PledgeMusic has stopped running active campaigns:
We are in discussions with several interested parties about a potential partnership with or acquisition of PledgeMusic. These conversations, if successful, would lead to a transaction which would allow us to meet all of our outstanding obligations. As a result, we are hopeful that, as long as the company is given some breathing space to operate, a solution to these current problems will be found.
Yikes.
An insider tells Variety that Grande felt “insulted” after producers initially refused to allow her to perform “7 Rings,” the latest single from her forthcoming album “Thank U, Next” (which arrives Friday, two days before the Grammys). A compromise was reached whereby “7 Rings” would be part of a medley, but Grande pulled out after producers insisted that the second song be of their choosing.
Brian Feldman, writing for New York Magazine:
The past few weeks have been rough for Elliot Tebele. Tebele is the morally compromised founder of Jerry Media, a media firm founded in 2015 that is the outgrowth of an Instagram account called @fuckjerry. @fuckjerry is a “meme account,” shorthand for a social media account that screenshots funny tweets and freeboots (rips and reuploads) viral videos. To put it another way, @fuckjerry is an account that steals jokes and other content from other users and monetizes it. Instagram, the billion-dollar Facebook subsidiary, has been aware of the account for years and has done nothing to curb its theft of intellectual property.
Ozuna now holds the record for being the artist with the most YouTube videos with more than one billion views:
“Thanks to all the colleagues who believe in me and always count on me, we continue here I love them and blessings to all, they are part of my success,” Ozuna wrote on Instagram when “Taki Taki” reached the figure. “I love my fans a lot and thank you for never abandoning me.”
We’ve reached the spot where I am laughably out of touch with things that are popular. I’d never heard one of these songs until this morning. I just missed one of the largest artists online.
Brian Feldman, writing at NY Mag:
There are viral things that anyone — everyone — can love. Grumpy Cat, the Dress, “Damn, Daniel!” — the sort of stuff that, at the very least, you can bring up at the dinner table. Then there’s the other stuff — memes couched in so many layers of irony that they become unintelligible and inexplicable, niche drama that sounds stupid when you explain it to anyone not glued to obsessive corners of the internet all day. And of course, the stuff too disgusting to mention in polite conversation.
That last category — the gross one — is where the poo-flip video belongs. As of Thursday night, the Poo Flip has amassed more than 7.5 million views on Twitter. I am going to describe it now. If you are the sort of person who knows that you have zero interest in anything that might be called “the Poo Flip,” close your web browser now.
This is the content we crave.
Y: The Last Man will be coming to FX in 2020:
FX’s version, however, will simply be called Y. Michael Green, who recently cut ties with Starz’s American Gods, will serve as showrunner with Aïda Mashaka, a veteran writer of Netflix’s Marvel offerings. Vaughan, meanwhile, will serve as an executive producer. And, as we previously reported, Melina Matsoukas will flex the skills she honed helming Beyoncé videos and episodes of Insecure as the pilot’s director.
It’s one of my favorite graphic novels of all time. Please don’t suck.
The network has handed out a pilot order for Heart of Life, a project inspired by Mayer’s song of the same name.
Heart of Life follows two sets of adult siblings from wildly different worlds who discover they are related and must reassess everything they thought they knew about their shared father. As they explore the mystery of their separate childhoods, they’ll experience the difficulty in overcoming the sins of the past, and learn the joys of reuniting with long-lost family.
Robinson Meyer, writing at The Atlantic:
Meteorologists have never gotten a shiny magazine cover or a brooding Aaron Sorkin film, and the weather-research hub of Norman, Oklahoma, is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Palo Alto. But over the past few decades, scientists have gotten significantly—even staggeringly—better at predicting the weather.
How much better? “A modern five-day forecast is as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980,” says a new paper, published last week in the journal Science. “Useful forecasts now reach nine to 10 days into the future.”
Joshua Bote, writing at NPR:
As was the case with They Shall Not Grow Old, which found Jackson reviving a trove of archival World War I footage, the Lord of the Rings filmmaker is mining 55 hours of unreleased footage of the band, using restoration techniques to render it in modern quality. The footage was originally intended for Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1970 documentary Let it Be.
Mark Hoppus talked with Kerrang about the upcoming Blink-182 album:
“After playing in this band for 27 years, I want to push it and do different things and take blink to places where we haven’t been before,” he tells Kerrang!. “We’re really trying to do that on the new record. We want to do with our band what we did in 2003 with Untitled, where we take our foundations and go off in completely weird directions.”
Warner Bros. announced Friday that Nolan’s next film will open in Imax on July 17, 2020.
The project is described as an event film, but nothing else is known about Nolan’s latest venture. The writer-director has a propensity for secrecy, writing his scripts away from any prying eyes. Furthermore, he is of such a stature that he can attract the actors he wants, package his project with thespians and then present it to a studio with what amounts to a simple yes or no question: Are you in or are you out?
How many clicks through YouTube’s “Up Next” recommendations does it take to go from an anodyne PBS clip about the 116th United States Congress to an anti-immigrant video from a designated hate organization? Thanks to the site’s recommendation algorithm, just nine.
Colin Stutz, writing at Billboard:
According an anonymous former employee who wished to remain anonymous, the root of these problems is improper money management where PledgeMusic failed to hold artists’ campaign funds separately and securely and instead invested it back into the company. The idiom “robbing Peter to pay Paul” came up in many conversations describing PledgeMusic’s actions and as the company’s growth slowed the situation worsened. Over the last year, according to the former employee, in effort to reduce overhead, PledgeMusic also laid off about a third of its U.S. staff and moved out of its New York offices into a WeWork shared workspace.
Logan White sat down with Adam Lazzara of Taking Back Sunday over at Substream:
While the two new songs are a great representation of where Taking Back Sunday is at currently going through their 20thyear as a band, Lazzara is unable to say whether these songs will be a representation of any future material. This ties into their effort of being as genuine as possible with each release of new music, as Lazzara explains “I think we’d be doing a disservice if we said, ‘Oh yeah, these two songs are the direction we’re going’ because, who knows what the next batch of songs is going to sound like.”
Magazine publisher Condé Nast said it would put all its titles behind paywalls by the end of the year, as pressure builds on major publishers to generate more revenue beyond advertising.
I am curious to see what they do with Pitchfork.
