A chunk of floating ice that weighs more than a trillion metric tons broke away from the Antarctic Peninsula, producing one of the largest icebergs ever recorded and providing a glimpse of how the Antarctic ice sheet might ultimately start to fall apart.
John Feldmann sat down with Alternative Press to talk about the new Goldfinger album:
If I listen to the song and it makes me happy, that’s all that matters for Goldfinger. The point isn’t trying to connect at radio. With Blink, the intent was a comeback record. We knew going into it that it was time to get on the radio and put the band back on the map where they belonged, because they’re a timeless, classic, legendary group. Not that Goldfinger isn’t, but we were always underground. I was singing about animal rights and telling Ted Nugent to fuck off. I was never trying to compete with whatever was on pop radio at the time. When we were blowing up, it was Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys, ultimately. That was never my goal; it was just to get my aggression out. “A Million Miles” came out of a spot of “I still care about music.”
Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:
A new report from Nielsen out this week paints a picture of the booming on-demand audio streaming business, pointing to a significant increase in consumers’ use of streaming services and record numbers of streams being served. According to the mid-year report, which focuses only on the U.S. market, on-demand audio streams surpassed the 7 billion figure for the first time ever during March of this year.
That’s audio streams, to be clear – not just music.
That is, the term “audio” also includes non-music streams like spoken word recordings and podcasts – the latter of which has also seen rapid growth.
Adam K. Raymond, writing for Vulture:
A sub version of this ruse is to create an “artist” for one ripoff song and use the same name as the original. For example, 1.7 million people looking for “Demons” by Imagine Dragons have instead listened to “Demons” by Imagine Demons. It’s the only track this “band” has on Spotify.
And:
Streaming’s impact on the way artists make music goes all the way to the top. Take Chris Brown, whose upcoming album Heartbreak on Full Moon has 40 tracks, and not because he has so much to say. The famously unscrupulous pop star has found a way to boost his streaming numbers, which in turn inflate sale figures, and will, he hopes, send his album shooting up the charts quicker than it otherwise would.
And:
That means that songs on playlists generally get a ton of plays. It’s why there are countless articles providing tips on how a band can get their music on a playlist. It’s also why Spotify is allegedly paying producers to create fake artists whose music can rack up plays without costing the company any more than what they paid up front.
SoundCloud Ltd. is cutting about 40 percent of its staff in a cost-cutting move the digital music service says will give it a better financial footing to compete against larger rivals Spotify Ltd. and Apple Inc.
SoundCloud, which in January said it was at risk of running out of money, informed staff on Thursday that 173 jobs would be eliminated. It had 420 employees. The company’s operations will be consolidated at its headquarters in Berlin and another office in New York. Offices in San Francisco and London will be shut.
Guess I should start giving serious thought to where I’d host the podcast if they go under.
Jordan Sargent, writing at Spin, with a detailed look at the what happened over at MTV News:
It was a fairly gentle critique of a band who, pretty much anyone would agree, is no longer putting out its best music. Still, the article became an immediate source of trouble for MTV and it was quietly deleted after the band raised concerns with executives at the network. […] Hopper called a staff meeting two days later to discuss the situation. According to an ex-staff member who attended the meeting, Hopper explained that the band became aware of the article and threatened to remove itself from the MTV Europe Music Awards.
And:
Conversations between senior staff and artist representatives on the topic of what would be accepted on the site happened with some regularity. On July 5, 2016, Hopper told the staff that MTV was attempting to book DJ Khaled for various unknown projects, telling the staff that they might have to “nix” any writing on the producer “unless it’s like, KHALED IS GREAT.” Elsewhere, interference from artist reps was so pervasive that some MTV News editors spent part of this past New Year’s Eve haggling line-by-line with a chart-topping, platinum-selling, Grammy-winning female pop star’s publicist over a post in which MTV’s editors eventually agreed to cut one sentence.
What a complete shit-show.
Joe Coscarelli, at The New York Times, sat down with producer No I.D. to talk about working with Jay-Z on his latest album:
He went home, wakes up at 4:44 [a.m.] and calls Guru over [to record]. I was blown away. I just walked out of the studio and wanted to go find my wife and hug her. I told him that’s the best song he’s ever written. Everything it covers about being a man, being in a relationship, being a father, how you affect your kids. These things don’t really get touched on in music, especially in hip-hop.
PVRIS’ Lynn Gunn spoke with Billboard about the band’s upcoming album:
I think one of the biggest things, though, is just I’m a complete perfectionist and control freak and you have to let go of control at some point or to some extent in this career and in this industry. It’s just like you need to let go and give up your power a little bit, and so the biggest thing from me was stress from that and then also just pressure to do well and pressure to, like, stay true and be a good person and perform well. You always have to have your game face on, so at some point, I just started suppressing every emotion and bottled it up and swept it under the carpet and never went back to it, and it just created this ongoing snowball of just feeling empty and numb and not really absorbing emotions or experiences for what they were — being in situations, but not being there. This record is just mostly about that and learning to let go and be vulnerable again — be in your emotions and actually feel them without suppressing them or avoiding them.
Katie Benner, writing for The New York Times:
Their stories came out slowly, even hesitantly, at first. Then in a rush.
One female entrepreneur recounted how she had been propositioned by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist while seeking a job with him, which she did not land after rebuffing him. Another showed the increasingly suggestive messages she had received from a start-up investor. And one chief executive described how she had faced numerous sexist comments from an investor while raising money for her online community website.
Shawna Potter, writing at Noisey:
I wish I could laugh it off with some clever joke, like “the Dickies are just boys who are as immature as their name,” but they’re not boys, they’re not immature; they are grown men. And the grown-man lead singer of the Dickies had such a problem with one single woman holding a protest sign during their set (not a group of friends, as he reported), that he threw a tantrum about it.
The anger that erupted in Phillips is always under the surface of men like this, even beneath their onstage characters. They do not like being challenged in any way, especially by women. And they definitely don’t equate their right to free speech with anyone else’s. In fact, they see others’ right to free speech as an affront to their own, and in this case, one to be met with anger and hate. That’s not punk.
And:
This incident highlights one of the often overlooked problems the music industry in general has been plagued with. While recent controversies at Warped have typically revolved around young male performers in their early 20s engaging in predatory behavior, there is a subset of older men, waving the “punk/rock/metal means free speech” flag as an excuse to put others at risk. This seems to always get shrugged off because they’re elder statesmen of the genre and are connected to the right people. But how do you suppose they got that far? At one point they were all young men pushing the limits of what they could get away with, a cycle that repeats itself each time their friends turn a blind eye and victims are silenced or belittled because someone really liked that one song they wrote.
That’s why it’s so important that we call out bad behavior when it happens, especially with our friends, no matter what band they’re in.
NME:
One of the men responsible for April’s disastrous Fyre Festival was arrested in New York City on Friday.
Billy McFarland, 25, is charged with wire fraud after allegedly defrauding investors in Fyre Media, his company. […] Explaining McFarland’s arrest, US Attorney Joon Kim said that he had allegedly shown fake documents to investors to encourage them to put more than $1 million into both Fyre Media and Fyre Festival. Ja Rule, the company’s co-founder, has not been arrested.
Nike is going to begin selling some of their products on Instagram and Amazon:
The partnership with Amazon is in its early stages and involves only a “limited” section of Nike products for now, Nikes CEO Mark Parker told investors on a conference call Thursday afternoon to discuss quarterly results, confirming recent media reports.
Nicholas Thompson, writing at Wired:
The algorithms that resulted were then tested on the one-fifth of the data that hadn’t been given to DeepText, to see how well the machines had matched the humans. Eventually, Instagram became satisfied with the results, and the company quietly launched the product last October. Spam began to vanish as the algorithms did their work, circling like high-IQ Roombas let loose in an apartment overrun with dust bunnies.
The iPhone turned 10 today. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has a good piece:
There is no way to overstate it. The iPhone was the inflection point where “personal computing” truly became personal. Apple had amazing product introductions before the iPhone, and it’s had a few good ones after. But the iPhone was the only product introduction I’ve ever experienced that felt impossible. Apple couldn’t have shrunk Mac OS X — a Unix-based workstation OS — to a point where it could run on a cell phone. Scrolling couldn’t be that smooth and fluid. Touchscreen response couldn’t be so responsive. Apple couldn’t possibly have gotten a major carrier to cede them control over every aspect of the device, both hardware and software. I can recall sitting the hall at Moscone West, watching the keynote unfold, 90 percent excited as hell, 10 percent concerned that I was losing my goddamn mind. Literally mind-blowing.
The Fader has a pretty interesting interview with Hayley Williams of Paramore:
She tells me that after we spoke, she had a panic attack in her car. She apologizes profusely for how this encounter has played out, and tells me that she felt triggered when I asked about the fallout from the lawsuit with her former bandmate. She says that legal reasons make it difficult for her to know what she can and cannot say, and that it both bores her and stresses her out that every recent story about the band has focused on band drama and not on the songs. Fair enough. I keep digging, though, and eventually she admits it was more than that, but that she is having a hard time explaining, or figuring out for herself, what it is.
I offer to let her sleep on it, telling her I was now likely to write about this strange episode, and that it might be good if she provided a more fully realized account from her own perspective. This idea, to my surprise, seems to immediately pique her interest. She quickly agrees and we hug, then go bowling at a little neon spot that doesn’t seem to have changed the decor since the 1980s.
The entire thing is worth reading.