Tom DeLonge talked with Spin:
“That said, Blink will be the priority forever,” he continues, his eyes lighting up. “Look at this dressing room. How do I go back from this fucking dressing room? We have to play stadiums, because I need a ping pong table in my dressing room. Honestly, I think this is a whole new beginning for the band. With what we’re planning on doing, who we’ve become, and how we’re doing it now I think it’s really, really exciting.”
Butch Walker talked with Rolling Stone about the anniversary of Letters and how he’s done with solo albums:
“I don’t want to be that cliché of an aging artist that puts out new shit that nobody cares about,” Walker tells Rolling Stone. “And when you write so many records doing a certain thing, you start to worry about recycling and repeating yourself. I would rather celebrate a record that has an anniversary — and I have a lot of them. By the time I get through that cycle, I’m going to be like 900 years old.” […]
So, if Walker is serious about calling his solo career quits, would that make 2022’s Butch Walker as…Glenn, his excellent piano-man LP in the vein of Elton John and Billy Joel, his final album?
“Glenn was the swan song,” he confirms. “And I thought that when I did it. I just really needed to process it over a year or two and see if my theory held up.”
A new feature announced by Instagram today will allow users to add a song on their profile — much like Myspace in the early 2000s.
The music added to a user’s profile shows up in the bio area, according to screenshots shared by Instagram. A song will be featured on a profile until the user removes or replaces it. But unlike Myspace, songs won’t autoplay — people viewing a profile with a song can play and pause the track.
Rocky Votolato has a Kickstarter up for a new band project.
I started a new band called Suzzallo! Our debut album is called “The Quiet Year” and this record is deeply meaningful to me. I absolutely can’t wait to share these songs with you guys. We are in the final stages of making the album now and could use your support to get it finished and released into the world!
The attorney general for Washington, D.C., sued StubHub on Wednesday, accusing the ticket resale platform of advertising deceptively low prices and then ramping up prices with extra fees.
The practice known as “drip pricing” violates consumer protection laws in the nation’s capital, Attorney General Brian Schwalb said.
“StubHub intentionally hides the true price to boost profits at its customers’ expense,” he said in a statement.
The company said it is disappointed to be targeted, maintaining its practices are consistent with the law and competing companies as well as broader industry norms. “We strongly support federal and state solutions that enhance existing laws to empower consumers, such as requiring all-in pricing uniformly across platforms,” the company said in a statement.
The organizer of Malaysia’s Good Vibes Festival has filed a lawsuit against the 1975 and all its members individually following frontman Matty Healy’s protest against the country’s anti-LGBTQ laws during the event last July. The festival is seeking £1.9 million ($2.4 million) after the band’s antics resulted in the festival being shut down.
In court documents filed by festival organizers Future Sound Asia in the U.K. High Court, they claim that the 1975 and their management team were aware of the numerous prohibitions the band had to abide by in order to perform.
Imogen Heap (Frou Frou, “Let Go”): “Let Go” was originally written for a film called Phone Booth. It had a much bigger energy, much bigger drums, very intense. I always loved the song, but it didn’t get into the movie. Then one night in our studio in West London, I brought out my cello. We stripped away all the intensity, and we were just left with the strings and the voice and that amazing bass line. We loved it so much, but through that whole Frou Frou album [Details], nobody really got to know about it until after Garden State.
Braff: There was a Radiohead song at the end, [“Sulk”]. Of course it would have been a huge Hail Mary try, but as I recall, what happened was we found a song that just works better. We didn’t need to make the insane ask of Radiohead.
Abby Jones, writing at Stereogum:
Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group have filed a joint lawsuit against Verizon, alleging the internet service provider of facilitating “massive copyright infringement committed by tens of thousands of its subscribers.”
The suit, filed in filed in Manhattan July 12, claims that Verizon has failed to protect copyrighted material by knowingly providing high-speed internet to a large community of online pirates.
YouTube is in talks with record labels to license their songs for artificial intelligence tools that clone popular artists’ music, hoping to win over a sceptical industry with upfront payments. The Google-owned video site needs labels’ content to legally train AI song generators, as it prepares to launch new tools this year, according to three people familiar with the matter. The company has recently offered lump sums of cash to the major labels — Sony, Warner and Universal — to try to convince more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI software, according to several people briefed on the talks.
Devin Coldewey, writing for TechCrunch:
Like many AI companies, music generation startups Udio and Suno appear to have relied on unauthorized scrapes of copyrighted works in order to train their models. This is by their own and investors’ admission, as well as according to new lawsuits filed against them by music companies. If these suits go before a jury, the trial could be both a damaging exposé and a highly useful precedent for similarly sticky-fingered AI companies facing certain legal peril.
The lawsuits, filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), put us all in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the RIAA, which for decades has been the bogeyman of digital media. I myself have received nastygrams from them! The case is simply that clear.
Comedy Central’s website has also been scrubbed from the internet:
For years, the Comedy Central website was home to a large amount of content, including clips from every episode of The Daily Show since 1999, the full run of The Colbert Report, and many more shows. Now, the site simply redirects to Paramount+, with a message explaining that “while episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website,” fans can still watch the channel through their TV providers or find “many seasons of Comedy Central shows” on Paramount+.
MTV News has been taken offline:
I believe the decision was at least partially motivated by Paramount’s unwillingness to pay for E&O (errors and omissions) insurance and associated licensing costs (such as for Getty Images) in perpetuity. Every piece of content published on a site like MTV comes with a certain amount of risk. Is there a sentence that is inaccurate? Does a negative review contain something that an artist might construe as libelous? Is a photo or video properly licensed? And often times, these issues don’t surface until years after the initial piece of content was published.
The Early November talked with Idobi about their new album:
Look at the triple disc as an example, I committed so hard to that theme that I probably took away from allowing myself to be a little bit more generous in creativity because of how strict I had to be to complete the theme like that. I didn’t want that to happen again.
So you look at it from a standpoint of learning from your mistakes and actually putting it into practice. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to grow and be better. So that was one of the reasons. But I’m really glad that you asked that question and picked up on it. And it was something that I bounced around with for a little while until I learned what this record wants to be, something different than maybe what’s exactly in my head.
Andrew McMahon talks about the new single released today with People:
When I was thinking about it, I was like, “Do I really want to put out a Wilderness track in the middle of Something Corporate tour? This is such a beautiful moment.” And I immediately called Josh, who was the co-founder of Something Corporate. I was like, “I want to send you a song. What would you think about bringing the guys together and doing this as a collaboration?” He was so genuinely enthusiastic about it, and it was almost like a healing moment. Josh and I were, we’ve been best friends forever, but you end a band, you move on, you just don’t know where people stand, and he was so excited. So, I brought it to the other guys and merged this Wilderness-esque production with my original band playing all the instruments. It became this beautiful moment that felt, weirdly for the first time, all of these bands coming full circle and feeling like for once it’s one thing in one place.
And:
The song that’s going to come out next was actually written for the last Wilderness record. Luke, who produced and co-wrote “Death Grip” with me, wrote a few songs on my last album. This song was a part of the sessions that we did together. It was the first time where I was like, “This feels way more like a Something Corporate song than it does a Wilderness song that belongs on this record,” and so I always just had it in my back pocket.
And then when “Death Grip” came up, and the band seemed legit excited about getting back in the studio, I forwarded them this other track, and I was like, “This is just a demo, but if we’re all together, maybe we should try and cut another song,” and everybody raised their hand and was excited. So, we cut both in the same weekend. That song was written during the pandemic. There were lyric changes and things that I had to make to say, “No, let’s put this in the present universe.” But it’s really about just trying to source your happiness in the middle of a difficult moment. It’s called “Happy.”
Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:
As highlighted by repair technician and consumer privacy advocate Louis Rossmann, Sonos has made a significant change to its privacy policy, at least in the United States, with the removal of one key line. The updated policy no longer contains a sentence that previously said, “Sonos does not and will not sell personal information about our customers.” That pledge is still present in other countries, but it’s nowhere to be found in the updated US policy, which went into effect earlier this month.
It has not been a good few months for Sonos.