One of the big motivators for me launching this site, and launching with a membership package like we did, was the writing of Ben Thompson over at Stratechery. Today he was featured on a podcast with another writer I greatly admire, Ezra Klein. A while back I quipped that I feel like I get a better education from podcasts than I did in business school — this is one of the episodes that makes that feel more true than ever.
Eamonn Forde, writing for The Guardian, looks at manager1 Peter Mensch’s claim that YouTube is the devil.
Perhaps part of Mensch’s attack on YouTube stems from him, and many others, in the 1980s handing the keys over to MTV before realising what a huge mistake it was. Cliff Burnstein, his long-standing management partner, has been quoted in the past saying that MTV was key in breaking Def Leppard, who they managed at the time and made them into, for a period, the biggest band in the world. MTV happily played expensive music videos but paid no broadcast royalties in the US, allowing its parent company Viacom to become one of the biggest media companies in the world. There are echoes here of what is happening with YouTube, and Mensch is understandably not keen to be bitten for a second time.
Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Muse, and more.↩
YouTube have announced they’re bringing 360° video to their live offerings. They’ll be streaming some of the second weekend of Coachella in this new format.
We first launched support for 360-degree videos back in March 2015. From musicians to athletes to brands, creators have done some incredible things with this technology. Now, they’ll be able to do even more to bring fans directly into their world, with 360-degree live streaming. And after years of live streaming Coachella for fans around the world who can’t attend the festival, this year we’re bringing you the festival like never before by live streaming select artist performances in 360 degrees this weekend.
Alexandra Pollard, writing for The Guardian, looks at the myth that a band needs to have male fans to gain credibility in the music scene. I enjoyed the entire piece, but this really stuck out to me:
As a reviews editor, I’ve lost count of the number of times writers have – while bemoaning a gig’s drawbacks – referred derisively to the amount of “teenage girls” in the crowd. It’s as if that phrase itself is a code that needs no further explanation, no elaboration as to why a young woman’s fully paid-up presence at the gig is, unquestionably, a bad thing. It isn’t. Their judgments are just as legitimate, their enthusiasm just as credible, even if their screams are a little louder. And if you think their taste is indiscriminate, you’d be wise to remember that for every One Direction, there’s a thousand other bands who tried and failed to gain even a fraction of their success.
I remember making comments just like that in the past and it was ridiculous and stupid. We talk a little bit more about looking back on our past selves and why we think the term “guilty pleasure” is outdated in this week’s podcast.
Brian Barrett, writing for Wired, with a behind the scenes look at Netflix:
The instant Daredevil premiered, Netflix greeted its users with eight header image variations of Matt Murdock and friends, shown to customers in eight identically sized chunks. Netflix immediately began tracking which top shots inspired the most streaming.
By now, those eight images will have given way to the best-performing two or three. After 35 days, one of those will become the default. The rest will vanish. This happens now for every Netflix original show. It’s survival of the clickest, all around the world.
Grimes talked with Rolling Stone about new music in the works, sexism in the music industry, and how rock music could work in 2016.
I personally really love [British bands] like Bring Me the Horizon and Foals. There’s definitely a future in rock, but it will probably be more fusion-oriented, like rock that uses 808s. Twenty One Pilots is kind of like that – it’s sort of rock, but the sound is hip-hop. You know all those songs on [the Smashing Pumpkins’] Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness that almost sound like Lorde or something? I feel like that vibe has not been explored.
Cynthia Littleton, writing for Variety, on a TV series in the work inspired by Bob Dylan songs:
Lionsgate TV is closing in on a deal with Amazon for an hourlong drama series inspired by characters and themes from Bob Dylan’s vast archive of songs.
“Time Out of Mind” will be spearheaded by writer-director Josh Wakely, who managed to secure the wide-ranging rights deal for Dylan’s song catalog. The project, which is in the early stage of development, will be produced through Wakely’s Sydney-based Grace production banner.
Dan Ozzi, writing for Noisey, talks with Latterman about their upcoming two reunion shows and catching up on what the members have been up to. It’s a great read.
Something I’ll experience so often on RVIVR tours is that people will come up to me and say, “I wish I saw Latterman!” And I’ll be like, “Yeah we played here.” And they’d be like, “Really? When?” And I’d say, “In 2001 at Trashcan Books.” And they’re like, “What’s that?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, the anarchist space?” And they’re like, “Oh that’s not around anymore. My older sister worked there, but I was ten years old.” RVIVR, in the beginning, we pissed a lot of people off. People were very, very angry at us about wanting to be inclusive of queer people, wanting to be inclusive of women, of trans people. To the point where people would come to RVIVR shows just to mess with us.
Tasneem Nashrulla, writing for Buzzfeed, spoke with Laura Jane Grace of Against Me! about the band’s choice to play a concert in North Carolina next month in light of the state’s ridiculous new “bathroom law.”
“Bryan Adams and Bruce Springsteen aren’t transgender,” Grace said. “For them to say, ‘I think this bill is messed up and I’m not going to go here and be part of the state,’ that seems like the effort of an ally, which is really commendable.”
But Grace said that the transgender people who live in North Carolina don’t have the option to boycott the state. “They live here. They pay taxes. They are prisoners to it.” While Grace acknowledged that someone like Springsteen canceling his concert brought a lot of attention to the issue, she said, “no one would care if we canceled.”
Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch, on Lady Gaga’s startup, Backplane, selling its assets:
Founded in 2011, Backplane raised a Series A of $12.1 million in 2012 from the top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Sequoia, Google Ventures, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Greylock, Menlo Ventures, Formation 8 and Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures all poured money in at around a $40 million valuation. That was despite basically just being a fan site for Lady Gaga with hopes of launching social networks for brands. It eventually raised $5 million more.
Alex Young, writing for Consequence of Sound, after Parker Cannon of The Story So Far kicked a fan in the back over the weekend:
Over the weekend, the band’s desperation for relevancy reached a boiling point, as lead singer Cannon decided it would be super badass to dropkick a female in the back. The female fan had climbed onstage during the band’s encore, seemingly with the intention of taking a selfie, which is pretty douchy thing to do. But no where near as douchy as potentially paralyzing a person by kicking them in the spine so that they fall off stage. It’s the type of dumb shit one would do in high school — or, as member of a pop punk band whose target fanbase matured a decade ago.
And from Emma Garland, at Noisey:
The flippancy with which Cannon acts so aggressively towards a young female fan who is literally funding his excuse to be on stage in the first place – despite the fact that he spends every night shouting “think about who you let between your thighs” and “I know where you’ve been / You’re ruining men” into a mic – is fucking gross. Yes, taking selfies onstage is probably quite annoying, but as a grown ass adult it’s your responsibility to handle it A) reasonably and B) not like a piece of shit.
Warped Tour’s going be running a full-fledged university by the time all the classes needed to teach pop-punk bros how to be decent human beings are accounted for.
Hanah Anderson and Matt Daniels have put together the largest ever analysis of film dialog by gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines.
But it’s all rhetoric and no data, which gets us nowhere in terms of having an informed discussion. How many movies are actually about men? What changes by genre, era, or box-office revenue? What circumstances generate more diversity?
To begin answering these questions, we Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.
You could spend hours exploring this page; incredible.
Ali Jaafar, writing for Deadline:
Downton Abbey star Jessica Brown Findlay has joined the cast of Steven, the Mark Gill-directed biopic of iconic British singer Morrissey. Findlay stars opposite Jack Lowden in the lead role of the movie that follows the character from his early life in the 1970s before he went on to become the lead singer in seminal 1980s band The Smiths. She will play Linder Sterling, an English visual artist, performance artist and musician from Liverpool who became a close friend of Morrissey.
Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery:
To that end, the significance of electric to Tesla that the radical rethinking of a car made possible by a new drivetrain gave Tesla the opportunity to make the best car: there was a clean slate. More than that, Tesla’s lack of car-making experience was actually an advantage: the company’s mission, internal incentives, and bottom line were all dependent on getting electric right.
Again the iPhone is a useful comparison: people contend that Microsoft lost mobile to Apple, but the reality is that smartphones required a radical rethinking of the general purpose computer: there was a clean slate. More than that, Microsoft was fundamentally handicapped by the fact Windows was so successful on PCs: the company could never align their mission, incentives, and bottom line like Apple could.
Keith Caulfield, writing for Billboard, reports that Kanye Westʼs The Life of Pablo will debut at number one on the Billboard 200 charts.
The Life of Pablo is the first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 where the majority (70 percent, in fact) of its units were generated by streaming equivalent albums (SEA). Its 66,000 SEA units equates to just over 99 million U.S. streams for the album’s tracks in the week ending April 7. (Each SEA unit is equal to 1,500 streams from an album.)