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…
Author
Joe Taylor Jr.
→ 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…
→ The case for giving yourself an artificial constraint
“One of the more effective ways to force yourself to have better ideas is to create an artificial constraint. For many years, I wrote two articles per week and it would often take me over 20 hours to complete each…
→ Getting found in the age of AI search
Although Kaleigh’s advice is written primarily for business marketers, it’s important for anyone who’s trying to sell anything. And that includes music, books, videos, any creative outlet. Getting found in the age of AI search means understanding who you’re up…
→ Real numbers from a social-media reach experiment
What if you returned to something you used to be an expert at and found the whole world turned upside down? I first met Tara McMullin at a conference in Colorado, where she spoke about the then-novel approach to building…
→ Where to find something real in a world of AI slop
In a world of AI slop, where do we find something real? Beyond that inciting question, Ted Gioia drops a thesis-level longread that challenges our assumptions about “authenticity” in music. Set aside some time for this one, it goes far…
→ subCULTURE: an anthology at the collision of comics, music, and style
Shelley Bond was a few years ahead of me at Ithaca College, and wrote an incredible comic about what it was like at the college radio station that forged so many unusual careers at the height of the alt-music era.…
Preparing for the Creator Economy Apocalypse
I put this blog into archive mode nearly ten years ago, thinking I’ve said everything I’ll ever need to say on any of these topics. But a lot of stuff’s been buzzing in my head lately, and Chris Gethard says…
Government arts funding’s going away. It’s our job now.
We knew it would happen someday. Back in 1989, Andres Serrano busted open a simmering debate over whether it’s right (or even effective) for tax dollars to support arts. As a high school student at the time, I got worried…
Getting music picked for branded content platforms
Morning Edition’s Allyson McCabe dropped a five minute mini-documentary about how “pay for play” at radio stations has evolved from the scandalous “song plugger” systems of the 1950s, through the bizarre indie promotion world of the 1990s, and into today’s…