Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web

TV still a music springboard: The New York Times ran an article opining that the more things change, the more they stay the same. More specifically, it reviewed the role that television performances still play in getting exposure for artists. The piece reviewed two recent sources of televised musical entertainment – the Grammys and the Super Bowl halftime show – and explored how predictable the ensuing bumps are to streams and concert ticket sales for those artists.

Vertigo, the latest experiment in social listening: An app called Vertigo is looking to create shared listening experiences for subscribers to Spotify Premium and Apple Music. The service lets people host listening parties for friends who are also subscribers to those music sources by sharing metadata rather than actually broadcasting the song (which would be a legal no-no). There have been many efforts at layering social interaction into the digital music experience; most have fizzled pretty fast. Both the music and social media spaces are already crowded, possibly to saturation, and the chances for a new app to break through do not seem good.