Taylor Swift sold a fuck-ton of records:
Taylor Swift achieves her 11th No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart (dated Nov. 5) as Midnights arrives with the biggest week for any album in nearly seven years. The set launches with 1.578 million equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Oct. 27, according to Luminate.
Nilay Patel, writing at The Verge:
You fucked up real good, kiddo.
Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.
I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.
Best article on the acquisition I’ve read so far.
A bunch of Angels and Airwaves albums have been re-pressed for a limited run.
After just its first week-and-a-half of availability, Blink-182‘s “Edging” is No. 1 on Billboard‘s Rock & Alternative Airplay chart.
Matty Healy of The 1975 and Phoebe Bridgers interviewed each other:
Matty Healy: Yeah, I remember your first record [Stranger In The Alps] had come out, and before I’d heard it George [Daniel, drummer with The 1975] had been saying to me, ‘Have you heard this ‘Motion Sickness’ song? So I put that album on, and I heard ‘Funeral’ and was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ For me, you only really love a piece of art when it makes you a little bit jealous.
Phoebe Bridgers: Oh my God, completely, dude. Like, I can’t listen to ‘Part of the Band’ and be like ‘I’m so glad he came up with that.’ [Laughs] That’s not the way I feel when I hear that song.
Matty Healy: I think it was the hit rate of the lyrics on that [first] album. And then when it got to Punisher, I realised you’re my favourite lyricist. You know, I’ll say it, because I’m allowed to say this shit because everyone thinks that I’m an insane person: I think we’re the best lyricists. Us and Kendrick, who are coming from a different place.
Blink-182‘s “Edging” marks the highest debut on Billboard‘s Rock & Alternative Airplay chart in over eight years, as the band’s reunion single with Tom DeLonge starts at No. 2.
So Mark and I would talk, but we weren’t really talking about the band. We’re friends before we’re a band. Far beyond what the band is to me is Mark’s health and his friendship. So we just were talking. And over the course of, I don’t remember the exact timeframe, but Mark said that they were talking to Tom and starting to work on things. So it didn’t come as any — it was just as far as the actual information dropping and the schedule of everything was revealed to me when it was to everyone else, but I knew that it was coming. It wasn’t this huge surprise, nor was it a stab in the back. Those guys, we were friends — and this includes Tom. Tom especially has been a friend and a fan of my band for many years. Long before I started playing with Blink, Alkaline Trio was out on tour opening for Blink. And Tom had, if not everything to do with it, a lot to do with that. So we’ve always been buddies. We haven’t talked in recent years.
Bartees Strange performed three songs for CBS Saturday Morning.
Matt Healy talks with Kyle Meredith about The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language.
Drive-Thru Records has posted up some vintage merch along with The Starting Line’s With Hopes of Starting Over being released on vinyl.
Fat Mike has announced the Punk Rock Museum.
It’s been 45+ years since punk rock pogo’d its way into music, fashion, film, and popular culture. January 13th 2023, The Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas opens its doors and proudly shoves in your face the history, culture, and absurdity of rock n’ roll’s bastard step-child. This museum invites lifelong fans and curious looky-loos of all ages to experience a hands-on, uniquely punk rock experience.
TechCrunch looks at Dance Diffusion, an AI music generator:
The emergence of Dance Diffusion comes several years after OpenAI, the San Francisco-based lab behind DALL-E 2, detailed its grand experiment with music generation, dubbed Jukebox. Given a genre, artist and a snippet of lyrics, Jukebox could generate relatively coherent music complete with vocals. But the songs Jukebox produced lacked larger musical structures like choruses that repeat and often contained nonsense lyrics.
Google’s AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows more promise, with an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn’t been open sourced.
Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what’s known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it’s fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works.
“I started writing a book, actually, earlier this year,” he revealed. “I’m not that far into it yet but I’m writing a book about my life and experience in Blink and what I’ve gone through over the past year or so.”
He describes the forthcoming tome as a combo of music memoir meets medical journey. Though he’s working with an editor and has a publisher, Hoppus is keeping mum on the specifics until the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.
“We’re finalizing the deal and I’m really happy with the way that’s coming together. I’m excited to tell my story,” Hoppus said, admitting that it’s a 180 from how he felt last year prior to the accidental social media post. “I didn’t say anything about being sick for the longest time because I was so scared and overwhelmed by the whole thing.”
Daryl Worthington, writing for the Quietus:
“The thing I find most interesting about the whole thing regarding format and materiality is that even though a large proportion of people may listen almost exclusively digitally to music, there is still a sense that if something doesn’t have a physical release it is a less substantial album. Even people who would never listen to CD, tape or vinyl I think still assign value to an album existing in a physical format. That physicality kind of haunts the release, giving it a substance even in its digitality. For me, given this, CD offers a really easy and practical way of providing this physical option.”