8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Spotify Ditches SoundCloud Bid (Again)

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Techcrunch:

The Financial Times reported in September that {SoundCloud and Spotify} were in “advanced talks” over an acquisition — things went pretty quiet after that, but we now understand that the deal died this past week. The source told TechCrunch that the company ultimately walked away because it feared that an acquisition could negatively impact its IPO preparation.



Spotify hasn’t officially said it will go public in 2017, but there has been plenty of speculation, including a funding round with incentives tied to a listing. The source said Spotify went cold on SoundCloud because “it doesn’t need an additional licensing headache in a potential IPO year.” That’s in reference to the complexity and financial cost that comes with negotiating with music labels, something that is hugely important to SoundCloud, which has a far larger catalog of tracks than other services because it caters to creatives, indies and remixers.



Spotify is reported to have declined to acquire SoundCloud two other times over the past two years, the FT said, with a proposed price apparently the sticking point on those occasions. Beyond expanding Spotify’s ad network and userbase, a deal was seen as key to strengthening its position as well-funded competitors ramp up their music services.

Music Industry Blog wondered back in September if SoundCloud has already peaked:

Throughout the 2010’s Soundcloud’s growth was impressive, growing from 1 million registered users in May 2010 to 150 million by December 2014. But registered user numbers only ever tell part of the story. The most telling statistic is Soundcloud’s Monthly Active User (MAU) number: 175 million. Impressive enough, and 50 million more than Spotify’s 125 million. But Soundcloud hit that number in August 2014 and it hasn’t reported a bigger number since. In fact, it could well be that Soundcloud hasn’t actually issued a new number since, but instead has simply being restating that number. If it had grown, you can be sure we’d have heard about it. If it had fallen, perhaps not.

The Dark Side Of ‘Mobilizing Your World’

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The Verge:

AT&T’s zero rating model is pretty much the nightmare scenario that internet advocates and pro-competition observers have been warning us about. That’s because AT&T owns DirecTV, and is now giving DirecTV Now privileged access to AT&T’s wireless internet customers. The corruption is so obvious here that it doesn’t need a fancy net neutrality metaphor — AT&T is clearly favoring a company it now owns over competitors.



The company stands to reap massive tolls on the other end of that “most favored nation” deal with DirecTV, because it also offers something called “sponsored data” to other companies that want the same kind of privileged access to AT&T customers. So, for example, if Netflix wants to compete fairly with DirecTV, it would need to pay AT&T to exempt its video traffic from data caps.



This is what ISPs really want the internet to look like: a bundle of premium services that run up the cost of access to their networks. It’s the same game internet companies have been playing from the beginning, when they got the government to classify them as “information services” instead of “telecommunications services” — the ISPs really don’t want to be “dumb pipes,” because there’s less money to be made when you just give people high-quality internet with no restrictions.



They’re using the same playbook: turn the internet into basic cable, and charge everyone for features and content on top of that. Then, charge competitors to compete with their own vertically integrated video services. It’s a two-way toll that ISPs have been trying to erect forever.



Republicans have been trying to gut the FCC for nearly a decade, and between Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress there’s probably enough support to dismantle net neutrality policy, if not the agency itself. If that happens, zero rating and sponsored data schemes could become completely monstrous.



I wish I could offer some optimism here, but I have the sinking feeling there are tough times ahead for us self-employed citizens who rely on an unvarnished internet for our bread and butter.

Music Matters In Our New World

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The Undefeated:

{Nina} Simone revealed the inspiration for her “Ain’t Got No, I Got Life” from 1968’s ‘Nuff Said! (RCA/Victor) and gracefully transitioned into talking about another song from the same project, “Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)”. Composed by bassist Gene Taylor 24 hours after the murder of {Martin Luther King Jr.,} in Memphis, Tennessee, the ode became a haunting soundtrack as uprisings ignited across the country. Simone posed an open-ended question to a country eviscerated over civil and human rights and one barreling toward an election that would alter the course of America. “Folks, you’d better stop and think,” she crooned, “Everybody knows we’re on the brink / What will happen / Now that the King is dead.”



“The song is extremely powerful. There’s no conclusion,” she said of the song in PBS’ Blank On Blank. In a time when every slab of concrete was seemingly red with black blood and wet with black tears, she displayed strength, and found vibrancy. “It’s a good time for black people to be alive,” she said. “It’s a lot of hell and a lot of violence. But I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life.”



And here we are, nearly a half-century later.

Cory Doctorow on Writing and the Influence of Science Fiction

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The always thought-provoking Cory Doctorow recently appeared on the London Real podcast, and I enjoyed his thoughts on the process of writing and how good science fiction is influential rather than predictive. These are the kinds of words that help me realize I should get up right now and start making new stuff. Click on the image below to listen from the point he starts talking about these subjects and, if you’re into it, be sure to listen to the rest of the podcast.

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“Talent is just not realizing that you’ve practiced.”

— Cory Doctorow on London Real

Sound Design: “Everything You Hear On Film Is A Lie”

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Here’s a fun Ted Talk about the role of sound design in media and how the best examples of this dark art intentionally lie to us:

Watch on YouTube

Sound design is built on deception — when you watch a movie or TV show, nearly all of the sounds you hear are fake. In this audio-rich talk, Tasos Frantzolas explores the role of sound in storytelling and demonstrates just how easily our brains are fooled by what we hear.

Brian Eno on the Oblique Strategies, 1978

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A terrific conversation with Brian Eno from 1978 was just republished online by Interview magazine. He speaks quite a bit about the Oblique Strategies deck and its uses:

The Oblique Strategy was an attempt to make a set that was slightly more specific, tailored to a more particular situation than the I Ching, which is tailored to cosmic situations, though I suppose that with sufficient skill one could use the I Ching. And of course, all of those oracles work in the same way. You can either believe that they carry intrinsic wisdom of some kind, or else you can believe that they work on a purely behavioral level, simply adjusting your perception at a point, or suggesting a different perception. Or you can believe a blend of both.



I always pick at random. Other people sort through them, but I never use them unless I come to a point where a piece isn’t getting anywhere and needs help. When I work there are two distinct phases: the phase of pushing the work along, getting something to happen, where all the input comes from me, and phase two, where things start to combine in a way that wasn’t expected or predicted by what I supplied. Once phase two begins everything is okay, because then the work starts to dictate its own terms. It starts to get an identity which demands certain future moves. But during the first phase you often find that you come to a full stop. You don’t know what to supply. And it’s at that stage that I will pull one of the cards out.



Later on you might be faced with a number of options that seem equally desirable—again I might pull one out rather than try all the options. I’ve used them on nearly every record I’ve made.



{David Bowie and I} used Oblique Strategies quite a lot. On one of the pieces {on Heroes}—”Sense of Doubt“—we both pulled an Oblique Strategy at the beginning and kept them to ourselves. It was like a game. We took turns working on it; he’d do one overdub and I’d do the next, and he’d do the next. The idea was that each was to observe his Oblique Strategy as closely as he could. And as it turned out they were entirely opposed to one another. Effectively mine said, “Try to make everything as similar as possible,” which in effect is trying to create a homogenous line, and his said “Emphasize differences,” so whereas I was trying to smooth it out and make it into one continuum he was trying do to the opposite.



Read the full interview HERE.

A Comprehensive Reissue Of Big Star’s Third Album

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Complete Third, a three volume (CD) reissue of Big Star’s convoluted but brilliant third album is out now on Omnivore Recordings. The set features loads of demos and outtakes and is an illuminating look at an album I thought I knew inside-out. A fine article from A.V. Club explores the album’s inception:

Due to the heavy amounts of alcohol and pills that were being consumed by all concerned in the fall of ’74, the accounts of the Ardent sessions differ. In the broadest sense, this appears to be what happened: After Big Star finished another disappointing tour, {Alex} Chilton returned to Memphis and put together acoustic demos of some offbeat new songs, then recruited respected local musician/producer Jim Dickinson to help bring them to fruition at Ardent. {Jody} Stephens came along for the ride, as the only other remaining original member of the band, and contributed one song (the gorgeous “For You”) plus some string arrangements; because Chilton didn’t share what he was doing with his drummer, the percussion tracks were sometimes improvised. The sessions were long and contentious, with engineer John Fry often begrudgingly spending his days cleaning up whatever madness a stoned Chilton churned out in the middle of the night.



The project just sort of trailed off when no one could stand each other’s company any more, after which Dickinson and his Ardent cohorts shopped around their finished versions of the songs without Chilton’s input. Whenever he deigned to talk about the record at all, Chilton would often say that no released version of Third represents what he had in mind. Sometimes he’d even say that the sessions was never meant to be for a Big Star album. The original tapes were labeled as “Alex Chilton,” “Alex & Jody,” or “Sister Lovers”—the latter of which may have actually been a proposed new band name, referring to the fact that Stephens was dating Lesa Alderidge’s sibling, Holliday.



I was lucky to meet and have a short chat with Alex Chilton on a few occasions. The first time I was introduced by a mutual friend who warned me beforehand to not mention the Third album, and especially not the song “Holocaust”. “Alex is a bit touchy about that period,” my friend said, and alluded to having made this dire mistake previously. Regardless, despite his moody reputation, Chilton was always warm to me. He remains one of my favorite songwriters.

 

The Last Steps: A Short Film About The Apollo 17 Mission

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It’s a good time to remember that humans (and us Americans) are capable of great things when we come together and fuel our endeavors with hope rather than despair and animosity. Here’s a wonderful video documenting the final Apollo moon mission, containing oodles of awe-inspiring footage that I’ve never seen.

Watch on YouTube

On December 7, 1972, NASA launched Apollo 17, a lunar mission crewed by Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt. It would be the last time humans traveled beyond low Earth orbit, the last time man landed on another celestial body, and the last time man went to the moon. The Last Steps uses rare, heart-pounding footage and audio to retrace the record-setting mission. A film by Todd Douglas Miller.

Taming Facebook’s Fake News Problem

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The Guardian:

Facebook has been accused of potentially swinging the election … by failing to acknowledge the fact that its algorithm was promoting fake news to millions of users. According to Buzzfeed news, more than 100 pro-Trump fake news sites were being run from a single Balkan town in the run-up to the election.

Cutting off the revenue to such sites by limiting the amount of money they can make from advertising may help limit their proliferation. But Facebook in particular faces a more fundamental issue given the ways in which its algorithm selects posts: if users engage more with fake news than real news, as seems possible, then Facebook’s algorithm will promote the fake news.



Tech2:

Called the B.S. Detector, this Chrome extension claims to identify and flag news that seems to be fake.The new project was released on Tuesday and can identify articles on Facebook that seem to be from a questionable source. When a user scrolls over an article that seems to be fake, a warning appears informing the user that the source of the article may not be from a credible source.



“I built this in about an hour yesterday after reading [Mark Zuckerberg’s] BS about not being able to flag fake news sites. Of course you can. It just takes having a spine to call out nonsense. This is just a proof of concept at this point, but it works well enough,” said {creator of the extension Daniel} Sieradski.

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Update: via The Verge:

Today, Google announced that its advertising tools will soon be closed to websites that promote fake news, a policy that could cut off revenue streams for publications that peddle hoaxes on platforms like Facebook. The decision comes at a critical time for the tech industry, whose key players have come under fire for not taking neccesary steps to prevent fake news from proliferating across the web during the 2016 US election. It’s thought that, given the viral aspects of fake news, social networks and search engines were gamed by partisan bad actors intending to influence the outcome of the race.




“Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement given to Reuters. This policy includes fake news sites, the spokesperson confirmed. Google already prevents its AdSense program from being used by sites that promote violent videos and imagery, pornography, and hate speech.



Update 2: solid think piece from Slate:

People tend to read, like, and share stories that appeal to their emotions and play to their existing beliefs. Without robust countervailing forces favoring credibility and accuracy, Facebook’s news feed algorithm is bound to spread lies, especially those that serve to bolster people’s preconceived biases. And these falsehoods are bound to influence people’s thinking.




And yet, in the days following the election, as criticisms of the company mounted, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed and denied the issue—a defensiveness that says even more about the company than the fake news scandal itself. Zuckerberg’s response points to a problem deeper than any bogus story, one that won’t be fixed by cutting some shady websites out of its advertising network. The problem is Facebook’s refusal to own up to its increasingly dominant role in the news media. It’s one that is unlikely to go away, even if the fake news does.

Other Music and the Bigger Ends

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The New Yorker:

This Saturday, Other Music—the tiny, beloved, and outré record shop on East Fourth Street—will cease its retail operations. Critics can and have read Other Music’s bow-out as representative, in an allegorical way, of any number of bigger Ends: the End of music as a physical medium to be collected and doted over, the End of curated off-line retail, the End of curation, the End of the East Village, the End of New York. Most of those Ends—whether real or imagined—have already been eulogized so aggressively that to revisit them now seems plainly indulgent. In our accelerated culture, collective nostalgia, in which we mourn the freshly antiquated for reasons that are unclear but still enormously potent, is its own cottage industry.

There are no record bins anymore—no little plastic signposts signifying content, broadcasting a set of principles, musical and otherwise. Genre itself—or, more specifically, genre affiliation as a means of self-identification—feels like another End hovering in the atmosphere this week. No one is asked to choose one affiliation at the expense of another. Instead, it is perfectly normal, even expected, that a person might have a little bit of everything stacked up in her digital library. The idea of “Other Music” as it was conceived in 1995 is unknowable now.