Charlie Jane Anders wrote about Problem Patterns, a Belfast punk band who posted a protest song called Bodies four days after the anti-immigrant riots in Northern Ireland. Riots June 9 to 11, song out June 15, proceeds given away. Cancelled…
→ How Client Portal got started, from the person who built it
Laura Elizabeth built Client Portal, a small software product, and still runs it. She went on a Dutch podcast in English to tell the origin story. We use this tool at Johns & Taylor every day, and it’s delightful that…
→ Netflix, Sony, and A24 are all bidding on Letterboxd
Netflix, Sony, A24 and Versant are all bidding for Letterboxd, and this newsletter covers the entertainment business with the numbers attached. Elizabeth Joyce has a counter-plan built on the public benefit corporation model, trying to hold social good and a…
→ You keep redesigning the routine instead of running it
Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes Ness Labs, a newsletter about experimenting your way through creative work, and runs a paid community alongside it. This one arrived in the September 10 edition, written the week she got back from Burning Man and…
→ Elizabeth Gilbert, Seth Godin, and Anne Lamott on starting when you’re stuck
How do you choose a project and stay with it? How do you begin when inspiration refuses to show up? How do you build a practice that reliably produces pages? Tim Ferriss pulled years of his interviews with working writers…
→ Spotify’s AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the Slop
GQ added a note to the end of the article conceding Slime Dot was an AI avatar, but said the “talent behind the music remains undeniable.”
→ Music influencers are getting paid to promote songs — and they’re not telling you
“But even though influencers largely seem like regular people sharing their love of music, the content they’re making can sometimes be a form of hidden advertising.”
→ Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius
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.”