Shannon Van Sant, writing at NPR:
MySpace — the once-dominant social media platform that was largely subsumed by Facebook — may have lost a decade’s worth of music uploaded by users, the company says. […] According to several media reports, it posted a message on its site recently reading, “As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from MySpace. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Jem Aswad and Chris Willman, writing at Variety:
Spotify, Google, Pandora and Amazon have teamed up to appeal a controversial ruling by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board that, if it goes through, would increase payouts to songwriters by 44%, Variety has learned. […] Sources say that Apple Music is alone among the major streaming services in not planning to appeal — as confirmed by songwriters’ orgs rushing to heap praise on Apple while condemning the seemingly unified front of the other digital companies.
Keith Buckley talked with Alt Press about the upcoming The Damned Things album:
“There were so many different personalities rearing their head on our last record; it was like we were all trying to represent the bands from which we came, and it ended up not being loyal to any of them,” he continues. “It was a strange mix of styles, and at the time, I appreciated it because I was working with geniuses and icons, but having sat on that album for 10 years, and with it just being Andy, Joe, Scott and I this time around, we’ve come out with something that feels like the stuff [we] should’ve been writing in the first place. This is rawer, less polished and less self-aware than last time. High Crimes is fun music with a cool attitude to it.”
Arrow will be coming to an end after season eight.
The final season of the Stephen Amell-led drama from executive producer Greg Berlanti and Warner Bros. TV will consist of a reduced order of 10 episodes and air in the fall. The final season will air during the 2019-2020 broadcast calendar.
Ben Kowalewicz of Billy Talent will be hosting the Juno awards this year.
Howard Zinn, writing in 2016:
I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another’s existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.
The A Star is Born soundtrack is once again the top selling album in the country:
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born soundtrack returns to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a fourth nonconsecutive week on top, as the set steps 3-1 with 128,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending Feb. 28 (up 152 percent), according to Nielsen Music.
Alexandra Pollard, writing at The Independent:
“Most of the songs were written before the breakup, which is weird because it does sound like a breakup record,” says Bain, as we settle on the floor beneath the shade of a tree. “I’ve analysed them retrospectively, and it feels like they’re about a breakup, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking, ‘I wanna break up with Marika’. I guess I was breaking up with a portion of myself as well. And that’s really hard to do. A lot of like, issues that I had… I had loads of anger and lots of weird stuff, like drinking and drug taking.”
The new album came out last week and it gets my full recommendation. It’s damn good.
Taylor Wofford. writing at Motherboard:
I find Twitter’s situation to be of their own making. They never concretely set out a set of rules. When I first started the forums, I wrote four pages of rules and a catch-all at the end: If there’s something else we don’t like, we’re going to ban you. We have every right to ban you and that’s it. With Twitter, they never defined anything. They never said what’s allowed, what isn’t allowed, what will happen. They just kind of floated around. If something got really out of hand they would get rid of it, but since they had no concrete rules, they had no active moderation, people didn’t know what was or what wasn’t allowed. They dug their own grave and now they’re way too far into it to dig out.[…]
It was an insane amount of work. You’re trying to do your best to make the place better and you’re getting shit on constantly. There’s just no way to win, so you just do your best to enforce the rules that everyone agreed on and hope that some lunatic who got banned doesn’t try to post your address, which has happened to most of them.
I’m not sure how many of you remember Something Awful or the internet in the early 2000s, but as someone that ran a website and forum during that period, I related to a lot of this article. I never spent much time around these specific forums, but faced many of the same challenges at AP.net.
The Sandlot will be getting a TV series revival with much of the original cast returning. The news came from the director of the original on The Rain Delay podcast. Slashfilm summarizes the conversation:
As for what the series is about, all Evans would say was that it takes place in 1984, and it will bring back the original kids from The Sandlot. They’re all now around 33 years old, and each of them has kids of their own. But that’s it. Maybe their kids pick up the mantle and start a game of their own on the dusty old diamond? If that’s the case, what kind of pickle will they get themselves into? We don’t know!
This sounds very much in my wheelhouse.
Jaclyn Hendricks, writing at Page Six:
Tiffany Haddish will soon be gaming up for a physical challenge.
The “Night School” actress, in addition to Shaun White and Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz, will be featured in upcoming episodes of Nickelodeon’s “Double Dare,” Page Six can exclusively reveal.
Tied to the 2019 Kids’ Choice Awards, “Double Dare” will have themed episodes airing from March 11 through the March 14, which will include Wentz, whose band is nominated for Favorite Music Group, and actor Joel Courtney, star of Favorite Movie nominee “The Kissing Booth.”
Josh Constine, writing at TechCrunch:
Facebook will drive a hard bargain with influencers and artists judging by the terms of service for the social network’s Patreon-like Fan Subscriptions feature that lets people pay a monthly fee for access to a creator’s exclusive content. The policy document attained by TechCrunch shows Facebook plans to take up to a 30 percent cut of subscription revenue minus fees, compared to 5 percent by Patreon, 30 percent by YouTube, which covers fees and 50 percent by Twitch.
It took me a weekend to build my own using Stripe. I firmly believe you should own the most important parts of your business and the membership system is how we can continue to exist as a publication. The idea of giving 30% to Facebook? Fuck all the way off.
Casey Newton, writing at The Verge:
Over the past three months, I interviewed a dozen current and former employees of Cognizant in Phoenix. All had signed non-disclosure agreements with Cognizant in which they pledged not to discuss their work for Facebook — or even acknowledge that Facebook is Cognizant’s client. The shroud of secrecy is meant to protect employees from users who may be angry about a content moderation decision and seek to resolve it with a known Facebook contractor. The NDAs are also meant to prevent contractors from sharing Facebook users’ personal information with the outside world, at a time of intense scrutiny over data privacy issues
But the secrecy also insulates Cognizant and Facebook from criticism about their working conditions, moderators told me. They are pressured not to discuss the emotional toll that their job takes on them, even with loved ones, leading to increased feelings of isolation and anxiety.
This story is terrifying.
“…We’re treating around 300 years of music from various countries, forms, philosophies, and so on as one genre. As far as modern commercial music, we don’t group the past 50 years together: can you imagine how strange it would be to group LL Cool J, Metallica, and The Spice Girls together? These are all artists that were popular in the 90s; beyond that, they have virtually nothing in common. Grouping together Mozart, Ravel, and Cage makes even less sense.”
A lot of really great points here.
The writers of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse share with Vulture the steps that went into using “Sunflower” in the movie:
It was critical that the song gag landed. We had a feeling it was because people knew the song, and they knew how he was messing it up. We were in big trouble when we couldn’t use it anymore — we needed to replace one of the greatest songs of the year, and we had to do it in time to spend the three months we would need to animate that shot. It turns out “Sunflower” is a massive hit song. We heard it as part of a batch of songs that Republic Records presented to us.
We also liked the metaphor this presents: Miles is singing a song that theoretically he’s a little too young for and he doesn’t know the words yet. That’s the metaphor we’re going to be working with for most of the rest of the movie. He’s going to be asked to step into shoes that he feels he’s not ready for, he’s not going to know the words, and he’s going to feel very self-conscious and nervous about that.
I love reading about the process behind decisions like this.
