Mr. Mason

Typically, when CEOs are ousted from the businesses they founded, they go "spend more time" with their families, take up a hobby like yachting or move immediately on to the next company they can try not to drive into the ground. Not so for former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, who was fired earlier this year. Though he's going to join Y Combinator as an advisor, Mr. Mason has another trick up his sleeve: dropping an album, of course.

TechCrunch reports that the daily deals site founder spent a week in L.A. recording "Hardly Workin'," which Mr. Mason describes as "a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce." Sounds like the perfect graduation gift for aunts and uncles to give you that you'll leave stuck between the seats of your parents' SUV.

Mr. Mason told TechCrunch that young people would frequently show up to meetings unarmed with business wisdom. What kind of riffraff would do such a thing? Since business books weren't really their style, he decided to record an album that youngs could make fun of with their friends while getting stoned.

"These songs will help young people understand some of the ideas that I’ve found to be a key part of becoming a productive and effective employee," Mr. Mason told TechCrunch. "I’m really happy with the results and look forward to sharing them as soon as I figure out how to load music onto iTunes, hopefully in the next few weeks."

How long 'til this thing is fully annotated on Rap Genius?

(Photo: Criterion.com)

Character actor and meme muse Steve Buscemi will sit in the director's chair once again. But rather than tackling episodes of shows like 30 Rock and Nurse Jackie, as he has in the past, Mr. Buscemi is heading to the Roseland Ballroom.

Digital Spy reports that Mr. Buscemi has agreed to direct the live stream of a Vampire Weekend concert taking place there on April 28. Apparently, Vampire Weekend's bassist recently discovered Mr. Buscemi is actually a distant cousin.

And with that, all of Brooklyn fell silent in awe.

#nofilter (Photo: Eurweb)

It was only a matter of time before Instagram, the popular photo sharing app purchased by Facebook for $1 billion, was forever immortalized in pop culture through song. Corpulent rapper Fat Joe has finally released the tune we've all been waiting for, delicately titled "Instagram That Hoe."

"Instagram that hoe," he sweetly croons, entrancing people everywhere with his honey-sweet voice and innovative diction:

Instagram that jet (jet), Instagram these kicks (kicks)
Bouve on my wrist, Instagram that bitch
Instagram that track (track), Instagram these racks (racks)
Fell up off that balcony ass, so fetch your bounce right back
I got hoes off of my roader, bracelet all on my ankle
Fuck parole and strip a pole, I love them hoes to their ankle
Instagram that hoe (hoe), Instagram her mama
Instagram that bitch on the top of the whip while she giving me knowledge

We humbly suggest that this musical masterpiece be named the theme song of Rich Kids of Instagram, stat.

(h/t The Daily Dot)

Mr. Braun did not wear a Mickey Mouse shirt.

Betabeat arrived at Google's Big Tent event at the Skylight West building just in time for the Trends and Transformations in Music panel. Moderated by Billboard editorial director Bill Werde, the topic du jour was how the Internet and social media have ushered in a new era of music production.

In attendance were Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino and none other than Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber's talent manager and the man credited with discovering America's favorite heartthrob. (Sadly, there appeared to be zero Beliebers in the audience, as no piercing screams rang out during the program.)

Mr. Werde kicked off the panel with a raucous slide deck, promising to only curse a few times during the panel after informing the audience that, "When the digital revolution happened, the music industry was the first one to shit the bed." Can't say he isn't honest.

After a conversation with Julia Nunes, a ukulele player who got her start on YouTube, Misters Braun and Rapino took the stage to discuss how their industries--record lable management and concert promotion, respectively--have shifted with the advent of social media.

Mr. Rapino argued that the Internet has actually been greatly beneficial to the concert promotion business, because it allows people to connect with music and bands in ways they couldn't before. "The Internet is the greatest thing to ever happen to live music," he said. "Social media is the greatest thing to ever happen to the concert business." Given his enthusiasm, perhaps Mr. Rapino should consider signing up for the Internet defense league.

"The way I look at the Internet is different than the way the media describes the social revolution," Mr. Braun chimed in. "The way I look at it is: it saved me a lot of time. I look at social media as a way to interact on an intimate, one-on-one basis."

Mr. Braun argued that creating that genuine connection between fan and artist is what makes artists successful, and without social media that connection wouldn't be possible.

"How many of you in the audience think Justin Bieber is manufactured?" he boldly asked. A bunch of hands timidly went into the air. "That is what I have to battle every day, because people assume success on a major scale is manufactured," he admitted. "But what I'm trying to make people understand with the Internet is if it is manufactured, you have no chance. [The fans] see everything."

Mr. Braun also didn't hold back when it came to his opinions on the old school industry bigwigs. "I think the only reason the music industry is slow is because you have people who are older who don’t wanna lose their jobs, who don’t what they’re doing," he confidently told the ground. "And I’m probably going to get into a lot of trouble for saying it, but I don’t give a fuck."

Say what you will about Mr. Braun, but his swag is pretty self-evident.

Take "emo," for example. Is most music not inherently emotional? (It is.) And yet, someone decided that something was "emo," and so it was, because we're all idiots. Or "indie." How can a band be independent ("indie") of anything when they are already a group of people aligned with each other? Or, for that matter, signed to a record label?

They can't, but because English-speaking human beings are creatures who care not for the beauty and brilliance of language so much as the convinence of what Orwell rightly predicted with the advent of Newspeak only a little over half a decade ago, Hipster Runoff—at its best, an unimpeachable satire on contemporary youth culture—was able to create "Chillwave" and get every music writer on the planet (including one at the New York Times) to use it, which is to say nothing of "Witch House" and furthermore, "Rape-Gaze."

And so we arrive at the juncture wherein someone has taken it upon themselves to devote time and intellectual capacity to a page on Wikipedia documenting "Tumblr-Wave," a genre that takes its name from that of the microblogging platform adored by melodramatic teenagers and incestuous media types everywhere.

Yes. This is something:

Forget the fact that plenty of artists prior to the three that the creator of this page singled out have strewn their music with references to Tumblr long before this, and that those same artists have often "allude[d]" to "90s culture and pop culture" in their music, and all of the people who also make music with Macbooks—the specificity of which is admittedly hilarious—and synthesizers (which is in all likelihood redundant, save the few fans of these artists who know what a real synthesizer actually is, but it might not be).

You can even forget the fact that proper nouns really have no place in genre-naming unless we're talking about the various movements of great late 20th century ice cream artisans.

And still, the reality of the painful realization that someone was stupid enough to make "Tumblr-Gaze" manifest in the form of that I'm-Beginning-To-Question-The-Beauty-Of-Its-Democratic-Nature human endeavor Wikipedia is simply that this must be the work of a sole madman or madwoman, a rogue etymological terrorist who must be stopped, and easily can.

As such, this writer endorses the unequivicoal deleting of "Tumblr-Gaze" from human existence, save that screengrab, which could serve as a lesson to us all about the way stupid ideas can hatch into things that burst from the chest of collective human intelligence like an alien bent on killing all aboard the spaceship of modern civilization's progress.

UPDATE: It appears someone has already started The Work to Be Done.

Godspeed them.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

That cord = digital crow's feet. (Photo: flickr.com/philomglol

Damn, we feel old: Did you guys realize that iTunes debuted in 2003, which is now almost a decade ago? That's practically a glacial age in technology, and in the era of Spotify, the software is starting to show its age.

Lest the program find itself suddenly in the dustbin of cultural history--Winamp-style--Apple reportedly plans to do a bit of sprucing up. Bloomberg says a major overhaul is scheduled to debut sometime before the end of the year. 

Sources tell Bloomberg that the revamp is designed to make music and other content more easily accessible across a variety of Apple devices, which is great news for those of us who haven't seen our iPod update cords in months. To that end, Apple is better integrating iTunes with iCloud.

Then there's a bit of here's-mud-in-yer-eye for Spotify:

One of the main ways Apple will attempt to improve discovery is by making it easier for people to share songs, a popular feature of Spotify Ltd.’s music-subscription service. Apple has been negotiating with major record labels for rights that would let a user listen to a song sent to them from a friend for free, one person said.

Remember myTunes, anyone? That made sharing super easy.

Mr. Dotcom performing "Megaupload Mega Song"

Hot on the heels of his celebrity-crammed hit track "Megaupload Mega Song," Megaupload founder and 50 Cent aficionado Kim Dotcom is releasing an album, according to TorrentFreak.

Mr. Dotcom had his bail limits modified today and has been granted Internet access, as well as permission to make two trips a week to a recording studio in Auckland, where he can continue to work on an album featuring "several international artists."

Megaupload's theme song, which Mr. Dotcom released last December in conjunction with several famous artists including Kanye West, Will.i.am and P.Diddy, has been viewed over 14 million times on YouTube. It's one of those annoyingly catchy jingles that will have you beating your head against the wall while whisper-screaming "MEGAAAAAA" in just a few hours' time.

This mysterious album raises so many questions: Will it sound like the Mega theme song, or will it veer into another genre completely (though we can't really see Mr. Dotcom going the country route); will the album cover feature Mr. Dotcom big pimpin' in a hot tub; and will he be forced to sue himself for hosting it on Megaupload? (So meta.)

The TorrentFreak commenters seem as perplexed as we are about the logistics surrounding purchasing the album.

"If his music ain't free, should we pirate it?" wrote a commenter named Devil's Advocate. "Yes, I know... think of the children."

"Fuck him and the children," responded another anonymous commenter. "I aint buying shit !!!11!!!"

New Megaupload slogan, perhaps?

Not quite, but basically, yes.

Thank you, Matt Langer, for directing us towards one of the most sadistic treatments—"bastardization" is unfair to bastards, here—of the entire genre of rap music, ever, delivered at the hands of a startup rapping about how they'd like some VC money.

And yes, of course they're white.

I know, with lyrics like "I'm gonna make this business grow/All I need is that seed round dough," it's hard to resist. But here's a startup idea: It's called Trepanatr. You install it as a Chrome plugin, and on your iPhone and/or Android device as an app. And every time you watch this video, via the very finest in location-based technology, someone will find you and personally trepan—hence the name, of course—the side of your head.

Want to know how TechCrunch treated this? Of course you do! Not-Michael-Arrington Erick Schoenfeld, show us your discerning and harsh critical eye for what this speaks to for startup culture:

Before you completely dismiss Undrip, Hagen was involved as a co-founder of Zinch, a college admissions matching service, which was sold to Chegg. And at least they are tackling a real problem. Filtering the realtime Twitter stream is something nobody has yet cracked in a satisfying way. If their product is half as slick as their video, it might do okay.

Hm. What we were looking for was something along the lines of "not only is this a great reason to dismiss young people as patently unserious, but while we're at it, this continues to serve as great evidence of just how patently white, male, and socially invalid the Valley and Alley actually are."

Maybe we'll just try Arrington instead:

"There's a guy, actually, his last company just launched at our event, and he's African-American. When he asked to launch -- actually, I think it was the other way around. I think I begged him," Arrington told CNN's Soledad O'Brien.

Um. Okay, one more time. Arrington, give us something good:

there's negative bias in SV. VCs are dying to invest in women & minorities just so they do

Nope! Cutting you off. Because you will continue to provide evidence that this is the only industry where a bunch of guys making a shitty rap video that totally patronizes predominately black music in a predominately facile and stupid way as they beg for money could actually be taken seriously. Which, after this, they no doubt will.

"I've had four reblogs this week, I'll explain/having a hard time adjusting to fame."

He continues:

Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these images and living vicariously through other people’s moments," Drizzy continues. "It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those things. They just emulate. It’s scary man, simulation life that we’re living. It scares me.

The collection of Drizzy-themed Tumblrs (All Things Drake, DrizzyFuckingDrake, FuckYeahDrake, etc) and the 3.9 million followers @drake has amassed on Twitter illustrate the catch-22 social media has led us to: if you have any sort of public persona, you have no choice but to play the game.

"It’s basically, like, when you used to sit there as a kid, and want to know what everyone is thinking. That’s your superpower. [Twitter is] knowing what everyone is thinking,” he said.

Drake fans had mixed reactions. "That's real as fuck," said one on the rapper's Blogger-hosted blog. "Its scary. I almost just copy-and-pasted this into my status but I realized that what I was doing embodied exactly what is ruining this generation," said another. And in The Source's comments: "Get off Tumblr's dick, Drake! We're building a community over there!"

Want Drake's new album? Thank him later. When you buy it.

So: a music artist--say, the most famous half-Jewish, half-black, all-Canadian former DeGrassi star (who also happens to be really, really good friends with Lil' Wayne) in the universe—spends all kinds of time working on the follow-up to his major label debut, which was widely perceived to be an ambitious-yet-rushed effort to capitalize on his quickly rising fame. Fans eagerly await the new album as singles trickle out and release dates get pushed back. Finally, after months of hot-and-heavy press anticipation, the album is unleashed onto the public...via a leaked copy on the internet, over a week ahead of time.

While sympathy for millionaire rappers like Drake—whose forthcoming album Take Care leaked last night—might be in short supply, put yourself in their platinum-selling shoes: How can that not be a frustrating experience? All the work put into it by the artist, the producers, all the coordination of press and marketing and carefully curated buildup goes out the window and is tested by an unplanned early fire sprung by who or what knows.

But look at how Drake reacted.

At first, resignation mixed with hints of graciousness:

And then, the suggestion of humility, ever-so-slight guilting, but in the end, a positive outlook:

How is Drake playing it so cool? Shouldn't he be outraged? Maybe—representatives for Drake declined to comment on the leak—but the fact is that others in his spot could use a lesson from the guy, who's managed to keep his cool in situations past just like this one.*

At this point, album leaks are something many an artist is simply prepared for now: Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—whose last album leaked a full two months ahead of the scheduled release date—was simply resigned to her experience. She found out her album was everywhere (long before it should be anywhere) not front her label, but a friend from another band whose albums have leaked, Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, who—when his own album leaked—canceled the official release and raged on his blog about it:

Fuck this shit. I can just make another album. It’s not finished and now it never will be. It was also going to have a rad cover. i would describe it to you but that would be stupid. P.S. there are no vocals on Quick Canal. I never got the chance to record them.

Cox eventually relented, apologized for the raging, and took full responsibility for the error. Sometimes it isn't even remotely the artist's fault, though (Karen O attributed the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' leak to a "production-related thing"), and sometimes the frustration of having an album leak can develop complexities of its own when other artists get in on the leak to the betterment of the release. For example, Pitchfork told Karen O that Kanye West had posted one of her songs on his own blog, an incredible exposure for anyone no matter how famous (West, of course, raged when one of his own tracks leaked last year, cancelling a weekly music series in light of the intrusion).

As simply sitting around and rage at the internet doesn't help anyone, artists and labels then have to move quickly, finding a way to make the best out of a bad situation. British band Los Campesinos' album recently leaked, prompting the band to get in touch directly with fans over Twitter: those who emailed them a proof of purchase would receive an exclusive link to an official download. They then—as many a band have—opted to give a stream of the album to a high-profile media outlet, which dilutes the power of the leak and helps the band with press exposure. This all goes without mentioning the more conspiratorial side of album leaks which suggests that artists leak their own albums, because the royalties they receive from album sales are marginal in comparison to the buzz an album leak can supply towards bolstering their other revenue streams (like touring).

But assuming that isn't the case, is there any way to realistically combat album leaks? Is there any way to fight against the torrent of BitTorrent streams and plethora of cloud-download sites (all of which can be crawled with a simple FilesTube search?).

Sure. An associated act of Drake, Toronto R & B crooner The Weeknd, releases his albums for free, without a label, with little advance notice. His last album, the much-anticipated Thursday—wasn't released by anyone but the artist himself, who clearly kept those surrounding the production of the album to a minimum. Jay-Z—who once stabbed a guy for bootlegging his album—managed to keep one of the highest-profile releases of the year, his collaboration with Kanye West Watch The Throne, from leaking by keeping it under lock-and-key, with the artist at all times up to the release date, and eschewing the typical routine of sending out advance press copies for review.

Whether or not the cost of fighting an album leak outweighs potential benefits of this stripe of crisis is the kind of ongoing battle that likely falls more to the labels who handle these albums and profit from their sales than the majority of artists who don't have the means or career infrastructure to prevent their albums from getting out ahead of time. At this point, however, a leak is almost an inevitable crisis, and the options that remain for all involved becomes less one of plugging the hole than finding the best way to let the water in.

It's a spin on the old adage: leaks are less about what happened to artists, and more, now, how they react to it. Drake's clearly got this thing down.

*H/T to @RockabyeReview.