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Inside Pandora’s Fight with Spotify and Apple Music

Jason Tate

John Paul Titlow, writing for Fast Company, looks at Pandora and their attempt to fight back the big streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music:

By shifting toward on-demand subscriptions, Pandora is hoping to add a new, much deeper layer of data and understanding to its artificial brain. By creating artist-based stations and thumbing songs, listeners can teach Pandora a lot—but behaviors like saving albums and listening to them on repeat or adding individual songs to playlists are vastly more informative (as Spotify and Apple already know). Right now, if you’re obsessed with the new Rihanna album, Pandora has no idea. These are the types of blind spots the service needs to fill in, especially if it wants to target superfans with special perks.

Data is just as crucial when it comes to selling concert tickets.

I’m fascinated by the idea of big music data and how it can find the perfect next band or album for a listener. I think Pandora is smart to be moving into trying to tie their music service into other things like selling concert tickets. But, I’m bearish on the company as a whole. They’ve been relegated to what is basically a feature in other apps and there’s no reason to pay for something you already get in a good enough fashion somewhere else.

Blink-182 Take It Back to the Beginning

Jason Tate

The world has been interviewing Blink-182 over the past week (the label’s mad at me for posting that the video went up on YouTube, so I’m probably s.o.l), the latest is from Forbes, discussing the new beginning for the band and giving a little more detail on some of the new songs:

Well songs like “Rabbit Hole,” that have this big anthemic gang vocal at the end of it. There’s a song called “No Future,” there are a lot of really energetic, anthemic, angst-y fun rock songs I can’t wait to play live. This album is really rich with sing-along melodies and sing-along choruses. When I go to a show I want to sing along with the band. I still have that energy of going to see Bad Religion at the Palladium and wanting to sing every single word and I think this album has a lot of that for people.

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The Dark Side of Guardian Comments

Jason Tate

The Guardian studied their online comments section, the results were harrowing:

The Guardian was not the only news site to turn comments on, nor has it been the only one to find that some of what is written “below the line” is crude, bigoted or just vile. On all news sites where comments appear, too often things are said to journalists and other readers that would be unimaginable face to face – the Guardian is no exception.

New research into our own comment threads provides the first quantitative evidence for what female journalists have long suspected: that articles written by women attract more abuse and dismissive trolling than those written by men, regardless of what the article is about.

Blog: Cool New App: Talkshow

Apps
Jason Tate

An interesting new app called Talkshow debuted this week:

Talkshow is a simple messaging app that allows you to text these things in public. With Talkshow, individuals, groups of friends, entertainers, creators — anyone! — can have conversations in public, to be viewed by others in real time or after the fact. Every Talkshow can be shared outside the app and embedded into other websites.

I can definitely see some interesting uses for this kind of thing.

New Blink-182 Album Will Go in Lots of Different Directions

Jason Tate

Rolling Stone were at the kickoff “Karaoke Bash” for Blink-182’s new album and tour and the article has some new information peppered in.

“It goes in a lot of different directions,” says Hoppus. “We have some songs that sound like Blink-182 from 1999. … We have some songs that are like nothing we have ever done before. We have a ballad called ‘Home Is Such a Lonely Place’ that has clean arpeggiated finger-picking guitars with strings underneath it. We have super-fast late-Nineties-punk-rock-sounding songs. … We tried to capture the energy and not worry so much about all the knobs.”

Investigation Into Prince’s Death Is Now a Criminal Probe

Prince
Jason Tate

David Chanen, writing for the StarTribune, on how the investigation into Prince’s death is now part of a criminal probe:

The law says that “investigative data collected or created by a law enforcement agency in order to prepare a case against a person, whether known or unknown, for the commission of a crime or other offense for which the agency has primary investigative responsibility are confidential or protected nonpublic while the investigation is active.”

The exception citation doesn’t mean that criminal charges will be filed at the completion of the Sheriff’s Office inquiry, only that charges are a possibility.

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Beach Slang Might Have Broke Up on Stage Last Night

Beach Slang
Jason Tate

Quite a few reports are coming in that say things did not go well at Beach Slang’s show in Salt Lake City last night:

Rumors are running rampant that Philly Replacements revivalists Beach Slang broke up onstage last night at their show at Salt Lake City’s Kilby Court. Fans who were at the show describe a scene where frontman James Alex announced onstage that this would be their last show and the crowd would be given refunds at the door.

Update: The band have updated their Facebook page and are not breaking up:

Salt Lake, for the car crash last night and Boise, for fumbling on you, I am gigantically sorry—even bigger than that. I am going to make good on making it up to you. Cross my heart. This, and all of you, mean too much to me. I love you with thunder. I love you all the way. So, yeah, Seattle, we are still coming to your good city, wild-eyed and ready, our hearts bashed back into shape. If you’re still in, we are.

Read More “Beach Slang Might Have Broke Up on Stage Last Night”

The Punisher is Coming to Netflix

Jason Tate

The Punisher is getting his own series on Netflix.

EW has learned that Marvel has ordered a spin-off starring vigilante character introduced in Daredevil season 2. Jon Bernthal will reprise his role as vengeful military veteran Frank Castle, who brings his own lethal form of justice to Hell’s Kitchen.

Writer and executive producer Steve Lightfoot (Hanniba, Casualty) will serve as showrunner.

Read More “The Punisher is Coming to Netflix”

Chatbots Are Out for Rob Gordon’s Job

Jason Tate

Christopher Heine, writing for AD Week, on how a chatbot is helping sell vinyl records. And it’s working.

Here’s how it works. People sign up to receive text messages and then get an album recommendation every day on their phone. Upon seeing such an offer, they can text back either “yes,” “like” or “dislike” to inform the chatbot of their musical preferences—and the reply affects what 12-inch slabs of wax are pitched their way in the future. If they answer “yes,” a link appears to let them buy the album in a couple of clicks. The Edit has sold some 50,000 records that way to tens of thousands of subscribers. What’s more, if a subscriber asks a “human question”—such as, “What is currently playing in the office?”—a customer service rep quickly steps in and provides a contextual response to further engage the patron. If the consumer seems ready to buy something but hasn’t pulled the trigger online, the chatbot—not the rep—sends that person a message to call a rep to complete the order.

The Rise and Fall of America’s Awful Beer Glass

Jason Tate

Laura Bliss, writing for CityLab, on the history of what is widely known as draft beer’s most common drinking glass … and why it sucks:

Under Fitz’s watch, there’s not a shaker glass in sight. The glass he once hardly noticed in the race towards sloshdom he now detests. “Shaker pints were never meant for draft,” Fitz says. “They’re the worst thing that ever happened to beer.”

And it’s not just at Pizza Paradiso. In more and more bars across the country, the little-recognized shaker is slipping out the back door. And among beer’s devotees, the end of the glass that defined a century in beer can’t come soon enough.

Warner Music’s Deal for BMG’s Catalog Sets Up Showdown With RED

BMG
Jason Tate

Ed Christman, writing for Billboard, looks at how Blink-182’s new label, BMG, and their distribution deal with the Alternative Distribution Alliance will be challenging RED as the largest indie distributor in the U.S.:

According to sources, BMG’s record label operations is already generating about $100 million globally, and about one-third of that is in the U.S. While BMG began its revival in 2008 by first pursuing music publishing opportunities, after it completed the sale of its music assets to Sony Corp., it actually held back about 200 album master recordings from the Sony deal. But it wasn’t until 2013 when it acquired Sanctuary and Mute as part of the divestiture’s the Universal Music Group made in order to keep the EU Commission’s regulatory agency happy about its EMI Recorded Music acquisition, that it began aggressively pursuing a recorded music strategy too. Since then, it has also acquired Union Square, Infectious, S-Curve, Vagrant, and Rise.

All these labels and deals and acronyms sure gets messy fast.

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Spotify Acquires CrowdAlbum

Jason Tate

Glenn Peoples, writing for TechCrunch, on Spotify’s aquistion of CrowdAlbum:

Spotify announced Wednesday it has acquired CrowdAlbum, a service that creates albums of events based on the location and time of photos and videos people share on social media sites. It can index content for any kind of event — sports, Earth Day festivals, political rallies — but mostly aggregates photos from music concerts and festivals.

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