Per Business Insider, the streaming music service Spotify has apparently decided that the road to profitability, or greater profitability, lies in jumping on developing original video content and hoping it will attract subscribers in the same way that Netflix and Amazon Prime are attempting to do:

Spotify has become a very popular service with consumers, but its business remains challenged. The reason: extremely thin margins. Spotify does not own the music its customers listen to. Music labels do, and Spotify has to pay the labels every time a customer listens to one of their songs. As Spotify gets more popular, the labels charge more and more.

The original plan for Spotify was that it would grow so popular with music listeners that Spotify would be able to dictate negotiations with the labels. This hasn’t happened. This is in part because there are several Spotify competitors all bidding for the same rights to the same music. Even though it has become a significant source of revenue for the labels, Spotify still depends on the labels more than they depend on it.

My initial reaction is that this is an odd move. The more logical move for Spotify would be to start signing bands, producing their records, and holding on to both profits from those album sales and the profits from streaming, which Spotify could demand exclusively from the artists whose albums they put out. That would involve much lower start-up costs than television, which is enormously expensive if you want it to attract buzzy talent and look good—I’m sure Battleground, Hulu’s nifty little political show, has done an okay business for the service, but it hasn’t made nearly the cultural splash as House of Cards did for Netflix. Second, sticking to music would keep Spotify in the same core business—they’ve got data that will let them push music they own into listeners ears via recommendation algorithms, and listeners who already come to them for a high-quality music product. Spending money to let new audiences know they’re in the television business, and to convince them that Spotify TV shows are worth watching, would mean a significant advertising outlay. And Spotify would presumably have to make technological improvements to make sure it can handle the much higher bandwidth of video.

I’m not saying Spotify is wrong to try to go into the television business. But original television is hard to do well, and it’s not going to be a solution for every media company. Netflix and Amazon are still a long way from proving they can consistently make genuine hits, much less that original content is going to be their core business.

Cleveland Browns linebacker Scott Fujita is among the National Football League players who have signed onto a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8, the California amendment that banned same-sex marriage. Arguments in the Supreme Court case begin Tuesday, and Fujita penned a powerful editorial in the New York Times this weekend outlining his support for marriage equality, making a perfect case for why sports can have such an impact on issues like this one:

Sometimes, people ask me what any of this has to do with football. Some think football players like me should just keep our mouths shut and focus on the game. But we’re people first, and football players a distant second. Football is a big part of what we do, but a very small part of who we are. And historically, sports figures like Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali have been powerful agents for social change. That’s why the messages athletes send — including the way they treat others and the words they use — can influence many people, especially children.

Believe it or not, conversations about issues like gay marriage take place in locker rooms every day. In many respects, the football locker room is a microcosm of society. While there is certainly an element of bravado in our sport, football players are not the meatheads many think we are. For some of my friends who raise personal objections to marriage equality, they still recognize the importance of being accepting. And many of them also recognize that regardless of what they choose to believe or practice at home or at their church, that doesn’t give them the right to discriminate. I am encouraged by how I’ve seen such conversations evolve. [...]

I support marriage equality for so many reasons: my father’s experience in an internment camp and the racial intolerance his family experienced during and after the war, the gay friends I have who are really not all that different from me, and also because of a story I read a few years back about a woman who was denied the right to visit her partner of 15 years when she was stuck in a hospital bed.

Athletes, as Fujita notes, have experiences that shape their lives and views, just like the rest of us. What they also have is a platform that allows them to play a major role in positive social change. Sports matter in these fights. Fujita, like Brendan Ayabadejo and Chris Kluwe, is yet another example of that.

The bridge is yours.

-Late-night musical chairs.

-Applications for ESA Foundation scholarships are open—if you’ve ever wanted to know more about video games, hop to it!

-Felicia Day’s YouTube channel is launching three new shows.

-Robert Redford as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.? I’m so on board for that.

-I wouldn’t say World War Z looks good yet, but it does look like it includes more of the original material from the novel than was initially advertised:

Amy Pascal, the co-chair of Sony Pictures, gave a speech at a fundraiser for the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center last week in which she encouraged her colleagues in the entertainment industry to discourage lazy defaults to homophobia in the form of insults. While I do think that sometimes it’s important to depict the worst impulses of bigots in order to demonstrate just how unappealing and damaging they are, it’s nice to see Pascal treat homophobic language as something that should used thoughtfully rather than casually. And I’m particularly glad to see her call out one of the most insidious and persistent forms of homophobia acceptable in the entertainment industry: prison rape jokes that assume gay men are the primary perpetrators:

Turning her attention to the media and industry, she elaborated on stereotypes and slurs commonly seen in entertainment. “How many times have you heard a character imply to another that the worst thing about going to prison isn’t being locked up for the rest of your life, it’s the homosexuality? And old stereotypes still exist,” Pascal said. “The most benign stereotypes would have a gay kid believe that they will end up being the asexual, witty best friend of the pretty girl, or a drag queen, or a swishy hairdresser. The list goes on.”

This stereotype of gay prison rapists is so disturbing not just because it reinforced long-standing and ugly prejudices that paint LGBT people as predators whether they’re incarcerated or not, but because the stereotype is the inverse of the reality. As David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow wrote in the latest installment of their long-running series on prison rape in the New York Review of Books “According to the new BJS study, 3.5 percent of men who identified themselves as heterosexual had been sexually abused by another inmate, but 34 percent of bisexual men had, and 39 percent of gay men.” I have no problem with Hollywood emphasizing the horror of prison rape. But it’s an issue that affects both men and women, and should be a source of solidarity between LGBT folks and heterosexual people, rather than a way to drive wedges between them.

If it takes three instances to make a trend, then Admission, the romantic comedy starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd that opened this weekend, makes it official: Fey may take on a great many subjects in her movies and television work, but her great emerging theme is what happens when professional women in their late thirties are confronted with their own maternal urges. Admission, which flips the script on efforts concerned with fertility like Baby Mama and 30 Rock, could have been a fresh take for Fey, a look at a character who genuinely doesn’t want to have children. But unfortunately, it’s her weakest stab at the subject yet, a movie that’s unwilling to grapple with the reasons other than simply being busy that a woman might have put off childbearing—or why a woman might not want children at all.

In Admission, unlike her previous characters, who have had trouble conceiving, Portia Nathan, Fey’s rigid Princeton admissions officer character, got pregnant in college. Rather than raise the child, Portia gave up the baby for adoption, and buried all thoughts of having a family so deep that they don’t resurface until 16 years later, when they’re forcibly unearthed by a classmate, John Pressman (Paul Rudd), who believes one of the students at the alternative school that he runs is Portia’s son. What follows is Portia’s quest to get the boy, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) into Princeton, hoping that his love of learning and exceptionally high test scores will offset his extremely poor grades and lack of activities.

But while all of her efforts, including getting Jeremiah a chance to stay on campus, setting up an interview with an eccentric professor of philosophy, and trying to juice his ventriloquism hobby into a legitimate side pursuit, are mildly amusing, they also serve to allow Admission to avoid larger, and much more interesting, questions. We learn that Portia’s college boyfriend broke up with her before she found out she was pregnant, but the movie never asks whether she would have kept her child had they stayed together. When, before Portia meets Jeremiah, her long-term boyfriend Mark (Michael Sheen, who played one of Liz Lemon’s most irritating boyfriends on 30 Rock), an English professor, leaves her for a Virginia Woolf scholar he’s gotten pregnant with twins, Admission focuses more on the fact that the other woman is more glamorous than Portia, rather than interrogating the idea that Portia’s stated lack of interest in children might have made her less desirable to a man who feels the pull of a more conventional family structure, even though he hates kids. And while Portia clearly feels that she didn’t do right by Jeremiah, Admission never makes remotely clear what, other than getting him into Princeton, she wants to do with her adopted son. Does she want to support him financially? Have a friendship with him? Of course the discovery of a specific child raises specific questions, but Admission spends more time poking fun at Portia’s fiercely feminist mother Susannah (Lily Tomlin) than it does at actually exploring what Portia would do differently in raising her own child, or why she might genuinely not have wanted children at all, given her upbringing. And the movie never even really resolves the question of whether Portia doesn’t want to be a parent, or whether the trauma of her unwanted pregnancy caused her to bury her maternal urges, preferring instead to throw in a silly montage in place of character development.
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This post discusses plot points from the March 24 episode of The Walking Dead.

Back at the mid-season finale, I suggested that the stakes in the conflict between Rick and the Governor were essentially the rebirth of democracy after modern civilization’s collapse world: Rick was fighting for an open, cooperative society, while the Governor represented a torturous, authoritarian alternative. That subtext became the text this week with Rick’s big speech renouncing his “this is not a democracy” diktat. Moreover, the episode made a beautiful case for why we should care so much about saving democracy through the unlikeliest of tragic heroes — Merle Dixon.

Let us first sing the praises of Michael Rooker, whose acting was critical helping “This Sorrowful Life” soar well above last week’s atrocious “Prey.” Rooker sold Merle’s transformation from a monster who, in a nice bit of staging, was quite literally shrouded in darkness to a man in existential crisis to, finally, someone willing to sacrifice his own life in a very nearly successful attempt to save the world by killing the Governor. It isn’t easy turn an inveterate racist into someone whose death the audience mourns, but Rooker’s command over Merle’s crisis of conscience, his ability to convey the nuances of the man’s path towards his one good decision is what made that last moment, where Darryl had to butcher a zombiefied Merle, so utterly heartwrenching.
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