“The internet and digital media have created the impression of limitless knowledge at our fingertips. But, by making us lazy, they have opened up a space that ignorance can fill.”
Tag: 07.27.16
Musician Payments For Streaming Are A Mess. So Apple Has A Plan (But…)
“Apple recently made a proposal that could fundamentally transform the way streaming services pay songwriters and music publishers. As part of a government rate-setting process known as the Copyright Royalty Board tribunal (CRB), Apple recommended that services pay a fixed penny rate per stream. This structure is a major departure from the way streaming services have traditionally paid royalties. Moving to a penny rate would be a tremendous step toward transparency in music publishing. But be careful of the fine print.”
Unmentionables: Euphemisms Are Like Underwear, Best Changed Frequently
John McWhorter: “What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion.”
What Are The Most Popular Songs Right Now? It’s Increasingly Difficult To Tell
Stream, steal, or buy: Those are your choices. The premium streaming services represent just one batch of countless channels by which consumers can hear music. And so Billboard now bears the complex task of incorporating traffic from an ever-widening variety of platforms — YouTube, Vevo, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Pandora, Vine, Twitter, etc. — into a standardized accounting that ranks all these songs together.
Diversity-In-Casting Arguments Crop Up Again, This Time Over A Concert Performance
The project in question is the in-progress stage adaptation of the 1998 Dreamworks animated feature The Prince of Egypt, about the life of Moses. The script and score will get their first public reading in a free outdoor performance next month on Long Island, and a social media fracas broke out over the false impression that the cast for the reading is all-white. (In fact, five out of the 15 Equity performers currently engaged are nonwhite.)
St. Louis Symphony Reports Rise In Ticket Sales And Attendance
Total ticket sales for all performances reached $6.87 million, up 3.8 percent compared with last season. Even though there are three fewer concerts this year, attendance rose more than 1 percent to 190,817, officials said.
Photographer Puts Her Images In Public Domain; Getty Picks Them Up And Charges Others To License Them; Photographer Sues Getty For $1 Billion
“In December, documentary photographer Carol Highsmith received a letter from Getty Images accusing her of copyright infringement for featuring one of her own photographs on her own website. It demanded payment of $120. This was how Highsmith came to learn that stock photo agencies Getty and Alamy had been sending similar threat letters and charging fees to users of her images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress for use by the general public at no charge.”
The Problem With Yahoo: The Snapchat Generation Barely Even Knows What It Is
Om Malik: “The $4.8-billion acquisition of Yahoo … by a telephone company, Verizon, is a watershed moment in the history of the Internet. It caps off an era – Web 1.0, for lack of a better term – that will soon be remembered much like telegraphs and rotary phones.”
The Real Problem With Playing Pokémon Go At The Holocaust Museum Isn’t (Just) A Lack Of Respect
“The museum, like the video game, relies on careful curation to furnish an alternate experience of reality. Playing Pokémon Go at a memorial isn’t just disrespectful – it interferes with the augmented reality you’re already in.”
Here Comes The First Feature Film (Co-)Written By Artificial Intelligence Software
Perhaps fittingly, it will be a horror film. “Impossible Things will be partly written by software that has analysed successes in the genre [and] uses that data to formulate a script that [incorporates] successful plot points. The goal: engineer a hit film.”