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.

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?

‘Billions’ Star Challenges Emmys Male-Female Acting Categories

Showtime
Jason Tate

Debra Birnbaum, writing for Variety, on how Billions star Asia Kate Dillon has been talking with the Television Academy about the gender specific classifications for acting categories:

That the star would be a contender for the upcoming Emmy Awards is a given — but when Showtime asked which category Dillon wanted to be submitted under, Dillon had to give it some thought. The performer identifies as gender non-binary, and choosing between “supporting actor” and “supporting actress” sparked a conversation — as well as some homework.

And:

Dillon hopes this sparks a larger conversation about category definitions overall, given that writing and directing aren’t gender-specific. “I can only speak to the world in which I wish to live,” says Dillon. “I think this is a really good place to start a larger conversation about the categories themselves, and what changes are possible and what may or may not be coming. I’m excited to see what other people think, and what they want to say once they become aware of this.”

Billions has been great this year and Asia’s character is a clear standout.