Game Kills Rap Beef

by Cyrus Langhorne

"Sh!t is Dead! We Chopped It Up!"

West Coast rapper Game has bigger things on his mind these days than entertaining rap beefs and announced an end to his guilty-by-association feud with Chicago hip-hop artist Lil Durk. #CeaseFire
 

Game broke the big news across social media network Twitter Sunday (June 29).

"My Big homie "G Weed" put @lildurk_ on the phone wit me. Sh*t is DEAD ! We chopped it up like REAL N*GGAS & both sides respect each other.," Game tweeted June 29. (Game's Twitter)

Durk also jumped onto his Twitter page to confirm the feud is over.

"@thegame @G_weeder149 a real one homie chiraq x LA," Durk tweeted June 29. (Lil Durk's Twitter)

Following Game's "Chiraq to LA" diss, Durk's camp revealed there were no plans to release a response track.

"Nah, we ain't gon' release no track," Durk's management told XXL. "Everybody that Game mentioned that he say he know in Chicago is releasing a track. G Count already released a track. Bump J is finna get on the phone from the federal penitentiary to say he don't know Game." (XXL Mag)

Durk's team also addressed Game's explosive jabs and decision to drag himself into rapper Tyga's feud.

The camp later spoke on the mystery of Game's involvement in the beef. "Game is trying to get a buzz off of us. We ain't gon to feed into that. We gon drop our single and our album. He might get a response on the album. Everybody gonna have to wait and see. Durk don't acknowledge Game; he's wondering where Game came from. They say Tyga paid him to get on the track. He can't handle that by himself." (XXL Mag)

Game threw himself into Tyga's beef by going off on Durk with handfuls of verbal jabs on the diss track.

"I don't f*ck with no new n*ggas, they like to sue, no woo n*gga /Tyga hit me like "Durk dissing" /Dirk Nowitzki? Dirk who n*gga? /Never heard of these n*ggas /Some of the nerve of these n*ggas /Don't make me put on burgundy n*gga /Let the AK (gunshots) I'm serving these n*ggas /Yo T raw, time to murder these n*ggas" ("Chiraq To LA")

BBQ Queen Tanya Holland's Recipe for Jerk Baby Back Ribs

Tanya Holland has a pioneer's spirit. Thirteen years ago the French-trained chef—who worked under Bobby Flay, cohosted Food Network's Melting Pot and wrote New Soul Cooking: Updating a Cuisine Rich in Flavor and Tradition (Stewart, Tabori & Chang)—moved from New York City to the Bay Area.

 

Photo Credit: Emily Nathan

Back East, she'd been known for pairing fresh, seasonal and sustainable foods with Black culinary traditions. But after relocating to California and opening her first restaurant, Brown Sugar Kitchen, in 2008, Holland decided to bring her own style and talents to the pit with her latest eatery, B-Side BBQ: "When it comes to barbecue, everybody has their region that they have an affinity for, so right away they are like, 'Well, what region is this?' And I say, 'It's my style—it's Oakland style.'"

To develop her technique, Holland—who serves as copresident for the San Francisco chapter of the prestigious Les Dames d'Escoffier, an exclusive organization for women in the culinary field—became a student of barbecuing methods, traveling across the country to figure out which flavors worked for her. While Texas may have influenced her brisket, you can choose from various regional styles for items like the pulled-pork sandwich, depending on whether you prefer vinegar-,mustard- or tomato-based sauce. But no matter the dish, everything is Cali-fresh.

"People come in thinking the barbecue will be from a certain region and that the pitmaster is going to be a guy," says Phil Surkis, Holland's husband and business partner. "I'm really proud of my wife for being the pitmaster and defining something new. She's doing her own thing."

JERK BABY BACK RIBS WITH PINEAPPLE SALSA
Makes: 8 servings (two 2-pound racks of baby back ribs). Prep time: 1 hour, plus overnight to marinate Cooking time: 3 hours
JERK SPICE
2 tablespoons garlic powder
2 tablespoons onion powder
1 tablespoon ground allspice
1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
2 teaspoons cascabel or ancho chili powder
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
Combine all spices in a bowl.

WET JERK MARINADE
½ cup cider vinegar
½ cup water
¾ cup soy sauce
¾ cup canola oil
1 cup sliced red onions
¼ cup sliced jalapeño peppers or 1 tablespoon diced Scotch bonnet peppers, stems and seeds removed
Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl.

HABANERO VINEGAR
1 habanero chile, stems and seeds removed
1 cup white wine vinegar
Puree habanero chile with white wine vinegar in a food processor. Pour into a bowl.

PINEAPPLE GLAZE
2 6-ounce cans pineapple juice
¼ cup brown sugar
Combine pineapple juice and brown sugar in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil and cook over medium heat until sauce is thick and reduced to about one third.

PINEAPPLE SALSA
½ pineapple, core included, chopped (about 2½ cups)
1/3 cup red onion, diced
1/3 cup jalapeño peppers, diced
1/3 cup red pepper, diced
1/3 cup cilantro, chopped
2 tablespoons canola oil
Juice of 1 lime
Salt to taste

Combine all ingredients in a medium bowl. Refrigerate until use. Wash ribs and remove thin membrane covering the back. Coat ribs evenly with Jerk Spice. Arrange in a 17-by-12-by-1-inch baking pan. Pour Wet Jerk Marinade over ribs. Cover baking pan with foil and refrigerate overnight. Remove racks of ribs from marinade, and bring to room temperature, about 30 minutes. Brush ribs with Habanero Vinegar. 

Prepare grill for cooking over indirect heat with medium-hot charcoals (moderate heat for gas grill). Lightly oil grill rack, then transfer ribs to area of rack with no coals underneath or with shutoff burner if using gas grill. Cook, covered with lid, until tender, 1½ to 2 hours. If using charcoal grill, add coals as needed to maintain medium heat. After 45 minutes, brush ribs with Pineapple Glaze. Brush two or three more times before serving. Ribs are done when meat is well-browned and has shrunk back from the ends of the bones. Transfer to a cutting board and let stand for 5 minutes before cutting into individual ribs. Garnish with Pineapple Salsa.

Per serving: 467 calories, 25g carbohydrate, 81mg cholesterol, 30g fat, 24g protein, 630mg sodium.

George Zimmerman Loses Defamation Lawsuit Against NBC

by Eriq Gardner 

A Florida judge rules the Travyon Martin killer can't demonstrate the TV network acted with actual malice in handling his 911 call.

A Florida judge has ruled that George Zimmerman can't prevail in a defamation lawsuit against NBCUniversal and some of its television reporters and, as a result, has granted the media company's motion to dismiss.

Zimmerman sued in December 2012 claiming that NBC distorted facts and edited his 911 call to make it appear as though his killing of Travyon Martin was racially motivated. "Their goal was simple," stated Zimmerman's lawsuit. The network attempted to "keep their viewers alarmed, and thus always watching, by menacing them with a reprehensible series of imaginary and exaggerated racist claims."


As part of the lawsuit, Zimmerman objected that NBC hadn't made it clear that he was answering a 911 dispatcher's question when saying, "He looks like he's up to no good. ... He looks black."

Zimmerman also was upset at the allegation that he used a racial epithet to describe Martin.

On Monday, Florida Circuit Court Judge Debra Nelson issued a final judgment that determined that Zimmerman was a limited-purpose public figure for having voluntarily injected "his views into the public controversy surrounding race relations and public safety in Sanford and pursued a course of conduct that ultimately led to the death of Martin and the specific controversy surrounding it."

As a result, in order to prevail in his lawsuit, Zimmerman needed to demonstrate that NBC acted with "actual malice," a legal standard that means knowledge or reckless disregard of falsity.

The judge won't let the plaintiff to go further.

In Judge Nelson's opinion (read here), she writes that Zimmerman spoke the words attributed to him, and that the "excerpt from the non-emergency call quoted in NBC's broadcasts accurately captured the 'gist' and 'sting' of what Zimmerman actually said and were not false in any material sense."

The judge adds that an edited quotation can't be held as being published with actual malice unless the alteration has a different effect on the mind of the reader than what was actually said. The judge concludes that "because Zimmerman is unable to demonstrate that the editing choices at issue resulted in a materially false change in the meaning of what he actually said, he cannot pursue his defamation claims arising from those choices as a matter of law."

As for the disputed use of a "racial epithet," the judge notes that the "tape recording itself is, at best, ambiguous," and thus, NBC's interpretation of that portion of the recording can't support a finding of actual malice either.
A spokesperson for the network's news division says, "NBC News is gratified by the court's dismissal of this lawsuit, which we have always believed to be without merit."

BitTorrent Bundle Wants to Make Artists (and Itself) Money

After hitting the '100 million' milestone, BitTorrent, the data transfer protocol long associated with piracy, continues to try and clear its name.

One year and 100 million legal downloads later, the BitTorrent Bundle platform — an online marketplace for 'Bundles,' in which content creators can distribute a combination of free and "gated" content — is increasingly taking hold as a viable marketing and distribution platform. Most recently, rapper G-Eazy made available a BitTorrent Bundle composed of unreleased tracks, photos and videos to promote his upcoming record "These Things Happen." The bundle was downloaded 1.4 million times over the course of a month, with the record it supports set to hit No. 3 on the Billboard 200 next week.

BitTorrent Bundle has also worked with Madonna (distributing her human rights documentary "secretprojectrevolution"), Moby (8.9 million downloads of a remix-able version of 2013's "Innocents"), De La Soul (who released a mixtape, "Smell the Da.I.S.Y”) and Public Enemy (1 million downloads of a re-mixable version of "Get Up Stand Up”), as well as with film and video game creators.

Riding on its initial success, BitTorrent (which claims 170 million monthly users) aims to monetize these bundles within the next few months. In the current model, some content is free to download while additional content is accessible only through a "gate" that downloaders can unlock (typically by submitting an email address). Soon, artists will be able to implement a "pay gate" to their bundles, enabling content creators to charge for the content compilations. BitTorrent plans to take a 10% cut from these pay gates.

While the term 'BitTorrent' has been associated with music and movie piracy for years now, it's crucial to understand the difference between BitTorrent, Inc. and the open source file transfer protocol known as BitTorrent. While the latter powers rampant piracy through torrent indexing sites such as Pirate Bay, BitTorrent, Inc. is a separate entity that uses the BitTorrent file transfer protocol for legal purposes.
Billboard spoke with BitTorrent's chief content officer Matt Mason — who also has penned "The Pirate's Dilemma," a book about understanding and competing with piracy — on the inspiration for the BitTorrent Bundle, marketing the service, partnering with labels, pay gates and why they’re not responsible for piracy on BitTorrent’s open source protocol.

Billboard: BitTorrent began a decade ago as a technology company that developed the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol as a way to transfer data. Why has the company delved into working directly with the music, entertainment and other content industries?
Matt Mason: When I joined, Eric [Klinker, CEO of BitTorrent] said to me that the thing he felt was the most valuable thing we could do was build a technology for the entertainment industries that went with the grain of the internet. One of the core tenants of BitTorrent and one of the core guiding principles of the internet when the internet was first conceived was 'put the end user in control.' The internet that artists have today is not what they were promised. We've got YouTube shutting the door on independent artists. We've got Spotify becoming Clear Channel. We've got all of the majors giving up on selling music directly. There's just absolutely nowhere to turn. This is something that has become more apparent as we've been building our bundles, which is why I think we've seen so much interest both from fans and artists in the last year. 

How have you developed relationships with artists and labels?
The same way that everybody develops relationships. I came into this business with a set of relationships. We've got a lot more now because people trust us, people see what we're doing and people understand our intentions. There's not a label or studio where we [haven't] talked to at least a few people. Yes, some people, when they met us, they're skeptical. They didn't understand what BitTorrent is. But once people see what we're doing, what we're building, once they meet the people who are passionate about doing good stuff for content creation, they work with us. 

What do you see the value added of the Bundle platform over other services (such as iTunes and Amazon) selling similar types of deluxe packages?
iTunes and Amazon kind of feel like Best Buy. They're not really geared toward to just letting the artist publish their creative work in the way that they want. We're trying to build an independent record store — a place where you can go and get lost in a piece of content. iTunes was built by Apple for the major labels and it's focused on selling singles. If you look at the artists using Bundles, yes they want to sell singles. But, they're more interested in building a direct connection with the fan that they can continue to monetize in a sustainable way. If we can build the right direct-to-fan set of publishing tools here, where artists configure the bundle to their business model and put it in front of a large audience, we can create something truly revolutionary. 

Can you explain how the pay gates will work?
It's going to be super simple. An artist, content creator or publisher will be able to put some content in front of that gate and some behind that gate, and they will be able to set the price that the consumer has to pay in order to open that gate. The big idea here is that everybody else on the internet that built a store has put content inside that store. What we're trying to do with a bundle is put the store inside the content. So, everywhere that bundle travels -- whether it's embedded in a blog or on Facebook -- wherever it travels on the internet, whenever someone opens that file, they'll get some valuable stuff for free and then they'll have an opportunity to pay for some more stuff.

So far, all of the bundles have been free. Why do you think that people will buy them?
If you look at all of the ways that projects have monetized within BitTorrent, we've been able to drive album sales, box office sales, DVD sales… we've driven all kinds of social and fan engagement. Every single bundle that we do, on average, 1 in 4 fans that downloaded the bundle shared the fact that they downloaded that bundle on Twitter or Facebook. Fans are starting to understand that bundles are this small direct connection to artists, which makes them actually compelled to share and support that content.

Do you anticipate the BitTorrent Bundle to be a competitor to iTunes, Amazon, Spotify and other services?
We think that it will. It's really up to the artist, right? If you're an artist and you decide that you're disgruntled with Spotify and iTunes and you decide to use Bundles and it works for you and you shift all of your traffic and engagement over to the Bundles platform, then in that situation it's a competitor. If you start off with Bundles, and then you embed a Spotify button so that people can go and subscribe to your stuff there, then it's an additive service to Spotify. In the end, it's about putting the control in the hands of the artist. Yes, we're trying to sell ourselves so that we can be a competitor to everyone else in the business, but if stuff's working for artists, who are we to say 'No, you've got to do this here.' 

BitTorrent still has a reputation primarily as a illegal file sharing site. What are your strategies to market the service as a paid, legal, online music outlet?
We've talked to people one-on-one. We talk to the music industry, the film industry, publishers, authors. We know that the perception is changing because there are a lot more people talking to us. They have no misconception of who we are. They understand the difference between BitTorrent the company, where it's literally impossible to get any illegal content (and it always has been), and piracy sites which may or may not be using BitTorrent technology on the backend. Piracy sites use BitTorrent because it's the best way to move data, and because they can. It's a page of code that's been open sourced for over a decade. 

Does BitTorrent feel a responsibility to decrease the usage of the BitTorrent protocol for piracy?
We're not responsible for that. I came to work at BitTorrent because I think that the best [option] is to build a service where you can have an impact on piracy. The more important thing is creating a fair, democratic marketplace for connecting content creators direct-to-fan. I work here because this is the only place that I can do that. What happens on the Pirate Bay has absolutely nothing to do with us. Why this makes sense for us strategically as a company is because everybody wrongly blames us for piracy. If bundles work, then people will understand that we're a technology company that enables the transfer and distribution of content. That's what we are. If bundles work, it helps us as a company.

Move Over YouTube, New Video Tech Company Ready To Compete

by  Kyle Heller

With the digital market booming with the launch of technology like BitTorrent, video tech company Cinematique co-founder Kyle Heller tells SOHH readers why his company's ready to make waves.

Cinematique revolutionizes the way we experience video by transforming it to be entirely interactive. For the first time, viewers can get what they want right at their finger tips. Whether it is learning more about a celebrity or purchasing a dress in real-time, it is now all possible from inside video.

Founded by a team of filmmakers and technologists, we recognized the way media is being consumed is not only migrating to touch screen devices but also our general desire to get more information whenever, wherever we want.

We developed the underlying technology MTE Video™ over two years to enhance the commercial content we were producing - after realizing its power, we decided to make it publicly available last July. Within the past year, we have experienced significant consumer adoption and market traction working with over 200 brands in fashion and retail.

The evolution of video from a passive to an active experience, with a world of information is inside the video waiting to be unlocked. We have built the platform to be completely seamless, rid of overlays or annotations overtop the video. We believe the viewing experience should only evolve without interrupting the video.

Anyone can contact us at sales@cinematique.com. We have primarily worked with fashion and retail brands, but [singer] Jason Derulo's 'Talk Dirty' is the first music video, with many others to be released in the near future! Both Warner Records and Monster have been amazingly supportive of this platform and all believe this will be the future of video - creating new ways of deeper engagement and monetization.

Radio Rules New Nielsen Listening Study

Radio still rules. Most audio consumption is passive listening done by people who value convenience, according to a new Nielsen study. Called the Audio Demand Landscape, the study breaks American consumers into six segments according to listening habits and favored formats. 

Three groups of radio listeners are 54 percent of audio listeners and 45 percent of all audio listening. Convenience-Seeking Traditionalists, 17 percent of the population, prefer broadcast radio and listen in the car. Background Driving Defaulters, 14 percent of the population, listen to car radio in the background. The Music-Loving Personalizers, 23 percent of the population, play music in the background and prefer free services.

Nielsen's study presents a different look at audio listeners. Most research shows listening activity across a wide swatch of listeners. Numerous studies track how many Americans, and the number in young demographics, listen to various audio formats. Nielsen's approach recognizes that different consumer groups have different listening objectives and gravitate toward different audio formats.

But Nielsen's study also helps explain the interest in Internet radio. Why have Apple and Amazon ventured into Pandora's territory with radio or radio-like services built for the masses? Because the masses are passive listeners unlikely to invest time and money in on-demand music services that require active participation.   

The most avid listeners account for the third-most listening time. The Discriminating Audiophiles group makes up 18% of both the population and listening time. Nielsen calls these consumers "highly engaged" music fans that enjoy a range of audio options and are willing to pay for specific content. 

Only two of the six segments, Techie Audio Enthusiasts and Discriminating Audiophiles, are both highly engaged with music and seem likely to pay for content. Nielsen defines Techie Audio Enthusiasts as "avid consumers of many types of audio" and "early adopters of new platforms to meet their audio needs."
The latter two segments account for 31% of audio listeners, or somewhere around 75 million people, based on Nielsen's estimate of 244 million weekly radio listeners age 12 and over.

1 dead, 4 hurt after BET Awards party shooting in East Hollywood

BET Awards party shooting in East Hollywood 

One person was killed and four others injured after a man opened fire at an overnight party early Sunday in East Hollywood to celebrate the upcoming Black Entertainment Television Awards.

The assailant was a lone gunman who is still at large, said Officer Drake Madison of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The shooting occurred at 5:17 a.m., when the gunman fired several rounds, Madison said. Ambulances transported three victims to a local hospital, where one died. The two others arranged their own hospital transportation.

Investigators have not released information about the victims. The coroner’s office said early Sunday that it had not yet received the case.

The shooting occurred at the Monalizza, a restaurant and banquet hall in the 1100 block of North Vermont Avenue. A restaurant manager, who did not give her name, said the shooting had nothing to do with the facility and indicated that it occurred on the patio. She referred all inquiries to the police.

The event itself “was like an after-party even though the awards are tonight,” Madison said. Gatherings associated with the awards take place all weekend.

“There were a couple of parties last night and probably there will be more after the awards tonight,” Madison said.

There is no indication that the Monalizza event was an official one for the awards or its promoters, he said.
The 14^th BET Awards take place at 5 p.m. at the Nokia Theatre and will be hosted by Chris Rock.