New Paramore Interview

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.

New Fall Out Boy Interview

Jason Tate 4 months ago

Billboard:

Now we just live in this time — and it’s not music; I look at my kids and they curate their own thing. They just go, “I like this and I like this,” and put it together. I think that that benefits a band like us because you know, we love Jay-Z, and then we’re referencing Metallica. We’re just a little bit all over the place, and I think we put out an album that felt free. And also when we put it out, it was coming out of living inside for a year and a half or whatever that was. So, I think this could be this niche Fall Out Boy record. It is what it is; I think there was some freedom in doing that, when we weren’t on the timetable of a label or the timetable of culture saying that you gotta do this (at) this time or whatever. I think the record benefited from the time.

Deryck Whibley Talks with GQ

Jason Tate 5 months ago

Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 talked with GQ in a wide ranging interview:

It’s partly the same reason that, last August, Whibley decided to sell the rights to Sum 41’s entire publishing-and-recorded-music catalog to an investment fund called Harbourview Equity Partners for an undisclosed sum. For a long time, despite several approaches, “I was so against selling it,” he says. “My songs are my babies, and I didn’t need the money.”
Then he started to question what he was so afraid of losing. He decided to conduct a thought experiment: “I told myself, Okay, I’m going to wake up tomorrow and act like I’ve sold it. What does that feel like? I woke up scared shitless. I had no songs. And I felt so excited and I picked up a guitar just naturally. Almost right away I wrote “Landmines”. And then I wrote another one, and then another one, and then I had another riff, and it was like, holy shit.” Letting go of his songs—much in the way he’s letting go of the band entirely now—unlocked a vital hunger inside of Whibley. “I felt the way I did when I first got signed. I felt the pressure and the need to create something.”
What he wound up creating was Heaven :x: Hell, a double album slated for early 2024 that should serve as the perfect capstone to the band’s two distinct eras: one side entirely All Killer–style pop-punk jams, the other full of the scorching metal headbangers they’ve favored lately. “I feel like there’s no other band in our genre that can just so easily pull this off,” Whibley says. “We have our own lane. It’s a great last record.”

Spotify Announces More Layoffs

Jason Tate 5 months ago

Spotify has announced they are laying off 1,500 people:

This brings me to a decision that will mean a significant step change for our company. To align Spotify with our future goals and ensure we are right-sized for the challenges ahead, I have made the difficult decision to reduce our total headcount by approximately 17% across the company. I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us.

Meanwhile, the stock spiked on the news so the CFO cashed in.

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The Joys of Last.fm

Jason Tate 5 months ago

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories:

There are a million questions that could be answered by Apple Music that aren’t, and that’s a shame.
Spotify does a better job at surfacing interesting data with Wrapped, but if you’re like me and prefer other aspects of Apple Music, sign up for Last.fm, use one of the many excellent indie apps, like Marvis Pro, Soor, Albums, Longplay, Doppler, and Air Scrobblethat support the service, and then enjoy your weekly, monthly, and annual reports in Last.fm’s app or on its website.

I 100% agree. Not only does Last.fm let you look into the data whenever you want, but you can also have your entire year of listening history at your disposal. And past years. There’s never a better time to start scrobbling than now, and the end of the year is a great time to begin collecting the data.

I use Marvis on iOS and Neptunes on the Mac and am happy with both. Passed the 100k scrobble mark this year and set a new personal record for number of songs listened to.

It May Be Time to Backup Your Bandcamp Purchases

Jason Tate 5 months ago

David Rutland:

You can’t rely on other people or organisations to hold onto your media forever, and it’s a tired but true maxim that the cloud is just someone else’s machine.
If you’ve spent your hard earned cash supporting independent artists through Bandcamp, a series of ownership changes and layoffs suggest that now might be the best time for audiophiles to download their audio files to secure offline storage.

And:

While we’re not saying that Bandcamp is going to disappear into nothing (MySpace is still around after all), we think it’s perhaps prudent to download your albums from Bandcamp and store them offline. You never know – that’s all we’re saying.
The Bandcamp UI isn’t really designed with massive downloads in mind, and there are a lot of boxes to tick.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to download all of your Bandcamp music using the excellent Batchcamp extension which is available as both a FireFox addon, or as a Google Chrome extension.

Internet Sleuths Want to Track Down This Mystery Pop Song

Jason Tate 5 months ago

Rolling Stone:

The grainy recording, just 17 seconds long, captures what indeed sounds like the catchy hook to an upbeat 1980s New Wave tune, though most of the words are hard to make out. It didn’t attract much interest at first. Yet as the months passed without an identification, each proposal of a potential artist being ruled out one after another, a cultish fascination began to take hold. Two years later, it’s the most-commented thread in WatZatSong history, and there’s a 5,000-strong subreddit devoted to theories about the song. Fans have recorded remixes and covers imagining the missing verses, generated longer versions with AI, and perpetrated successful hoaxes about where the original came from. But the fact remains: no one knows the band behind “Everyone Knows That.”

SAG-AFTRA Approves Deal to End Historic Strike

Jason Tate 6 months ago

Variety:

SAG-AFTRA negotiators have approved a tentative agreement that will end the longest actors strike against the film and TV studios in Hollywood history.
In an announcement Wednesday, the union said the 118-day strike would officially end at 12:01 a.m. on Thursday.
The union’s negotiating committee approved the deal on a unanimous vote. The agreement next goes to the SAG-AFTRA national board for approval on Friday.

Brian Fallon Reviews Every Gaslight Anthem Album

Jason Tate 6 months ago

Brian Fallon of The Gaslight Anthem helped review all of the band’s albums:

Here’s something that nobody knows: Brendan was going to do that record. What happened was our label and the band was like, “No, we’re not going to do another record with Brendan.” Especially the label. They were like, “No, fuck Brendan, you can’t work with him again.” They had some beef with Brendan. And my band was like, “He didn’t listen to us. He only listened to you.” I was like, “Yeah, but I’m listening to you, so whatever I’m saying, he’s getting it from you, too.” There was a little divide there. I didn’t make the call that I probably should have made, which is to put my foot down and say, “No, we’re going to go with Brendan.” Instead I said, “All right, we’re going to fire Brendan.” And that was the biggest mistake, because Brendan is still pissed at me about that. That ended my friendship with Brendan. I don’t think he ever got over that. But I was like, “Dude, I want to make a record with you, but my band doesn’t. What am I supposed to do? I’m in a band, man.” At the same time, I was going through a divorce. I had just gotten a house and now I’m giving the house away. That shit is weird. It’s like you get to the mountain top and then your life falls apart.

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Spotify Is Changing How It Pays Artists

Jason Tate 6 months ago

Billboard:

A new threshold of minimum annual streams that a track must meet before it starts to generate royalties. The threshold, according to MBW, will de-monetize tracks that had previously received 0.5% of Spotify’s royalty pool.
Financial penalties for music distributors and labels when fraudulent activity on tracks they have uploaded to Spotify has been detected.
A minimum play-time length that non-music noise tracks, such as bird sounds or white noise, must reach to generate royalties.

YouTube Negotiating With Labels Over AI

Jason Tate Oct 24, 2023

Lucas Sha, writing for Bloomberg, details the record labels and YouTube negotiating an AI tool that would let people create content using major musicians’ voices:

When YouTube hosted an event for creators in late September, the company unveiled a bunch of new AI-powered tools, including ones for video backgrounds and dubbing.
YouTube had hoped to unveil a tool that would let users perform using the voices of major musicians. Imagine you are an amateur creator uploading a video or a song, and you could sound like Dua Lipa.
Just one problem: None of the major music companies have agreed to participate — at least not yet. Music companies have some questions, and YouTube is still working to supply the answers.
This could be a pivotal moment for the use of AI in the creative industries. For all the fuss about the potential of AI, many of the most-hyped new tools have yet to establish meaningful commercial relationships with artists (aka rights holders). That’s why there are so many lawsuits; nobody has decided how copyright law is going to work in this new(ish) field.
While this is just a test — YouTube wants to try the feature with a little more than a dozen artists — it is still a negotiation between the largest music service in the world and the largest music companies that could result in artists consenting to the use of their work.

Look, I get it, I’m old and not cool and am probably yelling at clouds, but I can’t put into words how much I hate this idea.

Discogs’ Vibrant Vinyl Community Is Shattering

Jason Tate Oct 8, 2023

Natalie Weiner, writing at The Verge:

Discogs attributed the need to raise fees to its “significant investments in recent years to ensure compliance with various regulatory programs, including tax support and privacy protection.” The company said the change would allow it to “continue to devote resources to maintaining the Discogs Marketplace and develop better tools for collecting, selling, and enjoying music.”
Many sellers who spoke with The Verge speculated, in line with the viral thread, that the company was trying to pump up its valuation for a potential sale. All of them, though, had the sense that Discogs was trying to increase its profit margins without necessarily offering any improvements to its product in retur

Restaurants, Rest Stops and Red Bulls With Brian Fallon

Jason Tate Sep 29, 2023

Brian Fallon of The Gaslight Anthem talks with Paste Magazine about food on the road.

I would always eat the hash browns for breakfast and I would eat the chicken strips and fries. I wouldn’t really go for the burger, it was too messy and tour is a game of tricking the bathroom. You have to be very careful what you eat at night. Because when you’re home, if you wake up in the night and you’re like I have one bathroom, no problem. And when you wake up, barreling down the highway or in an airport, there’s not always a bathroom or there’s a bathroom you don’t want to use

Live Nation Stops Merch Cuts at Clubs

Jason Tate Sep 27, 2023

Rolling Stone:

Live Nation is ending merchandise fees for artists at all of its club-sized venues across the country, the company announced Tuesday as part of a new developing-artist program that it has launched with Willie Nelson.
The “On the Road Again” program, named after Nelson’s famous song, will also give artists playing those venues an extra $1,500 per show intended to help cover growing tour expenses like gas, transportation, and hotels. Live Nation also said it would give unspecified bonuses to crew workers, and the company will contribute another $5 million to the Crew Nation fund it started during the pandemic.

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Brian Fallon Talks with NME

Jason Tate Sep 27, 2023

Brian Fallon of The Gaslight Anthem took a quiz about the band for NME and talked about the band’s career and upcoming album:

Was there any other point during The Gaslight Anthem’s break when you considered getting the band back together?
“No, I’d put it pretty far to the back of my mind. We didn’t finish with a Smiths thing where we hated each other, it was more like we didn’t want to make an album that we were embarrassed by later, and it felt like we had entered a lull that every band goes through. People start off loving you, then they hate you, and then they love you again – and it felt like we were in that time where everybody hated us. We thought: ‘Maybe it’s time for us to shut up and make way for some other bands’ [Laughs]. We always knew we’d come back – we just didn’t think it would take nine years.”