Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather overthink the downside of Megan Trainor, the backside of Robert Pattinson, and the flipside of Taylor Swift and Spotify.
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Further Reading
- Watched on the Treadmill: 40 Minutes of Dance Videos by Fenzel on Overthinking It
- “Lorde, Racism, and Hip-hop”
- “Robert Pattinson steps out with questionable new haircut”
- Tonsure on Wikipedia
- “Thursday Grammar: Impostrophe!” by Wrather on Overthinking It
- “Tonsure the safety of our nation”
- Duck’s A** on Wikipedia
- Rat-tial on Google Image Search
- Nora Jane Struthers and the Party Line
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty#Claiming_the_Mandate_of_Heaven
Go to the 7th paragraph down in this section and they talk about the hair thing.
For children of a certain age, The Phantom Menace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_I:_The_Phantom_Menace) should not be underestimated for it’s portrayal of cool-guy-jedis rocking the tail’ and it’s ongoing popularity.
I don’t have a problem paying for music that I really love. If Spotify went away tomorrow I know which albums I would immediately go out and get. But I would also listen to dramatically fewer new albums and I’d also listen to a lot fewer albums in general. It’s harder to justify listening to music that you like but maybe don’t love when you’re paying the same amount for the albums.
The biggest selling point for me is that while music disappears from Spotify all the time and I can’t get every single album I want, it never crashes altogether. I had so many problems with iTunes and my iPod. There was no stability to it.
Also, all the singing on the podcast this week made me really happy.
This is a really articulate article by Galaxie 500 frontman Damon Krukowski highlighting the problems with Pandora and Spotify — specifically how they pay their artists. It was from 2012, and I’m not sure if things have changed (hopefully in favor of the artist), but still a good read.
http://m.pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/
I suppose it’s an obvious bit of Megan Trainor riffing, but I thought it was pretty amusing:
http://t.co/RmRfltsV5S
R-Patz was going to get the entire back of his head shaved, but then he realized that he needed a little patch to hide his bar code.
Y’all mentioned “Weird Al” at the beginning, and I’d like to add that when discussing the “market” for music and how it’s structured nowadays, ‘Mandatory Fun’ is his last traditional album. I’m sure you’re aware of this, but he said that in order to keep his music on-point and timely, he’ll release digital singles as he writes them in the future. And he’s hinted that he wanted to switch from the older format for quite some time but couldn’t, due to contractual obligations. He hasn’t said whether they’ll be set up with the “pay as much as you want” format or be at a set price, but I do think it should be noted because it speaks to the evolution of the distribution of media and music in particular. The particular context in which he releases his songs matters a LOT, since he’s more often than not spoofing something currently on the charts. So while ‘Mandatory Fun’ was the first (and thus last) album of his to reach #1, with the inclusion of digital downloads and streams into calculations of singles/songs, I imagine he’ll probably end up not only on the charts more often now, but also higher on them, to wit. There’s no way to avoid watching Taylor Swift, but I think Al another one to watch in order to see just how the digital thing can affect an artist. But one important aspect to keep in mind the whole time is that he’s obviously well established in the cultural zeitgeist, and he also has a great deal more capital behind him and thus the power to make that kind of choice. Much like how Taylor already has buttloads of money, she can afford to remove her music from Spotify and even suffer whatever hits to her fandom she may for doing so (I know a couple Swifties that have opted not to buy her next album or see her on tour over the Spotify thing, but the number like that pales in comparison to those who don’t care or will still purchase her content). He and Taylor are both focal points for very large media machines, and there are in fact a lot of similarities between them in how their networks operate. What would be really interesting is if the model Al is going to use will end up dominating and the idea of the “album” will in itself fade away.