Ambient legend Brian McBride, one half of Stars of the Lid, passed away this week. Pitchfork has a great primer on his work — a perfect soundtrack if you want your workday to sound a little bit more sublime.
The factory works under a method called “cellular manufacturing” where one person “handles production from raw parts to packaging,” as reported by Bloomberg. The plant is also designed to accommodate workers with disabilities.
The company’s music head, Ole Obermann, talked to Semafor about how that’ll work:
“The music that gets served up to you in terms of recommendations in TikTok Music will be heavily influenced by what we already know about your musical tastes through TikTok ... you could also be in TikTok Music with a playlist of your favorite songs, and then, say, go make a video using a particular song as the soundtrack.”
The service has already debuted in Indonesia and Brazil and is going to expand “eventually.”
Taylor Swift fans have been figuring out how to max out photo and video quality at the Eras Tour since it began — the only restriction is that you can’t bring a camera with a removable lens, so it’s like a little puzzle for photo nerds. There was a wave of point-and-shoot interest, then there was a period where renting Samsung phones just for the periscope zoom was in vogue — but here we have the current peak: Dominic says he took a Sony RX10 IV and set it to shoot jpgs in the fastest burst mode, which captures 24 still frames per second for about 10 seconds at a time. A little Premiere work later, and you have the highest-resolution Eras Tour video anyone’s shot yet.
Summer 2023: thousands of a people scream-sung a meme song at a Jonas Brothers show.
For no reason other than I immediately thought of it when Planet of the Bass landed, I implore you to watch (or re-watch) Elektronik Supersonik by Santo Cilauro (AKA Zlad), a YouTube classic.
But I won’t make you watch the original 17-year-old upload — I mean, you can if you want — instead, I present it here in crispy HD.
The Internet Archive’s Great 78 project launched in 2017 and streams thousands of digitized 78rpm discs and cylinder recordings for free. Now music labels, including Universal, Sony, and Concord, are suing, citing 2,749 sound-recording copyrights they say it’s infringed and pointing to the Music Modernization Act of 2018 (via Reuters).
They’re pursuing damages of up to $412 million, while the Archive is also battling book publishers in court over its National Emergency Library program.
For more information on the Music Modernization Act, check out this episode of The Vergecast.
