Someone printed kim k giving ray j head on a flag and waved it about as Kanye performed at Glastonbury ahahahaha pic.twitter.com/QXrp1gedwL
— Jacob (@JacobWTurner01) June 28, 2015
Yes, I know that Kim Kardassian is on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, but I must also add Kanye West.
But the guy who printed up this flag? He is never going on that list.
H/t the William Volk.
But Taylor Swift has earned her entry into the most noble order of the “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off“.
Taylor: 1 — Apple: 0:
Tech oligarchs aren’t supposed to say sorry. And no, Apple hasn’t formally apologized to the music community for demanding that it works for Apple for free, Apple still comes out of it with plenty of credit.
Ten days ago, the contracts for Apple’s new Spotify-ish streaming service leaked out, and they contained an unprecedented request. Apple said artists and rights owners would not be paid for music streamed during the service’s first three months. During that time, the service will be offered for free to people, and then rise to something like ten bucks a month.
Typically, streaming pays almost nothing today – fractions of a penny. The segment numbers tens of millions of paying subscribers, and hasn’t achieved scale. But this, from Apple, was genuinely nothing: a big, fat zero. The story flew onto the business pages. Only bottom-feeding pirate websites used artists’ work without paying them, and it looked like Apple was diving into the cesspit of file-sharers.
………
Within hours of the world’s biggest pop star weighing in on the side of the indies, Apple caved in. Taylor Swift livened up Sunday with a devastating open letter to Apple, explaining her music wouldn’t be on Apple Music.
By the evening, Apple’s content chief Eddy Cue was tweeting, and phoning reporters, to tell say the no-royalties period was scrapped. Artist will believe it when they see the new contracts arrive: the trial-period royalty may be lower than the regular royalty. But that’s still an epic turnaround – and Apple emerges looking better than anyone expected last week.
Apple clearly wants Apple Music to succeed – and many artists and rights owners want it to succeed, too. This is surprising on the face of it, given that Apple pays barely more than streaming services. (Again, we’ll wait for the first royalty statements before seeing whether this is true.)
Well played, Ms. Swift.
American Pie as a Shakespeare Sonnet.
F%$#ing Brilliant!
Pete Townshend is 70 years old today.
Amanda Marcotte writes of the
anti-science bent and the enthusiastic embrace of ignorance by the American right wing:
Spouting off about stuff you know nothing about is traditionally considered unwise. But as the Republican war on science intensifies, ignorance has started to become not only less of a handicap, but a point of pride. In the face of expertise and facts, being belligerently ignorant—and offended that anyone dare suggest ignorance is less desirable than knowledge—has become the go-to position for many conservative politicians and pundits. Sadly, it’s a strategy that’s working, making it harder every day for liberals to argue the value of evidence and reason over wishful thinking and unblinking prejudice.
The strategy of holding out ignorance to be the equivalent of expertise and simply daring your opponents to try to do anything about it was epitomized recently in the Ohio legislature. Republican state legislator John Becker introduced a bill that would ban all insurance plans in the state from covering abortion. It was a horribly misogynist and intrusive bill, but Becker didn’t stop at just trying to outlaw abortion coverage. He also insisted that IUDs, the most effective contraception available, be outlawed from insurance coverage. His reasoning was that he believes IUDs cause abortion, because he believes they work by killing fertilized eggs.
He is, of course, factually wrong in multiple ways.
An “abortion” is a procedure that stops a pregnancy, and if a fertilized egg fails to implant—and about half fail to implant, regardless of a woman’s choices—then you were never pregnant in the first place and therefore cannot get an abortion. But it’s also factually wrong that IUDs work by killing fertilized eggs. Like nearly all other forms of contraception, IUDs work by preventing sperm from meeting egg.
When confronted with the facts, Rep. Becker just blew them off. “This is just a personal view,” he said. “I’m not a medical doctor.”Well then, sir, by all means. Let your random “view” pulled directly out of your hiney supersede the actual opinions of people who are considering the evidence before drawing conclusions.
There is just one problem with the article, no musical accompaniment, so I have posted an appropriate music video.
Of course, Green Day is the obvious choice.
Over the past month or so, I’ve seen what seems like dozens of ads featuring songs by “The Who.”
I’ve heard Baba O’Reilly, My Generation, and Eminence Front, among others.
What’s up with that?
*Tomcat is to queen as dog is to bitch.
Carl Lewis will never medal in vocal skills
Rosanne Barr’s Infamous rendition, which I actually found hysterically funny
Specifically the pain of atrociously poor performance of our respective national anthems.
Unfortunately, I could find Robert Goulet’s infamous rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at the Ali-Liston fight.
Oh Well.
With all the complaints from various rock and rollers about there over Spotify and similar services, but the numbers show that it is still the record companies that are hoovering up most of the revenue in the music business:
………
In the 1960s, Motown Records had a reputation for depriving artists of well-earned royalties, most egregiously in the case of Barrett Strong whose name was removed as a songwriter of the 1960 hit “Money (That’s What I Want)” because of a so-called “clerical error.” Chamberlin’s point was, despite the groundswell of criticism from artists against Pandora and Spotify, it’s labels, not technology platforms, that are most responsible for low royalty checks. The reason artists feel the pain so acutely in today’s digital era is that there are more performers than ever before with access to wide distribution platforms like YouTube and far less money to go around: Music industry revenue has been cut in half since 2000.
Referring to the heyday of the overpriced CD in the 90s, [former Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy] Chamberlin said, “I just think when money’s swollen like that there’s this ‘high tide rises all boats’ type of mentality.” But the truth is, labels have always withheld massive shares of royalties, with or without Spotify.
The problem is, these contracts between artists and labels — and labels and Spotify — are proprietary and opaque, so it’s been difficult to identify precisely how much artists are getting screwed on a macro level, beyond looking at the sad earnings statements musicians occasionally publish on their blogs.
Until now.
A new report from audit firm Ernst & Young and the French record label trade group SNEP reveals better estimates than we’ve ever seen on the payout distribution of music streaming services.
And who do you suppose takes the biggest cut? You guessed it, labels.
According to the report, labels net 45.6 percent of the streaming revenue created by Spotify and Deezer, the two platforms included in the study. The streaming platforms themselves — most of which have yet to achieve profitability despite fielding frequent attacks for their supposed greed — take home 20.8 percent. An additional 16.7 percent is paid in taxes before songwriters and performing artists finally see their shares — which amount to 10 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively.
When you disregard taxes and the platforms’ share, labels keep a full 73.1 percent of the net revenue streaming services transferr to the music industry.
So how do the labels justify leaving such a slim piece of the pie to artists? “Well,” a record executive might argue, as he picks a piece of stale taco meat from his teeth, examines it, and decides to eat it, “Putting out an album is expensive.”
That may have been true fifteen years ago. But now that the world is digital, manufacturing costs are fast approaching zero. Recording software has gotten so good and so (comparatively) cheap that a kid with enough talent can make a record that sounds just as good as the new Taylor Swift album from her basement using ProTools, which costs $900 (or nothing, if one is willing to employ the five-finger Pirate Bay discount).
Furthermore, labels no longer need to launch an expensive world tour or bribe radio stations for an artist to receive international exposure. Sure, having a label marketing team behind your work certainly helps, but social media still possesses some vestige of its open, democratic roots — enough for savvy artists to build a following and attract attention to their work organically without a giant advertising budget.
My favorite example of an artist casting off major label overlords is hip-hop/R&B artist Ryan Leslie. He told me that his first album released on Motown in 2008 sold 180,000 copies. But the royalties Leslie received from those sales did not cover the $100,000 label advance he received to produce and market it. His new self-distributed album, however, has only sold 12,000 copies — less than one-tenth the sales of his Motown debut — and yet Leslie took home around $160,000 in revenue off album sales alone. When merchandise sales and concert tickets are included, Leslie has made over $400,000 since going independent, all of which he got to keep and distribute among his own small, lean team. (Of course it helped that Leslie already had a significant fan-base from his work on Motown).
Labels are withholding royalties as greedily as ever, and yet their value to artists has diminished greatly in the digital age. This demands a dramatic rethinking and restructuring of label-artist arrangements, a process that has barely begun to take shape.
If pop music artists have a problem with how they get revenue, they need to start with the record distributors, who are doing less and less for the musician, but still try to sit athwart the market and extract what are largely undeserved rents.
Streaming, Spotify and its ilk, much like iTunes and other digital music stores, are merely a channel.
Getting access to these services does not require the services of the record labels.
If you are getting boned by a contract with record labels, the problem is the contract with the record labels, not streaming.
I’m watching TV, and an ad for Jackson Hewett comes on, talking about all their offices, including about a thousand in Wal-Marts.
The background music is, I’ve Been Working on the Railroad, and it’s sung by Pete Seeger.
Seriously, Pete Seeger, who would never do this, and must be spinning on his grave over this.
I confirmed this via a Google search, and it appears that his family licensed this use.
It’s not some sort of bullsh%$ record label stealing for the artist bullsh%$.
Stop the world. I want to get off.
I am so angry that I could chew iron and spit nails.
Because it appears that Mr. Vicious’ band mate, John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon, has discovered a new mode of dysfunctional addictive behavior, overdoing the Apple App store:
I wasted – you’re the first to know this – 10,000 f‑‑‑‑‑‑ pounds in the last two years on apps on my iPad. I got into Game of Thrones, Game of War, Real Racing, and I just wanted to up the ante. And like an idiot I didn’t check myself. I’ve been checked now. But there’s a kid in me, see? A bit of my childhood was taken from me and I’m determined to bring it back.
I guess that it beats doing heroine, as Sid and his former girlfriend Nancy Spungen’s all too brief lives demonstrate.
But still, app abuse?
It boggles the mind.
There was a concert on the Mall in Washington, DC for memorial day , and right wing heads exploded over his singing the John Fogerty song Fortunate Son:
It’s still unclear if Bruce Springsteen, one of the musicians at the center of the latest controversy, will be similarly apologetic.
Pretty much everyone has had something to say about Springsteen’s performance Tuesday at the “Concert for Valor,” an HBO musical event for veterans held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Performing with Zac Brown and Dave Grohl, Springsteen sang “Fortunate Son,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic Vietnam War-era anthem that examines issues of class and jingoism in America. John Fogerty, the CCR frontman, said that his own experience as a drafted serviceman served as an inspiration for the song.
“I was the same age as the soldiers serving in Vietnam and from the same lower-middle class as them,” Fogerty once said.
………Springsteen also performed his hit “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song that, as the Washington Post’s Justin Moyer pointed out, actually includes many of the same themes as “Fortunate Son.”
Of course, as Charlie Pierce pithily observes, the song supports the troops, It condemn the people who profit from war without fighting themselves:
Apparently, one of the Fox peawits did notice what the song actually is about. (And it’s here where I point out that, unlike most of the people pretending to be offended today, Fogerty actually is a veteran, and that, when I was covering Vietnam veterans issues in the late 1970’s, most of the guys I talked to absolutely adored this song.) It’s not about people like this.
It’s about people like this.
Glad I could clear that up.
Republicans do not understand Rock and Roll.
QED.
My wife & I are at the Ottobar to see Natalie’s favorite local band, 3PM.
This does more make me a cool parent. I am the least cool person in the universe.
At least that is what my kids say.
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I’ve had the theme from The Prisoner going through my head for 3 days.
It’s not so bad, I like the theme, but it adds a surreal aspect to my day.
This is the extended opening from the first episode, “Arrival,” and I noticed a couple of things that I Had not before: McGoohan’s character drives under the gate before it opens, and he enters through what is clearly labeled an exit.
I am definitely going to have to go through the whole series looking for Easter eggs.
Talking with a Gentile cow-orker about Rosh Hashanah, and the blowing of the Shofar.
We talked about how some are short (ram’s horns) some are longer. (some sort of gazelle, and rather more melodic)
I noted that while the Shofar is played much like any brass instrument, i.e. with buzzing lips, but it differ in that the Shofar blower traditionally blow from the corner of the mouth, not the middle.
He said, “Kenny G. style“.
GAH!!!!
I’ve always wondered where the chopping motion on his arm that David Byrne uses in the video for Once in a Lifetime.
I just came across an interview where the Talking Heads front-man explains the meaning:
Pitchfork: I just had one last question. A friend of mine played a show in Providence and went to a hot dog stand. They’re in a band, so the hot dog stand guy says, “Oh, David Byrne used to work here. We’ve been here 30 years and he worked at this hot dog stand.” And at this place, when they do the hot dogs, they line them up on their arm and they take the condiments and they go like this [I make a chopping gesture along my arm, as seen in the video for “Once in a Lifetime”]. “That’s where he got that!”
DB: I did work at a hot dog stand, a place called New York System, where you put the hot dogs on your arm like that. But I got that thing from, I saw these Japanese kids dancing in the park in Tokyo, these kind of rockabilly dancers, and then there were these kind of space cadet kids that had a completely different set of movements. I videotaped a bunch of them, and that’s where I got that.
So, now you know too.
According to many sources, it’s a decent movie.
That’s all well and good, but in means that [it’s everywhere], because it is the Summer blockbuster of the moment, as is its ’70s soundtrack.
So, I have had Hooked on a Feeling stuck in my head all day, and I hate that fershlugginer song!!!
Gah!
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In this case, a dot matrix printer playing “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor:
H/t Neo on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
My older (and hairier) brother, AKA Bear Who Swims, is the umbrella bearer in this production of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta, The Mikado.
You will notice that he is not singing. This is because none of the Saroff boys got their mom’s singing voice, they got their dad’s singing(?!?!?) voice.
It’s for the band 3pm, a local band that Natalie is rather fond of.
It is a kick off for their new album, Slow Me Down.
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