Tag: Premium

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.

Justin Peters explains why he writes out all of his posts by hand in a moleskin before putting them online:

Twenty years’ worth of sustained Internet use has left me with a head full of random trivia and a profound inability to concentrate. Every time I sit down in front of my computer to write a post, I end up browsing the IMDb page for the movie Cool Runnings or the career stats for underrated outfielder Ryan Spilborghs. I’m just as distractible when my computer isn’t connected to the Internet: I’ve wasted weeks of my life playing this stupid baseball simulation game that I downloaded years ago and can’t bring myself to delete.

When I’m working on a computer, it takes me three times as long as it should to write a post. When I’m putting pen to paper, though, there are no distractions. It’s just me and the ink, and I can’t tab over to something more immediately gratifying. Not only do I finish my posts faster, I’m more likely to just sit and think before I write a sentence or a paragraph—something I don’t always do while composing in Microsoft Word. (All of my dumbest posts were written directly to the computer. See if you can guess which ones! The answer “all of them” will receive only partial credit.)

Along the same lines, Will Self describes why he composes his novels on a manual typewriter instead of a laptop:

To get away from the internet and from the sub-sonic sound of a computer. I come in to my study every morning and I write first drafts on the manual and I don’t even turn the computer on until after lunch. I don’t like having the machine on in the room. I find it very weird and oppressive. The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.

I know other people aren’t like that and don’t have that problem but I sure as shit do. And the real sea change was of course broadband – the fact that you can be seriously trying to write something and you can click a few buttons and watch somebody being anally penetrated with a Lewis gun, it’s incredibly distracting isn’t it? Or you can buy some shit you really don’t need with a few key strokes. I mean, that’s not good, is it? It’s not helpful.

A self-described “shy introvert” offers his perspective on social life:

Shyness is something different [from introversion]: a longing for connection with other people which is foiled by fear and awkwardness. The danger in simply accepting it, as[Quiet author Susan] Cain urges us to do with introversion, is that shyness can easily turn into a self-fulfilling persona — the pose becomes part of you, like a mask that melds with your face. There is always something we cling to in an unhappy situation that stops us escaping from it. In my case, it is the belief that lots of voluble people do not really listen to each other, that they simply exchange words as though they were pinging them over a tennis net — conducting their social life entirely on its surface. A small, self-regarding part of me thinks there is something glib about easy articulacy and social skill.

My more sensible self realises this is nonsense, and that shyness (or, for that matter, non-shyness) has no inherent meaning.

There is nothing specific to shyness that makes you more likely to be a nice person, or a good listener, or a deep thinker. Shyness might have certain accidental compensations — being less susceptible to groupthink and more able to examine the habits and rituals of social life with a certain wry detachment, perhaps. Mostly it is just a pain and a burden.

Yet shyness remains a part of being human, and the world would be a more insipid, less creative place without it. As Cain argues, we live in a culture that values dialogue as an ultimate ideal, an end in itself, unburdening ourselves to each other in ever louder voices without necessarily communicating any better. Shyness reminds us that all human interaction is fraught with ambiguity, and that insecurity and self-doubt are natural, because we are all ultimately inaccessible to one another. The human brain is the most complex object we know, and the journey from one brain to another is surely the most difficult. Every attempt at communication is a leap into the dark, with no guarantee that we will be understood or even heard by anyone else.

(Image: Die Schüchterne, by Hermann von Kaulbach, via Wikimedia Commons)

Dana Liebelson and Chris Mooney report that the CIA is funding National Academy of Sciences (NAS) research into geoengineering, which some say could mitigate climate change. But the CIA is keeping the research quiet – for domestic political reasons, it would seem:

The NAS website says that “the US intelligence community” is funding the project, and William Kearney, a spokesman for NAS, told Mother Jones that phrase refers to the CIA. Edward Price, a spokesman for the CIA, refused to confirm the agency’s role in the study, but said, “It’s natural that on a subject like climate change the Agency would work with scientists to better understand the phenomenon and its implications on national security.” The CIA reportedly closed its research center on climate change and national security last year, after GOP members of Congress argued that the CIA shouldn’t be looking at climate change.

Liebelson and Mooney note that the government’s interest in geoengineering dates back to the 1960s:

The first big use of weather modification as a military tactic came during the Vietnam War, when the Air Force engaged in a cloud seeding program to try to create rainfall and turn the Ho Chi Minh Trail into muck, and thereby gain tactical advantage. Between 1962 and 1983, other would-be weather engineers tried to change the behavior of hurricanes using silver iodide. That effort, dubbed Project Stormfury, was spearheaded by the Navy and the Commerce Department.

Kelsey D. Atherton points out that the military has good reason to worry about global warming:

Climate change, it turns out, is one of the major threats to national security, as specified in the 2013 “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community.” Climate change threatens food and water supplies, which in turn, could lead to all sorts of geopolitical conflicts. The intelligence community report singles out droughts in the “Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Niger, Amazon, and Mekong river basins,” and notes that increased populations will put intense pressure on (already scarce) resources. This doesn’t speak to a direct, pressing security threat, but instead thousands of future problems.

The one-child policy (OCP) alone doesn’t account for the shortage of females in the country’s population:

[A]n NBER working paper by economists Douglas Almond, Hongbin Li, and Shuang Zhang makes the case that the roots of the gender imbalance go back farther than the OCP. Specifically, they argue that it was the pro-market land reform policies and breakup of collective farms following the death of Mao Zedong that drove the trend in rural areas — 86 percent of the country’s population at the time. For rural couples, who were allowed to have two children and generally preferred at least one of them to be a boy, the second child was 5.5 percent more likely to be a boy after land reform was introduced in a given area. The introduction of the OCP, which happened around the same time, had an effect as well, but the authors find that it’s almost entirely eliminated when you control for the effect of land reform.

Why exactly land reform had this effect is less clear. The authors consider a number of possibilities including gender bias in land distribution, increase in the demand for male labor, increase in demand for old age support, and the collapse of the rural medical system, but don’t find empirical support for any of them.

More Dish on the state of the one-child policy here.

In a dispatch from his hometown of West, Texas – site of a devastating fertilizer-factory explosion in April – Zac Crain says that the loyalties that sustained the town after the disaster extends even to the factory’s owners:

Everyone in town knows Wanda and Don Adair, who bought West Fertilizer Co. in 2004 when it was on the verge of closing. Don is a farmer, and Wanda used to be a substitute teacher and writes a column for the West News. Everyone in town knows the plant manager, Ted Uptmore Sr., too. The plant was only insured for $1 million, but that number is almost irrelevant. No one blames them for what happened. They don’t care that the plant had a decades-long history of compliance problems with various governmental oversight organizations. It was an accident. And no one knows exactly what caused it.

Investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Texas State Fire Marshal’s Office have narrowed it down to a few things: an old golf cart parked in the seed building, shoddy wiring in the building itself, maybe even arson. It’s unlikely they will narrow it down further, given that all the potential evidence is scattered as far away as 2.5 miles, and the people on the scene are either dead or don’t remember anything after arriving at the plant. But even if they do, unless it points to Don Adair holding a gas can and matches, it won’t matter.

Previous coverage of the explosion here and here.