talich 闲侃

I was assigned as a K-pop reporter in late 2018 and had little knowledge about the fandoms prior to that point. But what I've learned over the years is that they are largely progressive & politically aware, on top of their next-level dedication & organization skills.

K-pop stans have been donating to charities & raise awareness of social issues online for a while now

One of the reasons why I think many people are surprised by how political of K-pop stans is the overall media coverage and dismissive/skewed views of K-pop on platforms like YouTube, both left and right.

Though it's getting better among entertainment-focused publications, many Western media outlets still see K-pop from the Western gaze, perpetuating exhausting tropes like it's "government propaganda," if not busy focusing on the dark side like suicides and sex crimes.

And I say all this to say that, despite the bad rep, K-pop fans are a pretty smart and social-media savvy bunch and I'm just glad to see them finally getting the recognition they deserve.

https://twitter.com/hyunsuinseoul/status/1268520592354897920

When the coronavirus pandemic forced millions of musicians into their homes, JamKazam’s free monthly sessions jumped to 135,000. In the first week of April alone, that number grew by another 100,000.

JamKazam, which allows musicians to perform together over the Internet, has seen its free monthly sessions jumped 2,600%.

JamKazam -- like most of its competitors, some of which are open-source -- is free, although it charges $1.99-$2.99 for JamTracks, or pre-recorded instrumentals used for playing along with cover songs. The JamKazam team has been expanding functionality due to the recent demand, planning a feature for remote bands to live-stream their performance to a webpage and sell tickets via online retailers.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/tech/9355957/band-practice-coronavirus-jamkazam-app-self-isolation

Many of the titles Dover published—both new and old—were risky for the same reason they were potentially-profitable: they were often on niche topics, but that meant they were highly-desirable to people interested in those niche topics. For artists, crafters, and scholars, the Dover catalog was the only place that they could purchase vital texts at an accessible price point.

The venture was a success and a business model he would follow going forward: looking for materials whose copyright had expired and publishing them under the Dover imprint.

Dover’s editors never revealed the secrets of exactly where or how they found the originals to reproduce, though editor Stanley Appelbaum recounts borrowing a “priceless” manuscript from a private library, personally escorting it to the photographer, and returning it the same day.

Dover also helped to give the paperback a new meaning by enlarging the size, using fine paper, stitching the binding, laminating the cover with cellophane, and declaring on the back cover: “This is a permanent book.”

Dover was still a profitable company when Hayward Cirker died in 2000.

After Cirker’s death, however, the company was quickly bought by the Courier Corporation. Courier was in turn bought by RR Donnelly in 2015, and when RR Donnelly split into three entities the next year, Dover fell within the umbrella of LSC Communications. On November 12, 2019, Newsday published a business short announcing that half of Dover’s last 50 employees would be laid off at the Mineola headquarters.

LSC Communications is a marketing service, and it has made clear it intends to make the current fad of adult coloring books the main focus of its Dover enterprise.

https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/02/23/this-is-a-permanent-book/

As Korea's only studio with foreign direct distribution, CJ has released more than 140 movies in the U.S. and more than 50 elsewhere, and it possesses a massive library of feature, scripted and unscripted IP. (CJ is producing Bong's Parasite limited series with HBO and Adam McKay.)

"Our generation, even down to Bong Joon Ho's generation, call ourselves Hollywood kids, because we were constantly fed with this content," Miky Lee says. "I felt like America really had the freedom of a wide range of creativity."

CJ was founded in 1953 by Lee's grandfather Lee Byung-chul as a sugar and flour manufacturing division of his expanding trading company, Samsung.

Meanwhile, Lee was gravitating toward the humanities, studying language and linguistics at top universities in Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Fluent in Korean, English, Mandarin and Japanese, she then attended Harvard for her master's in Asian studies, where she discovered a knack for teaching and an interest in introducing Korean culture to her Korean American students, who had assimilated to the ways of the West.

In late 1994, Lee was working in Samsung America's new-business division when a lawyer with whom the company often worked called with an investment proposition: "Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg are going to build a studio. Is Samsung interested?"

Lee put together a deal and took it to her brother, who agreed: CJ (which was in the midst of spinning off from Samsung as an independent entity) would invest $300 million to help launch DreamWorks, taking a 10.8 percent stake and distribution rights to its films in Asia (excluding Japan).

For CJ, the DreamWorks deal marked its sudden arrival as an entertainment player.

To transition into media, CJ first had to build the country's entertainment industry essentially from scratch. "Our plan was to package the high-powered DreamWorks content with Korean local content."

In 1998, CJ opened Korea's first multiplex, and today its cinema affiliate CJ CGV is the country's largest chain, holding about 50 percent of the market.

With the construction of its first cinema, the company created a fund to support domestic filmmakers. CGV's arrival coincided with the rise of a generation of Korean auteurs like Bong, Park and Kim Jee-woon

Lee had similar ambitions to turn K-pop music into a globally popular genre. Although K-pop artists now regularly tour around the world, many international fans got their first live experience with them through KCON, Lee's brainchild. BTS, the leading K-pop act, played its second-ever U.S. show at KCON 2014.

"Parasite is not a global film in terms of casting, but it's about the issue that everybody's facing now," says Lee, adding that the universal theme of the need for "basic human respect" represents the kind of cross-cultural content she wants to focus on in the future. "I'm happy to be the bridge. Just walk over me. As long as you cross my body bridge, it means we are all successful."

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/meet-important-mogul-south-korean-entertainment-1275756

Even so, to a degree unmatched by any jazz label since Alfred Lion's Blue Note, ECM reflects the tastes of one person, Manfred Eicher.

Blue Note embodied the hip modern jazz of the New York scene; ECM has presented a headier, in some ways more European perspective.

"Miles Davis' Kind of Blue was the jazz album that captured my attention," he said in an email interview from his office in Munich. "Previously, most of my listening had been to classical music. Hearing Miles and Coltrane and Bill Evans and Paul Chambers changed my priorities."

Well into his 20s, Eicher pursued a career as a musician, but in the late 1960s he worked as a production assistant on some studio recordings by Deutsche Grammophon, learning lessons from the engineers about microphone use and editing. He produced a couple of jazz records for a small label, then took out a loan, for the equivalent of $4000, from a record-shop owner to start his own company—which he called Edition of Contemporary Music, soon abbreviated as ECM.

The label's breakthrough came in 1971, when Eicher produced Facing You, a solo piano album by Keith Jarrett. (It was recorded in Oslo, where Jarrett was touring with Miles Davis's band.) Soon after, Jarrett signed a contract with Columbia, but then, in 1973, in an astonishing move, since dubbed "The Great Purge" and "Bad Day at Black Rock," Columbia dropped Monk, Mingus, Evans, Ornette Coleman, and Jarrett all on the same day. Eicher wrote Jarrett again, offering to sign him to ECM. Jarrett agreed, on the condition that he could do whatever he wanted. Eicher, of course, assented.

A source of Eicher's success is that he notices musicians who have escaped the attention of other producers and welcomes risks that others eschew. In 1978, he produced Steve Reich's minimalist breakthrough, Music for 18 Musicians, after Deutsche Grammophon took a pass, then went on to produce several more Reich albums. In 1980, while driving from Stuttgart to Zurich, he heard a piece of music on the radio unlike anything he'd heard before. He later found out that it was Tabula Rasa, by an obscure Estonian composer named Arvo Pärt; four years later, ECM released a recording of that music

Many of the covers are reproductions of works by some of Eicher's favorite visual artists. "Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, Antoni TÖpies, Robert Rauschenberg, and Mark Rothko influenced some early designs," he said. "And there has been a lot of influence from film, from Jean-Luc Godard above all." (Eicher is a good friend of Godard and has helped select the music for several of his more recent films.)

https://www.stereophile.com/content/manfred-eicher-you-cant-record-everybody

According to the Fender chief, the company found that of the 45 per cent of guitars Fender sold in a year that went to new players; 90 per cent abandoned the instrument within their first year as a beginner.

"We did the math. The 10 per cent of the salmon that make it through the dam have a lifetime value of $10,000 [each]. They buy five to seven guitars, they buy multiple amps, they drive the hardware side of the business.

“We felt if we could reduce the abandonment rate by just 10 per cent we could double the size of the industry," Mooney adds. "[There are] a million new entrants in English speaking countries alone every year; only 100,000 of them commit. If you could reduce abandonment by 10 per cent, that's an incremental 100,000 with an average lifetime value of $10,000. That’s an incremental billion dollar retail business every year."

“we found 72 per cent of people will pick up the instrument for no other reason other than to learn a new life skill.”

“So, not everybody wants to be standing with one foot on the monitor with the wind blowing through their hair. Most people would want to play quietly and solo in their own home, singing along with their favourite songs. And I think we have to embrace them alongside the really gifted virtuoso players that still exist out there.”

“We assumed that a very large percentage would be younger people buying an inexpensive guitar and an inexpensive amp if it was electric. But what we found is that was only 50 per cent of the community. The other 50 per cent were people whose kids have gone to college. They had the money and the time and they were buying high-priced guitars, high-priced amps, had a lot of time to talk to each other to get referrals online, [to work out] what’s working, what’s not, you know, what does the S1 switch on the [Ultra] do?“

https://www.musicradar.com/news/weve-been-making-guitars-for-70-years-i-expect-us-to-be-teaching-people-how-to-play-guitars-for-the-next-70-years-fender-ceo-andy-mooney-on-the-companys-mission

While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

Ironically, while the media acknowledged that Fascism was a new “experiment,” papers like The New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.”

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.”

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covered-rise-mussolini-hitler-180961407/#JGGjb6glD5QyzzOJ.99

I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t aware of the time he was imprisoned for a month. They never learned about Bach pulling a knife on a fellow musician during a street fight. They never heard about his drinking exploits—on one two-week trip he billed the church eighteen gorchsen for beer, enough to purchase eight gallons of it at retail prices—or that his contract with the Duke of Saxony included a provision for tax-free beer from the castle brewery; or that he was accused of consorting with an unknown, unmarried woman in the organ loft; or had a reputation for ignoring assigned duties without explanation or apology. They don’t know about Bach’s sex life: at best a matter of speculation, but what should we conclude from his twenty known children, more than any significant composer in history (a procreative career that has led some to joke with a knowing wink that “Bach’s organ had no stops”), or his second marriage to twenty-year-old singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke, when he was in his late thirties? They don’t know about the constant disciplinary problems Bach caused, or his insolence to students, or the many other ways he found to flout authority. This is the Bach branded as “incorrigible” by the councilors in Leipzig, who grimly documented offense after offense committed by their stubborn and irascible employee.

But you hardly need to study these incidents in Bach’s life to gauge his subversive tendencies. ... We hear a complaint about him improvising for too long during church services. We read an angry denunciation from fellow composer Johann Adolphe Scheibe about Bach’s “bombastic” and “confused” music-making. Bach even was forced to provide a memorandum to the city council in 1730 explaining why it was necessary to embrace “the present musical taste, master the new kinds of music.” Here he insists that “the former style of music no longer seems to please our ears,” and demands the freedom to follow the most progressive trends of his day. But perhaps the most revealing commentary comes from Scheibe’s diatribe, where he complains that Bach’s music was “darkened by an excess of art” and marred by an “unending mass of metaphors and figures.” In other words, the very signs of Bach’s greatness for later generations were the same elements that made him suspect during his own times.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/js-bach-rebel

He was a mentor to Dylan and a pal of everyone from Sam Shepard to Willie Nelson. He traveled the country with Guthrie, jammed with blues legends Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, backed Nico during her post–Velvet Underground club days, and partook of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue (one of his performances can be seen in Martin Scorsese’s recent doc on the tour). His reinvention — the way he transformed himself from the son of a Jewish doctor into an utterly secular all-American cowboy — set the template for so many who’ve undergone similar makeovers.

Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Pete Seeger and the other Weavers — at one time, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was friends and singing buddies with all of them. But at this point, they’re all gone, leaving Elliott, who will turn 88 the day after this walking tour, as probably the last of a generation of American folksingers, the one that preceded the folk boom of the Sixties.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/ramblin-jack-elliott-interview-bob-dylan-bob-weir-894982/

Spotify recently revealed that songs by The Beatles have been streamed roughly 1.7 billion times to this point in 2019. More impressive yet is the fact that about 30 percent of these streams came from individuals between the ages of 18 and 24.

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/10/01/beatles-spotify-18-24-year-olds/