Elias Leight, writing for Rolling Stone:
MTV plans to rebrand VH1 Classic as MTV Classic starting on August 1st. According to a statement from the company, the new channel will focus on “an eclectic mix of fan-favorite MTV series and music programming drawn from across its rich history, with a special focus on the 1990s and early 2000s.”
All of our childhoods one day become “classic.”
Bruce Springsteen will be releasing his autobiography, Born to Run, on September 27th. It will come with an 18-track companion album featuring five unreleased tracks. The companion album will be called Chapter and Verse, is due out on September 23rd, and a trailer has been released. Pre-orders for the book are also up.
Read More “Bruce Springsteen to Release Autobiography and Companion Album”
Juliet Simms is back with a new EP, From the Grave, and the former contest on “The Voice” brings her voice and aesthetic to this red carpet interview at the APMAs (shout out to the video bomb by husband Andy Biersack).
Shaun Cooper and John Nolan of Taking Back Sunday join the No Brown M&Ms Podcast to discuss the Taste of Chaos tour, their new album, internet criticism, Billy Joel, and much more.
Elaine Bradley of Neon Trees has started a new project called Kissed Out. You can stream the new single, “Minus Yours,” below.
Beartooth established their place in the scene with their first album, Disgusting, and their second, Aggressive, is already making headlines. Here they chat briefly with me at the APMA’s red carpet.
Dischord Records has put all of their artists records up on Bandcamp.
A Day to Remember are about to release their long-awaited new album, Bad Vibrations, on September 2nd. I spoke with the band briefly on the third annual APMA’s red carpet.
Halsey is featured on a new episode of Autobiographies.
From recording a commercial jingle in a basement in New Jersey to selling out Madison Square Garden. In a personal conversation with VICE, Halsey talks about her childhood, growing up bi-racial and the time she spent in NYC that lead to a break that changed everything.
A data scientist decided to look through 22,000 metal albums to find out what words are the most “metal.” Turns out “burn” is the most metal word. And then “cries,” “veins,” “eternity,” and “breathe.”
In the face of this complexity, it is not surprising that understanding natural language, in the same way humans do, with computers is still a unsolved problem. That said, there are an increasing number of techniques that have been developed to provide some insight into natural language. They tend to start by making simplifying assumptions about the data, and then using these assumptions convert the raw text into a more quantitative structure, like vectors or graphs. Once in this form, statistical or machine learning approaches can be leveraged to solve a whole range of problems.
I haven’t had much experience playing with natural language, so I decided to try out a few techniques on a dataset I scrapped from the internet: a set of heavy metal lyrics (and associated genres).
Chris Riotta, writing at Mic:
In the case of the RNC, as Billboard reported, the GOP had reportedly acquired a blanket license from the Broadcast Music Inc., a performing rights organization that collects licensing fees for artists to later distribute as royalties. This allows the Republican party to play virtually any work within the organization’s catalog — Queen included. Once a song is part of the BMI, the permissions are handled by that organization, not the artist. And because the BMI must adhere to anti-trust legislation, as Vox reports, the organization cannot discriminate as to who can or can’t use the song, or respect an artist’s requests to do so.
RX Bandits have announced a 10-year anniversary tour celebrating the release of …And the Battle Begun.
We’re very excited to announce that we’ll be bringing you the full performance of the album. In correlation with this tour, Sargent House is celebrating the 10 years of this album as well as the 10 years of Sargent House by issuing a repress of the album on vinyl.
Tumblr will be rolling out ads across their platform, and yes, on your blog, in the near future:
In addition, users can opt out of having ads displayed on their blogs by turning off on-blog advertising in the Settings. Yes: that means that ads on blogs will be the default – effectively allowing Tumblr to monetize its network of over 306 million blogs from 65 million users, unless those users take an explicit action to disable ads. Users will also be able to disable ads on a per-blog basis if they choose.
Tumblr says that ads will appear in three places, including the main page of the Tumblr blog if the blogger is using the default Optica theme for their blog, as well as on the slide-out section on the web, and on Tumblr’s mobile apps and mobile web.
Steve Baltin, writing for Forbes, details the release strategy behind Blink-182’s California after talking with the band, managers, radio, and label. It’s a little insider baseball at times, but there’s a lot of new information here:
“Our strategy really was kind of to give everything a little something,” he says. “That’s why we turned down an offer to window the record, cause we wanted the music to be accessible to the younger kids who listen to it on You Tube and Spotify and different places. We created ticketing tiers for our concerts so the core fans can buy the best seats in the house, but the young fans that might just be discovering the band can afford a ticket to the show also. That was our core strategy throughout this whole thing.”
Sorry in advance for linking to Forbes and their user hostile website.