HOT: Ice Cream as Hate Crime
After a group aiming to ban abortion in Ireland co-opted his 2012 track “Small Bump” for its campaign, Ed Sheeran was forced to come out and say that the meaning of the song (about a friend’s miscarriage) was being misrepresented and that he’d not given permission for such use. But Sheeran’s denouncement may have just been deflection from his part in some genuine evil that came to light shortly before. An Irish ice cream shop developed a flavor based on what is apparently one of Sheeran’s passions — ketchup (he has a Heinz tattoo?!). The (gag) ketchup (gag) ice cream (gag) — which was served with a (gag) ketchup (gag) sauce on top — was mercifully only offered for a limited time. Shop owners gave it away for free to those attending Sheeran’s recent concert in Dublin.
WARM: YouTube Pushes Music (Again)
YouTube has stepped up its role in the battle for music streaming supremacy. Given that most use it to stream music for free, the video site was the loudest voice against Billboard’s recent chart changes (which give paid streams more weight in chart positioning). YouTube is giving subscriptions another push with two new paid tiers, YouTube Premium (more generally focused, like the previous YouTube Red) and YouTube Music, which, for $10 a month, allows users to stream unlimited ad-free music, with its AI-powered algorithms for search and recommendations alleged to be the service’s edge over the competition. Another nice component/smart PR move — YouTube is rolling out expanded credits on all music videos posted to the site.
COLD: Music is Sadder?
Apparently having The Smiths in the ’80s and the omnipresence of Pharrell’s “Happy” in more recent years didn’t balance out the overall mood-swing of Pop music in that time span. Researchers at University of California in Irvine discovered that popular music has gotten sadder over the past 30 years. The study looked at 500,000 songs released between 1985 and 2015, deciphering moods and descriptors for each. Though the researchers reported “happiness” (represented, for example, by songs like Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”) has gone down and “sadness” (as heard in Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me”) has gone up, they also found that song attributes like “danceable” and “party-like” have gone up, suggesting the real news is that hedonism has completely overtaken society.
This article appears in May 16-23, 2018.