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The Rise and Fall of America’s Awful Beer Glass

Jason Tate

Laura Bliss, writing for CityLab, on the history of what is widely known as draft beer’s most common drinking glass … and why it sucks:

Under Fitz’s watch, there’s not a shaker glass in sight. The glass he once hardly noticed in the race towards sloshdom he now detests. “Shaker pints were never meant for draft,” Fitz says. “They’re the worst thing that ever happened to beer.”

And it’s not just at Pizza Paradiso. In more and more bars across the country, the little-recognized shaker is slipping out the back door. And among beer’s devotees, the end of the glass that defined a century in beer can’t come soon enough.

Warner Music’s Deal for BMG’s Catalog Sets Up Showdown With RED

BMG
Jason Tate

Ed Christman, writing for Billboard, looks at how Blink-182’s new label, BMG, and their distribution deal with the Alternative Distribution Alliance will be challenging RED as the largest indie distributor in the U.S.:

According to sources, BMG’s record label operations is already generating about $100 million globally, and about one-third of that is in the U.S. While BMG began its revival in 2008 by first pursuing music publishing opportunities, after it completed the sale of its music assets to Sony Corp., it actually held back about 200 album master recordings from the Sony deal. But it wasn’t until 2013 when it acquired Sanctuary and Mute as part of the divestiture’s the Universal Music Group made in order to keep the EU Commission’s regulatory agency happy about its EMI Recorded Music acquisition, that it began aggressively pursuing a recorded music strategy too. Since then, it has also acquired Union Square, Infectious, S-Curve, Vagrant, and Rise.

All these labels and deals and acronyms sure gets messy fast.

Spotify Acquires CrowdAlbum

Jason Tate

Glenn Peoples, writing for TechCrunch, on Spotify’s aquistion of CrowdAlbum:

Spotify announced Wednesday it has acquired CrowdAlbum, a service that creates albums of events based on the location and time of photos and videos people share on social media sites. It can index content for any kind of event — sports, Earth Day festivals, political rallies — but mostly aggregates photos from music concerts and festivals.

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Inside “Emojigeddon”

BuzzFeed
Jason Tate

Charlie Warzel, writing for BuzzFeed News, with an oddly fascinating tale of trouble and political infighting at the Unicode Consortium (the people that get to define what gets to be an emoji or not):

The series of frustrated messages show a deepening rift between those who adhere to the organization’s original mission to code old and obscure and minority languages and those who are investing time and resources toward Unicode’s newer and most popular character sets: emojis, a quirky periodic table of ideograms and smiley faces that cover everything from bemused laughter to swirling, smiling piles of poop. The correspondence offers a peek behind the scenes of the peculiar and little-known organization that’s unexpectedly been tasked with building what some see as the first digital universal language.

Bring on stuffed flatbread!

Dustin Kensrue Talks Lyric Themes of New Album

Thrice
Jason Tate

Dustin Kensrue of Thrice talked with BaebleMusic about the band’s upcoming album and some of the themes expressed throughout:

I would definitely say that we’ve drawn a lot of our influence from the current state of politics, but I also like to personalize things when I write, and I’ve always written that way. I’d say on the new album that half of the songs are like ‘Blood on the Sand,’ and bring out that much more hard-hitting political dialogue, especially given that it’s an election year, but I’d also say that we try to write beyond the politics of issues. Maybe it’s more that we’re writing about something broader, like society…culture even. I feel that my writing is about the way I take in what’s going on within society, and the importance I feel about certain issues leads me to doing my own personal research on them, which often translates into a song. One of the political issues we talk about in this album is the song ‘Whistleblower,’ which is about Edward Snowden, and then there’s the song ‘Black Honey,’ which delves into the political as well.

Your Media Business Will Not Be Saved

Jason Tate

Joshua Topolsky, writing on Medium, about the struggles the media industry now faces:

A second thing happened alongside those foundational publishing challenges: this industry which had controlled its ability to reach a populace through ownership of things like printing presses began to cede its power in the delivery and distribution process to other people. People who didn’t care about or understand the media business. People who told them the answer wasn’t the best of something, it was the most of something.

Partially this was done out of fear, but mostly it was done out of ignorance.

Obviously this is a topic near and dear to my heart. It’s why I’m trying something different with this website. And, well, this first month has been a rollercoaster. So far we’ve had one of the biggest unique visitor months a website I’ve run has seen in quite a while, we’re going to go past 4.5 million pageviews, our time on site and retention numbers have been fantastic, and a few hundred have already signed up to support this website, the content we are putting out, and the community we’ve been building. I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback from our sponsors and advertisers about the new model we’re trying out and they seem to be loving the exposure they’re seeing. I’ve heard from a lot of members that love how fast the site loads, love how quickly they can find what they are looking for, and have enjoyed our features, community, and even the advertisements themselves. But mostly they seem as excited as I am about the course we’re headed down.

Is this going to work long-term? I’m still not sure. But it’s a start. I hope we’re making the “good shit” that Topolsky writes about here. I think we are. There’s still a very long road to self-sustainability, but this time I at least feel like we’re in the right vehicle and it’s pointed in the right direction.

MTV to Bring Back “Unplugged”

MTV
Jason Tate

Steven Zeitchik, writing for the LA Times:

“Unplugged,” which could be on the air in coming months, will stoke the interest of those who came of age with artists such as Nirvana, Eric Clapton and Arrested Development breaking down their music to its acoustic basics, often with some added atmosphere.

“It won’t be carpets and candles,” Erik Flannigan, executive vice president of music and multiplatform strategy, said of the new show. “And it won’t be rock legends playing their catalog. “What we want to do,” he said, “is take the attributes that made ‘Unplugged’ such a success for so many years and reimagine them for 2016.”

The Lack of Diversity at Bled Fest

Jason Tate

Bled Fest have posted a blog on their website discussing, kind of, why they don’t have more diverse roster at this year’s festival:

Is there a responsibility on us or other event producers like us to even pay any attention to races, genders, etc.? Is there a quota? Let’s just roll with an estimate of 10%. If 10% of applications represent minorities, should I book 10% of acts featuring minorities? 15%? 20%? Should we specifically attempt to go outside of who submitted and the agents we work with (defined earlier as almost entirely white males) to make sure that there’s a fair % of minorities represented? and what’s fair? Do we focus more on race and gender than we do on skill, promotional value, achievement, professionalism, etc.?

I think this is a false choice. I don’t think looking at the reasons for why certain music scenes lack diversity means you need to ignore other metrics. Using phrases like “affirmative action” and “quotas” misses the entire damn point: do better than you’re doing right now. Let’s start there.

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Study Says Dyson Hand Dryers Spread More Germs

Jason Tate

Beth Mole, writing for Ars Technica, on how Dyson hand dryers spread viruses in bathrooms:

Researchers have long known that warm air hand dryers can launch bacteria into the air—compared to dabbing with paper towels, which unleashes virtually none. But new jet air dryers, made by Dyson, are significantly more problematic—they launch far more viruses into the air, which linger for longer periods of time and reach much farther distances, researchers recently reported in the Journal of Applied Microbiology. This is particularly concerning because viruses, unlike many infectious bacteria, can easily maintain their infectiousness in the air and on surfaces, and just a few viral particles can spark an infection.

Harriet Tubman Will Replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 Bill

Jason Tate

Micah Singleton, writing for The Verge, on how Harriet Tubman will be replacing Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill.

In a surprise move, Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, one of the most heavily circulated bills in the world, according to a report from Politico. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will announce the change later today, according to the report. This marks a big win for Woman on 20, the movement to put a woman on the face of US paper currency for the first time in nearly a century.

Press a Button, Play a Chord

Jason Tate

Josh Constine, writing for TechCrunch, looks at a new digital guitar where can basically press a button to play a chord:

You can also freestyle, playing whatever you want. Rock band Muse’s lead singer Matt Bellamy is an investor, and he told me he uses it to write songs since it’s so easy to recreate what’s in his head without fumbling to find where to put his fingers. The guitar automatically records your last 30 minutes of playing so if you discover the perfect riff, you won’t forget it.

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Concert ‘Merch’ Comes of Age

Jason Tate

Robert Cordero, writing for the Business of Fashion, on how concert tour merchandise is becoming not just a way for artists to make money, but also a player in the fashion world:

“Obviously, the sales [of concert ‘merch’] are big and significant,” says Jerry Lorenzo, the Los Angeles-based founder and designer of Fear of God, who worked closely with Welch to create some of Justin’s Bieber’s looks for his current tour. “But they’re just as important as a branding asset to an artist,” he continues. “It’s the new CD. It’s as important as the sound, a part of the vision.”

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