Tumblr Introduces Paid Subscription Tool to Woo Younger Bloggers

Jason Tate Jul 24, 2021

Katie Deighton, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

Microblogging stalwart Tumblr on Wednesday began a test letting some users charge their followers a monthly fee in exchange for access to exclusive content.
The blogging site, which Verizon Communications Inc. sold to WordPress.com owner Automattic Inc. in 2019 for far less than the $1.1 billion it paid for it, said it hopes to make the option to charge for posts widely available this fall.
The feature, called Post+, offers content creators a choice of three monthly prices to charge their followers—$3.99, $5.99 or $9.99—with Tumblr taking a 5% cut of subscription fees. Users can continue to post free content as well if they want.

Tumblr is still around?

A Cool Now Playing Widget for Your Desktop

Jason Tate May 17, 2021

Beautiful Pixels:

Sleeve is a beautifully crafted app for macOS that displays your currently playing track as a tiny widget on your Desktop. Made by Hector Simpson and Alasdair Monk from Replay, it works with Apple Music or Spotify and comfortably lives on your desktop without getting in your way. We’ve only been playing around with it for a day, but can confidently say that Sleeve is the ultimate example of a really polished and delightful app.
Sleeve shows the album artwork, track name, artist name, and album name on the Desktop. It’s not an interactive widget, so you can’t control playback using Sleeve (not that we want to). It works natively with the Apple Music and Spotify apps and doesn’t require your account details.

Sleeve is $5 and available here.

Facebook Bans Honest Signal Ads on Instagram

Jason Tate May 5, 2021

Shoshana Wodinsky, writing at Gizmodo:

A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users using Instagram’s own adtech tools.
The actual idea behind the ad campaign is pretty simple. Because Instagram and Facebook share the same ad platform, any data that gets hoovered up while you’re scrolling your Insta or Facebook feeds gets fed into the same cesspool of data, which can be used to target you on either platform later.

iOS 14.5 Releases

Jason Tate Apr 27, 2021

iOS 14.5 has been released and MacStories has a good overview:

Apple today released version 14.5 of iOS and iPadOS, a substantial update to the operating system for iPhone and iPad that debuted in September and introduced features such as Home Screen widgets, multi-column app layouts on iPad, compact UI, a redesigned Music app, and more.
Version 14.5 is the biggest – or, at the very least, most interesting – update to iOS and iPadOS we’ve seen in the 14.0 release cycle to date. That’s not to say previous iterations of iOS and iPadOS 14 were low on new features and refinements – it’s quite the opposite, in fact. Perhaps the pandemic and Apple’s work-from-home setup played a role in the company spreading new iOS functionalities across multiple releases throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021, but, regardless of the underlying reason, iOS and iPadOS 14 have evolved considerably since their public launch six months ago.

Watch unlock for the phone has been 👌.

Streaming Music Payouts

Jason Tate Apr 22, 2021

This breakdown from Nick Heer about music streaming payouts touched on a point I think about often:

I get millions of songs for my $10 per month. In about the same timeframe in 2009, I also added Burial’s “Untrue” to my library. I have played the thirteen songs on that album 684 times in total, leading to an estimated payout of $6.84. My CD copy of that album probably cost $15, of which William Bevan probably earned just a few pennies. Apple Music obviously has not existed since 2009 but, if it had, I cannot work out how much less artists would have made if I had streamed all of my music instead of buying physical copies.
Somehow, we are still paying just $10 per month for music in an era where streaming must be paired with live performance to have any hope of generating an income for an artist, all the while fighting the paradox of streaming music, and artists are still getting screwed in the middle of all of it. There would not be a music industry without music, but the industry gets all of the money while musicians still have to fight for scraps.

They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines

Jason Tate Apr 21, 2021

Andy Greenburg, writing at Wired:

Of all the mysteries and injustices of the McDonald’s ice cream machine, the one that Jeremy O’Sullivan insists you understand first is its secret passcode.
Press the cone icon on the screen of the Taylor C602 digital ice cream machine, he explains, then tap the buttons that show a snowflake and a milkshake to set the digits on the screen to 5, then 2, then 3, then 1. After that precise series of no fewer than 16 button presses, a menu magically unlocks. Only with this cheat code can you access the machine’s vital signs: everything from the viscosity setting for its milk and sugar ingredients to the temperature of the glycol flowing through its heating element to the meanings of its many sphinxlike error messages.
“No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu,” O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.

Wild story.

MacStories Reviews Albums 4.0

Jason Tate Apr 8, 2021

John Voorhees, reviews the new version of Albums 4.0 at MacStories:

Albums 4.0 is a beautifully designed, feature-rich app with more filtering and discovery tools than any other music app I’ve tried. The app is also opinionated, favoring album playback over individual songs or playlists. It’s the sort of focused, deep approach to music that Apple’s Music app doesn’t offer because it’s designed to appeal to a wider audience.
If you’re an albums-first music fan, you’ll love Albums. However, even if you prefer singles, playlists, and jumping around the Apple Music catalog as I do, Albums is worth checking out. The app’s powerful filtering opens up brand new ways to enjoy your music collection that any music fan can appreciate.

How Pandora Won Its Royalty Battle But Lost the War to Spotify

Jason Tate Mar 10, 2021

Tyler Hayes, writing for Vice:

For a few years in the late 2000s, Pandora was the on-demand DJ for tens of millions of people, creating the soundtrack to college dorm room parties, quiet coffee shops, busy kitchens, and family get-togethers. The days of building massive MP3 music collections through file-sharing was receding quickly into the past, and instead the shared experience of radio was making a comeback via the clever algorithmic matchmaking of Pandora’s endlessly customizable stations based on individual taste. Today it’s a feature we take for granted across every music service, even if Pandora’s implementation still seems like it was the best. Pandora itself, however, can feel like an afterthought. Betamax to Spotify’s VHS, or maybe more accurately, MySpace to on-demand streaming’s Facebook.

Turntable.fm Is Back From the Dead

Jason Tate Mar 5, 2021

Mitchell Clark, writing at The Verge:

It’s rare that apps come back from the dead, but it seems like that may be what’s happening with Turntable.fm, a site that let users create their own radio stations and DJ sets with music they curated before it got shuttered in 2013. Even rarer, it seems like there are two versions involved in the revival: the original Turntable.fm site is back up and running (with the involvement of its original founder, Billy Chasen), but there’s also Turntable.org, which will reportedly be launching in beta this April.

Soor Offers Customizable Widgets for Apple Music

Jason Tate Sep 21, 2020

MacStories details the third party Apple Music app, Soor, and their customizable home screen widgets for iOS 14:

Soor’s Now Playing widget is a much nicer way to find out what you’re listening to. Sticking a small widget on your Home screen or in your Today view will not only display the name of the currently playing song, but also provide artwork and let you know what music is coming up next.

Shazam Getting Control Center Button

Jason Tate Sep 18, 2020

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Apple bought music recognition app Shazam in 2018, and now it’s integrating it into iOS in another big way — a new Music Recognition feature can identify songs playing around you as well as in apps on your phone. And it even works when you’re listening to music on your headphones.
The new feature is available as a toggle in Control Center, but it does require a developer beta of iOS 14.2 if you want to try it right now.

I use Shazam very frequently, often when watching a TV show or movie. On iOS 14 you can assign “back taps” to a Shortcut, so I assigned a double tap on the back of the phone to a Shazam Shortcut that listens and identifies the song.

Amazon Music Gets Podcasts

Jason Tate Sep 17, 2020

The Verge:

Amazon Music now offers podcasts. The company issued an update today that brings more than 70,000 shows to the platform, including some major titles, like Serial and Pod Save America, as well as new exclusive deals like a show with DJ Khaled called The First One, where he’ll interview artists about their breakthrough hits and the stories behind them. Disgraceland, a popular show from iHeartMedia, will also become exclusive to the platform starting in February 2021.

Facebook to Launch Officially Licensed Music Videos Next Month

Jason Tate Jul 15, 2020

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:

Facebook is preparing to launch officially licensed music videos on its social network in the U.S. next month, in a direct challenge to YouTube. In materials reviewed by TechCrunch, Facebook informed Page owners linked to artists they’ll need to toggle on a new setting to add their music videos to their page ahead of an August 1st deadline, at which point Facebook will automatically create a page of their videos if no action had been taken.
Artists will not have to manually upload their videos or even provide links, Facebook told the artist Page admins. Instead, by enabling the new setting, artists are giving Facebook permission to add music videos to their Page, where they can be discovered by fans on the Page’s Videos tab. This library will include both the artist’s own official videos and those they’re featured in, Facebook explained in its marketing materials.

MusicSmart Puts the Spotlight on Music Credits

Jason Tate May 20, 2020

Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories, about the new app MusicSmart:

Here’s the amazing part – the “aha” moment that brought back the same feelings I had as a kid when reading through liner notes: in the Tracks section, you can tap any of the listed songs to view detailed credits for the selected song. These go beyond the standard “written by” credits you see in Apple Music: MusicSmart lists engineers (including mixing, mastering, and assistant engineers), producers, and even the name of the label and studio where the song was mastered. But there’s more: MusicSmart can show you the names of all the artists credited for the creation of a song even if they’re not core members of a band, including backing vocalists, percussionists, keyboard players, saxophonists – you name it.

I’ve been playing around with this app for the last couple of weeks and it’s a really nice addition for those that want to dive deeper into the credits of a song. In past I’d be listening to something and often wonder who was playing one of the backing instruments, or trying to figure out if the strings were real or fake, and end up Googling around and hoping I could find the information or a photo of the album credits. This is much nicer.

Jason Tate Apr 23, 2020

Megan Rose Dickey, writing at TechCrunch:

“It is unclear how long this economic uncertainty will last and therefore, to prepare accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with 13% of Patreon’s workforce,” a Patreon spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “This decision was not made lightly and consisted of several other factors beyond the financial ones.”