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Geoff Rickly Shares Recovery Story

Thursday
Jason Tate

Geoff Rickly of Thursday talks to The Ties That Bind Us about recovering from addiction:

Until he got clean in 2016, shortly before Thursday returned after a five-year hiatus, Rickly spent the last several years of his addiction trying desperately to salvage his personal life while putting on a professional front that still managed to move forward. He joined No Devotion, a Welsh alternative bound formed from the ashes of Lostprophets, in 2014 and signed the band to his Collect Records label. Whatever success he enjoyed, however, was eclipsed by the growing realization that his drug problem was slowly consuming everything.

“The last few years of using heroin, of course I wanted to stop, but it was literally impossible,” he said. “They tell you (in recovery) to take it a day at a time, and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to make it another 10 minutes. What are you talking about?’ It was so hard to imagine having to be without the thing that made me feel like a person, because unless I got really high, I didn’t really feel connected to people. If I wasn’t high, every sensation, every thought, was another expression of unbearable pain. Spiritually, I was so empty.”

Spotify Launches New Pay “Transparency” Website

Jason Tate

Wren Graves, writing at Consequence of Sound:

Spotify has announced a new pay transparency initiative, Loud & Clear, which is certainly one of those two things. This comes just days after the “Justice at Spotify” campaign organized worldwide protests outside of the streamer’s offices demanding one cent per stream, transparent contracts, a user-centric payment model, an end to payola, a switch to crediting all labor in recordings, and an end to lawsuits against artists.

Coachella Music Festival Moving to 2022

Coachella
Jason Tate

Variety:

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is moving from October 2021 to April of 2022, two industry sources with knowledge of the situation tell Variety. It is expected that the country-music themed Stagecoach festival, which takes place the weekend after Coachella’s two weekends, will move as well.

Reps for Goldenvoice, the event’s promoter, and AEG Presents, its parent company, either declined or did not respond to Variety’s requests for comment.

Grammys Ratings … Not Great, Bob!

Grammys
Jason Tate

Variety:

This year’s telecast was the lowest-rated in Grammys history in the early numbers.

Per Nielsen Live+Same Day official national numbers, Music’s Biggest Night delivered an average of 8.8 million viewers for the network during the ceremony’s broadcast on Sunday night at 8 p.m. ET with a 2.1 rating in the key, adults ages 18-49 demographic. […]

Nevertheless, this year’s telecast was still the highest-rated broadcast of the night, and it was the most-streamed Grammy show ever with 83% more live streams compared to 2020. In addition to cable, the show could be accessed on the CBS website and app as well as the network’s recently rebranded and debuted video-on-demand and over-the-top media streaming service Paramount Plus.

Lou Ottens, Inventor of the Cassette Tape, Dies at 94

Mixtape
Jason Tate

The Associated Press:

A structural engineer who trained at the prestigious Technical University in Delft, he joined Philips in 1952 and was head of the company’s product development department when he began work on an alternative for existing tape recorders with their cumbersome large spools of tape.

His goal was simple: making tapes and their players far more portable and easier to use.

“During the development of the cassette tape, in the early 1960s, he had a wooden block made that fit exactly in his coat pocket,” said Olga Coolen, director of the Philips Museum in the southern city of Eindhoven. “This was how big the first compact cassette was to be, making it a lot handier than the bulky tape recorders in use at the time.”

The final product created in 1962 later turned into a worldwide hit, with more than 100 billion cassettes sold, many to music fans who would record their own compilations direct from the radio. Its popularity waned with the arrival of the compact disc, an invention Ottens also helped create as supervisor of a development team, Philips said.

How Phoebe Bridgers Became a Lockdown Rock Star

Phoebe Bridgers
Jason Tate

Variety profiled Phoebe Bridgers:

“It would all be more tangible if a tour was happening — I would gradually be playing bigger venues, maybe getting more opportunities to go to lunch with someone cool, and see more fans and more tattoos of my lyrics,” she says. “Instead, every once in a while somebody at the grocery store comes up to me, very respectfully. But yeah, other than that, I’ve just got my same little life going.”

How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle But Lost the War to Spotify

Pandora
Jason Tate

 Tyler Hayes, writing for Vice:

For a few years in the late 2000s, Pandora was the on-demand DJ for tens of millions of people, creating the soundtrack to college dorm room parties, quiet coffee shops, busy kitchens, and family get-togethers. The days of building massive MP3 music collections through file-sharing was receding quickly into the past, and instead the shared experience of radio was making a comeback via the clever algorithmic matchmaking of Pandora’s endlessly customizable stations based on individual taste. Today it’s a feature we take for granted across every music service, even if Pandora’s implementation still seems like it was the best. Pandora itself, however, can feel like an afterthought. Betamax to Spotify’s VHS, or maybe more accurately, MySpace to on-demand streaming’s Facebook.

Weezer Release Audio Liner Notes

Weezer
Jason Tate

Weezer have released an audio version of the liner notes for OK Human via Audible.

Weezer and Jaron Lanier dive deep into the band’s new album, OK Human. The team discuss the album’s lyrical topics of modern life, technology, and what it is to be human as well as add insights into the sonics and recording process.

Turntable.fm Is Back From the Dead

Jason Tate

Mitchell Clark, writing at The Verge:

It’s rare that apps come back from the dead, but it seems like that may be what’s happening with Turntable.fm, a site that let users create their own radio stations and DJ sets with music they curated before it got shuttered in 2013. Even rarer, it seems like there are two versions involved in the revival: the original Turntable.fm site is back up and running (with the involvement of its original founder, Billy Chasen), but there’s also Turntable.org, which will reportedly be launching in beta this April.

Square Acquires Majority Stake in Jay-Z’s Tidal for $297 Million

Tidal
Jason Tate

The Hollywood Reporter:

Square, the mobile payments firm run by Jack Dorsey, has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Jay-Z’s music streaming service Tidal for $297 million, the companies announced Thursday.

Through the deal, Jay-Z and Tidal’s other artist shareholders — including Beyoncé, Madonna and Rihanna — will continue to own their piece of the business, which will operate as an independent division within Square.