2024. The upcoming performances over the next year will allow us to reflect on countless incredible memories together!”

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Apple Offers Reward for Musicians to Use High-End Audio Format

Jason Tate

Ashley Carman, writing for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is offering incentives to artists and record labels to produce music using a spatial-audio technology that surrounds listeners in sound.

Starting next year, the company plans to give added weighting to streams of songs that are mixed in Dolby Atmos technology, according to people with knowledge of matter. That could mean higher royalty payments for artists who are first to embrace the technology made by Dolby Laboratories Inc., said the people, who asked not to be identified because the change hasn’t been announced.

I’m not a fan of this as long as many Dolby Atmos mixes remain subpar and rushed. I’ve talked to multiple artists in the genre we cover that never even knew their songs were remixed for Atmos and had no say in the matter (and often disliked the mix). I don’t personally turn the setting on for this very reason.

New Paramore Interview

Paramore
Jason Tate

Uproxx:

Now that Paramore has spent the year touring behind This Is Why (and making sure to take better care of themselves while they’re at it), a chapter of the band’s career has come to a close. They’ve now fulfilled all label obligations and are effectively free agents. As for the future of Paramore, all three members agreed that there’s a level of uncertainty. But one thing’s for sure — they’re still going to be together, and they’re still going to keep having fun. “The only thing that matters is we will still get to be each other’s community,” Williams says. Farro agrees: “I just hope we can keep building the Paramore empire and then rule the world.” And wherever they end up, the massive community of fans Paramore has cultivated will be here for them, too.

New Fall Out Boy Interview

Fall Out Boy
Jason Tate

Billboard:

Now we just live in this time — and it’s not music; I look at my kids and they curate their own thing. They just go, “I like this and I like this,” and put it together. I think that that benefits a band like us because you know, we love Jay-Z, and then we’re referencing Metallica. We’re just a little bit all over the place, and I think we put out an album that felt free. And also when we put it out, it was coming out of living inside for a year and a half or whatever that was. So, I think this could be this niche Fall Out Boy record. It is what it is; I think there was some freedom in doing that, when we weren’t on the timetable of a label or the timetable of culture saying that you gotta do this (at) this time or whatever. I think the record benefited from the time.

Weezer Talk ‘Blue Album’ Anniversary

Weezer
Jason Tate

Weezer will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the their Blue Album with a tour and deluxe album reissue.

“We’re putting ideas together,” Cuomo says, adding that the band didn’t do anything exciting to celebrate the album’s 20th anniversary, so they want to do it this time. “It’s just this tidal wave of passion,” the singer and guitarist says of the fans’ obsession with the record, “So, we are going to give it its due respect and come out with a really amazing deluxe package with a bunch of additional material, and of course, we’ve gotta do some kind of epic tour.”

Deryck Whibley Talks with GQ

Sum 41
Jason Tate

Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 talked with GQ in a wide ranging interview:

It’s partly the same reason that, last August, Whibley decided to sell the rights to Sum 41’s entire publishing-and-recorded-music catalog to an investment fund called Harbourview Equity Partners for an undisclosed sum. For a long time, despite several approaches, “I was so against selling it,” he says. “My songs are my babies, and I didn’t need the money.”

Then he started to question what he was so afraid of losing. He decided to conduct a thought experiment: “I told myself, Okay, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and act like I’ve sold it. What does that feel like? I woke up scared shitless. I had no songs. And I felt so excited and I picked up a guitar just naturally. Almost right away I wrote “Landmines”. And then I wrote another one, and then another one, and then I had another riff, and it was like, holy shit.” Letting go of his songs—much in the way he’s letting go of the band entirely now—unlocked a vital hunger inside of Whibley. “I felt the way I did when I first got signed. I felt the pressure and the need to create something.”

What he wound up creating was Heaven :x: Hell, a double album slated for early 2024 that should serve as the perfect capstone to the band’s two distinct eras: one side entirely All Killer–style pop-punk jams, the other full of the scorching metal headbangers they’ve favored lately. “I feel like there’s no other band in our genre that can just so easily pull this off,” Whibley says. “We have our own lane. It’s a great last record.”

Spotify Announces More Layoffs

Jason Tate

Spotify has announced they are laying off 1,500 people:

This brings me to a decision that will mean a significant step change for our company. To align Spotify with our future goals and ensure we are right-sized for the challenges ahead, I have made the difficult decision to reduce our total headcount by approximately 17% across the company. I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us.

Meanwhile, the stock spiked on the news so the CFO cashed in.

Pale Waves Working on New Album

Pale Waves
Jason Tate

Pale Waves are working on a new album:

So all of my attention and energy is going into writing and recording our best album yet. Ultimately, that’s about building a world that feels like Pale Waves, while also feeling completely different to anywhere we’ve inhabited before. We’re creating another universe for our fans to explore, and for us to live in for a moment.

The Joys of Last.fm

Technology
Jason Tate

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:

There are a million questions that could be answered by Apple Music that aren’t, and that’s a shame.

Spotify does a better job at surfacing interesting data with Wrapped, but if you’re like me and prefer other aspects of Apple Music, sign up for Last.fm, use one of the many excellent indie apps, like Marvis Pro, Soor, Albums, Longplay, Doppler, and Air Scrobblethat support the service, and then enjoy your weekly, monthly, and annual reports in Last.fm’s app or on its website.

I 100% agree. Not only does Last.fm let you look into the data whenever you want, but you can also have your entire year of listening history at your disposal. And past years. There’s never a better time to start scrobbling than now, and the end of the year is a great time to begin collecting the data.

I use Marvis on iOS and Neptunes on the Mac and am happy with both. Passed the 100k scrobble mark this year and set a new personal record for number of songs listened to.

Gym Class Heroes Drummer Donates Rockefeller Tree

Gym Class Heroes
Jason Tate

The 2023 Rockefeller Christmas tree was donated by the drummer for Gym Class Heroes:

Matt and Jackie McGinley knew the Norway spruce that towered over their Vestal home near Binghamton was impressive.

They just didn’t know how impressive. Try good enough for the Rockefeller Center.

Matt, a Geneva native, founding member of rock-rap band Gym Class Heroes and a music composer, and his wife, Jackie, a professor at Binghamton University, donated the massive tree that will begin shining over the New York City plaza this week.

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It May Be Time to Backup Your Bandcamp Purchases

Bandcamp
Jason Tate

David Rutland:

You can’t rely on other people or organisations to hold onto your media forever, and it’s a tired but true maxim that the cloud is just someone else’s machine.

If you’ve spent your hard earned cash supporting independent artists through Bandcamp, a series of ownership changes and layoffs suggest that now might be the best time for audiophiles to download their audio files to secure offline storage.

And:

While we’re not saying that Bandcamp is going to disappear into nothing (MySpace is still around after all), we think it’s perhaps prudent to download your albums from Bandcamp and store them offline. You never know – that’s all we’re saying.

The Bandcamp UI isn’t really designed with massive downloads in mind, and there are a lot of boxes to tick.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to download all of your Bandcamp music using the excellent Batchcamp extension which is available as both a FireFox addon, or as a Google Chrome extension.