The Delivery Rider Who Took on His Faceless Boss

Financial Times:

UberCheats was an algorithm-auditing tool. Samii, who was working as a cycle courier for Uber in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the time, had lost trust in the automated system that essentially functioned as his boss. He had become convinced the Uber Eats app was consistently making errors and underpaying him. After weeks of trying and failing to get a human being at Uber to explain, he felt he had no choice but to take matters into his own hands.

Spotify Adding Music Videos

Spotify is rolling out music videos as a new beta feature for some artists.

The beta version of music videos on Spotify begins rolling out today with a limited catalog of music videos, including hits from global artists like Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, and Ice Spice, or local favorites like Aluna and Asake.

New Music Streaming Bill Aims to Increase Streaming Royalties

Pitchfork

Pitchfork:

U.S. House representatives Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman have introduced to Congress a new bill aiming to boost streaming royalties for artists. The Living Wage for Musicians Act would create a new payment system, the Artist Compensation Royalty Fund, that circumvents record labels and other intermediaries, funneling listeners’ money directly to artists. Tlaib said in a statement, “Streaming has changed the music industry, but it’s leaving countless artists struggling to make ends meet behind. It’s only right that the people who create the music we love get their fair share, so that they can thrive, not just survive.”

The funds would come from two sources: an added subscription fee (proposed as an extra half, with a $4 minimum and $10 maximum) and a 10 percent cut of streamers’ non-subscription revenue, from sources such as ads. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) has long supported the bill, noting that streaming platforms are already planning price hikes, and the proposal ensures extra fees go to the artists themselves.

Universal Music Still Not Available on TikTok

Technology

Reece Rogers, writing for Wired:

Over a month after the first songs vanished, it remains unclear when Universal and TikTok might reach new deals. “I think one of the risks for the music industry in general is if it turns out that the users on TikTok simply adapt,” says Cirisano, “and start using more unlicensed music. Start using more independent music. Start making more videos without music.” It’s quite frustrating for users to wake up one day and discover that videos with millions of views are now muted, and they might rethink their approach to making content.

Flop Rock: Inside the Underground Floppy Disk Music Scene

The Verge

The Verge:

Nobuko believes the proliferation of floppy music in Western cultures is linked to strong punk movements with a DIY aesthetic. “Also, the lobit scene seems to be bigger in countries that had bad internet connections, so they would already use lobit encoding to upload or download things online,” he explains. In a similar vein, Hilkmann believes that floppy recordings are an explicitly anti-capitalist niche that exists outside the usual means of publishing music today on Spotify and other streaming services. “A medium, artistically, is only interesting as long as it’s available,” he says. “Now that floppy disks are becoming more and more difficult to get, they’ve become more and more a collector’s item almost, while a few years ago, it was more like almost a trashy medium that you could quickly get your hands on and do fun things with.”

Adobe Reveals a GenAI Tool for Music

Technology

TechCrunch:

Today at the Hot Pod Summit in Brooklyn, Adobe unveiled Project Music GenAI Control, a platform that can generate audio from text descriptions (e.g. “happy dance,” “sad jazz”) or a reference melody and let users customize the results within the same workflow.

Using Project Music GenAI Control, users can adjust things like tempo, intensity, repeating patterns and structure. Or they can take a track and extend it to an arbitrary length, remixing music or creating an endless loop.

A video example.

G’Ra Asim Writes for the Boston Globe

Baby Got Backtalk

Baby Got Back Talk’s vocalist/bassist G’Ra Asim wrote an essay for the Boston Globe about the importance of keeping alternative music an equitable space:

Black History Month is getting a lot more punk rock. Today sees the release of “Articulate at That Level,” a mixtape featuring musicians of color and/or women artistswho are bona fide philosophers of rock. My band, Baby Got Back Talk, curated this playlist as a cross-section of the gnarliest noise emanating from today’s underground.

But make no mistake — the artists we’ve assembled aren’t tokens we scrounged up just to appease some fussy diversity, equity, and inclusion bureau. They represent the vanguard of alternative music in 2024.

Tennessee Republican Objects to Honoring Allison Russel

Grammys

The Tennessean:

Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, criticized House Republicans on Monday after a Republican leader objected to a ceremonial resolution honoring a Nashville-connected musician for winning a Grammy earlier this month.

Jones brought two resolutions to honor the band Paramore and singer-songwriter Allison Russell, who took home the Best American Roots Performance Grammy Award.

But House Republican Caucus Chair Jeremy Faison, R-Cosby, objected to the Russell resolution, a procedural move that kicked Jones’ resolution off the night’s consent calendar and back to committee, where objected consent items often die.

Well, that’s pretty fucking gross.

Why is Music Journalism Collapsing?

Ted Gioia, writing on the collapse of music journalism:

Before streaming, everybody in the value chain needed new music. The record stores would go broke if people just listened to the old songs over and over. 

And the same was true for record distributors, record labels, radio stations, nightclub owners, and music writers. Everybody needed hot new songs and rising new musicians.

Of course, fans also benefited. Life gets boring if you just listen to the same songs year after year, decade after decade. But there was no risk of that. The music industry worked tirelessly to find exciting new music, and share it with the world. 

That business model is now disappearing. The people who run the industry killed it—and now we live with the consequences.

The irony is that exciting new music is still getting released—but almost nobody hears it. The system actively works to hide it.

And occasionally an artist breaks through the industry inertia, and proves that fans still want exciting new music experiences. But here, too, entrenched interests do almost nothing to support this—and much to hinder it.

Music Status via Sleeve 2

Apps

Jason Snell detailed a cool little app called Sleeve 2 on SixColors:

What made me instantly buy Sleeve was its extensive capability to customize the currently playing track information. You can choose to show album art at a wide range of sizes (or omit it entirely), with your choice of corner rounding. You can choose display track name, album name, and artist name, and display them in a variety of fonts and weights. There’s customization for text alignment, drop shadows, and pretty much anything else you might want. You can set the track information to float above everything, always say on the Desktop layer, or float above briefly when the track changes, then land back on the desktop.

It also integrates with Last.fm.

Max Martin Breaks Record for Most #1 Songs

Billboard

Billboard:

Max Martin now solely has the most No. 1s among producers in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart.

He tallies his 24th career leader as a producer on the latest, Jan. 27, 2024-dated Hot 100, as Ariana Grande’s “Yes, And?” blasts in at No. 1. He surpasses the late George Martin – who produced 19 of The Beatles’ record 20 No. 1s – for the most leaders among producers over the chart’s 65-year archives.

Apple Music to Incentivize Spatial Audio Mixes

Benjamin Mayo, writing at 9to5Mac:

Apple will pay up to 10% more per play in royalties for tracks where a spatial version is available. This is starting with January’s payouts. Crucially, Apple Music users do not necessarily have to listen in Spatial Audio for the artist to be rewarded with the bonus payout.

Green Day Talk With The Sun

Green Day

Green Day talked with The Sun in a new wide ranging interview:

Mike says: “Social media is great for kids but if you’re finding your music via algorithms then that’s just fing lazy. I like to organically find new things. All I can say is just f***ing clear your search history to find new s***.” Tre laughs: “We say this now but as soon as we hang up, we’ll be making a TikTok account.”

Billie Joe adds: “I was told that Brain Stew was a sudden popular thing on TikTok with a lot of hip-hop kids dancing to it. And that’s cool. But I don’t have the patience to use it. It’s just like, eurgh. It’s cool for other people but we’re old- school man.”

That is why you won’t find the passionate and outspoken songwriiter venting on social media.

Billie Joe says: “My opinions are always in my songs. I don’t like to Tweet or Instagram about politics, because you’re contributing to insane people who are just bitching, arguing and taking sides. So I write about it in my songs. It’s funny as on New Year’s Eve, we played American Idiot [on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show] and we changed ‘redneck agenda’ to MAGA agenda’ [Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan]. Well, I woke up the next morning to people saying, ‘F***ng blah blah I can’t believe he said it’ or ‘it’s so awesome’ which was crazy. And then it’s on Fox News and Elon Musk and Tom Morello are saying things about it.  But it threw me as we’d pre-taped the show a month before and I’d forgotten about that lyric change. On actual New Year’s Eve, we were in our cover band, The Coverups, raising money for a chimpanzee sanctuary so I was like, ‘Hey what are you talking about? I was raising money for chimps’.”

Alkaline Trio Talk New Album

Alkaline Trio

Alkaline Trio talk with Rock Sound about their upcoming album:

Often leaning into hyperbole whilst holding a mirror to the darkest aspects of humanity, the Chicago punk legends have long charted the world’s descent into brooding chaos, and now – six years since they last released an album – real life has seemingly edged closer to Doomsday than ever before.

From a global pandemic to mass shootings to drug epidemics, there are no shortage of horrors sitting on our doorstep, and thanks to social media – they can often feel impossible to escape. As the planet unravels and we witness the Earth become a breeding ground for a whole host of terror, everything feels uncertain – but one thing’s for sure, it’s the perfect time for new Alkaline Trio music.

With their milestone tenth album, the three-piece are stripping things back to basics. Redefining their morbid sonic identity to serve as an antidote for the swirling confusion that now dominates so many of our lives – they’re back with a dark record for a truly dark time.