The RIAA has released their year-end report for 2018:
Revenues from streaming music platforms grew 30% year-over-year to reach $7.4 billion, contributing 75% of total revenues for 2018, and accounting for virtually all the revenue growth for the year.
The official list of Record Store Day releases is now out.
Jaclyn Hendricks, writing at Page Six:
Tiffany Haddish will soon be gaming up for a physical challenge.
The “Night School” actress, in addition to Shaun White and Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz, will be featured in upcoming episodes of Nickelodeon’s “Double Dare,” Page Six can exclusively reveal.
Tied to the 2019 Kids’ Choice Awards, “Double Dare” will have themed episodes airing from March 11 through the March 14, which will include Wentz, whose band is nominated for Favorite Music Group, and actor Joel Courtney, star of Favorite Movie nominee “The Kissing Booth.”
Jay Unger and Lydia Thomas, writing at the BBC:
The BBC has approached three of the biggest ticketing websites in the UK to respond to whether or not fans will be given a refund. At the time of writing, none of them have replied.
Marshall said it was “surprising” that the companies involved in the tour have been silent since the allegations were published.
“I’ve tried to speak to the ticketing companies,” he said. “I’ve tried to speak to the venues and the promoter and I’ve had very little response back.
Refund the tickets and cancel the tour. This should not be hard.
Josh Constine, writing at TechCrunch:
Facebook will drive a hard bargain with influencers and artists judging by the terms of service for the social network’s Patreon-like Fan Subscriptions feature that lets people pay a monthly fee for access to a creator’s exclusive content. The policy document attained by TechCrunch shows Facebook plans to take up to a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue minus fees, compared to 5 percent by Patreon, 30 percent by YouTube, which covers fees and 50 percent by Twitch.
It took me a weekend to build my own using Stripe. I firmly believe you should own the most important parts of your business and the membership system is how we can continue to exist as a publication. The idea of giving 30% to Facebook? Fuck all the way off.
Tim Rogner of Allister is on the latest episode of the Pop-Punk & Pizza podcast.
Ariana Grande still has the number one album in the country:
Thank U earned 151,000 equivalent album units in the week ending Feb. 21 (down 58 percent from its debut of 360,000 units), according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 20,000 were in album sales (down 82 percent).
Casey Newton, writing at The Verge:
Over the past three months, I interviewed a dozen current and former employees of Cognizant in Phoenix. All had signed non-disclosure agreements with Cognizant in which they pledged not to discuss their work for Facebook — or even acknowledge that Facebook is Cognizant’s client. The shroud of secrecy is meant to protect employees from users who may be angry about a content moderation decision and seek to resolve it with a known Facebook contractor. The NDAs are also meant to prevent contractors from sharing Facebook users’ personal information with the outside world, at a time of intense scrutiny over data privacy issues
But the secrecy also insulates Cognizant and Facebook from criticism about their working conditions, moderators told me. They are pressured not to discuss the emotional toll that their job takes on them, even with loved ones, leading to increased feelings of isolation and anxiety.
This story is terrifying.
“…We’re treating around 300 years of music from various countries, forms, philosophies, and so on as one genre. As far as modern commercial music, we don’t group the past 50 years together: can you imagine how strange it would be to group LL Cool J, Metallica, and The Spice Girls together? These are all artists that were popular in the 90s; beyond that, they have virtually nothing in common. Grouping together Mozart, Ravel, and Cage makes even less sense.”
A lot of really great points here.
Chelsey Norris noted in their Saves the Day live review that the band mentioned they’d be touring with Joyce Manor this summer:
One positive bit of news that came out of this experience – Conley says that fans will not have to wait as long to hear new music from the band this time around. “We’ll keep writing,” he told me. “I think we’ll probably have a new album out next year.”
He also let it slip that they’ll be going on tour with Joyce Manor this summer, so look for that announcement soon.
A Cook County judge has approved an arrest warrant for embattled R&B superstar R. Kelly, who was charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in Cook County Friday morning, records show.
His first court date is listed as March 8, according to records.
The writers of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse share with Vulture the steps that went into using “Sunflower” in the movie:
It was critical that the song gag landed. We had a feeling it was because people knew the song, and they knew how he was messing it up. We were in big trouble when we couldn’t use it anymore — we needed to replace one of the greatest songs of the year, and we had to do it in time to spend the three months we would need to animate that shot. It turns out “Sunflower” is a massive hit song. We heard it as part of a batch of songs that Republic Records presented to us.
We also liked the metaphor this presents: Miles is singing a song that theoretically he’s a little too young for and he doesn’t know the words yet. That’s the metaphor we’re going to be working with for most of the rest of the movie. He’s going to be asked to step into shoes that he feels he’s not ready for, he’s not going to know the words, and he’s going to feel very self-conscious and nervous about that.
I love reading about the process behind decisions like this.
Brian Ferguson, writing at Scotsman:
Chvrches singer Lauren Mayberry will be the first face and voice of BBC Scotland’s new TV channel – after her band were asked to record a brand new version of one of their songs.
The Glasgow-based pop and electronica group joined forces with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra to record a special orchestral version of their hit Miracle for a sequence lasting nearly three minutes which will herald a new era in Scottish broadcasting this weekend.
Chris Payne, writing at Billboard:
There’s a song that we refer to as “Paris” that’s really awesome. It was actually a beat I made for Juice WRLD and before I ever got in the studio with him, I played it randomly, and Mark [Hoppus] said, “Oh what are you working on?” They were like, “Whoa, we really like this.” And it morphed into a Blink song. It’s probably our favorite right now.
David Wallace-Wells, writing at The New York Times:
If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, according to the Global Carbon Project, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 2 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. Did we fail to act then because we thought it was all over already or because we didn’t yet consider warming an urgent enough problem to take action against? Only 44 percent of those surveyed in a survey last month cited climate change as a top political priority.
This is the most depressing part of the article for me. I remember 2000 and arguing with people in the AbsolutePunk.net forums about climate change. We did virtually nothing and now we’re in some real bad shit. Awesome.