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Dave Wiskus on SoundCloud Go and Artists

Soundcloud
Jason Tate

Dave Wiskus, of Airplane Mode, wrote an open letter to SoundCloud about their new streaming service:

You can slice it, package it, or spin it however you like, but the bare fact is that you’re making money off of songs you aren’t paying for. Worse, you’re doing it while perpetuating an air of exclusivity around the concept of making money. All while you’re pretending to be a friend to the little guy. There’s nothing artist-friendly about this approach.

But wait! There’s more!

Airplane Mode has a SoundCloud Pro account to get access to unlimited uploads and a few other features that make the service useful. This account costs us $15 per month. So not only are you getting our music for free and paying us nothing, we’re actually paying you to take it. What an excellent deal. For you.

Kanye West’s ‘The Life of Pablo’ Streamed 250 Million Times in 10 Days

Kanye West
Jason Tate

Dan Rys, writing for Billboard, on TIDAL’s recently released streaming and subscriber numbers. Apparently Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was streamed 250 million times in the first 10 days of release.

Tidal also finally released numbers for Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo streams for the first time, after West requested the service withhold the numbers when the album first became available in February. According to Tidal, Pablo surpassed 250 million streams in its first 10 days of release. Pablo, which West previously said would only ever exist on Tidal, has been going through some changes in real time of late as the artist updates certain tracks, and just yesterday made the single “Famous,” featuring Rihanna, available on both Apple Music and Spotify, ending his Tidal-only crusade.

SoundCloud Launches Subscription Service

Soundcloud
Jason Tate

Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge, on SoundCloud’s new subscription service.

Though anyone can create a SoundCloud account and upload songs unworthy of your time, some huge artists also use it to publish tracks that you won’t find anywhere else. Kanye West, for instance, posted a new song over the weekend that you won’t even find on Tidal. It’s his fourth track exclusive to SoundCloud.

But bonus tracks only go so far. What matters for a subscription music service is how many paid tracks are available, and SoundCloud Go appears to have far fewer than its top competitors. SoundCloud is advertising a library of 125 million songs, but at least 110 million of those are free, user-uploaded tracks. While Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and the other big streaming services have around 30 million paid songs, SoundCloud Go appears to include closer to 15 million.

This feels like a divergence from what makes SoundCloud unique.

Is the Album Review Dead?

Jason Tate

Dan Ozzi, writing for Noisey, asks: is the album review dead?

We are living in that age Bangs never got to see. There are enough services competing to offer us streaming music—Spotify, Pandora, YouTube, Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Amazon Prime, Rhapsody, 8tracks, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp, to name a few (and that’s not even mentioning the illegal download market)—that it would take hundreds of thousands of years to listen to it all. So with every new album available at our fingertips completely for free at the instant of its release for our own personal judgment, you’ve got to wonder: Do we still need the album review?

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Streaming Music Surpasses Digital Downloads

Jason Tate

The RIAA has released their report on the state of the US music industry in 2015. Streaming is now the biggest revenue source.

The U.S. recorded music industry continued its transition to more digital and more diverse revenue streams in 2015. Overall revenues in 2015 were up 0.9% to $7.0 billion at estimated retail value. The continued growth of revenues from streaming services offset declines in sales of digital downloads and physical product. And at wholesale value, the market was up 0.8% to $4.95 billion – the fifth consecutive year that the market has grown at wholesale value.

The Complete Conceptual History of the Millennium Falcon

Jason Tate

Michael Heilemann, writing for Kitbashed, goes deep on the history of Star Warsʼ Millennium Falcon:

But the Falcon’s conceptual development has always intrigued me because the conceptualization phase is unclear and hard to discern. I’ve researched this subject extensively over years and it’s only recently I’ve been able to make out some sort of sensible process.

So this then is The Complete Conceptual History of The Millennium Falcon or How I Started Worrying and Lost My Mind Completely Over a Fictional Spaceship Someone Please Do Something Send Help Why Are You Still Reading Someone Do Something.

Netflix Revamps Recommendation System

Jason Tate

Ben Popper, writing for The Verge, looks at how Netflix has revamped their recommendation system to handle a more global audience:

“We were very worried that running the algorithms we knew worked well when we pulled data from a single country and a single catalog, if we tried across places where the catalog differed, the recommendations would be pretty bad,” says Carlos Gomez-Uribe, vice president of product innovation at Netflix, and the leader of the recommendation redesign.

This obsession over the data and delivering the best recommendations for every subscriber is something I think is sorely missing in the music world. Spotify cares more than Apple Music, but imagine if it gets this good?

MTV: ‘The Myth of Rare Black Genius’

Kanye West
Jason Tate

MTV has been revamping their news and publishing recently and have put out just fantastic content. Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib recently wrote an article on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo and the “myth of rare black genius.”

Assessing The Life of Pablo, like assessing the entire career of Kanye West, means considering the demand for black greatness and the toll it takes on the great. I am not commenting now on West’s mental or emotional state. I have no access to Kanye West, or his life, beyond what he shares through his work. I am talking about the toll it takes on artists in the black imagination, in the spaces where we hold them dear. It is equal parts frustrating and wholly understandable to see the way both white establishments and black consumers hold on to the idea of black genius. The concept is held so tightly and with so little change or evolution in what the black genius can or should represent. This leaves the imagination with so few established and named black geniuses that they must be protected at all costs. I have been guilty of this, both the limited naming and the relentless protection, more with Kanye West than anyone else.

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The Brain’s Music Room

Jason Tate

Natalie Angier, writing for The New York Times, looks at how and why we’re drawn to certain music:

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.

Uber’s Atomic Meltdown

Jason Tate

Eli Schiff, writing on his blog, takes a deep dive on the missteps of Uber’s rebranding:

In general, it is not a great idea to put the brand of a company valued in the tens of billions of dollars in the hands of people who readily admit they don’t know what their own intentions are. Uber tore through and rejected the proposals of half a dozen external agencies and eventually made the decision to rebrand internally.

The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens

Jason Tate

Elspeth Reeve, writing for the New Republic, looks at the secret lives of “Tumblr Teens,” the back alley monetization schemes, and the story of some of the most popular accounts being terminated. It’s an in-depth profile on a faction of the internet, and youth culture, that I seemed to just miss.

Each social media network creates a particular kind of teenage star: Those blessed with early-onset hotness are drawn to YouTube, the fashionable and seemingly wealthy post to Instagram, the most charismatic actors, dancers, and comedians thrive on Vine. On Facebook, every link you share and photo you post is a statement of your identity. Tumblr is the social network that, based on my reporting, is seen by teens as the most uncool.

Grab some pizza, or if you’re my age: a beer, and dive in.

The Story Behind Discovering Gravitational Waves

Jason Tate

Nicola Twilley, writing for The New Yorker, with the behind the scenes look at the scientists that discovered gravitational waves exist:

The fact that gravitational waves were detected so early prompted confusion and disbelief. “I had told everyone that we wouldn’t see anything until 2017 or 2018,” Reitze said. Janna Levin, a professor of astrophysics at Barnard College and Columbia University, who is not a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, was equally surprised. “When the rumors started, I was like, Come on!” she said. “They only just got it locked!” The signal, moreover, was almost too perfect. “Most of us thought that, when we ever saw such a thing, it would be something that you would need many, many computers and calculations to drag out of the noise,” Weiss said. Many of his colleagues assumed that the signal was some kind of test.

SoundCloud Lost $70m in Two Years

Soundcloud
Jason Tate

Cyrus Farivar, writing for Ars Technica, looks at the losses that are apparently piling up for SoundCloud.

New financial records released by SoundCloud show that the company has nearly doubled its losses from 2013 to 2014—those two years combined account for a total of €62.1 million ($70.3 million) in losses. […] With mounting losses, the company’s board of directors wrote that there are “material uncertainties facing the business.”

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Apple Execs on ‘The Talk Show’ Podcast

Daring Fireball
Jason Tate

John Gruber has Apple’s Eddie Cue and Craig Federichi on this week’s episode of The Talk Show:

Very special guests Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi join the show. Topics include: the new features in Apple’s upcoming OS releases (iOS 9.3 and tvOS 9.2); why Apple is expanding its public beta program for OS releases; iTunes’s monolithic design; how personally involved Eddy and Craig are in using, testing, and installing beta software; the sad decline of Duke’s men’s basketball team; and more.

The entire thing is worth a listen (and what a coup by Gruber) but I found the part explaining/discussing iTunes to be the most interesting.

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