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LATEST ARTICLES - PAGE 61

Musician/Producer Steve Lacy Works Through His iPhone

iPhone
Jason Tate

David Pierce, writing for Wired:

Lacy’s smartphone has been his personal studio since he first started making music. Even now, with all the equipment and access he could want, he still feels indelibly connected to something about making songs piece by piece on his phone. He’s also working this way to prove a point: that tools don’t really matter. He’s feeling a tension that’s been in the music industry since the Tascam 424 Portastudio made mobile recording easy in the 80s, and has come up time and again since then. He wants to remind people that the performance, the song, the feeling matter more than the gear you use to record it. If you want to make something, Lacy tells me, grab whatever you have and just make it. If it’s good, people will notice. Maybe even Kendrick Lamar.

Spotify Upgrades Fan Insights Feature to ‘Spotify for Artists’

Jason Tate

Billboard:

Now, a year and a half later, the streaming service is upgrading Fan Insights and rebranding the initiative as Spotify for Artists, complete with new features and controls that allow all artists to not only peek under the hood at their data through the service, but also manage their artist presence within Spotify itself.

Sounds good.

With Spotify for Artists, verified musicians will be able to now manage the way their artist page looks, with photos; pinned songs, albums or playlists that they want to promote atop their profile; and the ability to add and control which playlists appear on their artist page, whether created by themselves or by fans or other artists.

Sounds great.

As with Fan Insights, artists will have access to listeners’ demographic information — age, gender, location — as well as real-time song information, playlist performance and data and the different ways listeners are accessing or discovering their music.

Sounds a tad creepy.

How Google Ate CelebrityNetWorth.com

Google
Jason Tate

Adrianne Jeffries, writing for The Outline:

In February 2016, Google started displaying a Featured Snippet for each of the 25,000 celebrities in the CelebrityNetWorth database, Warner said. He knew this because he added a few fake listings for friends who were not celebrities to see if they would pop up as featured answers, and they did.

“Our traffic immediately crumbled,” Warner said. “Comparing January 2016 (a full month where they had not yet scraped our content) to January 2017, our traffic is down 65 percent.” Warner said he had to lay off half his staff. (Google declined to answer specific questions for this story, including whether it was shooting itself in the foot by destroying its best sources of information.)

When Google’s priorities were about sending searchers to the best website online that had the information someone was looking for, it was great. This new era of competing against the websites themselves seems like it’s going to backfire. What incentive does a website have to exist, and how can it continue to exist, if it is cannibalized by Google once it gets popular?

Giving Star Ratings the Thumbs Down

BuzzFeed
Jason Tate

Caroline O’Donovan, writing for BuzzFeed, on why star ratings are awful:

The other problem is that not everyone can agree on what the star ratings mean — not even the companies themselves. Lyft says that five stars means “awesome,” four means “OK, could be better,” and three means “below average.” But for Uber, five stars is “excellent,” four is “good,” and three is “OK.”

Individuals have different interpretations, too. “For some people, three could mean this is good, while four is great and five is perfect. Some people might say, nowhere is going to be perfect, so I’m going to say five stars is really good, and four is good,” Celis said. “The way you can interpret those stars is infinite, and most people don’t have the exact same system.”

Agreed completely. Moving to a more descriptive system was one of the first things I did when redesigning this website.

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Lorde Talks With The New York Times

Lorde
Jason Tate

Lorde sat down with Jonah Weiner of The New York Times for a wide ranging interview:

No one’s feedback mattered to Lorde as much as Antonoff’s. When Max Martin heard “Green Light” shortly before its release, she told me, “he had a very specific opinion, which had to do with the melodic math — shortening a part.” Martin is probably the greatest pop craftsman alive. Since his late-’90s breakthrough he has written or co-written career-defining singles for Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and the Weeknd. Lorde sought an audience with him a few years ago at his Los Angeles studio, and they stayed in touch. Martin described “Green Light” as a case of “incorrect songwriting,” Lorde said, clarifying that this “wasn’t an insult, just a statement of fact,” and one, furthermore, that she agreed with: “It’s a strange piece of music.” (The press-averse Martin declined to comment.)

NBA Watching the Basketball Tournament’s Innovative Approach to Crunch Time

Basketball
Jason Tate

Zach Lowe, writing for ESPN:

Elam, a Mensa member, has devoted most of his spare time since 2004 to solving the slog of NBA crunch time. Oklahoma City’s win was remarkable to Elam because the Thunder’s deliberate fouling worked.

Elam has tracked thousands of NBA, college, and international games over the last four years and found basketball’s classic comeback tactic — intentional fouling — almost never results in successful comebacks. Elam found at least one deliberate crunch-time foul from trailing teams in 397 of 877 nationally televised NBA games from 2014 through the middle of this season, according to a PowerPoint presentation he has sent across the basketball world. The trailing team won zero of those games, according to Elam’s data.

I’m not convinced this idea doesn’t make most of the game kind of pointless, but it’s definitely outside of the box.

The Story Behind the ‘Essential Guide to Emo Culture’ 10 Years Later

Everybody Hurts Book
Jason Tate

Rabab Al-Sharif looks at the story behind the book, Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide To Emo Culture, as it turns ten:

“A lot of people, mostly critics and Pitchfork disciples, were quick to write off emo as a passing trend. They thought it was a gateway music that would provide an adequately angsty soundtrack to your teen years. Then, after puberty passed, you’d throw away the eyeliner, hide the flat irons, and try to forget whether mics were for singing or for swinging,” Simon says.

I’ve known Leslie Simon for a long time now and I can’t believe it’s been ten years since this book came out. What a trip down memory lane. I can see my copy sitting on the bookshelf from where I write this.

Sidebar: Why is loading one page on AltPress.com over 16 MB? That website is a mess.

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Billboard Music Awards Announce 2017 Nominees

Billboard
Jason Tate

Billboard have announced their 2017 music award nominations:

Drake and The Chainsmokers lead the pack with 22 nods. Among those, Drake will compete for Top Artist, Top Male Artist and Top Billboard 200 Artist. The Chainsmokers will also vie for Top Artist, as well as Top Duo/Group and Top 100 Artist.

Twenty One Pilots follows with 17 nominations, then Rihanna with 14, The Weeknd with 13 and Beyonce with 8.

Chris Bevington, Spotify Executive, Dies in Stockholm Attack

Jason Tate

Billboard:

Chris Bevington, an executive at music streaming service Spotify was killed in the Stockholm truck attack Friday (April 7), the company’s co-founder/CEO Daniel Ek confirmed on Facebook.

“It is with shock and a heavy heart that I can confirm that Chris Bevington from our Spotify team lost his life in Friday’s senseless attack on Stockholm,” Ek wrote on Facebook Sunday. “Whilst this terrible news is sinking in, our primary focus is on supporting the family and loved ones of Chris in any way we possibly can.”

A Man Was Dragged Off A United Plane After The Airline Overbooked The Flight

BuzzFeed
Jason Tate

Alicia Melville-Smith, writing for BuzzFeed:

Bridges said passengers were allowed to board the flight but were later told four people would need to give up their seats for four United employees who were needed in Louisville on Monday.

She said no passengers volunteered, so a manager came aboard and said passengers would be randomly selected and asked to leave.

When asked to leave, the man in the video became “very upset” and said he was a doctor who had patients to see the next day, Bridges said. A manager then told him security would be called if he refused to leave the plane. Three security guards then removed him from his seat while other passengers yelled in disgust.

Holy shit. The videos and pictures are horrific.

Spotify Considers Directly Listing Shares on Public Exchange

Jason Tate

The Wall Street Journal:

The Swedish company, last valued at $8.5 billion, is seriously considering not holding a public sale of shares. Instead it is exploring simply listing its shares on an exchange in what is known as a direct listing, according to people familiar with the matter. It wouldn’t raise money—the hallmark of an IPO—or use underwriters to sell the stock.

And:

There are risks to this approach, whose consideration by Spotify was earlier reported by Mergermarket. With market forces determining the share price from the outset, the company’s public debut could be more volatile and unpredictable. Also missing would be the large blocks of stock underwriters typically allocate to investors they believe will hold the shares for the long term and promote trading stability.

An Alternate History of Third Eye Blind

Third Eye Blind
Jason Tate

Rob Harvilla, writing on The Ringer, with an alternate history of Third Eye Blind:

Two decades! You’re (probably) old! But Third Eye Blind holds up. The full anniversary treatment is in order, complete with a victory-lap tour. But the punch line is that the album got so huge, and the band’s eventual split was so irreparable, that there are two bands now, and two tours.

Salazar and founding guitarist-songwriter Kevin Cadogan — who left the band in roughly 2006 and 2000, respectively, after vicious and prolonged battles with Jenkins over the holy rock-band triumvirate of money, power, and credit — are on the other one. The one not officially traveling under the Third Eye Blind banner.

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Post Visual Development in Rogue One

Rouge One - Star Wars
Jason Tate

Alexander Gustaveson, writing on ILM, about the digital work done on Rogue One:

Much of the work in Post Visual Development is pure design. We design digital environments and sets, we alter designs from pre-production, we create ships, weapons, and creatures.

Designing digital environments after plate photography allows flexibility in storytelling. For example: the Citadel sequence. The modular design and concentric circles allowed Gareth visual cheats: a character can jump huge distances geographically as needed for the plot, but the audience is not lost visually because the symmetry of the design.

Fascinating read.

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