as a listener, and as a fan of music, i feel like my experience is also being fucked up by the way the industry is right now.

We hate most in others that which we fail to see in ourselves.

Again, if you simply prefer the music of the early ’90′s, or more likely, that just happens to be the period in which you had a moment self of discovery (musical and otherwise) before real world circumstances beat it out of you, no problem. But blogs in general (or Pitchfork in particular) are a pretty convenient boogeyman compared to the public’s rotten taste and/or lazy music fans who’ve just fucking given up.

Paul is the perfect artist for a time when breathlessly reporting every step of a promotional campaign is prioritised over - or conflated with - actually assessing the art. Sure, most sites technically keep their news and reviews sections separate - but in the grand scheme of promo, this matters not a jot. The Paris Hiltonesque maxim that all that matters is that people are talking about you, not what they're actually saying, holds true across the board: in a crowded musical marketplace, repeated neutral mentions of an artist from a trusted source may not be an explicit recommendation, but they're more valuable than an averagely complimentary three-star review.

This week's sensationalist reframing of a nuanced profile of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon to focus entirely upon her split from Thurston Moore, writes Paul Tucker, cast light on a wider problem.

At some point, employers will have to face up to the unavoidability of hiring people whose first Google image is a shirtless selfie. Demographics will demand it. They’ll have to get used to it just as surely as they’ll have to get used to nose rings and, god help us, neck tattoos. It’s a shame, though, that it’ll be compulsory and reluctant. We should no more have to censor our electronic conversations than whisper in a restaurant. I suspect that as my own generation and the one after it finally manage to boot the Boomers from their tenacious hold on the steering wheel of this civilization that they’ve piloted ineluctably and inexorably toward the shoals, all the while whining about the lazy passengers, we will better understand this, and be better, and more understanding. And I hope that the kids today will refuse to heed the warnings and insist on making a world in which what is actually unacceptable is to make one’s public life little more than series of polite and carefully maintained lies.

An account by Justin Falcone of our week at the Tribeca Film Institute Storytelling Innovation Lab hackathon.

Matthew is a serious PHP expert who loves pushing code. Matthew is a Friday hacker who seems to work best in the morning.

Everyone appreciates the labor; they just don't think it changes everything.

Hackathons can spur creativity, can inspire a concerted amount of development effort on a focused project for a short period of time, and can increase attention to a critical issue. For people who feel disaffected and hopeless, a hackathon can rekindle a sense of creativity and possibility. But the tangible products of a hackathon (hardware, software) are rarely of adequate quality for real-world use.

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

Looking expectantly at the rest of the world to validate your interests, hobbies or art is a set-up to feel bad, to brood and be jaded that you are not understood. You need to reprogram your relationship with money as a creative person, because the one you have is like a hex. You need to grow-up your success dream and stop this focus on how it'll make you feel better.

Detective work regarding the mysterious Bandcamp-released ‘Jai Paul’. To me, it sounds like a collection of demos, the majority unreleased. The record was rumoured to be called Rayners Lane, which wouldn’t fit in with the self-titling of this album. It doesn’t sound like a huge budget XL album release, and would appear to be a mixtape, rather than a fully formed album. Despite Paul’s unusual way of approaching promotion, it would be very unlike XL to allow any artist to put out a record in such a colossally understated manner.The bitrates are hugely variable, particularly on the skits of which many seem to cut short (track 8), which wouldn’t fit with it being a proper album release.

There are all kinds of files. A song is just a file, as is a book, and so is a movie. People have been pointing this out for years, usually to explain piracy. For a long time, folks were gnashing their teeth and wailing that no one would pay for anything on the Internet ever; it was just too easy to steal. They went from renting their garments to renting out music. As solutions emerge, and marketplaces for licenses emerge, you have to wonder if new kinds of media will remain part of the free, “remix” culture of the Internet, or if they’ll want to participate in a for-pay market. Maybe the reason so much great creative work on the Internet is free is that it’s been too hard to charge. A Pandora, but for podcasts! A Spotify for funny animal videos! Once the framework is in place, the pitches will come. Then the licensing can start. After all, they’re just files.

Bitcoins appear, for the moment, at least, to be immune to the machinations of inept or crooked bankers and politicians…

Up until very recently, I'd recount my online experiences with some degree of shame or sheepishness, but in this apocalyptic year of 2012, that embarrassment is beginning to fall by the wayside. I've been having more and more conversations with people grappling with what is gained and lost by how some of our most meaningful musical discoveries-- not to mention life experiences-- have happened in front of, or facilitated by, screens. We're starting to come to terms with the fact that modern life is a constant, awkward/elegant oscillation between the digital and physical, faces and FaceTime, and we're starting to hear music that reflects this reality, the beginnings of a new ordinary.

Absurd, absurdist, and in its own elliptical way, one of the biggest influences on comedy today. Meet the unwitting pioneers behind the internet's dumbest revolution.

The old Google made a fortune on ads because they had good content. It was like TV used to be: make the best show and you get the most ad revenue from commercials. The new Google seems more focused on the commercials themselves.

the statement “it’s clearly satire” is never true, and can never be true. If satire depends on context, audience, intention, and reception—and I put it to you that it does—then it’s impossible to say, of a tweet like the infamous Onion tweet last week, that it’s “clearly satire.” If you don’t take it as satire, it isn’t. Satire is like shooting an apple off someone’s head. If you do it right, it’s pretty cool and no harm done; if you do it wrong, telling people what you meant to do is beside the point, and no one will care. It either works or it doesn’t. And if you hurt someone while doing it, claiming that it was really satire is just special pleading, demanding that your speech-act doesn’t have to abide by the normal rules.

Listen, either you know nothing about the HRC and you posted the photo without bothering to ask any questions about what actual cause you were supporting: disturbing. Or you actually do know about the HRC, and its policies, and you posted the photo anyway: more disturbing. Either way, the net effect is the same: the alignment between the HRC and the “gay rights” movement is solidified, attention and funding is directed towards the HRC and away from organizations that actually support coalitional politics, and yes, one more step is taken—away from the possibility of actual social change for those populations (undocumented immigrants, transgendered youth, the thousands of black and Latino men targeted daily by the prison industrial complex, for instance) that are actually in material need.

“Harlem Shake,” was a meme made by an amateur, George Miller, but its rapid replication was driven by media and marketing professionals, led and orchestrated by three companies: Maker Studios, Mad Decent, and IAC.

Without some sort of personal framework for approaching music, and expectations for what you think music should and shouldn’t be doing, there wouldn’t be much point in engaging it. And as pop and indie and hip-hop and R&B and metal all currently share a pretty close-knit territory, defining what you stand for might be the best preparation for the looming fallout from those who too often let us know what they are against.

YouTube crushing everything does seem like a concern. I love novelty songs, I ride hard for novelty songs—but if, suddenly, all our big hits are goofy YouTube-incubated one-offs, the novelty song will cease to be novel.

When there is an influx of content, criticism, information, details, write-ups, reviews, and analyses to be read, it can greatly impede the progress and expansion of art. Suddenly, without even realizing it, it is seven hours later, all you’ve done is read reviews, then you’ve read reviews of reviews, and your mind is so gone that the only thing you know you can do is to pick up that guitar and let out the emotion through your fingers and onto the fretboard, whaling on it until you’re revived enough to return to the digital world.

Overwhelmed by information yet encouraged by that very fact to regard ourselves as nothing but information, we become alive to the danger of being diluted to insignificance.

(UPDATED) By David Macias, president of Nashville based label services company Thirty Tigers. Much of the recent discourse about the music business reminds me of listening to partisan political commentators. Continue reading

In 2012, attempts to stay ahead of readers' innate desires resulted in a collective throwing up of hands. Think pieces and reviews still existed, but they were accompanied by other attempts to lure readers: Trifles like album titles and track listings treated as news items worthy of their own "stories" (to maximize the possibility of people tripping over their fingers and into a unique view); artists out of the public spotlight for more than six months unearthed as if they were creatures from another dimension; Tweets and other public statements by artists taken out of context and drained of their tone so as to stoke "WTF" headlines; superlative-laden lists not even aimed at expressing an opinion in count-downable form; posts with factual errors seen as hits to institutional credibility and opportunities to wring double the traffic out of one story.

ViolentAcrez is a deplorable guy. But he is honest in his ugly behavior. Nick Denton, in contrast, is a deeply unprincipled person who has meticulously crafted a veneer of respectability and outlaw journalism. I am, frankly, terrified of Reddit and the whole dark side of Internet practice that exists on forums and message boards. But it is a culture of open depravity. Gawker, and the larger scene of elite New York media it exemplifies, are something more devious, something more dangerous.

Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life. Swartz was a passionate eccentric who could have been one of the great innovators and creators of our future. Now we will never know.