HOLLYWOOD—Hollywood is headed to the White House. Here is one honor Meryl Streep is smiling about: President Barack Obama is awarding the Oscar-winning actress, a New Jersey native, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. On November 10, the President named the 19 recipients of the nation’s highest civilian honor and will present the awards at the White House on November 24. Meryl Streep holds the record for the most Oscar nominations in history, 18, and has won three times.
I don’t think Pop star Rihanna is ready to fill Josh Earnest’s shoes just quite yet, but she looked quite at home behind the briefing room podium at the White House. Rihanna posted images of her standing behind the podium as part of her tour of the President’s mansion on November 10. The singer was in the nation’s capital for a free Veterans Day concert featuring some of the biggest names in music. She was with her entourage and posted images on her Instagram account, “West Wing Posse!!” she wrote.
The concert took place on November 11, on Washington‘s National Mall. She was joined by Bruce Springsteen, Eminem and Metallica, among others. The free concert was spearheaded by Starbucks president Howard Schultz to raise awareness for veteran’s issues.
The music industry is constantly changing; therefore, YouTube has launched a paid music subscription service to take on Spotify. It’s called You Tube Music Key; the streaming service is available free with adverts or as a paid service with extra features without ads. Google, who owns YouTube, has renegotiated licensing deals with record labels in recent months but would not say how much those deals are worth, nor how much money an artist would earn from a stream of their songs.
The service has similarities with Spotify as it can create playlists and save music to a device to listen offline. However, Music Key has more of a focus on the music video itself, rather than audio. The bottom line is, if a musician has made a video for a song, the user must stream or download that video, as well. Other songs, without the video, can be streamed and downloaded as audio only. You may recall that Spotify, made the news when Taylor Swift didn’t release her new album, “1989,” on the site, before pulling her entire catalogue. Swift explained her decision by saying that music was valuable and shouldn’t be free.
Spotify boss Daniel Ek responded by saying that Spotify mitigated the effects of piracy. According to published reports, the videos from “1989,” will be available on YouTube Music Key, but not the entire album. YouTube has one billion monthly active users and has paid $1 billion to users since it was founded in 2005. While Spotify has a smaller user base-around 50 million monthly users-but has paid $2 billion to artists so far. According to reports, Apple has long been rumored to be launching a streaming service.
Rose’s Scoop: Gone but not forgotten, film legend Marilyn Monroe’s love letters are up for sale and plan to be auctioned next month. Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills has about 300 items including letters written by her second husband, baseball great Joe DiMaggio. There is also a love letter to Marilyn from her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller.