Month: July 2013

http://youtu.be/o90VsOopAws

That’s how Nigel Godrich described his decision to pull his music off Spotify, the streaming music platform, tweeting, “The reason is that new artists get paid fuck all with this model.. It’s an equation that just doesn’t work.” Godrich’s Atoms for Peace collaborator, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, also removed his solo material from the service, adding, “Make no mistake new artists you discover on #Spotify will no[t] get paid. meanwhile shareholders will shortly being rolling in it. Simples.”  Spotify responded with a statement:

Right now we’re still in the early stages of a long-term project that’s already having a hugely positive effect on artists and new music. We’ve already paid US$500M to rightsholders so far and by the end of 2013 this number will reach US$1bn. Much of this money is being invested in nurturing new talent and producing great new music. We’re 100% committed to making Spotify the most artist-friendly music service possible…

Spencer Kornhaber characterizes the protest as “annoying, not that effective, and still important”:

Yorke and Godrich’s rejection of Spotify matters … for the simple reason that it screws with the service’s appeal.

I’m a big Spotify user, and I pay $9.99 a month for a premium subscription. (People can listen for free on their home computers as long as they’re willing to sit through ads). I like feeling as though all of recorded music is at my beckon, anytime and anywhere. Of course, all of recorded music isn’t actually at my beckon, and there are annoying gaps in Spotify’s catalog–like, uh, The Beatles. But weirdly, almost insidiously, you adapt. The awesome electronic artist Four Tet tweeted yesterday that he’s withheld his label’s music from the service for a long time. Which reminded me–I haven’t listened to Four Tet in a while… and that’s probably because most of his stuff isn’t on Spotify.

Radiohead’s manager Brian Message maintains his support for Spotify.  But Sam Duckworth sides with Yorke and Godrich:

4,685 Spotify plays of my last solo album equated to £19.22 (that’s 0.004p per album stream). The equivalent to me selling two albums at a show. I think it’s fair to say that at least two of those almost 5,000 listeners would have bought the album from me if they knew the financial disparity from streaming. At the same time, many record labels are reaping the rewards of online streaming, whether it be through potential share dividends when a company gets sold or the “money for old rope” practice of repackaging music.

Meanwhile, Benji Rogers, the co-founder of PledgeMusic, believes his direct-to-fan platform creates an equitable music economy:

The average pledger, based on the past six months, spends $57 per transaction on the site, and for that money they don’t just get the album and/or merchandise – they get exclusive, immediate video updates from the artist, as the record is being created. … [Rogers is] at pains to clarify that Pledge is not a crowdfunding platform, or a direct-to-consumer service. “Crowdfunding is ‘please give money, then I will do’,” he elaborates. “Direct-to-consumer is ‘I’ve done it, here’s five ways to buy it.’ We’re in the middle with ‘be a part of the making of it’ – it truly is direct-to-fan.”

In an interview for her debut collection of short stories, This Is Paradise, Kristiana Kahakauwila explains why she tells a number of them from multiple perspectives:

In many ways fiction is more truthful than textbook history. Textbook history pretends to be objective, but it isn’t. Fiction admits to its subjective nature; moreover, it takes into account the emotional and psychological effect of an event. In many ways, only narrative can fairly engage both historical record and the humanity behind that record. The stories in this collection are ones that not only suit me personally—as someone fascinated with multiple versions and personal perspectives—but also ethically, as the stories bring to light viewpoints perhaps previously ignored or unknown.

The literary technique also connects to her distinctive background:

In Hawaiian, the word “hapa” loosely translates to “part” or “half.” I’m ethnically hapa—half Native Hawaiian and half Caucasian. Moreover, I grew up in California but spent holidays and summers on Maui with my paternal family, so I’m also geographically hapa. I wouldn’t have considered myself local until I moved to Honolulu. Now maybe I’m hapa-local.

I explain all this because my experience of Hawai’i has occurred in parts and on multiple levels: as a native and as a foreigner, as a local and as a visitor, as a Hawaiian and as a Caucasian.

My characters reflect this multiplicity of experience. “The Road to Hana” probably offers the most explicit discussion of this theme, but elsewhere characters such as Sarah in “Portrait of a Good Father” and Pili in “The Old Paniolo Way” struggle to find their place in Hawai’i. And I think they realize, as I have, that they don’t need to be restricted to one place, one relationship with the islands. They can occupy multiple spaces, have multiple relationships with their homes and their own histories. In one way or another, each of the characters is reflecting a part of me.

“Don’t be afraid to try YA” is Marisa Reichardt’s advice for adults curious about Young Adult literature:

Today’s YA novels don’t preach Afterschool Special-style morals to teenagers the way they did in the ‘80s. Books like My Name is Davy, I’m an Alcoholic, made me cringe more than feel like there was an author out there who understood what I was going through at 17. Today’s YA books also aren’t melodramatic like the Lurlene McDaniel books of the ‘90s. Fast forward twenty years later, and YA is legitimate literature where we can find beautiful lines like, “As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly and then all at once,” from John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. The depth and beauty of words like these will surprise many adults who have written off YA as being nothing more than angsty books about teenagers.

Meanwhile, Kelly Jensen chastises adults who claim “that YA books were never as ‘bad’ in their day”:

Of course they were.

The difference is that back in their teen days, the context was different. They were teens themselves! The context was living, breathing, and experiencing the hard truths and sharp edges that come with navigating adolescence in the moment. The context was discovering that sometimes bad things happen to people or the realization that grown-ups are flawed creatures. That sometimes — more than sometimes — the world is a cruel and unforgiving place, no matter how much you play by the rules.

Teens don’t read books like [Laurie Halse] Anderson’s or [Patrick] Ness’s, [Judy] Blume’s or [Robert] Cormier’s, or any other books published as YA each year as how-to guides. They don’t read them as prescriptions for how to engage in violence or how to join gangs or how to be promiscuous (which only ever applies to teen girl characters anyway). They’re smart enough to know the whole story matters. That challenges and situations matter in context — their adolescence.