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The Disappearing Web

Jason Tate

S.E. Smith, writing for The Verge:

This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be. 

Report: Spotify Filling Playlists with Ghost Artists to Minimize Royalty Costs

Jason Tate

Liz Pelly, writing for Harper’s Magazine:

For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.

And:

Another former playlist editor told me that employees were concerned that the company wasn’t being transparent with users about the origin of this material. Still another former editor told me that he didn’t know where the music was coming from, though he was aware that adding it to his playlists was important for the company. “Maybe I should have asked more questions,” he told me, “but I was just kind of like, ‘Okay, how do I mix this music with artists that I like and not have them stand out?’ ”

How Rich Musicians Used Covid Funds

Money
Jason Tate

Business Insider has published a report about how a bunch of very well off artists abused Covid grants. It’s behind a paywall, but there’s a good breakdown on Twitter/X:

Alice in Chains members paid themselves $3.4M from grant the same year they made $48M selling their catalog. Meanwhile, their longtime guitar tech Scott Dachroeden — the exact type of worker this grant was meant to help — had to rely on GoFundMe when he got cancer.

And a summary on Stereogum:

Lil Wayne got a taxpayer-funded $8.9 million grant, and he “spent more than $1.3 million from the grant on private-jet flights and over $460,000 on clothes and accessories, many of them from high-end brands like Gucci and Balenciaga.” Wayne also reportedly used $175,000 of that money on “a music festival promoting his marijuana brand, GKUA” and also used the grant for “flights and luxury hotel rooms for women whose connection to Lil Wayne’s touring operation was unclear, including a waitress at a Hooters-type restaurant and a porn actress.”

Pete Wentz on a Mission to Make Tennis More Inclusive and Less Elitist

Fall Out Boy
Jason Tate

Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy talked with BroBible about trying to bring tennis to the masses:

For Wentz, tennis isn’t just a hobby—it’s personal. “I love tennis. I grew up with it. Tennis has enriched my life,” he told BroBible in an interview at the LA event. “But it also has this air of being impenetrable. It’s not just elitist; it feels like something only certain people are allowed to be part of. The goal of this club is to change that. To make tennis accessible, interesting, and even a little rock-and-roll. If you want to try it, you should try it.”

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Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Talk Scoring Films

Trent Reznor
Jason Tate

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross sat down with IndieWire to talk about scoring films and the state of the music industry:

“What we’re looking for [from film] is the collaborative experience with interesting people. We haven’t gotten that from the music world necessarily, for our own choice,” Reznor said. “You mentioned disillusionment with the music world? Yes. The culture of the music world sucks. That’s another conversation, but what technology has done to disrupt the music business in terms of not only how people listen to music but the value they place on it is defeating. I’m not saying that as an old man yelling at clouds, but as a music lover who grew up where music was the main thing. Music [now] feels largely relegated to something that happens in the background or while you’re doing something else. That’s a long, bitter story.”

Make Your Own Website

Jason Tate

Gita Jackson, writing on Aftermath:

Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

I didn’t realize how important that was until I started my own website, and I didn’t even learn it from helping to run the damn thing. When I meet people at events, they tell me that they’ve set Aftermath as their homepage. People tell me they love interacting with other people in the comments. They tell me it’s one on a small list of websites, not social media, that they check in on every day. People, it seems, actually like going to a website, and they like that we made one.

This entire article speaks to me.

I’ve recently seen similar sentiments from others, like Louis Manta:

In the last 15 years, many people (myself included) were drawn to third-party solutions for presenting ourselves. For our résumés, LinkedIn. For portfolios, Behance and Dribbble. For blogging, Tumblr, Medium, and Substack. Instead of forums, Discord and Slack. But despite each of these advertising some amount of autonomy, in reality you have very little.

By centralizing not just your content, but yourself, on these sites, you rob yourself the opportunity to be more authentically you. In addition, a peer or competitor might appear next to you. It may not be great for you to have your competitor one click away from your own profile.

As I’ve pulled (way) back from social media over the past few years, I’ve found having a place for my writing, that I control, own, and can present how I want even more appealing.

Some Users Disappointed with Spotify Wrapped

Jason Tate

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:

Chief among the complaints are that Spotify prioritized the inclusion of an AI podcast for Wrapped over the other, clever and creative data stories that it typically offers — like those that identify your music personality, match you to a town that shares your musical tastes, describe your “audio aura,” or turn your listening history into a game you can share with friends, among other things. Others are upset over the lack of more detailed stats and the exclusion of information they’ve come to expect, like top music genres and top podcasts. Spotify declined to clarify how they decided which features to include.

Pete Wentz Interviewed by Anti-Matter

Pete Wentz
Jason Tate

Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy talked with Anti-Matter:

This is something me and Patrick [Stump] and the band have talked about on a bigger level, but for me, specifically, I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. The Breakfast Club was my high school; it was literally the high school I went to. Every one of those movies took place in that town. Also, I am mixed race. My mom’s parents are from Jamaica and my dad’s white, and they were super liberal and we were in a pretty conservative area. So I think I just didn’t really know where I fit in. I kind of didn’t really feel like I fit in anywhere.

Sky Ferreria Variety Interview

Sky Ferreira
Jason Tate

Sky Ferreira talked with Variety about her upcoming song and going independent:

They waited until the 10-year anniversary of Night Time, My Time to drop me via an automated message that got forwarded to me. And it was a weekend! After months of not hearing back from them! It was pretty—I’m still trying to figure out the words I can use to talk about it that won’t get me in trouble. But I also don’t really care about getting in trouble, because what else can they really do to me at this point? My relationship with them was obviously a bit fraught, and it’s never been very simple to explain. But to let me know I’ve been dropped from the label in such an impersonal way was clearly so personal.

It was their way of saying: “You can have fans write ‘Free Sky’ in the clouds with an airplane, but we still own you.” They kept me from putting out new music for 10 years as a way of making me look like I’m incapable of it, like it was my fault that I don’t technically own anything I record. I was already dreading the 10-year anniversary of my album because it’s sad. I should be able to celebrate something like that because as long as this album has been around, people still care about it. I’m able to do a song for an A24 film after all this time because that album clearly meant something to people, and I am proud of that. But it shouldn’t have to remind me of another year of being trapped in a mess that I didn’t create. They want me to look responsible by dragging it out and blocking me from releasing music even after already being blocked from so many other opportunities because of them.

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Lauren Mayberry Profiled in New York Times

Chvrches
Jason Tate

Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches has a new profile in the New York Times:

“I had an overly romantic notion of being in a band, this kind of ‘Goonies’ mentality,” Mayberry said, referring to her role since 2011 as frontwoman for the Glaswegian synth-pop trio Chvrches. “I was very conscious of not wanting to be perceived as disloyal.”

Despite her hesitation to step out on her own, “If the only reason you’re not doing something is because of how it might make other people feel,” she continued, “you’re going to people-please yourself to death.”

Dan Campbell Talks with Anti-Matter

Jason Tate

Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years is interviewed in the latest issue of Anti-Matter.

After The Upsides, people were talking to me after shows and they’d ask, “How did you cure your depression?” And I would be like, “I am deeply depressed right now. Right now. Things are bad for me at this exact moment” [laughs]. That’s where that line in “Local Man [Ruins Everything]” comes from: “I’m not a self-help book / I’m just a fucked-up kid.” It’s to say I don’t have the answers. All I can tell you is that you need to try. I can give you some techniques I’ve used, I could tell you that I am not a professional and you could maybe seek some therapy, but I don’t have this magic bullet for it. It’s just going to be about effort and consistency and accepting that there will be low days.

Fake AI Albums Flooding Spotify

Jason Tate

Elizabeth Lopatto, writing at The Verge:

To understand how this works, you need a sense of the mechanics. Streaming platforms like Spotify don’t work like your Facebook page — Mena and other artists aren’t logging in and adding albums to their accounts directly. Instead, they go through a distributor that handles licensing, metadata, and royalty payments. Distributors send songs and metadata in bulk to the streaming services. The metadata part is important; it includes things such as the song title and artist name but also other information, such as the songwriter, record label, and so on. This is crucial for artists (and others) to get paid. 

But this whole process effectively works on the honor system.

And:

“It was super weird,” says Marcos Mena, Standards’ lead songwriter and guitarist. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is something Spotify will take care of.’” After all, Standards has a verified artist page. But when a fake album was posted on September 26th, it didn’t budge. Mena emailed Spotify to tell them there’d been a mistake. The streamer responded two weeks later, on October 8th: “It looks like the content is mapped correctly to the artist’s page. If you require further assistance, please contact your music provider. Please do not reply to this message.” As of November 8th, the fake Standards album was still right there under the band’s verified, blue-checked name. It was finally removed by November 11th.

Cool, I definitely don’t see this continuing to be a massive problem.

Forums Are Alive and a Treasure Trove of Information

Technology
Jason Tate

Chris Pearson, writing at Aftermath, highlights what many of you probably already know: forums are alive and awesome.

When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums. Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.

Some great picks here. I, obviously, have an affinity for these kinds of smaller yet vibrant communities.

UMG Acquires Indie Label Group PIAS

Billboard
Jason Tate

Billboard:

In an announcement on Tuesday (Oct. 15), Kenny Gates said he and his [PIAS] co-founder Michel Lambot were selling their shares to UMG, which acquired a 49% stake in the company in 2022, to “allow us to offer a truly global distribution and services platform to the independent music community.”

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New Robert Smith Interview

The Cure
Jason Tate

Robert Smith of The Cure talked with The Times:

“Our songs always had a fear of mortality,” he says. “I don’t feel my age at all but I’m aware of it and when you get older that fear becomes more real. Death becomes more everyday. When you are younger you romanticise death, but then it happens to your family and friends. I am a different person to the last record and I wanted to put that across. It can be trite. People could say, ‘Oh, we’re all going to die — surprise me!’ But I try to find some emotional connection to that idea.”

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