music

NiemanLab
That being said: She’s a billionaire, her tour is taking over the world, she’s transforming the music industry in real time, and very few living celebrities have her scale of cultural influence. With all the love in the world, shouldn’t someone be, at least, attempting to look without fear or favor to see if she’s truly keeping her side of the street clean?
The kinds of stories that could shed light on the music industry if they looked with a critical eye.
Dada Drummer Almanach
Breaking news from Spotify: starting in 2024 (less than two months from now), they will no longer pay any royalty on tracks that fall below a minimum 1,000 streams a year. These tracks will still earn royalties, in theory – but those royalties will not be paid to their rights holders. Instead, they will go into a pot to be divided among accounts that garner more plays.
Happy holidays from Spotify, artists!

Update (12/4): Happy holidays from Spotify, employees
billboard.com
The star’s comments come amid a wave of anti-trans legislation in the U.S., specifically targeted at restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth. While right-wing politicians claim that the risks of this kind of care do not outweigh the benefits, peer-reviewed research disagrees. Multiple studies show that gender-affirming care reduces the rates of depression and suicidality among transgender kids.
Guys like Carlos Santana think they're taking a lone wolf stand but they're really just joining an angry mob. If you're raising yourself up by dumping on vulnerable people you're on the wrong side.
blog.archive.org
Statement from Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive: “When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify. When people want to study sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”
Argh, still mad about this. Scratchy 78s are not competition for Sony or Universal. These companies should be helping the Internet Archive preserve music.
Reuters
The labels' lawsuit filed in a federal court in Manhattan said the Archive's "Great 78 Project" functions as an "illegal record store" for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.
Yes, because everyone today signs up for streaming services to listen to old 78s and if this history project is online it means no one will sign up for streaming. WTAF? These companies think they can lock up all of our history and culture behind a paywall. This makes me want to never buy anything from these music companies again.
somafm.com
I’ve been returning to this site frequently. Getting a playlist right is an art that humans are better at than algorithms, and I’m enjoying these curated mixes more than the big streaming service offerings.

Music: Champagne Year (St. Vincent Cover)

I am mildly obsessed with the song Champagne Year by St. Vincent so I made a cover version with a guitar as vocals. ugh, the loose timing of everything in this was difficult to copy. But it was a nice musical meditation and challenge over the holiday break.

Bloomberg
"When one bidder asked for details about who owned what and where, Ingenious, the UK-based group working on behalf of the band, couldn’t get a straight answer from Gilmour and Waters. Most of the interested parties say they haven’t heard from the sellers in weeks."
When you see an email come in about setting up a meeting re: $500 million sale and you roll your eyes and click delete.
The Guardian
"It’s Pink Floyd if it’s me and Nick, and that is the biggest promotional vehicle; that is, as I said, the platform that I’ve been working on for my whole adult life, since I was 21. I wouldn’t do this with many more things, but it’s so vitally, vitally important that people understand what’s going on there and do everything within their power to change that situation."
Sounds great. Wish we were getting new Pink Floyd music under better circumstances.

Music: Tiny Major Metal

I really need to start naming these. This is another 60 seconds of layered guitars in GarageBand. This time in a major key so it's Tiny Major Metal.

Spotify, Wrapped

I would like to announce that I have ended my business relationship with Spotify. That means I'm no longer paying Spotify $15/month for a family account. With Neil Young off the platform, they're literally removing the music I listen to most. Here's my 2021 Spotify Wrapped top artists list. (And keep the judgy looks to a minimum—we all got through 2021 our own way.)

Spotify Wrapped Top Artists 2021 screenshot with Neil Young at the top

I agree with Neil Young (and Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren and Brené Brown) that it's not good to support a company that refuses to remove public health disinformation.

Not everyone in my family plays their carefully curated Neil Young playlist 24/7 so they weren't as eager to jump ship. We all agreed that moving to a new service was good, but we couldn't agree which service to move to. We rarely sit down and put together our technical requirements for a digital service as a family. So we assembed our RFP and we're waiting on the contracts from Procurement.

In the end we found a music service from a company with no problematic stances: Amazon Music. I'm kidding, of course. Chances are very good that I'm going to want to leave this service in the near future and maybe that will be the environment we're in until there's real competition. Neil Young recommends Amazon and he has a deal that will give new users four months free.

The biggest barrier to moving services was moving our playlists. I found an app for that that works well: Free Your Music. It costs $15, but I look at that like a moving services tax. Hopefully that's a one-time fee. I had 30+ playlists to move over and I've only found a few mismatches here and there that were easy to fix.

If anyone else is a hardcore Neil Young fan it's worth checking out his Neil Young Archives website. (Thanks for the gift subscription, Dad!) The central music services are kind of like fancy spreadsheets to me. They make navigating songs easy but treat all artists the same. Looking through the Neil Young Archives is more like rifling through a dusty trunk where there's all kinds of bizarre things to find. It looks like this:

Screenshot of a track listing from On The Beach at the Neil Young Archives website

Truly awful if you're trying to get something done efficiently. Awesome if you want to have a feeling of discovery. We have a lot of "efficient" experiences online and I think we could use more planned weirdness.

Anyway, Spotify is a good, efficient music service. They must view podcasts as the future of their business if they're willing to both be bad citizens and degrade their music offering to keep those listeners.
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