According to Steven Shaviro, the combination of digital media and neoliberal capitalism has changed the way movies are composed, their underlying logic. I’ve argued that these changes in film composition parallel recent-ish changes in pop music song composition. Brostep sounds like Transformers having sex because, well, Skrillex and Michael Bay are using the same basic methods to achieve the same general aesthetic. (Seriously, there’s a “Transformers having sex” tag on Mixcloud.) This 2011 video mashes a Transformers clip with a brostep song, and in the same way that 2 Many DJs showed that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Bootylicious” are effectively the same song structure, it shows that Bey and brostep are effectively the same compositional structure.

But that’s all a preface to what I really want to talk about: Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” video.

Like “We Are Never, Ever Getting Back Together,” “Bad Blood” is another Max Martin produced pop dubstep track, with verses and choruses organized around a soar or a drop. The first soar/drop happens as Swift’s character is getting suited up by the Trinity, around 1:20-1:30. Here the handclaps rhythmically intensify till a drop, but a drop with no wobble. We just land on the downbeat as Swift sings “now,” and the bass and percussion comes back in. [1] This is repeated at 2:15. These soars take us from the verses into the choruses; they’re mini-climaxes.

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Yesterday Apple announced something many of us were expecting: a streaming service to rival Spotify and possibly expand/destroy the services provided by recently acquired Beats Music. At first glance the recently announced service seems to be not much more than an also-ran for streaming: Apple Music lets you stream the iTunes catalog, make playlists, and provide a radio service for a reasonable monthly subscription. Unlike other services however, Apple is claiming to keep some of the human-curated playlists that gave Robin James’ 80 gig iPod classic a run for its money.

At the center of this “we’re not just Spotify” pitch are not only ad-free stations with real DJs playing music available to a global audience, but a kind of global radio brand that is something much more than Spotify’s pre-made playlists. The inaugural station “Beats 1” will be available in 100 countries when the service launches at the end of this month and even though, at time of writing, most of the world has known about this service for all of half an hour there’s still a lot gleam from the introductory demo. Apple is interested in not only shedding its U2 Dad Rock Albatross (someone photoshop a literal visual representation of that please), it wants to do so by establishing itself as the arbiter of global pop. more...

What counts as a threat via social media, and what are the legal implications? The Supreme Court just made a ruling on this subject, deciding 8-1 that content alone is not sufficient evidence. Most accounts of this ruling frame it as “raising the bar” for a legal conviction of threatening behavior via social media. I argue instead that the bar has not been raised, but made less fixed, and rightly so.

At issue was an earlier conviction and jail sentence for Anthony Elonis, whose Facebook posts projected harm onto his ex-wife, an FBI agent, and school children. more...

Two weeks ago Zel McCarthy published a story in Thump about a mysterious infographic that’s been making the rounds lately. The infographic purports to show which drugs are popular at various music festivals by scraping Instagram for references to different drugs and certified cbd. The consumers of the Maeng Da variant have reviewed it repeatedly that the consumption of this medicine has improved their ability to concentrate on their work and their tasks hence increasing their efficiency, redirected here if you want to read this post. Scientific research elaborates that it has a direct effect on the cerebral system of the body making it a brain drug or a mental enhancement medicine that can be used as a supplement in small amounts to improve the ability to work and to concentrate more on the work. Anyone that knows a thing or two about research design would already raise an eyebrow but it gets worse.If you need Telescoping flagpole for festival  you can visit here. According to McCarthy:
This intentionally-opaque study was conducted and assembled by a Florida-based content marketing agency Fractl, which works regularly with DrugAbuse.com. While at first glance the site appears to be a credible resource for those struggling with addiction and abuse issues, it’s actually a redirect for for-profit rehab and addiction centers, mainly ones that bankrolls the site. Here are 11 things to look in an addiction treatment program. To help dig deep into the issues of research design, online performativity, and substance use I sat down over Skype with Ingmar Gorman, a clinical psychologist at the New School for Social Research who was quoted in the Thump article saying that this “study” was not only poorly constructed, it was also indicative of an archaic, “moralistic approach” to substance abuse research. What follows is edited to make us both sound more articulate. You can listen to the whole interview (warts and all), using the SoundCloud embed at the end of the interview. The recording, along with the sound of a computer fan and me saying “uhh” a lot, also includes something I’ll call “bonus content” about a study that used the Watson supercomputer to tell if someone was on psychedelics. Enjoy. more...

So, when you talk about DNA with respect to music, THIS is the first thing that comes to MY mind.

This is cross-posted at Its Her Factory.

There are a lot of reasons to headdesk over this 538 video about Pandora’s Music Genome Project and its application to music therapy. There’s the video itself: some people in my twitter TL found its cinematography too precious. There’s the project it details: a big data project that uncritically draws assumptions about music from 18th century European music theory (CPE Bach actually wrote the book on tonal harmony), and assumptions about structure, organization, and relationships from genetics.

In addition to the technical problems with the project (that is, its uncritical reliance on Western music theory…whiiiiiich is also racist, in the sense of normatlively white supremacist), the Music Genome Project is, I want to suggest, racist. Its genetics-based approach is too too resonant with 19th century race science, and its therapeutic application (the second half of the video is entirely about this) is pretty clearly biopolitically racist.

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I love speculative fiction, especially when it includes a mystery. So imagine my excitement this past Saturday when I learned that Netflix released the new original series Between, premised on a mysterious illness that kills everyone over 21 years old. Blue skies could wait, this day was for binge watching. Or, as it turned out, for watching a single episode and then taking the dogs for a walk. Contrary to their usual season-dump format[i], Netflix is releasing Between on a weekly basis.

This got me thinking about how release schedules affect television for both producers and consumers, and wondering why Netflix would revert to the more traditional model. more...

“I just wanted to hear your voice and tell you how much I love you” –Samantha, Her

“Is it strange to have made something that hates you?” –Ava, Ex Machina

2001: A Space Odyssey is memorable for more than its depiction of artificial intelligence but also its tranquil pacing and sterile modernism. Ex Machina plays the same, taking place somewhere almost as deeply isolated as space. The remote IKEA-castle of a compound is itself mostly empty with soft piano notes echoing off lonely opulence. The mansion is cold and modern but incorporates the lush nature outside. The film moves from windowless labs to trees and waterfalls to a living room that’s half house half nature. The techno-bio juxtaposition and enmeshment clearly echo the film’s techno-human subject matter. But the wilderness reminds of death as much as life.

The nature here is more than natural but is isolation, is the constant implication that there is no escape, is vulnerable dependence, and ultimately is a reminder that you are under the control of a violent, clever, scheming drunk. more...

School’s out for the summer, as they say (well, sorta–I’m still teaching a little), which means I’m back here regularly. I’m really excited to be back! It’s been about a month, but I still wanted to post my reflections on the TtW music panel.

The music panel was so much fun–Sasha was a fantastic moderator with interesting and thoughtful questions, and all my co-panelists had such insightful things to say. The audience questions were also fantastic.

One thing I really, really appreciated about the panel was that we stayed largely away from questions of distribution. It can feel like most discussions of music and the web focus on the web as a location or method of distribution: downloads, streaming, piracy, and so on. Both music critics and tech writers have been talking about  this  for nearly two decades. The topic gets a lot of attention because it sits right at the center of two of our biggest social institutions: capitalism (how to make money with music) and the state (intellectual property, law, etc.). Though there are still important conversations to be had about this (Eric Harvey’s work is a good example), this approach can sometimes feel tired and overplayed, on the one hand, and like it eclipses other, equally important questions about music and the web, on the other. We don’t just use the Internet to distribute music.

So instead of focusing on the web as a platform for distributing music, the panel focused on music and the social web. We talked about tons of stuff, but here are the questions that stood out in my mind (and its admittedly imperfect memory):

• Music making, listening, and fandom are necessarily and inherently social. How does the sociality of social media impact the way music and music fandom works? How does the sociality of social media impact the work of being a celebrity artist?
• Is music just fungible content designed to generate interaction, which is the real point?
• How does social media appearance of a musician impact the interpretive contest for their songs? Or are songs just part of their online portfolio/brand?
• Someone raised the issue of text-based memes based on song lyrics. From a songwriting and composition perspective, has the lyrical meme replaced the sonic hook as the focal point of a pop song? Sasha pointed out that the lyrics can recall a sonic memory, but it’s not the sonic part that’s driving the spread/loop/virality. Is there a difference between an earworm and a viral meme? (Does the parasite vs viral metaphor get us anywhere with this question?)
• The social web is focused on interactivity (because that’s what generates sellable data). How does the interactivity of social media manifest in, say, the composition of songs? The relationships between fans and artists? The business model of the music industry?
• Though we didn’t talk about distribution, we did talk  about labor. How are the labor practices of digital social media adopted/incorporated by the music industry? How is fan labor monetized? What are the ethics of that? One audience member asked about the role of labels nowadays, and I suggested that labels are for labor–they do the secretarial grunt work of making and marketing and promoting a record. Like secretarial work, participatory interaction is historically feminized labor (e.g., wives and daughters playing piano in the parlor). Looking back, I wonder about the gendering of musical labor on the social web. Is it all feminized, in line with the broader feminization of labor under real subsumption? Or is more ‘expert’ work–I’m thinking especially of annotation here, but maybe also some kinds of curation–masculinized (in that it’s more prestigious and might bring more benefits)?
• There was another question from the audience about cell phone bans at concerts. I argued that this has a social rather than an aesthetic function: concert etiquette has always been way of establishing status distinctions among different audiences, and cell phone bans are, I think, part of this tradition. More elite audiences eschew the use of cell phones at concerts.
• I wish we talked more about gender and race. Especially because race (ok, white supremacy) is fundamental to both the economics and the aesthetics of pop music in the US, and because we’re starting to understand how race is a factor in the economics, aesthetics, and dynamics of social media, the “race/music/social web” conversation really, really needs to happen.

Listening back to the panel, you might be excused for thinking it was actually a panel about Drake. He was the central reference point for just about every idea and question we talked about. After the panel I told my friend “so, uh, I think I need to write about why this ended up being the Drake panel.” Why does pop music + the web = Drake? (‘Scuse me while I Drake that for myself). In 2013, one study found that Drake was the most talked-about rapper on social media.

 
Is there something about Drake that makes him distinctively appealing to various web media (viral memes, hashtags, lmdraketfy.com, etc)? Or, is there something distinctive about Drake that makes his spread through web media more visible, more appealing to the kind of people who are at TtW? (Ie, why Drake not Beyoncé or Rihanna?) At the level of stereotypes, Drake is “the black guy with feelings.” Is there something about social media that just resonates with the kind of artist Drake is? Given the importance of affect and interpretation (annotation, ‘explainer’s, thinkpieces, etc.) on the social web, is there something (something racialized and gendered) about Drake’s emotive, feelings-y persona that makes him meme-able, annotate-able (to white people)?

Fox has decided to renew X-Files, a series that aired its last episode over thirteen years ago, with a “six-episode event series” that begins this January. I don’t know what an “event series” is but I’m pretty excited. Of course, there’s a lot of new things to distrust the government about, so one has to wonder: from the burning temperature of jet fuel to the Facebook algorithm, what will the writers decide to focus on? I couldn’t help myself and made a listicle. more...