8 tips to follow if you’re trapped in a crushing crowd
Provided By: NPR & BILL CHAPPELL When does a crowd become dangerous? Should you push back in a crush of people? Those are some of the questions you might be asking yourself after eight people died and more were hurt during a Travis Scott performance at the Astroworld Festival in Houston. The tragedy put a spotlight on how organizers and emergency staff handled the event. But it also raises direct and personal questions about what we should do to avoid an unsafe crowd — and how you can help yourself and others. “Most of the time what we do is we give advice to organizers” about managing crowds, says Mehdi Moussaïd, a research scientist in Berlin who studies crowd behavior. “But actually, we don’t give so often advice to the people that are in there.” Looking to help the average person, Moussaïd, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, came up with “tips to survive” a dangerous crowd situation. We should note that while Moussaïd has studied a number of cases where crowds became deadly, he’s not afraid to be in a crowded environment, like at a concert. “I actually like it,” he says. “I used to be afraid of crowds, before I was a scientist in this domain. But I think that was mostly because I didn’t know how the crowd works and what the behavioral mechanisms are. Now that I know how it functions, I feel kind of comfortable. So yeah, I’m not afraid anymore.” Moussaïd, who wrote a book called Fouloscopie: Ce que la foule dit de nous, or Crowd study: What crowds say about us, compiled his tips for a widely cited article in The Conversation. In an interview with NPR, he expands on his advice. Interview highlights 1. Keep your eyes open for danger signs Once you’re in a crowd and you start feeling the pressure, I’m afraid it’s almost already too late to act. The best thing you can do is to try not to put yourself in this critical situation. The thing is, most people don’t realize that it’s dangerous. We don’t have this culture of being aware of the dangers of the crowd. And yes, indeed, it’s dangerous. The most important advice is to be aware there could be a danger if the crowd is too dense around you. 2. Leave as soon as you sense the crowd getting too dense If you start feeling uncomfortable, but you still have time and some freedom of movement — then just go away. It’s something that people don’t have in mind. They’re like, “Oh, I don’t feel good, but the concert is nice, so I’m going to just keep pushing and go toward the concert.” No, don’t do that. If you feel bad, it means that really it’s dangerous. Just move away and keep yourself safe. 3. Stay standing, and don’t put a backpack on the ground Staying on your feet is important because if you fall, it’s going to be really difficult to stand up again, precisely because there are too many people. It also helps others because if you fall, you’re going to be an obstacle for your neighbors who are most likely going to fall in turn — possibly on your body — and this will create a chain reaction, a snowball effect. You don’t want to be under this big pack of people. That’s absolutely dangerous. Obstacles are terrible. It could be a body in this worst-case scenario, but even just a backpack left on the ground would be an obstacle that increases the risk that somebody would fall on it. 4. Lack of oxygen is the killer in crowds, so preserve space around your chest People often ask me, “Why do we die in a crowd? What’s the cause of death?” Well, the cause is not enough oxygen. You’re so densely packed that your lungs don’t have enough space to do their job, and to keep you breathing. That’s one thing that is superuseful that people should be aware of: The problem is going to be breathing. If you can maintain sufficient space for you to breathe, you’re going to be OK. Put your arms out just in front of your chest and hold them there. In this position, you would have some space, just a little bit, to push for half a centimeter or just 1 centimeter — enough for you to keep breathing. It’s not going to be comfortable. You’re going to be feeling really bad, but at least you’ll survive. 5. Don’t push. Move with the crowd In a crowd, everything is about chain reactions. When you push your neighbors, they’re going to push their own neighbors and it eventually hits an obstacle. Then the pushing is amplified — and it’s going to come back to you. If you feel a push, don’t push back. Don’t amplify this wave. Just go with the flow. It’s not going to be comfortable, you’re not going to like it, but it’s the best way to behave in this situation. Don’t add pressure in the system. In the worst moments, you have multiple pushing waves at once. This is what we call crowd turbulence. You don’t want to be where two waves cross, because the pressures come from opposite directions, and that’s really dangerous. When we observe crowd turbulence, we see death, a tragedy. 6. Avoid walls and solid objects When we look at where the injuries and fatalities happen in a tragedy, most of the time they happen along solid obstacles. That makes sense, because if you go with the flow of pushing waves, you’re fine. But if you’re next to a wall, you cannot just go along, because the wall is preventing you. So the wave is going to crush you against the wall. That’s where you don’t want to be — so avoid obstacles. 7. Learn to detect crowd density Density is really the critical variable, that’s the first thing we measure. It’s expressed as the number of people per square meter,
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How a Hit Happens Now
The most influential playlist in music is Spotify’s RapCaviar, which turns mixtape rappers into megastars. And it’s all curated by one man. By Craig Marks In this, the year hip-hop won the music business, one of its defining hits was released more or less by mistake. Back in February, Lil Uzi Vert, a charismatic, septum-pierced 23-year-old rapper out of Philadelphia who’d become internet famous with a frenetic outpouring of digital singles, EPs, and mixtapes, was on his first tour of Europe, opening a string of shows for the Weeknd. Uzi, who counts late nihilist punk GG Allin and ’90s shock-rocker Marilyn Manson as heroes, dove into the crowd during a gig in Geneva. Backstage after the set, he realized he’d lost his phone during the plunge. “He lost two phones, actually,” says Leighton “Lake” Morrison, one of the principals, along with veteran producers Don Cannon and DJ Drama, of Uzi’s Atlanta-based label, Generation Now. “And he’d broke the screen on a third.” Prior to Europe, Uzi and his team had been in L.A. and Hawaii, working on tracks for his first official album, to be released on Generation Now through Atlantic Records. The songs they’d finished were on one of the lost phones. “Yeah, I was upset,” says Morrison. “We’d just spent a month and half recording in Hawaii, and I had to justify all this money Atlantic had given us that we’d just blown.” Uzi had lost a phone in 2016 that contained some new collaborations with fellow mumble-rap fashion plate Young Thug, and those were soon leaked on the internet. “We didn’t want to go through that again.” In this new digital era of music consumption, brought about by streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, many hip-hop artists have rejected the traditional blueprint for releasing new music, which mimicked Hollywood’s rollout of a blockbuster film: a lavish, many-months-in-the-making marketing campaign, led by one or two radio-friendly singles designed to create maximum exposure for a record company’s big moneymaker, a proper studio album. Streaming is built on a song-based economy, though, and young MCs like Uzi are too savvy and restless to play by the old rules: They spray-hose new tracks when the mood strikes, and fans binge the content like couch-bound Netflix addicts inhaling new episodes of Black Mirror. “Hip-hop artists have liberated themselves from the shackles of the album,” says Lyor Cohen, co-founder of pioneering rap label Def Jam and now YouTube’s global head of music. “The album is far less important than just putting out music.” That night in Geneva, Uzi wasn’t thinking about upending the norms of distribution. In the three years since he uploaded his first song onto the DIY streaming platform SoundCloud, he’d collaborated with everyone from Gucci Mane to Pharrell, built a 4-million-plus Instagram following, and racked up a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 record with his featured verse on Migos’s viral smash “Bad and Boujee.” “Streaming has definitely made me money,” says Uzi. “It’s a whole other way to put your music out there.” Back at his hotel, he reached for his laptop and logged onto his SoundCloud account. Minutes later, he texted Morrison in Atlanta. “I just leaked everything I recorded,” he wrote. “There wasn’t even any artwork,” shrugs Lake. Uzi made up song titles on the spot. He called one “Boring Shit.” And another was hurriedly named after the Weeknd tour, carrying not even a hint of the song’s content in its title. “XO Tour Llif3,” a gothic, Sturm und Drang–filled relationship saga about his then-girlfriend Brittany Byrd (and drugs) that features the sticky, none-more-black refrain “All my friends are dead / Push me to the edge,” became an immediate sensation among the fevered rap nerds on SoundCloud. One month later, after Generation Now had sorted out producer credits, it was added to Spotify and Apple Music. There too, the response was instantaneous and overwhelming. Spotify’s Tuma Basa, the curator of streaming’s most important playlist, RapCaviar, with 7.6 million followers, says approvingly that when he listens to “XO Tour Llif3,” he imagines “Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love arguing. He’s telling a story. Guys like Uzi keep me excited about this shit.” Still, few could have predicted that Uzi’s warbled soap opera would eventually be voted Song of the Summer at the 2017 VMAs. “I couldn’t have planned it any better if I’d tried,” says Julie Greenwald, co-chairman and COO of Atlantic. “XO Tour Llif3” also made history on the May 6 Billboard Hot 100 as one of five hip-hop songs in the top 10, only the second time that Billboard’s preeminent chart featured five rap songs (Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble” was No. 1; Lamar’s “DNA” No. 4; Future’s “Mask Off” was No. 5; Kyle’s “iSpy” featuring Lil Yachty No. 6; and “XO Your Llif3” No. 10). Strikingly, these songs were getting little to no airplay on the nation’s hit-driven radio stations, traditionally, along with sales, the most powerful factor in determining a song’s Hot 100 placement. “Let’s be honest,” says a top major-label executive: “No cool kid is listening to top 40 radio.” Instead, those kids are glued to streaming services. Spotify, which launched in the U.S. in 2011, may be the most effective and efficient new platform to promote and monetize recorded music since the advent of MTV in the early 1980s. Adding users by the millions every month, it now claims 60 million subscribers and 140 million overall users. Spotify and Apple Music (which has around 27 million subscribers), along with YouTube, Pandora, Amazon Prime Music, SoundCloud, and the Jay-Z–backed Tidal, have propelled the recorded-music industry, in wreckage since the launch of the file-sharing service Napster in 1999, to double-digit revenue growth for the first time since — you guessed it — 1998. In 2016, revenue generated from streaming services grew 69 percent year over year, to $3.9 billion; for the first time, streaming accounted for more than half of all recorded-music-industry revenue. And in numbers that sometimes strain belief, users are opening their Spotify or Apple Music apps and streaming hip-hop and R&B
U2 Launching New Album Using Alexa?!
By: Radio Ink The world of digital continues to edge in on radio’s space. iHeartMedia has really taken advantage of the company’s scale in recent years by teaming with artists and launching their new songs – and playing the daylights out of them – sometimes for an entire day at the top of every hour. Now, it’s Jeff Bezos’ team taking advantage of Amazon’s scale, and using Alexa to do the same for U2. U2 is releasing its new album called Songs of Experience this Friday. Amazon is calling what happens today through that launch, ‘ a new kind of radio.’ Historical music, live performances, interviews and exclusive new content will take place on Amazon starting tonight at 6 p.m. EST and will be available to Amazon Music account holders via multiple platforms. Amazon Prime members and Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can access the special programming through Alexa by saying, “Alexa, play The U2 Experience.” An Amazon press release said, “The U2 Experience” features a chronology of the band’s career, including commentary surrounding the significance behind iconic songs and legendary stories from the road, as told through live broadcast interviews. Some of the band’s biggest hits are also included, along with live recordings of songs from “The Joshua Tree” and “Songs of Experience,” recorded during “The Joshua Tree Tour 2017.” Amazon Music’s global head of programming Alex Luke interviewed band members during their tour in Sao Paolo, Brazil this Fall.
Return of the Top 40 Troubadour: How Singer-Songwriters Reclaimed Pop Radio
by Elias Leight When Post Malone’s “Rockstar” topped the Hot 100 earlier this month, it marked the fifth hip-hop No. 1 of 2017, tying a chart record. In this climate, it’s not surprising that pop acts are scrambling to capitalize on rap’s chart popularity by borrowing hip-hop production techniques (Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato) or collaborating with rappers (Maroon 5, Bebe Rexha, Calvin Harris, Charli XCX). But there’s one notable sector of hold-outs. Over the last 12-15 months, a parade of guitar-toting male troubadours have climbed, slowly and sensitively, on to pop radio, and their singles — from James Arthur‘s “Say You Won’t Let Go” to Niall Horan‘s “Slow Hands” — make no attempt to engage with hip-hop production and delivery. These strum-happy tracks, which tend to be subdued even while expressing desire or angst, also offer the opposite of rap’s buoyant energy. (Additionally, their lethargy separates this recent period of acoustic popularity from a similar surge that took place in 2012 and 2013, when the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons scored hits with songs meant to inspire arena clap-alongs.) But they continue to get airwave play. “Ed Sheeran really led the way for this,” says Nadine Santos, Director of Programming for Music Choice, which controls audio content for cable TV subscribers. “He had the same sound that came off so adult contemporary, but you went to his shows and saw 12-year-old girls. Everyone picked up on that, and this year you saw a lot more of it.” In the aftermath of Justin Bieber‘s “Love Yourself,” a Sheeran co-write that hit No. 1 in Feb. 2016, a steady trickle of singer/songwriter ballads has turned into a flood, with, among others, Arthur’s “Say You Won’t Let Go,” large chunks of the new albums by former One Direction members Harry Styles and Niall Horan, and Nick Jonas’ single “Find You” appearing on Billboard’s Pop Songs chart, which tracks radio play at pop stations. MAX had a breakout hit with his ballad “Lights Down Low” — tellingly, a lone outlier on an album that’s packed full of hip-hop-leaning tracks — and Nick Fradiani released his most successful single to date with “All On Me,” which he crafted to be riff-first: “I did not want to lose the fact that I play the guitar and I’m a singer-songwriter,” he tells Billboard. The climate is so good for singer-songwriters that Sam Hunt‘s “Body Like a Back Road” — a simple acoustic tune that’s likely the least daring single, sonically speaking, Hunt has ever released — became the most successful crossover hit of his career. Maybe more surprising was the success of former Britain’s Got Talentcontestant Calum Scott, a newcomer who took Robyn‘s “Dancing on My Own,” a defiant, battering piece of electronic disco, turned it into a maudlin ballad and scored an American hit. In the end, his version did better than Robyn’s original, suggesting that a guy can go a long way with an acoustic guitar and a somber tune. And at the moment, it is mostly guys benefiting from the latest wave of interest in the singer/songwriter sound. Female-helmed singles at pop radio tend to sound current; the lone exception on top 40 radio lately is Kesha’s “Praying.” Even Taylor Swift, who has scored crossover singer/songwriter hits in the past, has stuck to singles with chomping, programmed beats in the lead-up to Reputation. However, the songwriter Ina Wroldsen (Calvin Harris and Disciples’ “How Deep Is Your Love,” Clean Bandit’s “Rockabye”) believes the female artists are also beginning to benefit from the renewed interest in singer/songwriters. “It’s heavily male dominant,” she acknowledges, “[but] as much as the boys are coming, so are the girls, and I like that.” “When I started out,” she continues, “I would do showcases around London and it was like, ‘we really like your songs, you need to lose the baby fat.’ Whereas with the boys, they’re like, ‘that’s him.’ I feel like we’re finally getting to a place where it’s also ok for the girls to be who they are.” The rise of slow, acoustic tracks is due in part to a more accommodating radio atmosphere. In 2011, when Calvin Harris‘ “We Found Love” and Katy Perry‘s “Firework” ruled the charts, artists were focused on creating tracks at around 120 beats per minute (b.p.m.), and it would be hard for a song like “Say You Won’t Let Go” to break through. Consequently, the acoustic hits at that time — try the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” — amped up the energy with resonant kick drums and fun nonsense words. But the drastic fall in the average tempo of top 40 pop over the past few years has made it much easier to fit stately ballads into rotation. “Radio has its own idea of what the tempo of the times are; right now it’s about 102 or 103 [b.p.m.],” says Jamie Hartmann, who has written songs for James Bay and Kygo. As a result, the tempo gap between ballads and upbeat records is now negligible. There’s just a 4 b.p.m. difference, for example, between “Say You Won’t Let Go” and Luis Fonsi‘s global smash “Despacito,” even though Fonsi’s single got played on rhythmic radio, which wouldn’t touch Arthur’s record with a ten-foot pole. Pop’s downshift naturally means that new doors opened for unhurried ballads. At the same time, these acoustic ballads stand out as much for what they’re not as what they are. For every musical action, there is a reaction — the Rolling Stones fashioned themselves as a more rugged alternative to the clean-cut Fab Four, “Americana” coalesced as a genre in opposition to “bro country,” and the likes of the Mumford & Sons offered a reprieve from all the high-octane, high-compression dance music that invaded the mainstream in 2012. In a world where everyone pays fealty to hip-hop, the opposite sound cuts through precisely because it does nothing of the sort. If you’re scanning radio frequencies right now, it’s hard to get further away from rap than “Slow Hands” and “Lights Down Low.” In a related but separate vein, these ballads also gain traction because they rely on guitars at a time when rock is struggling to get any perch in the top 40. When Portugal. The Man crowned the
Record labels plead for more radio royalties amid cultural policy review
JOSH O’KANE CONTRIBUTER TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL As Ottawa overhauls its cultural policies, Canadian record labels are pleading for the federal government to revise copyright laws in favour of artists, hoping to offset internet-driven losses to both musicians and the businesses that support them. Industry association Music Canada is asking Ottawa to change two specific pieces of the Copyright Act, which faces a mandated five-year review this year. The combined amendments could deliver more than $50-million in extra royalties to performers and their record companies annually, the group says. One request is believed to be straightforward – to amend the definition of “sound recording” to widen the scope of who gets royalties for the use of music on film and television. The other is more controversial and reignites a tension between the music business and radio broadcasters. The label association is hoping Ottawa will remove a two-decade-old piece of the act that exempts radio stations from paying royalties to labels and performers from their first $1.25-million in annual ad revenue, save for a nominal $100 fee. The group insists the exemption amounts to a “subsidy” for the radio industry by letting stations use their content without fairly paying the copyright holders. But the Canadian Association of Broadcasters insists that the allegation neglects the payouts radio does deliver to Canadian artists, as well as the promotion that stations give their music. Canada’s recorded-music industry has lobbied for similar changes during past Copyright Act reviews. But as Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly conducts a sweeping re-evaluation of Canadian cultural policies, Music Canada released a report last week that it hopes will catch political attention. It highlights the radio-royalty and sound-recording recommendations as two key chances to reduce the “value gap” between music’s worth and the revenues paid to artists. “In these situations, there is always a fear that government will propose vague solutions that don’t make real, tangible change,” Graham Henderson, Music Canada’s president, said in an interview. “Our goal was to point at two changes that will put millions of dollars into the pockets of music creators and people who invest in them.” A copy of the report has been sent to Ms. Joly’s office, he said. The tension around royalty payments is partly focused on who, exactly, is promoting whom: whether radio stations give artists fresh ears to drive music sales+ or whether songs drive people to tune into radio stations, giving them opportunities to sell ads. The broadcasters’ association declined an interview but sent The Globe and Mail comments by e-mail. “The allegation that local radio is somehow being subsidized by Canadian artists and record labels is both untrue and disappointing given the level of support we provide to the Canadian music industry each year,” its statement reads. The exemption, the broadcasters said, is designed to help smaller radio stations, and reflects similar royalty rules in the United States. In Canada, “local radio pays close to $100-million each year in music royalties and contributes close to $50-million each year in developing and promoting Canadian artists domestically and around the world and remains a key platform for discovering new music.” Bolstered by streaming-music services such as Spotify and Apple Music, recorded-music revenues are on an upswing, but are hardly back to where they were in the high-margin compact-disc days. Music Canada represents the “big three” labels – Universal, Sony and Warner – and a number of independent companies. It recently worked with an Australian economics professor to determine how much money has been lost since the early days of digital music. Had annual revenues simply matched the pace of inflation and real gross domestic product growth, he found that between 1997 and 2015, an additional cumulative $12.6-billion could have been generated for music creators. For the same period, according to Statistics Canada, operating revenues for the country’s radio broadcasting industry grew from $871-million in 1997 to $1.6-billion in 2015. Royalties are one income stream that can boost the recorded-music industry. But where songwriters and music publishers collect royalties for all songs played on radio, labels and performers can’t until a station’s revenue hits the $1.25-million mark. (For revenues beyond that, a 2.1-per-cent royalty is collected for labels and performers.) Music Canada also hopes to wring more cash from TV and film by expanding royalties to accommodate performers. The fiddler, label-owner and musicians-rights activist Miranda Mulholland highlighted this issue at an Economic Club of Canada speech earlier this year. “Even though I played on almost every episode of CBC’s Republic of Doyle, which is now syndicated worldwide, I only receive the one-time union rate I got per session, which was around $280, while the composer collects residuals every time that show airs,” she said. READ MORE
Study: Radio Still Rules New Music Discovery
By: Radio Ink Integr8 Research released its third in a series of posts exploring how changing technology impacts radio listening, music consumption, and radio’s role of introducing listeners to new music. The company interviewed 3,140 15 to 39-year-olds who listen to a local CHR, Rhythmic CHR, Urban, Alternative, or Country station. The research discovered that local FM radio stations remain the leading source for 15 to 39-year-old listeners to learn about new music. As you can see by this chart, at 49% local radio dwarfs its closest competitor which is YouTube at 16%. As you might expect, with the rapid growth of technology, especially with the younger generation, the younger the participant in the study, the more likely they are to go to YouTube or an on-demand service. Turning to the Connected Car, 43% of connected car owners say they hear the latest new music first on FM radio, while 33% hear new music first on an on-demand audio service. READ MORE
Who is Dev Leone?!
Dev Leone f/k/a D’Ray Sonshine, came on the scene back in 2009 as the debut artist of Albright College’s Lion Records college label. After an R&B release of “The Reflection” Dev has been fine tuning his craft releasing mix tapes and performing at clubs around the Philadelphia area. Dev Leone is also on the writing team for RCA Records, assisting the team with a variety of Rap and R&B lyrics. Dev’s 2017 solo Hip-Hop album release of “Emancipation” is under his label Ifodige Productions, Inc. / Honor Roll Hustle and features of some of Philly’s best upcoming talent such as Zero (currently featured on Tory Lanez upcoming album), A-1 Twig, John Mastermind Meyers and Philly Chase. Connect with Dev: NOW STREAMING – Click the icons below: Available for purchase – Click through the below listed retailers: Music Videos: CONTACT Management: [email protected] PR: [email protected] Booking: [email protected]