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Streaming Accounts for 75% of Music Industry Revenue

Jason Tate

The RIAA have released their mid-year revenue report for the music industry. Patricia Hernandez, writing at The Verge, has a good rundown:

Turns out, streaming makes more money than physical CDs, digital downloads, and licensing deals combined.

Streaming in this context includes paid subscriptions to services such as Spotify and Tidal, but also digital radio broadcasts and video streaming services such as VEVO. It’s a broad category that nonetheless has made $3.4 billion dollars in 2018 so far, a total that amounts to 75 percent of overall revenue for the record industry.

Spotify to Allow Indie Artists to Upload Music Directly to Service

Jason Tate

Dan Rys, writing at Billboard:

Beginning today (Sept. 20), Spotify will begin allowing a select group of independent artists the ability to upload their music directly onto the streaming platform through their Spotify For Artists account, the company announced. […] For those artists who control their copyrights and do not have label or distribution agreements in place, they can log into their Spotify For Artists account, upload their music, fill in relevant metadata information, preview how the upload will look on their page and set the song to go live at a pre-scheduled time

Half of All Cellphone Calls Could Be Scams by 2019

The Washington Post
Jason Tate

The Washington Post:

Nearly half of all cellphone calls next year will come from scammers, according to First Orion, a company that provides phone carriers and their customers caller ID and call blocking technology.

The Arkansas-based firm projects an explosion of incoming spam calls, marking a leap from 3.7 percent of total calls in 2017 to more than 29 percent this year, to a projected 45 percent by early 2019.

My tried and true method of just never answering the phone will finally pay off.

Hayley Williams Is the 21st Century’s Pop-Punk Prophet

Jason Tate

Jenn Pelly, writing at NPR:

Williams has reflected, of late, about how the lack of young women musicians in her scene contributed to loneliness and self-loathing. “I doubted whether people would ever take me seriously,” she said. “I felt like I needed to be part of a boy’s club to make it. It really affected my sense of self and what I thought I owed people.” And so she would go twice as hard as the men she shared stages with. “I thought I had to be better than them to prove my worth,” she said. “I wish I’d learned sooner that [being a woman] is actually this incredible strength.”

There’s no other way to put it: Paramore are on the short list for the best band, and catalog, to come out of this music scene in the last twenty years.

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong

Science
Jason Tate

Michael Hobbes, writing at HuffPost:

Which brings us to one of the largest gaps between science and practice in our own time. Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path.

About 40 years ago, Americans started getting much larger. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV put together.

Patrick Stump Talks Scoring New Film ‘Spell’

Patrick Stump
Jason Tate

Billboard sat own with Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy:

I’ve scored a few films and some shows; I’m not an old pro but I’m comfortable as a composer now. He’s the first director — or anyone involved in production I’ve worked with — who’s also a pretty great musician. It was one of the easiest I worked on because there were just language things… He was so quick to describing what he meant. It’s one thing to describe, say, chords: “Why don’t we go to a minor here?” But it’s another thing, not just knowing the nomenclature, to also know the purpose behind stuff. “Why don’t we try something like this here?” He has a very clear idea of what he wanted and it allowed me to just play.

Spotify Sued for Gender Discrimination

Jason Tate

Gene Maddaus, writing at Variety:

A female sales executive sued Spotify on Tuesday, alleging that the head of sales took his staff on drug-fueled “boys’ trips” to the Sundance Film Festival, and excluded women who were better qualified.

Hong Perez filed suit in New York Supreme Court, accusing the streaming company of systemically discriminating against female employees. Perez alleges that her boss, Brian Berner, selected an all-male group to attend Sundance in 2016 and 2017, and that some of the men got into a physical altercation during one of the trips.

Music Modernization Act Passes in Senate

Jason Tate

Ed Christman, writing at Billboard:

The long road to copyright revision is nearing its end as the U.S. Senate passed the Music Modernization Act by unanimous consent Tuesday (Sept. 18). The move mimics the House’s unilateral support, previously passing the bill by a vote of 415-0 back in April.

With the Senate’s move, the legislation has been renamed the Orrin G. Hatch Music Modernization Act in honor of the Republican senior senator from Utah — a songwriter himself — who will retire at the end of his term this year.

Spotify Lifts Song Download Cap

Jason Tate

Amy X. Wang, writing at Rolling Stone:

A common gripe among Spotify users is that the app limits the number of songs that can be downloaded to phones and computers for offline listening (3,333 tracks per device, with a three-device limit, to be exact). In its latest software update, the streaming service has quietly increased the limit threefold.

A number of power-users first noticed that they were able to save more than 3,333 songs this week, and the Swedish streaming giant confirmed the change on Wednesday to Rolling Stone.

A well deserved finally.

A New Spotify Initiative Makes the Big Record Labels Nervous

Jason Tate

Ben Sisario, writing at The New York Times:

Over the last year, the 12-year-old company has quietly struck direct licensing deals with a small number of independent artists. The deals give those artists a way onto the streaming platform and a closer relationship to the company — an advantage when pitching music for its influential playlists — while bypassing the major labels altogether.

Although the deals are modest — with advance payments of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to several people involved — the big record companies see the Spotify initiative as a potential threat: a small step that, down the line, could reshape the music business as it has existed since the days of the Victrola.

This feels inevitable. At some point these digital streaming services will have better algorithms for figuring out what music is not only going to be universally popular but also own the distribution method to help make it so. At that point, what’s the point of a record label?

Here They Come Again

Louis CK
Jason Tate

Anna Merlan, writing at Jezebel:

What gets lost in this particular equation is the part where someone makes amends. Nobody is required to lay out a road map for CK and Lauer and others like them to follow to gain forgiveness. Their spots onstage and on TV aren’t guaranteed, and if they remain professionally disgraced for a period of time that they—or their famous friends—find uncomfortable, that’s not the same thing as a “life sentence.”

But these comebacks are also predicated on the idea that redemption is directly equal to being allowed back in the public eye, being allowed to continue to reap money and power and influence in the field that gave you enough clout to feel comfortable harassing or assaulting women in the first place.

None of these men—that we know about—have talked publicly about undergoing counseling, made large donations to RAINN, done anything to understand the power dynamics they were part of. But there’s clearly an eagerness to let some of them back in anyway, after making the barest effort possible. The question is who benefits from that attitude, and who, once again, is harmed.

I thought this piece made a really compelling argument about the questions around what happens next for those accused of sexual misconduct.

Tumblr Is Explicitly Banning Hate Speech

Jason Tate

Shannon Liao, writing for The Verge:

Tumblr is changing its community guidelines to more explicitly ban hate speech, glorifying violence, and revenge porn. The new rules go into effect on September 10th.

“It’s on all of us to create a safe, constructive, and empowering environment,” Tumblr writes in its blog post. “Our community guidelines need to reflect the reality of the internet and social media today.”

The Eagles Now Have the Best Selling Album of All Time

Jason Tate

Rolling Stone:

The Eagles officially have the best-selling album of all time. Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975 has overtaken Michael Jackson‘s Thriller, reclaiming the top spot nearly a decade after the King of Pop’s death.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently recalculated sales of the best-of collection and certified the LP as 38x platinum, pushing the 33x platinum Thriller to second place, the Associated Press reports. The RIAA confirmed the new certifications to Rolling Stone.

I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment

The New York Times
Jason Tate

Kelly Marie Tran, writing at The New York Times:

It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them.

Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.

And those words awakened something deep inside me — a feeling I thought I had grown out of. The same feeling I had when at 9, I stopped speaking Vietnamese altogether because I was tired of hearing other kids mock me.

The Courageous Fight to Fix the NBA’s Mental Health Problem

Basketball
Jason Tate

Jackie MacMullan is doing a five part series on mental health in the NBA for ESPN:

Yet there remain many obstacles to confront, chief among them the stigma attached to mental health that prompts many players to suffer in silence. There’s another critical sticking point: The union insists that mental health treatment be confidential, but some NBA owners, who in some cases are paying their players hundreds of millions of dollars, want access to the files of their “investments.”