I’m Donating to RAINN Today

Today’s a great day to donate to RAINN, just throwing that out there.

RAINN is the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization. RAINN created and operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline in partnership with more than 1,000 local sexual assault service providers across the country and operates the DoD Safe Helpline for the Department of Defense. RAINN also carries out programs to prevent sexual violence, help victims, and ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice.

Support that which brings joy and goodness into the world. Support that which helps people. With all the evil lurking in the shadows, I urge everyone to reject it from our music scene.

Queens of the Stoned Age

Suketu Mehta, writing for GQ:

There are a thousand ways to buy weed in New York City, but the Green Angels devised a novel strategy for standing out: They hired models to be their dealers. In the eight years since the group was founded—by a blonde, blue-eyed Mormon ex-model—they’ve never been busted, and the business has grown into a multimillion-dollar operation. Suketu Mehta spent months embedded with them at their headquarters and out on their delivery routes to see where this great experiment in American entrepreneurship might lead.

This entire article is fascinating.

Kid Rock Eyed as Potential Senate Candidate

Roll Call:

A surprising name has been thrown out as a potential Republican contender for Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow’s Senate seat next year: Kid Rock.

The rocker’s name came up as a possible candidate at a Michigan Republican Party convention last weekend. There have been no official decisions announced as of yet.

One step closer to Idiocracy.

SoundSource: Taking Control of Your Mac’s Sound

Rogue Amoeba has released their new Mac app SoundSource:

From SoundSource’s menu bar icon, you can instantly configure the audio devices your Mac uses for Input, Output and Sound Effects. In seconds, you can adjust the volume for each of your audio devices or switch between connected devices. SoundSource can also enable the soft play-thru of audio from input devices. Use the Play-Thru window to monitor any connected input, such as a microphone, right through your headphones or other output.

Against the Current’s Chrissy Costanza Talks About Reading & Leeds Lineup

Against the Current

Against the Current’s Chrissy Costanza talked with Alternative Press about the gender disparity at this year’s Reading & Leeds Festival:

So I started looking into it a little bit more because I didn’t want to speak without knowing what I was talking about. And I saw one site posted, “Who else do you want to see added to the Reading & Leeds lineup?” and I scrolled through the comments. [In] literally 350-something comments, I think there was like a handful of Paramore’s, one PVRIS comment, and that was it as far as girls go. Everything else was male bands and I was like, “Well, we’re all screaming about how there’s no girls on this [festival] and it’s like, you guys, the girls, the fans—I’m watching you guys comment. None of you are asking for girls. None of you—you’re all asking for guys, like every single one of you.” So how is Reading & Leeds supposed to put girls in their festival if you aren’t even supporting each other at this point? If we can make up over half the fans, women are the ones who are most actively commenting on all these things, the most active presences on social media. We have so much power and we’re not using it.

Dear anyone looking to book great artists for your festivals: this thread is full of them.

Google Adds Sharable Location Lists in Maps

Google

Google has launched sharable location lists in Google Maps:

The new feature adds another layer to the already-existing “save” option in Google Maps. Once you pinpoint a desired location, you can hit the “save” button to reveal a number of premade lists including “Want to Go,” “Starred,” and “Favorites.” Then you can choose the list you want the location to live in, or create a new list with a personalized title like “Vacation.” In Google Maps’ menu, you can find all your saved lists in the “Your Places” folder when you want to recall saved locations. Now each list will have a “share” button as well, which lets you grab its link to share with others or share it via different social networks. This should make it easier to share things like favorite restaurants and shopping locations with visiting out-of-town family and the like.

This is a really cool feature. I’ve used apps like Relay and Rego in the past to achieve something similar.

Facebook Tries to Offer Music Labels a YouTube Alternative

Facebook

Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:

The world’s largest social network has redoubled its efforts to reach a broad accord with the industry, according to interviews with negotiators at labels, music publishers and trade associations. A deal would govern user-generated videos that include songs and potentially pave the way for Facebook to obtain more professional videos from the labels themselves.

Disney Severs Ties With PewDiePie Over Anti-Semitic Posts

YouTube

Disney has severed ties with YouTube star PewDiePie after a series of anti-semitic posts. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Kjellberg said in a video a few days later that the Jan. 11 clip was a joke that went too far. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which owns YouTube, pulled ads that run on its videos from the Jan. 11 video within days of its posting, before it was taken down this past weekend. YouTube hasn’t pulled any of the nine videos in question, though PewDiePie’s account took down three of them. Google hasn’t removed ads from any of Mr. Kjellberg’s other videos.

Being a piece of shit is all the rage in 2017.

An Oral History of The Beatles’ First U.S. Concert

The Beatles

This weekend marked the anniversary of The Beatles’ first U.S. concert, the Washington Post has an oral history:

I never was a screamer. It was all about the music for me. The concert started with some warm-up groups, and I was relieved because I had heard about the screaming that went on in England. And I thought: Nobody’s screaming. This is going to be nice; we’re going to be able to hear them. (Laughs.) When they started playing, you couldn’t hear a thing. It was unbelievably loud, like white noise. I remember the policeman near me stuck bullets in his ears.

Prince Albums Return to Streaming Services

Prince

Prince’s Warner Music catalog has returned to a variety of streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music:

The Purple One’s Warner Music catalog, including the albums “Purple Rain,” “1999” and “Sign O’ the Times,” will be available Feb. 12 on subscription-streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Napster and iHeartRadio …

Do Young Artists Care About Album Sequencing?

MxPx

I saw Mike Herrera of MxPx post this question on Twitter last night, and I am curious what people think:

Do young artists (median age 20) care about album sequencing? Song order.

I’ve talked about it before, but sequencing and the entire album experience are two of the things I love most about music. Listening to an entire work of art put together with care and precision, or seeing feeling like the flow is messed up if something is out-of-whack, has always fascinated me. The streaming/single based world makes me feel like an outlier sometimes.

An Oral History of ‘The West Wing’

The Hollywood Reporter has an informative oral history of The West Wing:

Aaron Sorkin: I didn’t really know anything about television beyond watching a lot of it, and my plan was to come up with an idea for a new play or movie, but my agent wanted me to meet with John Wells, and I said, “Sure.” The night before the meeting, there were some friends over at my house, and at some point [Akiva Goldsman and I] slipped downstairs to sneak a cigarette. Kivi knew about the meeting and said, “Hey, you know what would make a good series? That.” He was pointing at the poster for The American President. “But this time you’d focus on the staffers.” I told him I wasn’t going to be doing a series and that I was meeting with John to meet John — I wanted to hear stories about China Beach and ER, and I especially wanted to hear about his years as stage manager for A Chorus Line. The next day I showed up for the lunch, and John was flanked by executives from Warner Bros. and agents from CAA. John got down to business and said, “What do you want to do?” And instead of saying, “I’m sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding. I don’t have anything to pitch,” I said, “I’d like to do a series about staffers at the White House.” And John said, “We’ve got a deal.”

Amazon and Alexa’s Roll in the Future of Music

amazon

Stephen Witt interviewed Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Steve Boom about Amazon Music, the music industry, and the Echo’s roll in the future:

If you’re asking people to pay for streaming music in a world where there are a lot of free alternatives, then you need to build a service that they want to use every day. And that’s one of the beauties of this device. What we are seeing is that people are listening to more music than ever: we see from data, and we hear anecdotally from customers. Since I have the Echo in my kitchen, my living room, my bedroom, the kids’ room, we’re listening to more music than we were listening to in the past