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.)
Camilo Jose Vergara’s “Tracking Time” project photographs a variety of locations across the country from the 70s up to present day. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing and have been scrolling through the photos all afternoon.
Bruce Springsteen has canceled his upcoming North Carolina show over their ridiculous new “bathroom” law:
As you, my fans, know I’m scheduled to play in Greensboro, North Carolina this Sunday. As we also know, North Carolina has just passed HB2, which the media are referring to as the “bathroom” law. HB2 — known officially as the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act — dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use. Just as important, the law also attacks the rights of LGBT citizens to sue when their human rights are violated in the workplace. No other group of North Carolinians faces such a burden. To my mind, it’s an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognizing the human rights of all of our citizens to overturn that progress. Right now, there are many groups, businesses, and individuals in North Carolina working to oppose and overcome these negative developments. Taking all of this into account, I feel that this is a time for me and the band to show solidarity for those freedom fighters. As a result, and with deepest apologies to our dedicated fans in Greensboro, we have canceled our show scheduled for Sunday, April 10th. Some things are more important than a rock show and this fight against prejudice and bigotry — which is happening as I write — is one of them. It is the strongest means I have for raising my voice in opposition to those who continue to push us backwards instead of forwards.
Brittany Spanos, writing for Rolling Stone, talks with Gerard Way about his new DC Comics imprint.
It feels great. A monthly book is a lot different than the limited series that I was doing — and still continue to do — with Umbrella Academy. We’re on Series Three right now, and you really have a long time to write those things. You plan those out pretty far in advance. Being a comic-book writer for a monthly book is a whole different animal, and you end up putting a lot of yourself into it — a lot of personal things I feel. And that happens in Umbrella Academy, too, but it feels more immediate because you need material to sell those books. To get back to your question, it feels amazing. I come in, and I help edit. I art-direct; I help put the teams together; I give people directions. Sometimes I write scenes, things like that. It’s using all of my skills, which is really great, and it’s more focused than when I was doing art for the band, but it’s very similar.
Rolling Stone have put together a list of the Top 40 Punk Albums. No London Calling, but Enema of the State? I knew I was an absolute punk.
Punk rock started in 1976 on New York’s Bowery, when four cretins from Queens came up with a mutant strain of blitzkrieg bubblegum. The revolution they inspired split the history of rock & roll in half. But even if punk rock began as a kind of negation — a call to stark, brutal simplicity — its musical variety and transforming emotional power was immediate and remains staggering. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Ramones’ toweringly influential self-titled debut, we’ve compiled a list of the 40 Greatest Punk Albums of All Time.
Cade Metz, writing for Wired, tells the inside story of WhatsApp turning on end-to-end encryption.
More than a billion people trade messages, make phone calls, send photos, and swap videos using the service. This means that only Facebook itself runs a larger self-contained communications network. And today, the enigmatic founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton and Jan Koum, together with a high-minded coder and cryptographer who goes by the pseudonym Moxie Marlinspike, revealed that the company has added end-to-end encryption to every form of communication on its service.
I’m sorry for ruining your productivity today.
Chris DeVille, writing for Stereogum, looks at how Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo may be the first number one album with practically zero actual “sales.”
Pablo still isn’t on sale anywhere besides Kanye’s site, and even if Tidal reported the limited number of Tidal TLOP purchases to Nielsen SoundScan, those sales happened weeks ago. But HITS Daily Double and @chartnews report that the album is projected to accumulate about 60,000 equivalent units based almost entirely on TEA and SEA and will likely ascend to #1 on the Billboard 200 next week.
Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch, looks at Spotify’s latest move of raising $1 billion in convertible debt to fight Apple Music.
What the debt does provide Spotify is opportunities to make acquisitions. With SoundCloud and Pandora in the dumps, Spotify could potentially make a play to bring more independent music or radio listeners into its music empire.]
Why would Spotify agree to these aggressive terms? Because it’s competing with the most well funded company in history: Apple.
Cory Doctorow, writing at BoingBoing, talks about how Reddit’s “warrant canary” just died.
In early 2015, Reddit published a transparency report that contained heading for National Security Requests, noting, “As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information.”
Five hours ago, Reddit published its 2015 edition, which contains no mention of classified requests for user information.
“Warrant canaries” are a response to the practice by governments of serving warrants on service providers that include gag orders forbidding the service from disclosing the warrant’s existence.
John Gruber, writing for Daring Fireball, reviews Appleʼs upcoming 4-inch iPhone SE.
For anyone with an iPhone 5S (or older) who has been holding out on an upgrade in the hopes of a new top-tier “small” iPhone, the iPhone SE is cause for celebration. If you are such a person, run, don’t walk, to buy one. You will be delighted.
If you’ve already upgraded to an iPhone 6 or 6S and have made peace with the trade-offs of a larger, heavier, less-grippy-because-of-the-round-edges form factor, the appeal is less clear. Me, I talk the talk about preferring the smaller form factor, but ultimately I’m a sucker for top-of-the-line CPU/GPU performance and camera quality.
If I knew that there would be top of the line updates to this sized phone each year, I think I’d go back to the smaller size, but without knowing for sure, it’s too hard to make that call.
Adam Ewing, writing for Bloomberg, reports on TIDAL’s claim that the previous owners of the service inflated the subscriber numbers.
“It became clear after taking control of Tidal and conducting our own audit that the total number of subscribers was actually well below the 540,000 reported to us by the prior owners,” Tidal said in an e-mailed statement. “As a result, we have now served legal notice to parties involved in the sale.”
An old friend shared this comic with me yesterday that puts a speech from Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, into the style of the old strip. It’s something I’d seen and read before, but it hit me on a whole new level today.
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.
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.
