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Gerard Way Has a New DC Comics Imprint

Gerard Way
Jason Tate

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’s Top 40 Punk Albums

Ramones
Jason Tate

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.

Read More “Rolling Stone’s Top 40 Punk Albums”

WhatsApp Turns on Encryption

Jason Tate

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.

Kanye West’s ‘The Life Of Pablo’ May Hit #1 With Virtually Zero Sales

Kanye West
Jason Tate

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

Jason Tate

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

Reddit
Jason Tate

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

Daring Fireball
Jason Tate

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

Jason Tate

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.”

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?

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.