Nura, playing alongside fellow service members during the show’s Veterans Week, raised eyebrows and the wrath of Twitter when she guessed “Z”, “X” and then just didn’t even call out any letters. Looks like she wanted the others to go home with a win and some money in their pockets.
THAT, right there, is awesome.
“If you think about it, the majority of victims last night are music fans. This is the first direct hit on music that we’ve had in this so called war-on-terror or whatever it’s called. It’s very upsetting. These are our people… I think music is very important. I think U2 has a role to play and I can’t wait till we get back to Paris and play and that’s what I’m feeling from the messages we’re receiving from music fans is these people will not set our agenda. They will not organize our lives for us… You’re not gonna turn us into haters or you’re not gonna turn us around in the way we go about our lives.” – Bono, U2
Spotify’s deep reservoir of listener data provides a wealth of insights about behaviors and preferences that can inform not only how to be a better platform for consumers, but also how to achieve infinitely better results for advertisers. In this presentation from hivio 2015, the audio future festival, Brian Benedik, Spotify’s VP and Global Head of Ad Monetization, reveals some of those amazing insights.
From Mark Ramsey: What if music genres are a lot less important to how listeners tune in music than “use case” moments? That is, what if what you want to do while you’re listening is more important than the genre you are listening to?
That’s just one insight from Spotify’s deep dive into their massive dataset.
Think about the implications of that for a moment. It suggests that you should spend less time trumpeting your genre and more time trumpeting the moments that your genre is suited for in the lives of your listeners.
“Take It Easy” was written by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey, and most famously recorded by the Eagles (with Frey singing lead vocals). It was the band’s first single, released on May 1, 1972. It peaked at #12 on the July 22, 1972 Billboard Hot 100 chart, spending 11 weeks on the chart that summer, after debuting at #79 on June 3. It also was the opening track on the band’s debut album Eagles and it has become one of their signature songs, included on all of their live and compilation albums. Jackson later recorded the song as the lead track on his second album, For Everyman (1973), and released it as a single as well, although it did not chart.
https://youtu.be/s-aa6d7CKko
This past April, CBC Music spoke with Buffy Sainte-Marie before the release of her phenomenal new record, Power in the Blood. CBC’s John Fraser has illustrated and animated one particularly powerful quote about stereotyping.
You’ve described yourself as very shy when you were younger. How do you think shyness affects creative people?
Richard Thompson: It’s a funny thing. I can never tell who’s shy and who isn’t. Danny Thompson, a bass player I’ve worked with, will say, “I’m really quite a shy person.” What? He’s always the loudest person in the room!
A lot of shy people end up on stage. Being on stage has done me a lot of good. It took me a long time—I used to kind of hide in the back. Even though you’re shy, there’s this thing in you that wants to get up there. I remember being six years old and getting up at a party and singing something. This is me, a kid with a bad stutter, but somehow I get up on stage and do this.
Via Mother Jones
In 1996, David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest was a critical and popular success. The new movie The End of The Tour recreates the author’s tour for that book. This NPR interview was originally broadcast March 5, 1997.
“A lot of the impetus for writing “Infinite Jest” was just the fact that I was about 30 and I had a lot of friends who were about 30, and we’d all, you know, been grotesquely over-educated and privileged our whole lives and had better healthcare and more money than our parents did. And we were all extraordinarily sad. I think it has something to do with being raised in an era when really the ultimate value seems to be – I mean a successful life is – let’s see, you make a lot of money and you have a really attractive spouse or you get infamous or famous in some way so that it’s a life where you basically experience as much pleasure as possible, which ends up being sort of empty and low-calorie. But the reason I don’t like talking about it discursively is it sounds very banal and cliche, you know, when you say it out loud that way. Believe it or not this was – this came as something of an epiphany to us at around age 30, sitting around, talking about why on earth we were so miserable when we’d been so lucky.”
This fascinating 1958 documentary titled “How Film Is Made”, documents the production process and birth of photographic and cinematic film, was initially uncovered as part of a heritage in the Netherlands. Although its exact source and purpose are as of yet still unknown, it may have been an instructional film for new employees at Kodak’s factories world wide, and was probably used as a promotional film for the general public as well. It’ll make you long for the days when you snapped a photo and had to send it away and wait a week to get back.
After Chelsea’s last match of the season, Josh Turnbull, a little boy takes a soccer ball and runs as fast as he can towards the goal. When the crowd notices him, they start to cheer him on as if it’s championship match. Nice one.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, from Seinfeld and Veep, cursing on the set of Sesame Street in front of Elmo and Zoe. What the Muppets do next are awesome.
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Eric Alper is a 6-time nominee for Publicist of the Year during Canadian Music Week and has overseen the publicity campaigns for over 183 JUNO Award-nominated albums (and 16 in 2025), 45 Grammy-nominated albums, including 47 JUNO Award, 58 Canadian Folk Music Award, 126 Maple Blues Award-winning albums and is also truly honoured to work with some of the biggest and most important artists of our time.
Contact me: eric@thatericalper.com
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