Spottily has clearly identified a paying market for "incidental" music, something that people will play just to fill in as background noise while not caring about it. But it relies on a huge number of people who're prepared to pay a vanishingly small amount for it, or even to put up with ads to have it play for free.
But that's not "the audience" that all "creatives" are seeking or writing for. At least some of them are writing for the sort of person who actively seeks out and values "manually created art". People like me. People who'll not only go and listen to an artist's back catalog after enjoying hearing a previously unknown artist, and who'll buy the music that they love (including buying the vinyl even though they have access via streaming and paid downloads as well). People who'll keep an eye open for tours, and who'll buy concert tickets and encourage friends to do so as well.
That will probably never generate Taylor Swift or Rhiannon style careers or income, but I think "1000 true fans" is a valid today as it was almost 20 years ago when it was written:
Anybody "putting out slop" using GenAI in their art is fooling themselves if they think it's ever going to be possible to become truly rich and famous that way. If there's money to be made from AI slop music, it'll be raked in by streaming services and AI companies who can produce a million tracks a day and A/B test then on streaming services with a billion listeners. And _maybe_ there'll be a very few specialist AI music production companies, someone with a finely tuned AI and extremely skilled prompters - and with enough skill and talent to recognise when the AI output is going to be popular enough to be worth releasing. Someone like Stock Aitken Waterman used to be back in the 80s. But those production companies are directly in the targets of enshittification by the AI companies (the same as every company in any industry that becomes dependent on someone else's GenAI).
Splits up as 31 men to 19 women on their top 50 richest singers list. So closer to 2/3rds men that half.
I did realise while counting, that my gut feel wouldn't have included a lot of those men as "pop stars", in retrospect probably because my interpretation of "pop music" leans heavily towards women, and rightly or wrongly I'd label at least half the men on that list as "rock stars" instead (and very few of the women).
Maybe it's related to the decades during which I grew up, but I'd say "rock star" had a better connotation than "pop star" when I was growing up.
"Pop stars" contained a lot of boy/girl bands or solo artists who "don't write their own songs/music" (among many other accusations of not being "real musicians").
You know how it's said that eskimos have 50 words for "snow"?
Aussies have 50 meanings for the word "cunt". It can simultaneously be both the worst and the best thing you can call someone. And aussies know exactly which meaning is intended from context.
It's easier than that, the meaning is defined by the previous word. Although you do have to be an Aussie to know that being called a "sick cunt" is high praise, while being a "dog cunt" is a mortal insult.
It also depends on how long you stretch the word cunt. Shorter cunt usually infers insult, longer cunts belie respect, and if it goes for more than a second, you’re probably watching Aussie rules footie or the cricket and something bad/good happened, depending on whether the pitch goes up or down in the last milliseconds.
It's fascinating to me that her new album's name is "Wuthering Heights", the name of Kate Bush's debut and number 1 single from 1978. Kate Bush is well known (in the circles of people who know about this sort of thing) and as fiercely independent and self-controlled artist. I hope Charlii manages her career and fame as well as Kate has over the decades.
As I understand, Charli’s album is the soundtrack to a movie called Wuthering Heights. Which is loosely based on the 19th century novel of the same name. And that novel was also the inspiration for the Kate Bush song.
I was aware of her name, and roughly her genre, but couldn't have named or even recognised a single track of hers.
I looked her up and started listening as I read the article, and the while listening to the two track released so far from her upcoming album I was thinking "this is really good, why haven't I listened to her before?" then I put on her last album Brat, and realised "Oh, right. That's not my style of music. She's never been writing for me, and I know who she is writing for, and I understand why they like her and why she's so popular." And I respect that.
I'll keep an ear out for her new album, and based on what I've heard so far I fully expect to enjoy it, way more than I'm enjoying Brat. I've also added her substack to my rss feeds, no guarantee it'll stay there long term, but I'm at least curious enough to follow along for her next few blogposts.
But often there are obvious and "easy" answers that are anything but easy for the person who needs those answers.
"Just cheer up, depressed person!"
"Just eat less and exercise more, fat person!"
"Just stop shooting up, heroin addict!"
"Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"
I'm sure there are lots of pro sports players that get and heed advice just like yours, and finish out their short and bright sports career well financially set for their remaining 60-ish years when they're no longer capable of earning half a mil plus a year being athletes.
But I'm also fairly sure the career and lifestyle, and the managers, hangers on, and sycophants they're surrounded with push then hard the other direction.
I'm not from the US, so I don't have a real understanding of US pro sports and the way people end up there, but I have this impression that it's "one of the ways out of the ghetto" for at least some of them. People who won the genetic lottery, but lost the birth demographics lottery. They've never had generation wealth or even a middle class safety net. They don't have family or friends who have experience or advice about what to do with suddenly having way more money that anybody the have even known. They don't have family or close friends who can recommend trusted financial advisors or lawyers. Any advice they're getting risks coming from people they ane not certain they can trust to have their own interests at heart, and aren't trying to skim their own percentage off the top.
I don't exactly pity someone who earns 500k+ a year in a short pro sports career, and blows it all ending up poor. But I think I can understand how the system is set up - if not to actively encourage that outcome, at the very least that system probably doesn't do as much to protect against it as they could.
You are both right. Yes it’s very easy to just eat less or spend less. But it’s also nearly impossible for the obese or the athlete respectively. Because we need to recognize people don’t really have free will to do what they know is best. If we recognized that and acted accordingly then the world would be so much more reasonable to live in.
Can you expand on that? I feel like it’s the most misused and overused word in my vocabulary and one I wish I could just get rid of a lot of the time and never seem to manage. It just creeps in.
Just in the usage being complained about argues that whatever it is modifying does not need or benefit from analysis.
It just creeps in, but why? Why does it creep in? Often because we do not want to do the complicated analysis as to why things are the way they are because then it does not validate our preferences which are often emotional and not movable by logic anyway.
Just exercise more, fatty, says that the problem of being a fatty has a simple solution that anyone can see and there is no need to argue the point here. Start jogging!!
Just in the rather archaic meaning nowadays as being right and proper and what should happen in a fair and balanced universe is tangentially related, the archaic meaning of Just is memetically echoed in the assertive mode of Just doing things. If the world was fair and balanced and most of all really simple then Just jogging would cure the fatty, but it doesn't.
> "Don't accept generic lifestyle creep, pro athlete who's teammates are all living it up like they live in a gangsta rap music video!"
I'm not sure lifestyle creep is actually the main problem that celebrities going broke suffer from. Stereotypically the lifestyle is something they can afford, but they make bad investments.
I do. Mostly because I literally have dozens of them lying around ready to be reused for whatever my latest idea is. Admittedly the bulk of those are clones, not "official" Arduino products.
Other reasons I'll reach for an Arduino over alternatives like ESP, RasPi (Linux or 2040/2350) include:
Simplicity. I very much ascribe to KISS. Having WiFi or Linux as part of my hardware _always_ leads me into scope creep. If the idea could be done on an AT328 (or similar), in my head it _needs_ to be.
Robustness. I probably have thrown out dozens of 3.3V microcontrollers/SOCs with dead io pins because I fucked up. An Arduino will often shrug off shorting 12V to an io pin (or even vcc) without blinking. RasPis seem to sometimes get damaged just because you looked sideways at them while thinking about 12V.
Experience. For me, the way I come up with project ideas seems to often be fundamentally linked with "knowing" how I'll do it on an Arduino. I've been using them over 20 years now, practically since they first appeared. And I'd been writing code for ATMega chips since a Burningman project in 1999, struggling with a cross compiling gcc toolchain. Arduino IDE was both instantly familiar, and such a breath of fresh air for me back then. It allowed me to easily experiment, and lowered my barrier of entry to random weekend or evening project ideas.
Separateness from work. I find the low level coding on a bare 8 bit microcontroller to be almost a completely different thing to coding for work. When work is going badly and I'm approaching burnout, any personal time Linux based coding for RasPis pretty much grinds to a halt. I'll find myself reading a book or doomscrolling social media instead of tinkering with that kind of project. The Arduino IDE is different enough to "work tools" that it doesnt get affected quite as
Spottily has clearly identified a paying market for "incidental" music, something that people will play just to fill in as background noise while not caring about it. But it relies on a huge number of people who're prepared to pay a vanishingly small amount for it, or even to put up with ads to have it play for free.
But that's not "the audience" that all "creatives" are seeking or writing for. At least some of them are writing for the sort of person who actively seeks out and values "manually created art". People like me. People who'll not only go and listen to an artist's back catalog after enjoying hearing a previously unknown artist, and who'll buy the music that they love (including buying the vinyl even though they have access via streaming and paid downloads as well). People who'll keep an eye open for tours, and who'll buy concert tickets and encourage friends to do so as well.
That will probably never generate Taylor Swift or Rhiannon style careers or income, but I think "1000 true fans" is a valid today as it was almost 20 years ago when it was written:
https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
Anybody "putting out slop" using GenAI in their art is fooling themselves if they think it's ever going to be possible to become truly rich and famous that way. If there's money to be made from AI slop music, it'll be raked in by streaming services and AI companies who can produce a million tracks a day and A/B test then on streaming services with a billion listeners. And _maybe_ there'll be a very few specialist AI music production companies, someone with a finely tuned AI and extremely skilled prompters - and with enough skill and talent to recognise when the AI output is going to be popular enough to be worth releasing. Someone like Stock Aitken Waterman used to be back in the 80s. But those production companies are directly in the targets of enshittification by the AI companies (the same as every company in any industry that becomes dependent on someone else's GenAI).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Aitken_Waterman
reply