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Kanye West’s ‘The Life Of Pablo’ May Hit #1 With Virtually Zero Sales
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.
Spotify Raises $1 Billion in Debt
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.
Reddit’s Warrant Canary Just Died
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 on the iPhone SE
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.
TIDAL Turns One, Jay Z Says Old Owner Inflated Subscriber Numbers
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.”
Advice from Bill Watterson
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 on SoundCloud Go and Artists
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
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
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?
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?
Streaming Music Surpasses Digital Downloads
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
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
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’
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.