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No Fun at All Announce New Members

Jason Tate

No Fun at All have announced some new members and that they’re heading into the studio to record a new album:

No Fun At All proudly presents two new members! Joining the forces are guitarist Fredrik Eriksson (Twopointeight, Fas 3) and bassist Stefan Bratt (Atlas Losing Grip). We are rehearsing new material right now and are planning to record a new album together with producer Mathias Färm (Millencolin) at Soundlab Studios. The album will be released in the spring of 2018. The first chance to catch us live will be July 31 in Stockholm at Gröna Lund. See ya in the pit! Spread the news!

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Pandora Premium Now Open to All

Pandora
Jason Tate

Pandora Premium is now available to all users, TechCrunch reports:

The service itself is essentially Pandora’s own spin on on-demand music, offering a combination of radio-like listening as well as the ability to search and play any track and build playlists. It costs $9.99 per month, which is in line with other offerings on the market today, including Spotify and Apple Music.

Happy Paramore Day

Paramore
Jason Tate

Paramore have released a video for their new single “Hard Times.” They’ve also announced that their new album, After Laughter, will be out on May 12th. Pre-orders are now up and the track listing and album artwork can be found below. The band also sat down with The New York Times for a really fascinating interview:

“You can run on the fumes of being a teenager for as long as you want, but eventually life hits you really hard,” Ms. Williams, a mighty presence who barely cracks five feet, explained last month, speaking for the first time about the tumultuous period since Paramore last released an album, in 2013. “I didn’t even know if we were going to make another record,” she said. “There was a moment when I didn’t even want it to happen. Then it was like, I want it to happen, but I don’t know how we’re going to do it.”

I’ll say this: The band couldn’t have written an album more in my wheelhouse for my current musical tastes. I like it a lot.

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Riot Fest Announces First Wave of Bands

Riot Fest
Jason Tate

Riot Fest will be returning to Chicago’s Douglas Park this year from September 15th-17th. Today they’ve unveiled the first group of artists for the festival, and, damn, it’s got some heavy hitters. Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, and a Jawbreaker reunion are the headlining acts. The full list of artists can be found below.

Tickets go on sale later today at via Ticketfly.

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Musician/Producer Steve Lacy Works Through His iPhone

iPhone
Jason Tate

David Pierce, writing for Wired:

Lacy’s smartphone has been his personal studio since he first started making music. Even now, with all the equipment and access he could want, he still feels indelibly connected to something about making songs piece by piece on his phone. He’s also working this way to prove a point: that tools don’t really matter. He’s feeling a tension that’s been in the music industry since the Tascam 424 Portastudio made mobile recording easy in the 80s, and has come up time and again since then. He wants to remind people that the performance, the song, the feeling matter more than the gear you use to record it. If you want to make something, Lacy tells me, grab whatever you have and just make it. If it’s good, people will notice. Maybe even Kendrick Lamar.

Spotify Upgrades Fan Insights Feature to ‘Spotify for Artists’

Jason Tate

Billboard:

Now, a year and a half later, the streaming service is upgrading Fan Insights and rebranding the initiative as Spotify for Artists, complete with new features and controls that allow all artists to not only peek under the hood at their data through the service, but also manage their artist presence within Spotify itself.

Sounds good.

With Spotify for Artists, verified musicians will be able to now manage the way their artist page looks, with photos; pinned songs, albums or playlists that they want to promote atop their profile; and the ability to add and control which playlists appear on their artist page, whether created by themselves or by fans or other artists.

Sounds great.

As with Fan Insights, artists will have access to listeners’ demographic information — age, gender, location — as well as real-time song information, playlist performance and data and the different ways listeners are accessing or discovering their music.

Sounds a tad creepy.

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How Google Ate CelebrityNetWorth.com

Google
Jason Tate

Adrianne Jeffries, writing for The Outline:

In February 2016, Google started displaying a Featured Snippet for each of the 25,000 celebrities in the CelebrityNetWorth database, Warner said. He knew this because he added a few fake listings for friends who were not celebrities to see if they would pop up as featured answers, and they did.

“Our traffic immediately crumbled,” Warner said. “Comparing January 2016 (a full month where they had not yet scraped our content) to January 2017, our traffic is down 65 percent.” Warner said he had to lay off half his staff. (Google declined to answer specific questions for this story, including whether it was shooting itself in the foot by destroying its best sources of information.)

When Google’s priorities were about sending searchers to the best website online that had the information someone was looking for, it was great. This new era of competing against the websites themselves seems like it’s going to backfire. What incentive does a website have to exist, and how can it continue to exist, if it is cannibalized by Google once it gets popular?

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