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Alkaline Trio Talk With NME

Alkaline Trio
Jason Tate

Alkaline Trio sat down to talk about their new album with NME:

After going through the mindset of “it’s not done until we all love it,” the band landed on an album with some familiar noir themes. “Unfortunately, ‘Blood, Hair And Eyeballs’ is a dark record but I don’t think we had a choice,” Andriano explained. “There’s a fairly apocalyptic theme that runs through the record, because it seems like we’re living through the end of time right now.

“Humanity really needs to get its shit together, which means the record is broader than just Matt and I writing about our personal lives. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to pull that off.”

Green Day Talk With The Sun

Green Day
Jason Tate

Green Day talked with The Sun in a new wide ranging interview:

Mike says: “Social media is great for kids but if you’re finding your music via algorithms then that’s just fing lazy. I like to organically find new things. All I can say is just f***ing clear your search history to find new s***.” Tre laughs: “We say this now but as soon as we hang up, we’ll be making a TikTok account.”

Billie Joe adds: “I was told that Brain Stew was a sudden popular thing on TikTok with a lot of hip-hop kids dancing to it. And that’s cool. But I don’t have the patience to use it. It’s just like, eurgh. It’s cool for other people but we’re old- school man.”

That is why you won’t find the passionate and outspoken songwriiter venting on social media.

Billie Joe says: “My opinions are always in my songs. I don’t like to Tweet or Instagram about politics, because you’re contributing to insane people who are just bitching, arguing and taking sides. So I write about it in my songs. It’s funny as on New Year’s Eve, we played American Idiot [on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show] and we changed ‘redneck agenda’ to MAGA agenda’ [Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan]. Well, I woke up the next morning to people saying, ‘F***ng blah blah I can’t believe he said it’ or ‘it’s so awesome’ which was crazy. And then it’s on Fox News and Elon Musk and Tom Morello are saying things about it.  But it threw me as we’d pre-taped the show a month before and I’d forgotten about that lyric change. On actual New Year’s Eve, we were in our cover band, The Coverups, raising money for a chimpanzee sanctuary so I was like, ‘Hey what are you talking about? I was raising money for chimps’.”

Billie Joe Armstrong Breaks Down Some of the Band’s Singles

Green Day
Jason Tate

Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day broke down some of their biggest hits:

There’s a band called 5 Seconds of Summer who wanted me to write a song for them. All of a sudden I was writing the lyrics, and I was like, “Oh my God, there’s no f—ing way I’m giving these guys this song.” There’s all those [lyrics] where it’s the last moment of someone’s life — it’s so intense. It’s just a song [from 2016’s Revolution Radio] about being a survivor.

Alkaline Trio Talk New Album

Alkaline Trio
Jason Tate

Alkaline Trio talk with Rock Sound about their upcoming album:

Often leaning into hyperbole whilst holding a mirror to the darkest aspects of humanity, the Chicago punk legends have long charted the world’s descent into brooding chaos, and now – six years since they last released an album – real life has seemingly edged closer to Doomsday than ever before.

From a global pandemic to mass shootings to drug epidemics, there are no shortage of horrors sitting on our doorstep, and thanks to social media – they can often feel impossible to escape. As the planet unravels and we witness the Earth become a breeding ground for a whole host of terror, everything feels uncertain – but one thing’s for sure, it’s the perfect time for new Alkaline Trio music.

With their milestone tenth album, the three-piece are stripping things back to basics. Redefining their morbid sonic identity to serve as an antidote for the swirling confusion that now dominates so many of our lives – they’re back with a dark record for a truly dark time.

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Despite Music Industry Growth, Companies Are Tightening

Jason Tate

Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:

Last year was brutal for the media business, as nearly every major entertainment and technology company fired employees. This year is shaping up to be more of the same.

More than a dozen major corporations across technology, finance and media announced major job cuts this past week, including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Unity Software Inc. Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, plans cuts in the first quarter. Animation studio Pixar will let staff go in the second half. All told, media companies have fired more than 70,000 employees since the start of last year, according to Vivek Couto at Media Partners Asia.

EU Regulating Music Streaming Royalties

Globe
Jason Tate

The Verge:

The EU has proposed sweeping changes within the music streaming industry to promote smaller artists and make sure underpaid performers are being fairly compensated. 

A resolution to address concerns regarding inadequate streaming royalties for artists and biased recommendation algorithms was adopted by members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on Wednesday, highlighting that no existing EU rules currently apply to music streaming services, despite being the most popular way to consume audio.

Pitchfork Folded Into GQ

Pitchfork
Jason Tate

Pitchfork is being folded into GQ:

Condé Nast is merging Pitchfork, the digital music publication it bought in 2015, with men’s magazine GQ — a move that will result in layoffs at Pitchfork, including the exit of editor-in-chief Puja Patel.

According to Wintour, “Both Pitchfork and GQ have unique and valuable ways that they approach music journalism, and we are excited for the new possibilities together.” She added with the organizational changes, “some of our Pitchfork colleagues will be leaving the company today.”

A rep for Condé Nast did not have information on how many Pitchfork staffers are being let go. Wintour’s memo about the Pitchfork changes was first reported by Semafor’s Max Tani.

Music Streaming Fraud Costs Musicians Millions

The New York Times
Jason Tate

David Segal, writing for New York Times:

The guys in Bad Dog, a folkie duo from Washington, D.C., weren’t hoping to get rich off the album they recorded this summer. David Post and Craig Blackwell have been devoted amateurs for decades, and they’re long past dreams of tours and limos. Mostly they wanted a CD to give away at a house party in December.

But not long after “The Jukebox of Regret” was finished in July and posted on SoundCloud, nearly every song on it somehow turned up on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and at least a dozen other streaming platforms. This might have counted as a pleasant surprise, except for a bizarre twist: Each song had a new title, attached to the name of a different artist.

And:

Despite their backgrounds, both men were stymied by the vast and arcane world of music streaming fraud, a realm where anonymous pirates are constantly devising new ways to steal from the $17 billion a year pool of royalty money intended for artists.

That’s a giant, tempting pot of gold for scammers around the world. Beatdapp, a Vancouver company that detects fraud for industry clients, estimates that a little more than 10 percent of that pot, about $2 billion, is swiped annually.

First Grammy 2024 Performers Announced

Grammys
Jason Tate

Olivia Rodrigo, Dua Lipa, and Billie Eilish are the first round of Grammy 2024 performers.

Both Eilish and Rodrigo are among the most-nominated artists on the bill (and, at 22 and 20 respectively, among the youngest) with six nods each while R&B star SZA leads the list with a total of nine nominations. Following SZA, tied with seven nominations apiece, are Victoria Monét, Phoebe Bridgers (six of those for her work with Boygenius, one for a collaboration with SZA) and mixing engineer Serban Ghenea.

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Mike Dirnt Talks With Rolling Stone

Green Day
Jason Tate

Mike Dirnt of Green Day talked with Rolling Stone:

Well, it’s funny you say that, because [the Saviors track] “The American Dream Is Killing Me” was written by Billie almost four years ago. But we all knew it was just low-hanging fruit. We’re not a parody of who we are, and songs like that need time to be fleshed out. If that means just sitting back and letting life happen, so be it. And it was one of the last things we recorded. Rob’s like, “What else do you got?” As we get towards the end of recording, it was two songs. It was that one and “Father to a Son.” And those two songs, Rob’s like, “Oh, you’ve got to record those.”

And then Billie had to go in for “American Dream” and just deep dive on the lyrics, and just tweak a few things here and there. But “The American Dream Is Killing Me” was the line a while back ago. We were like, “Yeah, it’s just not the right time.”

Bruce Springsteen Developing Film

Bruce Springsteen
Jason Tate

Bruce Springsteen is reportedly working on a Nebraska feature film:

Sources say that Springsteen has been consulting on a possible feature film about the making of his watershed 1982 album, “Nebraska.”

I’m told Bruce has been collaborating with director-writer Scott Cooper, whose six terrific films include “Crazy Heart,” about a washed up country singer. Jeff Bridges won the 2010 Oscar for starring in that one, the movie also won Best Song. Maggie Gyllenhaal was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

New Interview With Turnstile

Turnstile
Jason Tate

Brendan Yates of Turnstile sat down for a new interview with Anti-Matter.

Putting out every record, there’s always a certain level of discomfort that comes with it. Or the tours we do. We’ve done tours before where we see an opportunity for something new, but we also know that it’s not necessarily the perfect hardcore tour—with comfortable venues, reactions, people, or that kind of thing. It’s placing ourselves in environments where we are the fish out of water, which I think we’ve done continuously in our time as a band. And it’s not always “the bigger thing.” Like, we did an arena tour last year not because it was the “biggest” thing we could do, but as an experience thing. It’s always gotta feel right, but it’s about finding that perfect sweet spot where it’s going to be uncomfortable, but it’s also going to be a totally new eye-opening experience in different ways. Sometimes you take away things that are negative from it, and sometimes you take away things that are positive, but that’s kind of a theme with our band. We’re always looking for that sweet spot of feeling like it’s something that feels true to us, but also feeling a level of discomfort that’s going to teach us something new or give us a new experience so that we’re never doing the same thing over and over.

Taylor Swift Breaks Elvis Presley’s Record as Solo Artist With Most Weeks at No. 1

Taylor Swift
Jason Tate

Variety:

Taylor Swift has broken Elvis Presley‘s longstanding record for the most weeks spent atop the Billboard 200 album chart by a solo artist. She set a new mark of 68 total weeks, as “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” landed on top of the chart for a fifth time in the final full tracking week of 2023.

Although Swift set a new record for an individual, the ultimate high-water mark among all artists is still held by the Beatles, whose albums have spent 132 weeks on top of the Billboard 200. Presley’s 67 weeks now puts him in second place among solo recording artists and third place among all acts.

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Merch Company SCP Owes Millions

Legal
Jason Tate

Chris Eggertsen, writing for Billboard:

Illinois-based merch company SCP owes more than $4 million to over 300 clients including Mitski and Brent Faiyaz after abruptly shutting down operations last week, according to internal documents obtained by Billboard. And with plans to file for chapter 7 bankruptcy on Friday, it’s unlikely those clients will ever recover all the money they’re owed. 

Some of SCP’s other clients included Father John Misty, Chappell Roan, T-Pain, Finneas, Brand New and Carly Rae Jepsen; record labels Loma Vista Recordings and Triple Crown Records; Pharrell Williams‘ Something in the Water music festival; and online content creators such as the Dungeons & Daddies podcast and YouTubers Team Edge.  

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