I release music sometimes, under my own name, or with my rock band, the Roland High Life. And in order to get our songs onto all the major music services, I pay an annual fee to DistroKid. They're an affordable company, with an easy-to-use interface that handles all the licensing stuff and makes sure we're getting paid that one-one-bazillionth of a cent every time someone plays our songs on Spotify or YouTube or hell, even Tik-Tok, whatever that is.
And now, for some inexplicable reason, they've added a new feature: automated memes. Like this:
And this:
And of course, this:
On one hand: why? Who really needs this feature? Will the commodification of memes push us that much further towards the brink of some disastrous culture climax?
On the other hand: this is stupidly delightful and I'm having too much with it so I really don't care. Read the rest
Lawmakers in Congress want Spotify to detail its allegations of abuses by digital rival Apple as part of a federal antitrust probe, reports Reuters late on Friday citing two anonymous sources. Read the rest
Spotify has asked the EU Commission to intervene in its business relationship with Apple, citing the fact that Apple takes a 30% vig on all customer revenues from people who join the service or buy songs through an Iphone app, while Apple's own competing Itunes store does not have to pay this commission.
Read the rest
BB pal Lissa Soep of YR Media (formerly Youth Radio) writes:
Our Interactive team delved into Spotify's algorithm to discover how songs on the platform are scored for their "danceability." We were intrigued by this use of Artificial Intelligence to quantify something as personal and cultural as what makes us want to move our bodies. So we built a tool that invites users to rate a curated playlist for each song’s “danceability” and compare that rating against the one Spotify produced algorithmically. Our writer Deborah Raji uses the project to raise fascinating questions about what it means for AI to be making its way into so many corners of our lives.
"Can You Teach AI to Dance?" (YR Media)
(Image: detail of illustration by Symone Woodruff-Hardy) Read the rest
Taylor Swift's latest record deal contained a clause in which Universal finally committed to sharing any gains from a future sale of Spotify (which the company invested in along with Sony and Warner) with all its artists, not just those whose accounts are in the black.
Read the rest
The Beautiful Shitholes is David Byrne's Spotify playlist of music from the countries Donald Trump infamously condemned as "shitholes."
Read the rest
This is cool. "Boil the Frog" is a 2012 web app by Paul Lamere that creates a "seamless playlist between any two artists."
Boil the Frog lets you create a playlist of songs that gradually takes you from one music style to another. It's like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. If you heat up the pot slowly enough, the frog will never notice that he's being made into a stew and jump out of the pot. With a Boil the frog playlist you can do the same, but with music. You can generate a playlist that will take the listener from one style of music to the other, without the listener ever noticing that they are being made into a stew.
It's kind of like that game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" but for connecting musical styles.
Naturally, I had to gave it a whirl. I discovered that it takes 23 songs to connect Nancy Sinatra to Insane Clown Posse, but only 11 songs to connect her to Vanilla Ice.
You can give it a try and learn how it works here.
(reddit)
Previously: Infinite Gangnam Style: realtime, beat-matched remix that goes on forever Read the rest
The Mac/Win/Lin versions of Spotify wrote hundreds of gigabytes of bad data per day to their 40,000,000 users, thrashing their drives. Read the rest
At this week's London Design Festival, design firm Uniform displayed Solo Radio. Stand in front of the device and it scans your face for input into software that assesses your emotions. Then it plays a song via Spotify algorithms with the appropriate mood. Read the rest
Apple has rejected Spotify's latest app for inclusion in the Ios App Store, citing its rules against app vendors processing their own payments; Apple requires software vendors to pay to use Apple's own payment processor -- which collects hefty commissions -- in their apps. Read the rest
The Verge obtained the 2011 agreement between the label and the music streaming service, which launched later that year. "Sony Music came out the winner," reports Micah Singleton Read the rest
