I’m really disappointed in the Hopscotch Festival 2006 lineup, which dropped yesterday. There is only one band I would be interested in seeing (Pearl and the Oysters). The festival seems to have cut back, eliminating one main stage, reducing water stations, less social media, etc.
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Dave Kendall, creator and host of MTV’s 120 Minutes, has passed away.
The British-born Kendall conceived 120 Minutes after joining MTV as a producer, pitching the network a dedicated program for the punk, post-punk, goth, synth-pop, ska, and other underground sounds largely ignored by corporate rock radio. 120 Minutes debuted on March 10th, 1986, and Kendall later served as its host from 1989 through 1992. “By far the most important thing about 120 Minutes was that it acted as a distribution channel for organic musical produce, if you will,” Kendall told CONSEQUENCE in a 2016 interview. “The only other outlet for non-mainstream music at the time was a few local college radio stations.”
Apparently, Kendall was the force behind getting the show greenlit. You know he must have had to push just to get a terrible time slot like 12am on a Sunday night. I think I learned how to program my VCR just so I could record 120 Minutes. It was a school night, after all.
Matt Pinfield, the last to host the show, offered a tribute on Instagram.
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Jay Peters reports for The Verge about the year-over-year rise in the number of CDs being purchased.
The data suggests that “the CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible,” Luminate says. “This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself.”
The surprise here is that approximately half of the Gen Z and millennials buying CDs don’t even own a device on which to play them. It’s still about that connection, though. I admitted the other day that I sometimes listen to a CD even when I could just as easily (more easily even) stream the album.
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Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra & Avin Omar
One problem with posting your listening habits on a periodically updated Now page is that those habits can literally change overnight. A couple of days ago, I updated my /now page, only to get deeply into a new Swedish jazz EP very shortly after.
(more…)
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It’s All About The Benjamins
In another in a seemingly endless supply of misguided moves, the administration is putting in place a new federal rule under which a college program must prove that it’s graduates earn more than if they had never enrolled or lose access to federal loans. This administration is so focused on money it’s inconceivable to its leadership that there could be any other purpose to an education.
“We know we need nurses. We know we need journalists. We know we need early childhood educators,” he said. “We don’t know how many artists we need, but I can guarantee that if you eliminate access, we will impoverish our cultural life nationally.”
It’s amazing that we could devalue and disincentivize these professions even more, but here’s a way to do it as well as adding to the bureaucratic load.
Fediverse reactions
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I’ve had some problems with the plugin, but I’ve been really impressed with how aggressively the @wordpress.org team has been integrating the ATmosphere.
Love the ability to @-mention users and have those users get notified.
Fediverse reactions
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Poptimus Prime
Freddie deBoer writes about how poptimism has achieved so much success because of the cultural context in which it was born. A culture that considers it wrong to have standards that can identify one thing as better than another is fertile ground for the elevation of terrible art. That’s why we have record reviews that treat pay-for-play pabulum like Rebecca Black songs as if they were written by Neil Young. It’s a culture that feeds our desire for comfort rather than challenge.
(more…)Fediverse reactions
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Corporation Games
Will Gottsegen writes for The Atlantic about Sony’s decision to discontinue manufacturing physical discs for their games.
The convenience of downloads may be an upside, though there are certainly real downsides in the transition away from physical media. When you buy a disc, you own it and can resell it or lend it out the old fashioned way—without online mediation. No corporate middleman was watching me hand my copy of Red Dead Redemption to my friend when I was done with it. Although physical games can be damaged or even decay over long periods of time, I could still loan that same copy out today if I wanted. Digital purchases only grant you a license for use, and that license can be revoked. At around the same time that Sony announced the digital transition for PlayStation, it also alerted customers that more than 500 movies and shows would be pulled from its online marketplace, removing them from the libraries of users who had purchased them. (As an Arts Technica headline put it, “We’re Reminded We Don’t Own What We Buy.”).
The new rental culture comes with some sobering thoughts about our limited ability to retain access to some of our favorite entertainment, be it games, movies or music. Luke Plunkett has even gone as far as to suggest that, without ownership, we have lost the concept of media piracy.
Would you be willing to pay $60 for generous rental terms on a video game? Does the framing of the question shift the mindset of how your money is being spent?
