Facebook on Friday said an attack on its computer network led to the exposure of information from nearly 50 million of its users.
Facebook Claims Network Breach
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Amazon’s Aggressive Anti-Union Tactics Revealed
Bryan Menegus, writing for Gizmodo:
Amazon, the country’s second-largest employer, has so far remained immune to any attempts by U.S. workers to form a union. With rumblings of employee organization at Whole Foods—which Amazon bought for $13.7 billion last year—a 45-minute union-busting training video produced by the company was sent to Team Leaders of the grocery chain last week, according to sources with knowledge of the store’s activities. Recordings of that video, obtained by Gizmodo, provide valuable insight into the company’s thinking and tactics.
WhatsApp Cofounder Brian Acton Gives The Inside Story On #DeleteFacebook And Why He Left $850 Million Behind
Parmy Olson, writing at Forbes:
It’s also a story any idealistic entrepreneur can identify with: What happens when you build something incredible and then sell it to someone with far different plans for your baby? “At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton says. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”
Pinegrove Address “Sexual Coercion” and Announce a New Album
Jenn Pelly, writing at Pitchfork:
Since late 2017, both the band and the alleged victim have focused on coming to a private resolution via a trusted mediator. Until that resolution was reached, Hall said, “there was really no way for us to offer any clarification” to their fans. It was the alleged victim’s request that Pinegrove take a year off from touring and that Hall enter therapy. “We wanted to honor that,” Hall said. “She recognized that we’ve honored it, and has since approved our plan to release an album and play some shows later on this year.” (Their mediator confirmed this.)
SiriusXM to Acquire Pandora for $3.5 Billion
SiriusXM and Pandora have announced acquisition plans before the stock market opens. SiriusXM is offering to acquire Pandora for $3.5 billion in stock, or $10.14 per share. Pandora would continue to exist as an independent service.
A Brief Inquiry Into The 1975
Dan Stubbs, writing for NME:
A Cole Porter-like jazz song sounds like a standard and has the killer lyric “I fight crime online sometimes”; a new wave pop song is outwardly about love but is not so subtly an ode to heroin (“I’ve got a 20-stone monkey on my back”), there’s a fragile, beautiful ballad about guilt, one song employs the kind of plastic piano sound last heard on Glenn Medeiros’s ‘Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You’; a ‘90s-style alt-rock track, ‘I Always Wanna Die Sometimes’, is a stirringly moving song about depression; a spoken word piece, voiced by Siri, skewers our relationship with the internet in a modern parable. And even in this jumbled up state, it sounds like a masterpiece, a game-changer, a bar-raiser. An absolute stone cold legend masterpiece. It sounds like they’ve done what Matty said all that time ago: they’ve made ‘OK Computer’ for a new generation of kids – ’Snowflake Computer’, if you will.
Streaming Accounts for 75% of Music Industry Revenue
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
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
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
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
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’
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
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
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
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.