Shazam for iOS has introduced an update that makes app navigation more simple and streamlined. Gone are the traditional navigation tabs at the bottom of the screen; they have been replaced by a paginated layout where a swipe left or right is used to switch screens.
Paramore and former bassist Jeremy Davis have settled their lawsuit.
“Everything has been resolved and settled,” said Jay Bowen, Nashville-based attorney for Paramore. “Paramore had a great show last night, getting ready for their tour. The album’s out (May 12).”
Bowen said he couldn’t comment further and Nashville attorney Derek Crownover, who represented Davis, declined to comment.
The original cast and creator are returning for a two-hour holiday movie, “Psych: The Movie,” this December, Variety has learned.
The news comes more than three years after “Psych” went off the air in spring 2014, after airing for eight seasons and more than 120 episodes.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Donald Glover will be writing, producing, and show-running a new animated series based on Deadpool.
The 10-episode series will launch in 2018, with Marvel’s Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory joining the Glover brothers as exec producers. Loeb and his executives are believed to be big fans of FXX’s Archer, and approached FX brass with the idea, not the other way around. FX then approached Glover, a significant talent with increasing geek cred. Following a complex negotiation, the series will hail from Marvel Television, FX Productions and ABC Studios’ cable arm, ABC Signature. A voice cast has not yet been determined.
I am so in.
Ingrid Lunden, writing for TechCrunch:
Today Amazon unveiled the Echo Show, a WiFi-enabled home device with a seven-inch screen that is the newest addition to its Alexa-powered Echo range of home hubs that plays media and responds to voice commands. […] The device, which comes in black and white versions, will cost $229.99 and will be shipped from June 28, with preorders available now. It appears that it will be available first in the U.S. only.
I use my Echo for controlling the lights, playing the daily Jeopardy game, setting cooking timers, re-ordering common items, and playing a “favorites playlist” when I don’t have my phone near. Pretty much in that order. It’s a nice device, I’m glad we have it, but I wouldn’t call it anywhere near essential yet. As they get more powerful and more capable of understanding queries and context, I think this will be an interesting space to watch. This device, however, looks like a bad piece of corporate tech from the ’90s. It’s hideous.
John Oliver ran a new segment on net neutrality last night and has set up a website redirect where you can make your voice heard on this important issue.
If you’re looking for more on this topic Jon Lovett sat down with Tim Wu, who coined the phrase, on this week’s episode of the Lovett or Leave It podcast.
Lena H. Sun, writing for The Washington Post:
The young mother started getting advice early on from friends in the close-knit Somali immigrant community here. Don’t let your children get the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella — it causes autism, they said.
Suaado Salah listened. And this spring, her 3-year-old boy and 18-month-old girl contracted measles in Minnesota’s largest outbreak of the highly infectious and potentially deadly disease in nearly three decades.
Aaron Pressman, writing for Fortune:
It’s official: For the first time, a majority of American homes have only wireless telephones.
The trend to drop landlines has been growing over the last decade alongside the growth in mobile phone use, according to semi-annual surveys performed by the Centers for Disease Control, which wants to monitor how to contact people for future surveys. But it wasn’t until the end of 2016 that a majority of all households relied solely on mobile phones.
Since leaving my parent’s home for college, I’ve never had a landline. I doubt I ever will.
David Pierce, writing for Wired:
Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming services have fundamentally changed how people listen to music. In the process, they’ve changed how artists and songs break. Radio may remain the most popular way of discovering music among casual fans, but unless you’re Drake or Rihanna, it’s hard to get any play. Plus, real fans—the people who go to concerts and buy merch and actually pay for music—use streaming services like Spotify.
“Spotify playlists, and Spotify charts, and Spotify plays, have become the number one tool that labels and artists and managers are using in order to break artists and measure success,” says industry analyst Mark Mulligan. Facebook has more users, YouTube has more views, but Spotify represents more important real estate. “If you get things working on Spotify,” Mulligan says, “that’s going to crank the wheel.”
I’ve heard from labels and managers that specifically target certain regions in the world to boost Spotify plays and hit charts because it may lead to getting onto a featured playlist.
Brian Barrett, writing at Wired:
Although the hack offers a reminder that even the best security can be undone by the so-called “weakest link” — Netflix can’t do much if a vendor is compromised — it provides a bigger lesson in how the internet has largely shifted away from torrenting. If a show lands on The Pirate Bay and nobody watches, did it really stream?
Consider that in 2011, BitTorrent accounted for 23 percent of daily internet traffic in North America, according to network-equipment company Sandvine. By last year, that number sat at under 5 percent. “There’s always going to be the floor of people that are always going to be torrenting,” says Sandvine spokesperson Dan Deeth. That group will surely enjoy whatever Piper’s up to in season five. But the idea that so small a cohort might prompt Netflix to negotiate with hackers seems absurd.
I commented on this when New Found Glory’s new album leaked and there were a bunch of comments in the threads basically saying, “no reason to go hunt for the leak, it’ll be on Spotify soon enough anyway.” I always thought easy and convenient access to music would help curb piracy, but even I didn’t think it would have as big an impact as it has.
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday evening that its website would be “undergoing changes” to better represent the new direction the agency is taking, triggering the removal of several agency websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information. […]
The staffer described the process of reviewing the site as “a work in progress, but we can’t have information which contradicts the actions we have taken in the last two months,” adding that Pruitt’s aides had “found a number of instances of that so far” while surveying the site.
Yet the website overhaul appears to include not only policy-related changes but also scrutiny of a scientific Web page that has existed for nearly two decades, and that explained what climate change is and how it worked.
Yeah, if you hide the science that’ll stop it from being true.
It’s been 25 years since the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The cast recently got together to talk about the film during a special screening. Variety has some of the tidbits revealed:
The most iconic moment in “Reservoir Dogs” is unquestionably the scene in which Madsen’s character, Mr. Blonde, tortures a captured cop (Kirk Baltz), cutting off his ear after doing a little dance to the jaunty tune of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You.” That dance was entirely spontaneous, it turns out. “You never made me do it in rehearsal, because I was so intimidated by it,” Madsen reminded Tarantino at the panel. “I didn’t know what to do. In the script, it said, ‘Mr. Blonde maniacally dances around.’ And I kept thinking, ‘What the f–k does that mean? Like Mike Jagger, or what? What the f–k am I gonna do?’”
ESPN on Wednesday began another round of layoffs, this one aimed at on-air personalities, perhaps the starkest sign yet of the financial reckoning playing out in sports broadcasting as cord-cutting proliferates. […]
The network has lost more than 10 million subscribers over the past several years. At the same time, the cost of broadcasting major sports has continued to rise. ESPN committed to a 10-year, $15.2 billion deal with the N.F.L. in 2011; a nine-year, $12 billion deal with the N.B.A.; and a $7.3 billion deal for the college football playoffs, among many others.
This is what’s mind-blowing about the ESPN layoffs. It’s possible that the money the network decided it had to cut is so big that it couldn’t just prune people from fading properties like SportsCenter, or more fully abandon its plan to colonize local sports pages, which had been evident for some time. Here is ESPN cutting a digital reporter covering its biggest growth sport — one of two writers it attached to maybe the most popular sports team on the planet right now.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has launched a new venture called Wikitribune to help fight fake news:
Wikitribune is a news platform that brings journalists and a community of volunteers together.
We want to make sure that you read fact-based articles that have a real impact in both local and global events. And that stories can be easily verified and improved.
Carly Rae Jepsen sat down with Billboard to talk about the chorus of “Call Me Maybe” and how she feels about the song today:
The next day, Jepsen and Crowe brought the song to Josh Ramsay, the leader of pop-rock group Marianas Trench, who suggested that they turn the song’s pre-chorus into its proper chorus. “He went, ‘That pre-chorus is way hookier than the chorus that you guys have, so let’s repeat it,’” says Jepsen. From there, “Call Me Maybe” — originally more of a folk-leaning track, in the vein of Jepsen’s earlier singer-songwriter work — was re-imagined as a bubblegum pop track by Ramsay, who ended up producing the song. “He got inspired and started adding strings,” remembers Jepsen. “before we knew it, it had this whole new life.”
Billboard recently released a list of the “100 greatest choruses” of the 21st century. Fall Out Boy, Yellowcard, Fun., Jimmy Eat World, and Walk the Moon all feature.