Drake is once again at number one on the charts, Gucci Mane comes in at number two, and Twenty One Pilots are sitting at number three:
Trailing Drake on the latest Billboard 200 at No. 2 is Gucci Mane’s Everybody Looking, which debuts in the runner-up slot with 68,000 units (of which, 43,000 are in traditional album sales). It’s the highest rank ever for the rap artist, who previously peaked at No. 4 in 2010 with The Appeal: Georgia’s Most Wanted.
Alison O’Brien, writing for Pretty Famous:
PrettyFamous, an entertainment research site by Graphiq, found the most famous band formed each year since 1951. To do this, they created a customized Band Score on a scale of 1 to 100 based on a weighted average of a band’s Wikipedia page views in the last 30 days, page views of album releases and total number of Spotify followers.
Some fun ones: Brand New (2000), Fall Out Boy (2001), ABBA (1972), and Pink Floyd (1965).
A new study by the University of Pennsylvania looks at how Kickstarter impacts the economy. The Kickstarter blog has a run down of the findings:
- Employed 283,000 part-time collaborators in bringing creative projects to life.
- Created 8,800 new companies and nonprofits, and 29,600 full-time jobs.
- Generated more than $5.3 billion in direct economic impact for those creators and their communities.
Peter Sterne, writing for Politico, on how Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, has filed for bankruptcy:
“Gawker Media Group’s resilient brands and people will thrive under new ownership, when the sale closes in the next few weeks,” he wrote. “On this bitter day for me, I am consoled by the fact that my colleagues will soon be freed from this tech billionaire’s vendetta.”
Hogan sued Denton, Gawker and Daulerio in 2012, after the news site published a short excerpt of one of Hogan’s sex tapes. Peter Thiel, a billionaire technology venture capitalist who dislikes Gawker, secretly funded Hogan’s lawsuit against the company.
Alex Morris, with a fantastic profile of Halsey for Rolling Stone:
She’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, really good at getting into stuff. A little more than two years ago, Halsey was not actually Halsey, she was Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 19-year-old community-college dropout, couch-surfing between basements in her native New Jersey and the Bed-Stuy/Lower East Side hovels of a badass, tatted-up crowd of “degenerate stoners” she met through her boyfriend two years before that, back when she was an arty, misfit high school kid taking AP classes and roaming the halls covered in paint. She’d gotten into the well-regarded Rhode Island School of Design, and then learned that she couldn’t afford to go. She’d found the college she could afford a waste of time.
The NPD is reporting that bluetooth headphone revenue has overtaken non-bluetooth headphone revenue for the first time:
According to The NPD Group’s Retail Tracking Service, Bluetooth headphone revenue overtook non-Bluetooth for the first time in June accounting for 54 percent of headphone dollar sales and 17 percent of unit sales in the U.S.
The joy of not having a cord attached to my pocket is amazing. But Bluetooth still sucks, a lot. Trying to use multiple devices, not looking ridiculous with that behind-the-head cord, and the sound quality is still not there. Oh, and every time my phone doesn’t want to connect to the headphones I’m sure it’s punishing me for all the times I set it next to the charger instead of actually plugging it in because, what?, it’s not the boss of me.
The Hollywood Reporter, with news of a Rocketeer revival:
The new take keeps the story in a period setting and offers a fresh view on the characters. Set six years after the original Rocketeer and after Secord has vanished while fighting the Nazis, an unlikely new hero emerges: a young African-American female pilot, who takes up the mantle of Rocketeer in an attempt to stop an ambitious and corrupt rocket scientist from stealing jet-pack technology in what could prove to be a turning point in the Cold War.
Anna Maria Barry-Jester, writing at FiveThirtyEight, on all the rancid olive oil we probably use:
“We call the U.S. the world’s dumping ground for rancid and defective olive oil. We don’t know the difference,” said Sue Langstaff, a sensory scientist who consults for the beer, wine and olive oil industries, among others. Studies have shown that even frequent olive oil consumers in the U.S. don’t know what the extra virgin or cold pressed designations mean, let alone have the ability to taste the difference. And in blind taste tests, consumers often prefer lower-quality olive oils.
Elias Leight, writing for Rolling Stone:
MTV plans to rebrand VH1 Classic as MTV Classic starting on August 1st. According to a statement from the company, the new channel will focus on “an eclectic mix of fan-favorite MTV series and music programming drawn from across its rich history, with a special focus on the 1990s and early 2000s.”
All of our childhoods one day become “classic.”
A data scientist decided to look through 22,000 metal albums to find out what words are the most “metal.” Turns out “burn” is the most metal word. And then “cries,” “veins,” “eternity,” and “breathe.”
In the face of this complexity, it is not surprising that understanding natural language, in the same way humans do, with computers is still a unsolved problem. That said, there are an increasing number of techniques that have been developed to provide some insight into natural language. They tend to start by making simplifying assumptions about the data, and then using these assumptions convert the raw text into a more quantitative structure, like vectors or graphs. Once in this form, statistical or machine learning approaches can be leveraged to solve a whole range of problems.
I haven’t had much experience playing with natural language, so I decided to try out a few techniques on a dataset I scrapped from the internet: a set of heavy metal lyrics (and associated genres).
Chris Riotta, writing at Mic:
In the case of the RNC, as Billboard reported, the GOP had reportedly acquired a blanket license from the Broadcast Music Inc., a performing rights organization that collects licensing fees for artists to later distribute as royalties. This allows the Republican party to play virtually any work within the organization’s catalog — Queen included. Once a song is part of the BMI, the permissions are handled by that organization, not the artist. And because the BMI must adhere to anti-trust legislation, as Vox reports, the organization cannot discriminate as to who can or can’t use the song, or respect an artist’s requests to do so.
Tumblr will be rolling out ads across their platform, and yes, on your blog, in the near future:
In addition, users can opt out of having ads displayed on their blogs by turning off on-blog advertising in the Settings. Yes: that means that ads on blogs will be the default – effectively allowing Tumblr to monetize its network of over 306 million blogs from 65 million users, unless those users take an explicit action to disable ads. Users will also be able to disable ads on a per-blog basis if they choose.
Tumblr says that ads will appear in three places, including the main page of the Tumblr blog if the blogger is using the default Optica theme for their blog, as well as on the slide-out section on the web, and on Tumblr’s mobile apps and mobile web.
Steve Baltin, writing for Forbes, details the release strategy behind Blink-182’s California after talking with the band, managers, radio, and label. It’s a little insider baseball at times, but there’s a lot of new information here:
“Our strategy really was kind of to give everything a little something,” he says. “That’s why we turned down an offer to window the record, cause we wanted the music to be accessible to the younger kids who listen to it on You Tube and Spotify and different places. We created ticketing tiers for our concerts so the core fans can buy the best seats in the house, but the young fans that might just be discovering the band can afford a ticket to the show also. That was our core strategy throughout this whole thing.”
Sorry in advance for linking to Forbes and their user hostile website.
The ALSA has reported that the donations received from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge has led to a significant gene discovery:
According to a paper published today in Nature Genetics, researchers part of Project MinE’s global gene sequencing effort, funded by The ALS Association through ALS Ice Bucket Challenge donations, have identified a new ALS gene, NEK1, which now ranks among the most common genes that contribute to the disease, providing scientists with another potential target for therapy development. This was the largest-ever study of familial (inherited) ALS, involved contributions from over 80 researchers in 11 countries, and was led by John Landers, Ph.D., of University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass. and Jan Veldink, Ph.D., of University Medical Center Utrecht, in The Netherlands.
Mike Prevatt, writing for Las Vegas Weekly, details the artists behind Blink-182’s tour graphics:
After working on tours with Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Madonna, he formed live production design company NeonBlack with colleague Dominic Smith. Knowing Blink-182 needed a production company for its upcoming summer tour, the year-old NeonBlack designed a production/stage concept (which is its biggest yet), pitched it to the band and was hired as the trek’s show designer.
