HOT: A Fab Streaming Christmas
After apparently realizing some money was being left on the table by not having music on streaming services, hundreds of songs by The Beatles popped up on Spotify, Apple Music and several other platforms just after midnight on Christmas Eve. If The Beatles, who were also late to the CD and legal-download revolutions, were interested in courting a young audience to carry its legacy (and cash flow) into the future, it appears to have worked — after two days of streaming, Spotify reported that 65 percent of Beatles listeners were under 34.
As audiophiles will agree, this is the ONLY way to listen to The Beatles; listen to the warmth of that "CA-CHUNK":
WARM: Vinyl for Pennies?
Columbia House, the company that destroyed the credit ratings of numerous young people by offering 12 CDs (or, at one point, cassettes, 8-tracks and vinyl records) for a penny (or an entire dollar) and then requiring marked-up “regular-price” purchases be made, is coming back. After shutting down the business in August, the company was bought at auction by John Lippman, who told the Wall Street Journal he plans to re-launch the mail-order service to sell vinyl records. Exact plans were not revealed, but if he uses the old Columbia House bait-and-switch formula, collection agencies will be salivating.
COLD: Don’t Hate Him Because He’s Beautiful
Enrique Iglesias has learned at least two things in his career — trying to catch a drone is not a good idea and women are going to throw their undergarments at him. But he probably never imagined that a country’s president would chastise the latter practice, as Sri Lanka’s president Maithripala Sirisena did in response to Iglesias’ Dec. 20 concert there. The prez was outraged that female fans could so easily fling bras onto the stage (he also wasn’t pleased that alcohol was served and that fans were able to climb onstage and kiss the singer), suggesting the promoters should be “beaten with toxic stingray tails,” referring to an ancient punishment practice in the country. Coincidentally, Sri Lanka is one of the prime exporters of lingerie for companies like Victoria Secret.
Conclusive evidence of the eroded morality of an entire nation:
