Turns out it’s trivially easy to scoop up millions of songs for use as training data.
→ Robin Sloan is rewriting Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Bestselling author Robin Sloan wonders why and how we became so rigid about the works we create, as he undertakes a new edition of his best-known work.
→ The Midnight Rambles Have Been Postponed
Unsettling news from Woodstock, where Amy Helm posted to Instagram about “disturbing circumstances” at the legendary Levon Helm Studios that seem to have pushed her and other longtime team members out of day-to-day management.
→ The going rate for a paid newsletter is $10 a month
I’m seeing this report cited a lot on social media, but I don’t know this is the right north star for a lot of independent publishers. Figuring out that the median subscription price for paid newsletters is $10 is one…
→ What it costs for indie bands to go on tour
“I wouldn’t say that we make most of our money from touring, but I will definitely say that we make more money when we are going on tours that aren’t financial failures.”
→ Nobody is policing the creator economy’s undisclosed ads
Audiences trusted that they were watching independent content, but instead of being an unpaid ad, the influencer had a secret partnership with Polymarket to create fake gambling opportunities for their followers. The “bet” could be something as ridiculous as how…
→ Hank Green interviews Ze Frank, the guy who (pretty much) invented vlogging
Hank Green credits Ze Frank with inventing video blogging, and while both of these guys picked up and ran with ideas that bubbled up from the early web, Ze’s work set early standards for what would become its own industry.…
→ You don’t need long-form to build an audience — you need consistent small signals
Mathers’ 30-day challenge — one tiny public post a day — is the lowest-stakes audience-building advice you’ll read this week. Short doesn’t mean slight.
→ John Dickerson is trading his weekly news roundup for something looser and more frequent
The former CBS Evening News anchor launched a member-supported Substack, and has been working through some format changes in public. It’s an interesting example of someone who’s a professional in one field applying their skills to something very different, and…
→ How to fix TV comedy
Everyone who greenlights any kind of creative venture right now—not just the sitcoms Paul Scheer describes in this great essay—is running through this same dilemma right now. The way we used to place bets about investing time and energy into…
→ How we’ll fight the platform war against Big AI
“Users, and especially users who are developers have an enormous amount of leverage to control where AI goes. And if those communities of users can coordinate, they can put power back into the hands of the people.”
→ The perimenopausal ability to smell the past
“…there’s something about perimenopause that brings me back to that teenaged girl who loved to sit in her room, or anywhere really, and write poetry, without caring if it’s good or correct. I mean this literally and figuratively, whether it’s…