Tennessee Republican Objects to Honoring Allison Russel

Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones, D-Nashville, criticized House Republicans on Monday after a Republican leader objected to a ceremonial resolution honoring a Nashville-connected musician for winning a Grammy earlier this month.
Jones brought two resolutions to honor the band Paramore and singer-songwriter Allison Russell, who took home the Best American Roots Performance Grammy Award.
But House Republican Caucus Chair Jeremy Faison, R-Cosby, objected to the Russell resolution, a procedural move that kicked Jones’ resolution off the night’s consent calendar and back to committee, where objected consent items often die.

Well, that’s pretty fucking gross.

Why is Music Journalism Collapsing?

Jason Tate 3 months ago

Ted Gioia, writing on the collapse of music journalism:

Before streaming, everybody in the value chain needed new music. The record stores would go broke if people just listened to the old songs over and over.
And the same was true for record distributors, record labels, radio stations, nightclub owners, and music writers. Everybody needed hot new songs and rising new musicians.
Of course, fans also benefited. Life gets boring if you just listen to the same songs year after year, decade after decade. But there was no risk of that. The music industry worked tirelessly to find exciting new music, and share it with the world.
That business model is now disappearing. The people who run the industry killed it—and now we live with the consequences.
The irony is that exciting new music is still getting released—but almost nobody hears it. The system actively works to hide it.
And occasionally an artist breaks through the industry inertia, and proves that fans still want exciting new music experiences. But here, too, entrenched interests do almost nothing to support this—and much to hinder it.

Music Status via Sleeve 2

Jason Tate 3 months ago

Jason Snell detailed a cool little app called Sleeve 2 on SixColors:

What made me instantly buy Sleeve was its extensive capability to customize the currently playing track information. You can choose to show album art at a wide range of sizes (or omit it entirely), with your choice of corner rounding. You can choose display track name, album name, and artist name, and display them in a variety of fonts and weights. There’s customization for text alignment, drop shadows, and pretty much anything else you might want. You can set the track information to float above everything, always say on the Desktop layer, or float above briefly when the track changes, then land back on the desktop.

It also integrates with Last.fm.

Max Martin Breaks Record for Most #1 Songs

Jason Tate 3 months ago

Billboard:

Max Martin now solely has the most No. 1s among producers in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart.
He tallies his 24th career leader as a producer on the latest, Jan. 27, 2024-dated Hot 100, as Ariana Grande’s “Yes, And?” blasts in at No. 1. He surpasses the late George Martin – who produced 19 of The Beatles’ record 20 No. 1s – for the most leaders among producers over the chart’s 65-year archives.

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Apple Music to Incentivize Spatial Audio Mixes

Jason Tate 3 months ago

Benjamin Mayo, writing at 9to5Mac:

Apple will pay up to 10% more per play in royalties for tracks where a spatial version is available. This is starting with January’s payouts. Crucially, Apple Music users do not necessarily have to listen in Spatial Audio for the artist to be rewarded with the bonus payout.

Green Day Talk With The Sun

Jason Tate 3 months ago

Green Day talked with The Sun in a new wide ranging interview:

Mike says: “Social media is great for kids but if you’re finding your music via algorithms then that’s just fing lazy. I like to organically find new things. All I can say is just f***ing clear your search history to find new s***.” Tre laughs: “We say this now but as soon as we hang up, we’ll be making a TikTok account.”
Billie Joe adds: “I was told that Brain Stew was a sudden popular thing on TikTok with a lot of hip-hop kids dancing to it. And that’s cool. But I don’t have the patience to use it. It’s just like, eurgh. It’s cool for other people but we’re old- school man.”
That is why you won’t find the passionate and outspoken songwriiter venting on social media.
Billie Joe says: “My opinions are always in my songs. I don’t like to Tweet or Instagram about politics, because you’re contributing to insane people who are just bitching, arguing and taking sides. So I write about it in my songs. It’s funny as on New Year’s Eve, we played American Idiot [on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show] and we changed ‘redneck agenda’ to MAGA agenda’ [Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan]. Well, I woke up the next morning to people saying, ‘F***ng blah blah I can’t believe he said it’ or ‘it’s so awesome’ which was crazy. And then it’s on Fox News and Elon Musk and Tom Morello are saying things about it. But it threw me as we’d pre-taped the show a month before and I’d forgotten about that lyric change. On actual New Year’s Eve, we were in our cover band, The Coverups, raising money for a chimpanzee sanctuary so I was like, ‘Hey what are you talking about? I was raising money for chimps’.”

Alkaline Trio Talk New Album

Jason Tate 3 months ago

Alkaline Trio talk with Rock Sound about their upcoming album:

Often leaning into hyperbole whilst holding a mirror to the darkest aspects of humanity, the Chicago punk legends have long charted the world’s descent into brooding chaos, and now – six years since they last released an album – real life has seemingly edged closer to Doomsday than ever before.
From a global pandemic to mass shootings to drug epidemics, there are no shortage of horrors sitting on our doorstep, and thanks to social media – they can often feel impossible to escape. As the planet unravels and we witness the Earth become a breeding ground for a whole host of terror, everything feels uncertain – but one thing’s for sure, it’s the perfect time for new Alkaline Trio music.
With their milestone tenth album, the three-piece are stripping things back to basics. Redefining their morbid sonic identity to serve as an antidote for the swirling confusion that now dominates so many of our lives – they’re back with a dark record for a truly dark time.

Despite Music Industry Growth, Companies Are Tightening

Jason Tate 3 months ago

Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:

Last year was brutal for the media business, as nearly every major entertainment and technology company fired employees. This year is shaping up to be more of the same.
More than a dozen major corporations across technology, finance and media announced major job cuts this past week, including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Unity Software Inc. Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music company, plans cuts in the first quarter. Animation studio Pixar will let staff go in the second half. All told, media companies have fired more than 70,000 employees since the start of last year, according to Vivek Couto at Media Partners Asia.

13-Year-Old Becomes First Person to Ever Beat Tetris

Jason Tate 3 months ago

Jason Koebler, writing for 404 Media:

A 13-year-old competitive Tetris player has become the first known human to beat the game on the original NES by forcing it into a kill screen. In doing so, the player, Blue Scuti, broke world records for overall score, level achieved, and total numbers of lines in the 34-year-old game. Previously, only an AI had broken Tetris.

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Taylor Swift Breaks Elvis Presley’s Record as Solo Artist With Most Weeks at No. 1

Jason Tate 4 months ago

Variety:

Taylor Swift has broken Elvis Presley‘s longstanding record for the most weeks spent atop the Billboard 200 album chart by a solo artist. She set a new mark of 68 total weeks, as “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” landed on top of the chart for a fifth time in the final full tracking week of 2023.
Although Swift set a new record for an individual, the ultimate high-water mark among all artists is still held by the Beatles, whose albums have spent 132 weeks on top of the Billboard 200. Presley’s 67 weeks now puts him in second place among solo recording artists and third place among all acts.

Amazon Prime Video Will Start Showing Ads on January 29th

Jason Tate 4 months ago

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

Earlier this year, Amazon announced plans to start incorporating ads into movies and TV shows streamed from its Prime Video service, and now the company has revealed a specific date when you’ll start seeing them: it’s January 29th. “This will allow us to continue investing in compelling content and keep increasing that investment over a long period of time,” the company said in an email to customers about the pending shift to “limited advertisements.”

Big loser energy.

The NYT Sues Open AI and Microsoft

Jason Tate 4 months ago

New York Times:

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.
The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

Bluesky Posts Now Open to Public

Jason Tate 4 months ago

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Bluesky remains an invite-only decentralized Twitter alternative, but now, you don’t need to have an account and log in to be able to see posts on the platform, according to a blog post from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Now, anyone can easily see posts from both the web and from the Bluesky app — like this one.
If you want to prevent people who aren’t logged in from seeing your posts, you can “discourage” that by clicking a toggle in settings. But Bluesky notes that “other apps may not honor this request” and that the toggle doesn’t make your account private.

I have an account on Bluesky, but I haven’t found myself using it much. In fact, as Twitter/X have gone up in dumpster-fire flames of Oppenheimer proportions, the more I’ve started to think about if I even want or need this kind of service in my life. There’s a real lack of joy, and besides the Absurdist Twitter thread, I am finding less an less value in any of them. I’ve been spending more time curating my RSS feeds and have replaced the Mastodon/X/Threads space on my home screen with my RSS reader. Kicking social media off the first screen of my phone, so far, has felt like a net positive.

SCP Merchandising Closes Down

Jason Tate 4 months ago

Billboard:

SCP Merchandising, an Illinois-based merch company used by artists including Mitski, Father John Misty and Carly Rae Jepsen, has shut down, according to a member of SCP leadership still on-site after the company laid off its staff over the weekend.
Based on accounts from multiple former SCP employees on LinkedIn, the company’s employees were abruptly laid off on Sunday evening (Dec. 17). The source tells Billboard that the company will most likely file for bankruptcy and that there is no process yet for clients to retrieve their merchandise, but that those with outstanding balances will not be able to do so until they pay those off with SCP or a potential bankruptcy trustee. They add that priority will be given to clients who have no balance due as well as those who are arranging for payment of unpaid bills.

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New Paramore Interview

Jason Tate 4 months ago

Uproxx:

Now that Paramore has spent the year touring behind This Is Why (and making sure to take better care of themselves while they’re at it), a chapter of the band’s career has come to a close. They’ve now fulfilled all label obligations and are effectively free agents. As for the future of Paramore, all three members agreed that there’s a level of uncertainty. But one thing’s for sure — they’re still going to be together, and they’re still going to keep having fun. “The only thing that matters is we will still get to be each other’s community,” Williams says. Farro agrees: “I just hope we can keep building the Paramore empire and then rule the world.” And wherever they end up, the massive community of fans Paramore has cultivated will be here for them, too.