OFF! have launched a Kickstarter for a new film.
OFF! Announce New Documentary
Apple Music’s U.S. Subscriber Count Overtakes Spotify
Reuters is reporting that Apple Music has surpassed Spotify in paid monthly U.S. subscribers:
Apple Inc’s streaming music service overtook rival Spotify Technology SA in terms of paid subscribers in the United States, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday.
Apple’s service had 28 million subscribers as of the end of February compared with Spotify’s 26 million paid subscribers, the person said.
Billie Eilish Tops Billboard Charts
Billie Eilish has the number one album in the country:
Billie Eilish scores her first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, as When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? storms in atop the tally with 313,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending April 4, according to Nielsen Music, scoring the second-largest week of 2019 for any album. Of the album’s starting sum, 170,000 were in album sales, the second-largest sales week for an album this year.
Alex No Longer Fanboying Out Over Mark Hoppus
Alex Gaskarth talks about working with Mark Hoppus in the new issue of Rock Sound:
“I did come up on blink and Mark was very much an inspiration to me, but we’ve had the honeymoon period as it were, become good friends… I’m not fanboying out in front of him anymore, like I used to seven years ago! I don’t think the creative process would be as honest if I was sitting there going, ‘Yeah, whatever you think man, I love you!’ We both keep each other in check, and push each other to do better.”
21 Women Accuse Dahvie Vanity of Sexual Assault
After speaking to Farrell and her mother, Captain Kurt Romanosky, a detective from the Crimes Against Children squad of the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, called 22-year-old Jesus David Torres, the man known on Myspace as “Dahvie the Elite Hair God.” Romanosky informed Torres that he was aware of the sexual contact with Farrell, and that her mother would not ask cops to arrest Torres if he cut off contact with her daughter. Torres claimed he didn’t know how young Farrell was, said he was sorry and promised not to talk to her again.
Warning: This article is extremely graphic.
The Artist Formerly Known as Grimes
Grimes sat down with Cultured for a new interview:
“The last album was a piece of crap,” she says. “I feel like people really misread it and it feels like a stain on my life.” She resists the notion that she tried to make a pop record, and considers it more of a genre exercise in which she demonstrated her range as a producer. “I just wish I could make music in a vacuum,” she claims, before retorting, “it’s good to make people mad actually, I retract my statement. If you can make people mad without actually hurting anyone, that’s probably a good thing.”
The MySpace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010)
A wide-ranging collection of 490,000 mp3 files from MySpace.com, accomplished using unknown means by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010. […] Nearly every file in this item is no longer hosted at MySpace, due to a suspicious and low-key deletion/loss of data in 2018.
A bunch of music that was thought to be lost, has been found.
PUP Talk New Album With BrooklynVegan
PUP talked with BrooklynVegan about their new album, Morbid Stuff:
Yeah, a lot of the record thematically is about working through depression and working through challenges with mental health, but we tried to kind of take a light approach, a gentle approach to it. I think music and this band particularly is supposed to be fun, fun for us and fun for the listeners. We’re in a band ’cause it’s a good time for us, and there’s this weird sort of paradox of you wanna write about the stuff that’s closest to your heart, the stuff that affects you the most. And for me in the past couple of years, that’s been depression and mental health.
Mark Hoppus Talks About Fyre Festival
Mark Hoppus talked with NME about the Fyre Festival disaster:
“It was pretty shocking,” Hoppus told NME of his first viewing of the documentary. “It was shocking but not entirely surprising. We had indications kind of early on that there were problems. Our production crew was having problems getting even the most basic of answers as to staging, power and things that you would normally have well in advance of the show. That being said, us and our crew have always prided ourselves on being able to put on a good show.
“If you give us electricity and a stage then we will do our best to put on a great show. We continued in good faith, the show got closer and closer. Travis [Barker, drums] doesn’t fly so he was going to have to get on a boat for several days to get there then our production crew just said, ‘I don’t think that this is going to happen, I think we should pull out now’. That’s when we issued our statement.”
YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant
Mark Bergen, writing for Bloomberg:
Wojcicki and her deputies know this. In recent years, scores of people inside YouTube and Google, its owner, raised concerns about the mass of false, incendiary and toxic content that the world’s largest video site surfaced and spread. One employee wanted to flag troubling videos, which fell just short of the hate speech rules, and stop recommending them to viewers. Another wanted to track these videos in a spreadsheet to chart their popularity. A third, fretful of the spread of “alt-right” video bloggers, created an internal vertical that showed just how popular they were. Each time they got the same basic response: Don’t rock the boat.
Old The Academy Is… Gear Up for Sale
Andrew Mrotek of The Academy Is… has a Reverb Shop where he’s selling some old gear.
Green Day to Release New Book
Green Day will be releasing a new book called Last of the American Girls on October 29th via Dey Street Books.
Named after the song “Last of the American Girls” off “21st Century Breakdown,” the book is described as “an inspiring homage and handbook for the rebellious everywoman who refuses to capitulate,” according to a statement from their publisher. No further details are available at this time, but the book is being further billed as a celebration of “true rebel girls,” another song reference to the “American Idiot” track “She’s a Rebel.”
Weezer Already Working on New Music
In a new interview with Substream Magazine, Weezer confirm they’re working on two new albums:
Yeah, we’ve got two records. One of them is almost done, and I think the code name for that is OK Human. That’s something I’m super excited about. There’s this other idea about another record with the code name Van Weezer. That’s in the conceptual stage [right now]. We’re gonna make records forever at this point. We’re excited about it too, which is fun. It’s not lost on us that nobody wants us to do this. So we’re just gonna go for it.
Jawbreaker Working on New Material
Jawbreaker confirm with Music Radar that they’re working on new music:
We’re writing right now and we’ve rescued a couple of old songs that we never had a chance to record right at the end of the band. We’re going to get together in San Francisco and get right back to it. We don’t have a label yet, and we haven’t booked any studio time. We’re just dipping our toes and taking it one step at a time.
Descendents Working on New Music
Milo Aukerman confirmed with The OC Register that the Descendents are working on new music:
When we put out the last record we thought, ‘OK, I bet we could put out another record after this one and not wait a decade to do it.’ It was such a rewarding experience and you know what? Our fans deserve better. They deserve more than a record every decade or so. We started writing almost immediately after that record was done. I have been writing and Stephen (Egerton) has really picked up the mantle, too. Between us I think we have like 20 songs written and Bill (Stevenson) and Karl (Alvarez) have been writing songs as well. We’ve done some basic tracking, but it’s still a work in progress but I hope we’ll have something out by the end of the yea