Larry Fitzmaurice, writing at Vulture:
What follows are 17 testimonials from working indie and indie-adjacent musicians about what they do when they’re not making music, how they perceive their financial future in the industry, and how much money they make — or, much more often, lose — in the process.
Mark Bergen, writing for Bloomberg:
Wojcicki and her deputies know this. In recent years, scores of people inside YouTube and Google, its owner, raised concerns about the mass of false, incendiary and toxic content that the world’s largest video site surfaced and spread. One employee wanted to flag troubling videos, which fell just short of the hate speech rules, and stop recommending them to viewers. Another wanted to track these videos in a spreadsheet to chart their popularity. A third, fretful of the spread of “alt-right” video bloggers, created an internal vertical that showed just how popular they were. Each time they got the same basic response: Don’t rock the boat.
Libby Solomon, writing at The Baltimore Sun:
All Time Low singer and Dulaney High School graduate Alex Gaskarth is entering Baltimore’s nightlife business with an investment in Full Tilt Brewing.
The craft brewery, which has been brewing beer for six years, opened its own location for the first time this year on York Road in Govans, in part thanks to Gaskarth, said Full Tilt co-founder Nick Fertig. […]
The 6,000-square-foot taproom and brewery at 5604 York Road in Govans, less than a mile from the county line, is full of what Fertig said are unique touches — arcade games, graffiti on the wall, a shuffleboard and garage doors that can roll up in the warmer months to let in fresh air.
Zane Lowe sat down with Music Business Worldwide to talk about Apple Music and various other topics:
Well the artist, first and foremost, has to create an environment which offers a 360 degree creative experience for fans before we even think about how to collaborate with that [and] help them build their story.
An artist like Billie Eilish thinks in sounds, she thinks in colors, she thinks in visuals, she thinks in collaborations, she thinks in all kinds of different forms of creativity. When you’re dealing with an artist like that, it opens all these other areas that you can help build things around.
Jon Brodkin, writing at Ars Technica:
The music industry is suing Charter Communications, claiming that the cable Internet provider profits from music piracy by failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs. The lawsuit also complains that Charter helps its subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds.
While the act of providing higher Internet speeds clearly isn’t a violation of any law, ISPs can be held liable for their users’ copyright infringement if the ISPs repeatedly fail to disconnect repeat infringers.
The cast of Parks and Recreation reunited for the show’s ten year anniversary last night:
“The show had an argument to make,” Schur said. “The argument was about teamwork and friendship and positivity, being optimistic and not getting cynical and believing that people can do good and believing in the power of public service and believing that if you work hard and you put your head down and believe in the people around you who are part of your team, that good things are possible. That you’ll achieve the things you want to achieve, and I don’t feel like we left anything on the table. I feel like the show sort of made its argument. And we also — maybe this was like a preventative measure or something — we did jump ahead to the year, like, 2074.”
Taylor Lorenz, writing at The Atlantic:
Instagram is teeming with these conspiracy theories, viral misinformation, and extremist memes, all daisy-chained together via a network of accounts with incredible algorithmic reach and millions of collective followers—many of whom, like Alex, are very young. These accounts intersperse TikTok videos and nostalgia memes with anti-vaccination rhetoric, conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Clinton family, and jokes about killing women, Jews, Muslims, and liberals.
Cariann Bradley, writing at L’odet:
I told Zac that if all three of us feel good about it, we do it. In moving forward, if the three of us are happy, then we will just do whatever we want to do. If that means collaborating with each other, bringing other friends in to collaborate — there are seven band members when we tour. We’re all friends and we all make music in different parts, together. So I feel like, yes, I want to be in Paramore. I never want to have to put out a press release that says we’re over or that I quit or that we’re taking a hiatus, which is essentially a marketing ploy these days. I would rather it just be. It just is a part of each of our DNA. If we choose to move into it as a brand and put a name on these songs and make a new t-shirt, then awesome. But I’ve been in a band with them since I was 12; I don’t think the band is going anywhere. As long as we’re friends, the band just is. It’s just in us.
This whole interview is fantastic.
Amy Wang, writing at Rolling Stone:
Patrick Stump was livid. On a lurching tour bus rigged with a wobbly Jenga tower of recording equipment, the singer and Fall Out Boy frontman had been trying to lay down demos for the band’s second album — it’d been hours, fiddling with rubber cords and finicky software — and nothing was working well together. Stump can still precisely recall the panic in the moment he finally finished the rough sketch of a song only to see the whole apparatus glitch and crash on his computer. “I just lost it, screaming in the back of a bus,” Stump tells Rolling Stone, a decade and a half later. “When you’re being creative, you just want to get your idea out. When you’re composing, time is everything, because you’re thinking the second guitar has to do this and the background vocals are going to do this and you just want to get it all out as quickly as possible. I thought: I’m not going to be able to do this.”
Madly clicking around on his laptop in search of a new route, Stump happened to open one of its pre-loaded programs. While he’d heard of Garageband, a piece of free software shipped with all Mac computers, he’d thought it was more toy than tool — and no one else was giving it much attention then, in the early 2000s. “But I opened it that first time and never looked back,” says Stump, who talks about the software with a particular fondness, as if remembering his meeting with an old friend. “I just started recording, without having to learn a new program, which was always one of the scariest things about music.”
I really enjoyed this article looking at the 15-year history of Garageband.
Jonathan Stempel, writing at Reuters:
Fall Out Boy was sued on Friday by a stuffed animal company that accused the rock band of illegally exploiting the wearable, life-sized llama puppets it made for a music video by featuring them in other videos, a tour and an extended-play album.
In a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, seeking damages its lawyer said could reach millions of dollars, Furry Puppet Studio Inc said Fall Out Boy did not have permission to use the puppets anywhere other than its 2017 video for its song “Young and Menace.”
Now that’s a title I never expected I’d write.
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.
