Taylor Swift accepts the Dick Clark Award for Excellence during the 42nd American Music Awards in Los Angeles, California November 23, 2014MARIO ANZUONI/Reuters
STANDING FIRM
Taylor Swift may have put her country roots behind her, but she's sticking to her guns like a cowpoke when it comes to her anti-streaming stance.
As The Hollywood Reporter reports, the pop superstar publicly reiterated her disdain of Spotify and other streaming services while accepting the inaugural Dick Clark Award for Excellence at the American Music Awards on Sunday night.
In her speech, Swift, the only artist in recording history to have three albums sell more than one-million copies in a single week, gave all the credit to her fans.
"What you did by going out and investing in music and albums is you are saying that you believe in the same thing that I believe in: that music is valuable and music should be consumed in albums and albums should be consumed as art and appreciated."
Although Swift refrained from getting specific in her speech, it was apparent the 24-year-old singer was making reference to her recent decision to cut ties with the music-streaming service Spotify for the sake of artist purity.
In an article penned for The Wall Street Journal last summer, Swift said, "The value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace."
The irony here: Although Swift remained firmly committed to the album cause in her AMA speech, more people were talking about her dance moves at the American Music Awards.
By early Monday morning, GIFs of Swift dancing awkwardly in the audience to performances by Lorde and Jessie J were already going viral via social media.
Of course, it's worth pointing out that clunky dancing has somehow become a Taylor Swift trademark this past year.
In August, Swift was dancing away while sitting in the front row of the MTV Video Music Awards. And wasn't that Swift shaking her groove thing in the crowd at the Grammy Awards last January?
As Swift has effectively shown the world in her latest single, she's just trying to Shake It Off.
JUST KIDDING
It turns out that a government official in Poland who recently criticized Winnie the Pooh for not wearing pants was making a joke. Last week, officials in the Polish town of Tuszyn stated their opposition for naming a public park after the famed literary character. "The problem with that bear is it doesn't have a complete wardrobe," said councilor Ryszard Cichy in an audio recording of a closed-door meeting that was allegedly leaked to the press. Cichy later told a local newspaper that he was joking after the official discussion on naming the park went on too long.
Source: Time
MAN OVERBOARD
Sting will step into a role for the struggling Broadway musical The Last Ship. The former Police frontman wrote the score for the lavish production that has suffered from abysmal ticket sales since opening at the Neil Simon Theater last month. "I've been working on this show for five years and been at every rehearsal, every performance, so it's not like I've flown in from Planet Rock Star to save the day," Sting told the New York Times. "I know all the lines and lyrics after all these years."
Source: New York Times
THE FORCE RETURNS
Get ready for the first sneak peek of the upcoming Star Wars movie. Disney plans to unveil the first trailer for a big-budget reboot helmed by J.J. Abrams "at select North America theaters" this Friday. In consort with the upcoming U.S. Thanksgiving weekend, the website for distributor for distributor Regal Entertainment announced the trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII will play before main attractions at theatres in San Diego, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Houston, Seattle and three other locations from November 28 to November 30. Star Wars: Episode VII is scheduled for release on December 18, 2015.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
CHEATING GENES
A new study cites genetics as a contributing factor of men and women having affairs. The study from the University of Queensland focused on date from 7,300 twins aged between 18 and 49, all of whom were in long-term relationships. The researchers discovered that 9.8 per cent of the men and 6.4 per cent of women had two or more sexual partners in the previous year. Researchers then compared the difference in those rates between identical twins, who share the same set of genes, and non-identical twins and employed genetic modelling to estimate the heritability factor. The results indicated that 63 per cent of unfaithful behaviour in males was due to inherited genes, while 40 per cent of the infidelity in woman was likewise credited to genetics.
Source: The Telegraph