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.”
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Spotify’s AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the Slop
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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.
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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.
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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 many times Donald Trump said “McDonald’s” at a press conference. If you earn your income based on people trusting you, then when someone else is secretly taking money from them by placing an undisclosed bet, it’s an unfair advantage.
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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. Here’s a conversation between two creators who figured out how to be actual humans on the internet, comparing notes across twenty years of doing it their own way.
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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.
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Silence Where a Story Might Have Been
“No AI system has ever felt the wind on its face, or the touch of someone’s hand. All it can do is recalibrate what someone else has written about what that feels like when asked to do so…” -
Music’s Next ‘Disco Sucks’ Moment Is Near
Every generation discovers music publicists its own way. -
Los Campesinos! Break Down What It Actually Costs To Tour North America
Solid accounting — here’s a “we did okay” set of numbers from a band that SOLD OUT a two week run across the US. -
Paul McCartney Banned From Reddit After Promoting Himself in Paul McCartney Subreddit
Yup, that tracks. -
The Indie Alliance
“Nashville is not happy, it doesn’t want to give up its stranglehold on country music.” -
YouTube’s CEO Has a Blunt Message for Creators: The Platform Is the Only Home That Matters
“But as creators diversify and AI reshapes content production, the permanence of YouTube’s dominance faces questions the company hasn’t fully answered.” -
Today they banned my book. It was not the first. It won’t be the last. Here’s what I want you to know.
“When books and thoughts and people are suppressed, we all lose. Keep fighting the good fight, friends. It’s worth it.” -
How To Save TV News: Moneyball
The death of TV news is a self-serving prophecy told by those who don’t know how to save it -
Antitrust trial begins that could lead to breakup of Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation
The shame here is that after the House of Blues crew took over what became Live Nation, those venues were run better than ever. It’s the handcuffs for artists—you want to play the venue we control in Town X, you better play our venue in Town Y, Town Z, and Town A—that have them on the ropes here. What will that do to the smaller promoters and venue owners who’ve adoped the same strategy? -
1 Million Monthly Listeners. 12 Tickets Sold. Here’s The Scam.
Some of us have been talking about this since the 00s. -
A ‘Cease Operations’ notice was posted on World Cafe Live’s door this week
This whole episode is so aggressively sad.I worked at and consulted for WXPN through the period where Hal and the original team were planning this venue. I walked through this space when it was just a shell. I have had so many positively wonderful experiences in this building. Seeing it end like this is just tragic.
The handoff after Hal’s retirement to a team of folks with zero experience in running a venue threw kerosene on a fire. This is one of the nightmare scenarios my former colleagues worried about.
Flipping the venue from for-profit to non-profit a few years ago should have opened up a track to keep the place solvent. But I’m not entirely sure that anyone realizes this is an organization that LICENSES its name from XPN and Penn. Most folks I talk to assume that “Penn will just pay the bill.”
And they probably will, but only as part of taking over the venue entirely. (Which, at this point, is not a terrible idea. There were so many concerns in the 90s and 2000s about how direct ownership of a venue would raise business and political issue. After all of this, I’m not sure how you would do it otherwise.)
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Apple’s 30% Commission Mandate Forces Patreon Into Contentious In-App Purchase Migration
“Apple continues to aggressively defend its commission structure in markets where it maintains the legal authority to do so, arguing that the App Store provides valuable services including payment processing, fraud prevention, and customer acquisition that justify its fee structure.”The gambit here is to get Patreon creators on board with the same revenue split as software developers — the latter being incentivized by the logic that if the iOS platform didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be a market.
In service of protecting that profit margin, Apple’s calibrating this percantage across anything that takes a payment from their metwork. Creators have to very quickly figure out if it’s worth it to maintain access to an audience of impulse buyers, or if they can afford to cultivate an audience on their own platforms.
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Scoring Big on the Secondary Concert Ticket Market – spinme.com
Because I somehow found myself this week agreeing with Kid Rock and what not… (even a stopped clock?) I wanted to resurface this post from ~15 years ago and lament that some of these things have gotten better but somehow the bad things are way, way worse.
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Scoring Big on the Secondary Concert Ticket Market
Because I somehow found myself this week agreeing with Kid Rock and what not… (even a stopped clock?) I wanted to resurface this post from ~15 years ago and lament that some of these things have gotten better but somehow the bad things are way, way worse.
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I’m Building an Algorithm That Doesn’t Rot Your Brain
What happens when the For You page isn’t “for you” anymore?
