MUSIC BUZZ: Bully // Torres // Emika // More
Alicia Bognanno at SXSW 2015
The Nashville band Bully is preparing a highly anticipated release this June and front woman Alicia Bognanno visited our favorite record store Rough Trade to select some records (apparently she didn’t have to buy them in the end).
It’s finally here: since SXSW Elke and I have been anticipating Mackenzie Scott’s aka Torres second album. It’s been released last Monday and since then I have Strange Hellos or Sprinter spinning in my head. Go to Spotify or iTunes to listen.
On the same day, there is another album I’ve been waiting for: Emika’s third electronic album Drei (Spotify, iTunes). A review will follow on glamglare soon.
Spotify did some data mining and The Guardian sums up how music discovery behavior changes with age. Apparently at 42 people turn back to the charts to see what’s going on in pop culture. But:
Kalia stressed that parents and older music fans aren’t necessarily less cool: in fact, they may be more cool in many instances, because they’re discovering artists and genres that aren’t as mainstream.
You can find the results of here on glamglare.
Courtney Harding makes another interesting observation about the music industry giving up on people above a certain age:
Which is kind of silly, because older people tend to have more money, and are old enough to remember the days when music wasn’t just free-flowing free information. We will buy your stuff! We might not buy t-shirts, because we have to wear grown-up clothes to work, but we’ll buy the shit out of a classy silk screen on an album cover we can frame. We’ll pay extra to see a show at a reasonable hour in a nice venue. Our money is yours for the taking, music business, if you’d look up from chasing the next big thing for five minutes.
The Verge reports, that the music sharing site Grooveshark, which just shut down last week, is back from the grave as some sort of zombie:
The cloned site’s creator, who goes under the pseudonym Shark, claims to have started backing up Grooveshark after suspecting that it was about to go offline. Shark claims to have backed up 90 percent of Grooveshark’s content and to have also assembled a team dedicated to bringing all of Grooveshark’s features, including playlists and favorites, back online. “I was connected to Grooveshark a few years back and I have, together with the team I’ve gathered, the knowledge and the technological abilities to bring it back to life,” Shark writes in an email to The Verge.
Honestly, I don’t get it: if you care about music you have to understand you can’t betray those who make it. If you don’t care, then why bother to share or download it? But then, read this story about men who stole music just for the sport of it.
The Apple streaming service is coming soon. Re/Code has some details:
A feature that will let music owners upload a sampling of songs that users could listen to without subscribing to the service. Several sources describe this feature as something akin to SoundCloud, the music streaming service that describes itself as the “YouTube for audio.”
I was wondering how Apple makes those who bought music on iTunes (like me and some hundreds of millions others) not feel stupid when they can listen to everything for a low monthly subscription now. Maybe this is part of it. Of course:
Apple declined to comment on either the details of its new service or any regulatory inquiries.
Justin Spicer wrote for Cuepoint about the power of (Pitchfork) album reviews and gives some advice to readers of reviews:
Next time you read a review from any website and see the rating, ask yourself why it exists and what influences shaped it? Read the accompanying review and compare whether it matches up or justifies the score. Better yet, ignore the score and read the review.
Exactly: ratings without their context mean nothing. So better try to understand the review or just listen to the music yourself. BTW, Elke and I don’t do ratings and only write about what we like.
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