furgooswft13

Pulls plug

There will be thought police of a different kind. Gab.com is what you are looking for, if you can stomach it.

At this point I agree with Hobbes; language is an impediment to understanding.

https://i1.wp.com/footnotes2stories.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

Wew lad hot take there. I'd rather rot my brain by listening to enjoyable music than social media doomscrolling. Besides Taylor Swift is to pop music like Shakespeare is to Youtube comments.

Hello fellow HN swiftie. I've also been pondering creating some (non copyright infringing) Taylor Swift app recently. Something like this is always a good idea as I'm constantly doing double takes to make sure I'm listening to Taylor's Version whenever a Red or Fearless track starts playing. I wonder if this would be possible too for Youtube playlists/suggestions, as that's my primary streaming music source. Also, since this app is written in Swift (natch), don't suppose there's any possibility of an Android port?

I know this is an unpopular take among reddit swifties, but I really miss The Swift Life app. When it shut down part of me wanted to reverse engineer the server-side to keep it going. It was a unique social media app and had a great, creative and artistic community. I even got free rep tickets from a friend on it! Also Taymojis. I still keep the app's icon on my phones homescreen, and launch it every now and then...

Weird blog-rant. Had Spotify sided with Neil, the music hosted on their platform would still be "valueless". Neil was not pulling his music to protest for fair compensation for musicians. In fact Neil seems to care about that very little, as he has previously gone on record to say that performing artists should not even go on tour [1], the thing that in the before-times netted the vast majority of their income, so long as pandemic persists.

In fact it's kind of insulting to struggling musicians that this controversy has absolutely nothing to do with artist compensation, the lack of which being the primary controversy of the platform before this convenient dust-up.

1. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/neil-young-con...

> Direct your energy at something important

Like paying musicians reasonable amounts of money per stream? People have been complaining about this since the very beginning of Spotify. But as usual woke nonsense takes up all the air in the room because it's fiscally irrelevant.

> Soviets were allies of the US against Nazis, they didn't kill millions of americans nor did they wish genocide on anyone. They do not stand as a symbol if rebellion against legitimate government either.

Are we talking about the people who fought a revolutionary war against the monarchy of the Russian Empire, eventually murdering the Tsar's family, wife and kids included? Then proceeded to stoke violent class warfare and political purges throughout Soviet territory, including the Holodomor in Ukraine. All the while funding communist revolt in other countries across the Far East and Europe. Those guys right?

Genocide aside, the Nazi takeover of Wiemar Germany was almost completely on the level comparatively. But both regimes racked up massive body counts, and both did so with intention.

Hanging out with my wife, playing piano, stanning Taylor Swift.

Does not work with any app however the website itself seems to load, old and new

Saying you can't discriminate against trans women because of their "immutable characteristics" is the height of irony.

He sold a significant stake in it at least, reposting my comment from another thread:

I'm confused. I read Neil Young recently sold significant stake in his music catalog to an investment company [1]. Doing something like this pretty much nullifies that investment. Perhaps the particulars of the deal he signed still allows him to do this, in which case the investment company made a bad deal.

If Spotify is just doing this as a courtesy, without full permission from all relevant stake holders, or specific contractual cover, then the investment company should be looking to sue both Neil Young and Spotify.

Surely I'm missing something.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/06/neil-young-sells-50percent-o...

I'm confused. I read Neil Young recently sold significant stake in his music catalog to an investment company [1]. Doing something like this pretty much nullifies that investment. Perhaps the particulars of the deal he signed still allows him to do this, in which case the investment company made a bad deal.

If Spotify is just doing this as a courtesy, without full permission from all relevant stake holders, or specific contractual cover, then the investment company should be looking to sue both Neil Young and Spotify.

Surely I'm missing something.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/06/neil-young-sells-50percent-o...

All those things existed before confiscatory taxes were imposed on basically all forms of economic activity. None have improved while the government has stolen 50%+ of my income. In fact they have universally gotten worse, and still more expensive.

This is just "basic infrastructure as a service", except the only service you're actually getting for your payment is not going to jail. That's called extortion.

How many enduring stars have those talent shows actually produced though? The first season of American Idol got us Kelly Clarkson, who is still well known enough. That was 20 years ago though. Can most people name any other winner of these talent shows?

Meanwhile several massive stars who have become household names (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kesha, Justin Bieber etc.) have arisen more-or-less the old fashioned way; via good marketing and viral music. And then there's Disney (Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Olivia Rodrigo, and Britney ofc, though she's another story...).

None of these stars became big by virtue of having particularly stellar vocals. But their voices were unique and suited to their music (and the likes of Kesha and Bieber made auto-tune part of their signature....what's T-Pain been up to recently?).

Honestly if one is looking to make it big in pop music, they'd be wasting their time participating in any of these talent shows, even if they do win. These days you just start a TikTok account...

I'm not sure raw technical talent in singing or playing was ever particularly emphasized in popular music, rather just a nice perk and fodder for stan wars.

ban dang

I actually feel TNG lost a lot of humor and levity and amusing banter after season 2. I know I'm in an extreme minority when I say I prefer the first two seasons of TNG over the rest. Yes most of the great, classic episodes are from season 3 on, but the filler in between became much less enjoyable. Too serious and dour for the middling forgettable plots being presented. Picard smiled more in the first 2 seasons than the rest combined.

> Most of the Q episodes too

Those were the worst Q episodes though (granted "I am NOT a merry man!" might alone have made Qpid worth it). Q was at his best when he was taken seriously by the crew, not treated as an annoying but harmless diversion.

As far as DS9 ripping off B5, there are some surface level similarities, but in the end the shows and characters and plot are very different and since the usenet wars of the 90s seem like a lifetime ago I think the shows can stand on their own without bringing up JMS's butthurt.

I was more saying that B5 as well did not take itself too seriously in the day-to-day, despite the very serious and deep themes the show explored. That show had plenty of time for stupid jokes and amusing banter. A lot of people found the acting on it to be too cringe/soapy. Well maybe that's why I enjoyed TNG season 1-2 so much...

> DS9 was the darkest

While this is true in many of the plots and themes explored on the show, especially the Dominion War, it by no means meant the show always took itself super seriously. In fact there is much more humor and general levity on DS9 than TNG which felt more stuffy and righteous.

It wasn't outright comedy besides a few episodes (Little Green Men, Our Man Bashir, Take Me Out to the Holosuite, Ferengi episodes), it was natural banter between character pairs (Odo and Quark, Bashir and Garak, Bashir and O'Brien, Worf/Martok/Sisko, Jake and Nog, the entire extended Ferengi family, etc.). Often episodes would be structured with a "serious" A-plot and a more soapy B-plot where most of the shenanigans would take place.

It's part of the reason DS9 felt, to me at least, more real and lived-in than TNG. TNG was promoting an ideology, a religion of sorts. Very aristocratic, many sacred cows. You would not expect humor to show up much for such people. DS9 on the other hand showed people living in a less than ideal situation, dealing with a galactic shitstorm that washed up on their shores. One of the ways real people deal with such situations is humor.

Granted this was the 90s, since 9/11 TV shows, including Star Trek, became more dark for the sake of being dark. Seemed like Archer was torturing people every other episode at times, and I'm not sure he knew how to smile. And for the epitome of "dark and super srs", look no further than nuBSG, where characters could not even take a dump without Irish bagpipe music being played over it.

Yes I miss the 90s. A lot of what I said about DS9 applies to Babylon 5 as well.

Just use nitter.net

Explanation: pretty sure almost nobody read that wall of text, just downvoted and moved on. How long did it take you to write that? Downvoting takes one second and can be done while rolling ones eyes.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Nickelodeon animated TV show, ended after a planned 3 seasons, at the height of its popularity.

And looking at how the spinoffs fared (especially the live-action movie...), it indeed seems like a very good decision.

They are mandatory only in the sense you might get a small fine if you happen to be caught and pulled over without one. You still keep your drivers license, and your car, and your job.

Also you can take the seatbelt off when you get out of the car.

It's still nonsense (click it or ticket laws), but you gotta pick your battles. Though I'm ready to murder the people who invented/mandated "beep incessantly if the seatbelt is not clicked, even if the car is stationary".

128 + 3 in another

Bash. There is no actually used language that can do as much with as few keystrokes, not even perl. Who needs quotes for strings anyways.

I just refresh /newcomments

while :; do make; make clean; done

I don't downvote often, but when I do I downvote dang performing has janny duties. That guy needs a life.

The woman has started watching her YT talking heads at 2x speed, ugh. The only thing more annoying hearing constant idiotic blather is hearing it in chipmunk.

> That's why Taylor Swift has such extensive and stadium sized concerts for example. Assuming she's a normal human being on the road for 9 months straight sounds pretty miserable. The financial return must outweigh it.

For reference, she pulled in $100 million in 2018, the year of her last major concert tour. In 2020 she made just $23.8 million, only 10 of which was from streaming [1]. She is consistently one of the top streamed artists in the world, and was ranked as the highest paid musician in both 2018 and 2020.

So yes, touring is a huge revenue generator for music artists, even beyond just merch sales. It's even more important for artists that cannot rely on top tier streaming or physical sales numbers.

> it's also shocking to see how large the song writing teams are for certain artists.

When the songwriting and production credits for a track look like a laundry list of names pulled from a hat, that's good evidence of Song Factory writing with little to no involvement from the performing artist. This is very common in the popular music industry but there are exceptions, such as with Taylor Swift. For her and other artists that emphasize "singer-songwriter", you are likely to see only 1 co-writer, whom also serves as producer, for several tracks.

Besides the character of the music itself, this has consequences for compensation, as there are less people to split the earnings to. Then there is masters ownership. One of the reasons Taylor eeked out the top spot for highest paid musician in 2020, is because she now owns the masters to her recent albums (which are also her most streamed). This entitles her to a significantly bigger cut. Most music artists do not own their own masters (on top of often not writing their own songs).

> it's borderline impossible to be "big" without a gigantic team behind you.

This is certainly still true but maybe less so than in the past. At least, artists can "get big" (be discovered) without much of a team because of the likes of streaming and TikTok. Staying big, and musically relevant, probably still does require a big team. Making a living from your music, much less becoming actually rich (and staying that way unlike the likes of M.C. Hammer and TLC), is some kind of voodoo magic.

1. https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/taylor-swift-to...