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Spotify Says They Overpaid Songwriters and Publishers in 2018

Jason Tate

Tim Ingham, writing at Music Business Worldwide:

Because of this additional complexity, Spotify has now calculated that, retrospectively, according to the CRB decision, many music publishers actually owe it money for 2018, due to an overpayment based on the prior rates. And guess what? It wants that money back.

Spotify told the publishers the news this week and, as you can imagine, these companies – already up in arms over Spotify’s CRB appeal – are fuming about it.

One senior figure in the music publishing industry told MBW: “Spotify is clawing back millions of dollars from publishers in the US based on the new CRB rates that favor the DSPs, while appealing the [wider CRB decision]. This puts some music publishers in a negative position. It’s unbelievable.”

Frank Turner on Latest Dialog Podcast

Jason Tate

Frank Turner is the latest guest on the Dialog podcast:

We also trace Turner’s early years of constant touring and how he’s managed to find the time to write new songs and books while on tour. We talk about social media’s dual nature as a useful tool and destructive force in society too; a topic that has become a common theme among Dialog guests. Finally, we touch on the evolving music industry and how it’s affected Turner’s career as a musician.

Justin Courtney Pierre Talks About Upcoming Motion City Soundtrack Tour

Justin Courtney Pierre
Jason Tate

Justin Courtney Pierre talked with Alternative Press a little about Motion City Soundtrack’s upcoming tour:

I think Josh said to me, “Hey. You want to do a show on New Year’s?” And I said, “Sure. What New Year’s?” I think I was just about to do my tour. [Pauses.]

I can walk you through a scenario, and this might explain things: I’ll hear from Josh, or I’ll call Josh and say, “Hey! I’ve got an idea for a song or a thing. Do you want to work on it?” And he’ll say, “Yeah, let’s figure out a time for it to work out.” We’ll plan that out, and then the time will come, and something will come up, and we won’t be able to do it. Then a month will [go] by, and one of us will call each other and say, “Hey, hey, you want to do this thing? This sounds like a good idea. Let’s do that.” That loop has always kind of happened the last couple [of] decades. Also, I don’t know; I’m speculating here.

Motion City are a much bigger beast than the little stuff that I’m doing. But I don’t have a problem with doing both of them at the same time. I think that I’m going to make music in one form or another forever. [Deep breath.] I really should’ve thought of things to talk about. I like to make it up on the fly because it’s honest, you know, instead of preprogrammed sound bites…

Lyrics Site Accuses Google of Lifting Its Content

Google
Jason Tate

The Wall Street Journal:

Genius Media Group Inc. depends on Google’s search engine to send music lovers to its website stocked with hard-to-decipher lyrics to hip-hop songs and other pop hits.

Now Genius says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music site. […]

Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song.

When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”

Listening to Fall Out Boy on the Brink of Collapse

Jason Tate

John Bazley, writing at Catapult:

We didn’t yet know exactly how the following year would work its fingernails into our neighborhood and pick it apart, but there was a palpable feeling of impending doom lingering over the roofs in my hometown.

All easy to ignore, of course, when Fall Out Boy would release a new record. I was twelve, living within my CD collection and the narratives it projected upon the world in front of me. I didn’t know about subprime mortgages or Lehman Brothers then. I just counted the days until Infinity On High. There was no other world event that could possibly take precedent over the release of that album. My excitement for Infinity On High may have been an unsustainable motivator, but sustainability itself was a questionable construct in 2007.

This is very well written.

Spotify’s Mood Related Data Lets Advertisers Target by Listeners Emotional State

Jason Tate

Liz Pelly, writing for The Baffler:

[A] more careful look into Spotify’s history shows that the decision to define audiences by their moods was part of a strategic push to grow Spotify’s advertising business in the years leading up to its IPO—and today, Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firms.

This creeps me out.

The Day the Music Burned

The New York Times
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

The archive in Building 6197 was UMG’s main West Coast storehouse of masters, the original recordings from which all subsequent copies are derived. A master is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the irreplaceable primary source of a piece of recorded music. According to UMG documents, the vault held analog tape masters dating back as far as the late 1940s, as well as digital masters of more recent vintage. It held multitrack recordings, the raw recorded materials — each part still isolated, the drums and keyboards and strings on separate but adjacent areas of tape — from which mixed or “flat” analog masters are usually assembled. And it held session masters, recordings that were never commercially released. […]

The list of destroyed single and album masters takes in titles by dozens of legendary artists, a genre-spanning who’s who of 20th- and 21st-century popular music. It includes recordings by Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, the Andrews Sisters, the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Clara Ward, Sammy Davis Jr., Les Paul, Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton, Burl Ives, the Weavers, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Bobby (Blue) Bland, B.B. King, Ike Turner, the Four Tops, Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart, Cat Stevens, the Carpenters, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Al Green, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, the Eagles, Don Henley, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Iggy Pop, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Barry White, Patti LaBelle, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Police, Sting, George Strait, Steve Earle, R.E.M., Janet Jackson, Eric B. and Rakim, New Edition, Bobby Brown, Guns N’ Roses, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Sonic Youth, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, 50 Cent and the Roots.

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Anberlin Talk Reconciliation

Anberlin
Jason Tate

Anberlin sat down with Billboard to talk about their “reconciliation:”

Christian is elated to return to Anberlin “with a revived passion.” This is on their terms with nobody breathing down their neck. “This feels so liberating,” he exclaims. “For the first time in probably eight years, I’m actually looking forward to a tour. We have already talked about quality of life. Sometimes you need to walk away and take time out or a break or a vacation so that life can talk to you. I think that money has a way of slaughtering the muse. It’s not just money – it’s responsibilities and mouths to feed. So many different dynamics are such a quick killer to the muse. And once she feels betrayed, it’s not easily accessible for some time. I just feel that sense of energy and electricity back in the air. That’s something that I haven’t felt in a long, long time.”