Help! @help I have this persistent message in my feed, but I can’t seem to locate it in the logs.
Help! @help I have this persistent message in my feed, but I can’t seem to locate it in the logs.
Jay Peters reports for The Verge about the year-over-year rise in the number of CDs being purchased.
The data suggests that “the CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible,” Luminate says. “This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself.”
The surprise here is that approximately half of the Gen Z and millennials buying CDs don’t even own a device on which to play them. It’s still about that connection, though. I admitted the other day that I sometimes listen to a CD even when I could just as easily (more easily even) stream the album.
Dave Kendall, creator and host of MTV’s 120 Minutes, has passed away.
The British-born Kendall conceived 120 Minutes after joining MTV as a producer, pitching the network a dedicated program for the punk, post-punk, goth, synth-pop, ska, and other underground sounds largely ignored by corporate rock radio. 120 Minutes debuted on March 10th, 1986, and Kendall later served as its host from 1989 through 1992. “By far the most important thing about 120 Minutes was that it acted as a distribution channel for organic musical produce, if you will,” Kendall told CONSEQUENCE in a 2016 interview. “The only other outlet for non-mainstream music at the time was a few local college radio stations.”
Apparently, Kendall was the force behind getting the show greenlit. You know he must have had to push just to get a terrible time slot like 12am on a Sunday night. I think I learned how to program my VCR just so I could record 120 Minutes. It was a school night, after all.
Matt Pinfield, the last to host the show, offered a tribute on Instagram.
One problem with posting your listening habits on a periodically updated Now page is that those habits can literally change overnight. A couple of days ago, I updated my /now page, only to get deeply into a Swedish jazz EP very shortly after.
In another in a seemingly endless supply of misguided moves, the administration is putting in place a new federal rule under which a college program must prove that it’s gradautes earn more than if they had never enrolled or lose access to federal loans. This administration is so focused on money it’s inconceivable to its leadership that there could be any other purpose to an education.
“We know we need nurses. We know we need journalists. We know we need early childhood educators,” he said. “We don’t know how many artists we need, but I can guarantee that if you eliminate access, we will impoverish our cultural life nationally.”
It’s amazing that we could devalue and disincetivize these professions even more, but here’s a way to do it as well as adding to the bureaucratic load.
Freddie deBoer writes about how poptimism has achieved so much success because of the cultural context in which it was born. A culture that considers it wrong to have standards that can identify one thing as better than another is fertile ground for the elevation of terrible art. That’s why we have record reviews that treat pay-for-play pabulum like Rebecca Black songs as if they were written by Neil Young. It’s a culture that feeds our desire for comfort rather than challenge.
Freedom Fuel gas stations sound like a J.R. Ewing scheme.
I’m glad I don’t like lobster or I might have been tempted to act on the skate shop owner’s recommendation of the lobster rolls at Dollar General.
Sticker selection from the skate shop.
Bought the hype and started reading Galahad and the Grail Merlin’s Isle by Malcolm Guite 📚.