#70 million streams

[shakira-fan-page]

"El Jefe” has reached 70 MILLION streams on Spotify. 🤠

- This is Shakira’s 57th song to reach this on the platform.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don’t

TONIGHT (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel (13hPT) and a keynote (18hPT) at the LOCUS AWARDS.

Spotify's relationship to artists can be kind of confusing. On the one hand, they pay a laughably low per-stream rate, as in homeopathic residues of a penny. On the other hand, the Big Three labels get a fortune from Spotify. And on the other other hand, it makes sense that rate for a stream heard by one person should be less than the rate for a song broadcast to thousands or millions of listeners.

But the whole thing makes sense once you understand the corporate history of Spotify. There's a whole chapter about this in Rebecca Giblin's and my 2022 book, Chokepoint Capitalism; we even made the audio for it a "Spotify exclusive" (it's the only part of the audiobook you can hear on Spotify, natch):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Unlike online music predecessors like Napster, Spotify sought licenses from the labels for the music it made available. This gave those labels a lot of power over Spotify, but not all the labels, just three of them. Universal, Warner and Sony, the Big Three, control more than 70% of all music recordings, and more than 60% of all music compositions. These three companies are remarkably inbred. Their execs routine hop from one to the other, and they regularly cross-license samples and other rights to each other.

The Big Three told Spotify that the price of licensing their catalogs would be high. First of all, Spotify had to give significant ownership stakes to all three labels. This put the labels in an unresolvable conflict of interest: as owners of Spotify, it was in their interests for licensing payments for music to be as low as possible. But as labels representing creative workers – musicians – it was in their interests for these payments to be as high as possible.

As it turns out, it wasn't hard to resolve that conflict after all. You see, the money the Big Three got in the form of dividends, stock sales, etc was theirs to spend as they saw fit. They could share some, all, or none of it with musicians. Big the Big Three's contracts with musicians gave those workers a guaranteed share of Spotify's licensing payments.

Accordingly, the Big Three demanded those rock-bottom per-stream rates that Spotify is notorious for. Yeah, it's true that a streaming per-listener payment should be lower than a radio per-play payment (which reaches thousands or millions of listeners), but even accounting for that, the math doesn't add up. Multiply the per-listener stream rate by the number of listeners for, say, a typical satellite radio cast, and Spotify is clearly getting a massive discount relative to other services that didn't make the Big Three into co-owners when they were kicking off.

But there's still something awry: the Big Three take in gigantic fortunes from Spotify in licensing payments. How can the per-stream rate be so low but the licensing payments be so large? And why are artists seeing so little?

Again, it's not hard to understand once you see the structure of Spotify's deal with the Big Three. The Big Three are each guaranteed a monthly minimum payment, irrespective of the number of Spotify streams from their catalog that month. So Sony might be guaranteed, say, $30m a month from Spotify, but the ultra-low per-stream rate Sony insisted on means that all the Sony streams in a typical month add up to $10m. That means that Sony still gets $30m from Spotify, but only $10m is "attributable" to a specific recording artist who can make a claim on it. The rest of the money is Sony's to play with: they can spread it around all their artists, some of their artists, or none of their artists. They can spend it on "artist development" (which might mean sending top execs on luxury junkets to big music festivals). It's theirs. The lower the per-stream rate is, the more of that minimum monthly payment is unattributable, meaning that Sony can line its pockets with it.

But these monthly minimums are just part of the goodies that the Big Three negotiated for themselves when they were designing Spotify. They also get free promo, advertising, and inclusion on Spotify's top playlists. Best (worst!) of all, the Big Three have "most favored nation" status, which means that every other label – the indies that rep the 30% of music not controlled by the Big Three – have to eat shit and take the ultra-low per-stream rate. Only those indies don't get billions in stock, they don't get monthly minimum guarantees, and they have to pay for promo, advertising, and inclusion on hot playlists.

When you understand the business mechanics of Spotify, all the contradictions resolve themselves. It is simultaneously true that Spotify pays a very low per-stream rate, that it pays the Big Three labels gigantic sums every month, and that artists are grotesquely underpaid by this system.

There are many lessons to take from this little scam, but for me, the top takeaway here is that artists are the class enemies of both Big Tech and Big Content. The Napster Wars demanded that artists ally themselves with either the tech sector or the entertainment center, nominating one or the other to be their champion.

But for a creative worker, it doesn't matter who makes a meal out of you, tech or content – all that matters is that you're being devoured.

This brings me to the debate over training AI and copyright. A lot of creative workers are justifiably angry and afraid that the AI companies want to destroy creative jobs. The CTO of Openai literally just said that onstage: "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place":

https://bgr.com/tech/openai-cto-thinks-ai-will-kill-some-jobs-that-shouldnt-have-existed-in-the-first-place/

Many of these workers are accordingly cheering on the entertainment industry's lawsuits over AI training. In these lawsuits, companies like the New York Times and Getty Images claim that the steps associated with training an AI model infringe copyright. This isn't a great copyright theory based on current copyright precedents, and if the suits succeed, they'll narrow fair use in ways that will impact all kinds of socially beneficial activities, like scraping the web to make the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

But you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, right? For some creative workers, legal uncertainty for computational linguists, search engines, and archiving projects are a small price to pay if it means keeping AI from destroying their livelihoods.

Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.

This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?

This is true across the board. The Big Five publishers categorically refuse to include contractual language -romising not to train an LLM with the books they acquire from writers. The game studios require all their voice actors to start every recording session with an on-tape assignment of the training rights to the session:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

And now, with total predictability, Universal – the largest music company in the world – has announced that it will start training voice-clones with the music in its catalog:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/umg-startsai-voice-clone-partnership-with-soundlabs-1235041808/

This comes hot on the heels of a massive blow-up between Universal and Tiktok, in which Universal professed its outrage that Tiktok was going to train voice-clones with the music Universal licensed to it. In other words: Universal's copyright claims over AI training cash out to this: "If anyone is going to profit from immiserating musicians, it's going to be us, not Tiktok."

I understand why Universal would like this idea. I just don't understand why any musician would root for Universal to defeat Tiktok, or Getty Images to trounce Stable Diffusion. Do you really think that Getty Images likes paying photographers and wants to give them a single penny more than they absolutely have to?

As we learned from George Orwell's avant-garde animated agricultural documentary Animal Farm, the problem isn't who holds the whip, the problem is the whip itself:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Entertainment execs and tech execs alike are obsessed with AI because they view the future of "content" as fundamentally passive. Here's Ryan Broderick putting it better than I ever could:

At a certain audience size, you just assume those people are locked in and will consume anything you throw at them. Then it just becomes a game of lowering your production costs and increasing your prices to increase your margins. This is why executives love AI and why the average American can’t afford to eat at McDonald’s anymore.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ceo-passive-content-obsession

Here's a rule of thumb for tech policy prescriptions. Any time you find yourself, as a worker, rooting for the same policy as your boss, you should check and make sure you're on the right side of history. The fact that creative bosses are so obsessed with making copyright cover more kinds of works, restrict more activities, lasting longer and generating higher damages should make creative workers look askance at these proposals.

After 40 years of expanded copyright, we have a creative industry that's larger and more profitable than ever, and yet the share of income going to creative workers has been in steady decline over that entire period. Every year, the share of creative income that creative workers can lay claim to declines, both proportionally and in real terms.

As with the mystery of Spotify's payments, this isn't a mystery at all. You just need to understand that when creators are stuck bargaining with a tiny, powerful cartel of movie, TV, music, publishing, streaming, games or app companies, it doesn't matter how much copyright they have to bargain with. Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch-money. There's no amount of money that will satisfy the bullies and leave enough left over for the kid to buy lunch. They just take everything.

Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are workers at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That's how we lose.

On the other hand, if we address the problems of AI and labor as workers, and insist on labor rights – like the Writers Guild did when it struck last summer – then we ally ourselves with every other worker whose wages and working conditions are being attacked with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.

The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that AI-generated works don't qualify for copyrights, meaning everything AI generated can be freely copied and distributed and the companies that make them can't stop them. This is fantastic news, because the only thing our bosses hate more than paying us is not being able to stop other people from copying the things we make for them. We should be shouting this from the rooftops, not demanding more copyright for AI.

Here's a thing: FTC chair Lina Khan recently told an audience that she was thinking of using her Section 5 powers (to regulate "unfair and deceptive" conduct) to go after AI training:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

Khan has already used these Section 5 powers to secure labor rights, for example, by banning noncompetes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Creative workers should be banding together with other labor advocates to propose ways for the FTC to prevent all AI-based labor exploitation, like the "reverse-centaur" arrangement in which a human serves as an AI's body, working at breakneck pace until they are psychologically and physically ruined:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

As workers standing with other workers, we can demand the things that help us, even (especially) when that means less for our bosses. On the other hand, if we confine ourselves to backing our bosses' plays, we only stand to gain whatever crumbs they choose to drop at their feet for us.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[turtlesandfrogs]

Started the day by reading this article from the NY times, and I'm frankly, disturbed.

Some highlights:

"For decades, farmers across America have been encouraged by the federal government to spread municipal sewage on millions of acres of farmland as fertilizer. It was rich in nutrients, and it helped keep the sludge out of landfills."

Which I knew, and I knew that there were concerns about contaminants from like, the medications people were on. But human waste is part of the nutrient cycle, and it always made sense to me that it should be throughly composted and returned to agricultural lands, and I assumed that people in general were taking the steps necessary to make it safe.

But here's what I didn't know:

"The 1972 Clean Water Act had required industrial plants to start sending their wastewater to treatment plants instead of releasing it into rivers and streams, which was a win for the environment but also produced vast new quantities of sludge that had to go somewhere."

Which, yay, no longer polluting bodies of water, but now that means we're applying industrial waste water to agricultural lands. And have been since 1972. Which leads to this situation, among many others, I'm sure:

"The sludge that allegedly contaminated the Colemans’ farm came from the City of Fort Worth water district, which treats sewage from more than 1.2 million people, city records show. Its facility also accepts effluent from industries including aerospace, defense, oil and gas, and auto manufacturing. Synagro takes the sludge and treats it (though not for PFAS, as it’s not required by law) then distributes it as fertilizer."

So here's what some states are doing:

"In Michigan, among the first states to investigate the chemicals in sludge fertilizer, officials shut down one farm where tests found particularly high concentrations in the soil and in cattle that grazed on the land. This year, the state prohibited the property from ever again being used for agriculture. Michigan hasn’t conducted widespread testing at other farms, partly out of concern for the economic effects on its agriculture industry.

In 2022, Maine banned the use of sewage sludge on agricultural fields. It was the first state to do so and is the only state to systematically test farms for the chemicals. Investigators have found contamination on at least 68 of the more than 100 farms checked so far, with some 1,000 sites still to be tested.

“Investigating PFAS is like opening Pandora’s box,” said Nancy McBrady, deputy commissioner of Maine’s Department of Agriculture."

This is fun:

"The E.P.A. is currently studying the risks posed by PFAS in sludge fertilizer (which the industry calls biosolids) to determine if new rules are necessary.

The agency continues to promote its use on cropland, though elsewhere it has started to take action. In April, it ordered utilities to slash PFAS levels in drinking water to near zero and designated two types of the chemical as hazardous substances that must be cleaned up by polluters. The agency now says there is no safe level of PFAS for humans...

It’s difficult to know how much fertilizer sludge is used nationwide, and E.P.A. data is incomplete. The fertilizer industry says more than 2 million dry tons were used on 4.6 million acres of farmland in 2018. And it estimates that farmers have obtained permits to use sewage sludge on nearly 70 million acres, or about a fifth of all U.S. agricultural land."

There's more, but I wanted to condense it at least a little bit. I am glad we're raising awareness, and I'm glad we're starting to regular the amount in our drinking water, and I hope that we'll find a way to actually deal with PFAS. I am so frustrated that people are exposed in the first place, and in nigh inescapable ways.

Also, to all those people who were like, oh, organic isn't at all healthier for consumers? Guess what the organic standards don't allow to be applied?

[contemplatingoutlander]

Amazon’s Alexa has been claiming the 2020 election was stolen

The popular voice assistant says the 2020 race was stolen, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source -- foreshadowing a new information battleground

This is a scary WaPo article by Cat Zakrzewski about how big tech is allowing AI to get information from dubious sources. Consequently, it is contributing to the lies and disinformation that exist in today's current political climate.

Even the normally banal but ubiquitous (and not yet AI supercharged) Alexa is prone to pick up and recite political disinformation. Here are some excerpts from the article [color emphasis added]:

Amid concerns the rise of artificial intelligence will supercharge the spread of misinformation comes a wild fabrication from a more prosaic source: Amazon’s Alexa, which declared that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Asked about fraud in the race — in which President Biden defeated former president Donald Trump with 306 electoral college votes — the popular voice assistant said it was “stolen by a massive amount of election fraud,” citing Rumble, a video-streaming service favored by conservatives.

The 2020 races were “notorious for many incidents of irregularities and indications pointing to electoral fraud taking place in major metro centers,” according to Alexa, referencing Substack, a subscription newsletter service. Alexa contended that Trump won Pennsylvania, citing “an Alexa answers contributor.”

Multiple investigations into the 2020 election have revealed no evidence of fraud, and Trump faces federal criminal charges connected to his efforts to overturn the election. Yet Alexa disseminates misinformation about the race, even as parent company Amazon promotes the tool as a reliable election news source to more than 70 million estimated users. [...] Developers “often think that they have to give a balanced viewpoint and they do this by alternating between pulling sources from right and left, thinking this is going to give balance,” [Prof. Meredith] Broussard said. “The most popular sources on the left and right vary dramatically in quality.” Such attempts can be fraught. Earlier this week, the media company the Messenger announced a new partnership with AI company Seekr to “eliminate bias” in the news. Yet Seekr’s website characterizes some articles from the pro-Trump news network One America News as “center” and as having “very high” reliability. Meanwhile, several articles from the Associated Press were rated “very low.” [...] Yet despite a growing clamor in Congress to respond to the threat AI poses to elections, much of the attention has fixated on deepfakes. However, [attorney Jacob] Glick warned Alexa and AI-powered systems could “potentially double down on the damage that’s been done.” “If you have AI models drawing from an internet that is filled with platforms that don’t care about the preservation of democracy … you’re going to get information that includes really dangerous undercurrents,” he said. [color emphasis added]

[the-24-7-lawlu-library]

Hellooo

~I'm searching for some Modern AU lawlu fic. Highschool AU are also fine

Thanks for this wonderful blog btw~<3

Hello nice person and happy new year !

We have quite a few for you:

Chasing the Sun by @illusiverose (E) [A Mod's favourite]

Trafalgar Law is a young surgeon who has carefully avoided getting too close to anyone to protect himself from his own dark past. This plan worked well, until a chance meeting with a young fireman named Monkey D. Luffy has him abandoning reason and dignity for a chance to bask in sunlight. He just hopes he made the right decision.

Broken Heart Syndrom by Callunar (M)

Law is a tired surgeon in the cardiac unit at Grand Line Hospital. He's got a few close friends, a cat called Bepo and an incredibly loud, annoying neighbour. Law had been doing his best to avoid said neighbour but life didn't always work out the way he planned.

More than a physical attraction (it's a passion) by gentoopengwyn (M)

When space was made available at the bar where the man stood, Luffy immediately shoved his (nonalcoholic) drink towards a confused Usopp and made his way over. "Hey," he said with a grin as he sidled up next to the man. "I'm Monkey D. Luffy." "I'm not interested." - Or: 5 times Luffy simps for Law + 1 time Law simps for Luffy

These Things Happen by trixree (T)

Law has been awake for twenty hours straight. He’s fine, everything is fine. And he will continue to be fine so long as no one takes his coffee away from him. Enter: Luffy.

Sabishigari-ya by Alexgrand (M)

Trafalgar Law attends medical school in Tokyo. Though he excels academically, his social life is lacking. He finds a website where he becomes infatuated with a user named Mugiwara22.

(We Would Never) Break the Chain by cosmicatta (M)

Two little boys meet in a small fisher village in the late 70s. As if brought together by the forces of nature, their lives become forever intertwined, their paths inevitably following each other in circles, always returning to the starting point. Luffy is sunshine and dynamite; Law is drizzle and dusk. It’s simple, until it’s not. They can’t be children forever, after all. “I’ve always been a little bit in love with you.”

Boyfriend's duties by Martilla (E) [A fandom classic by this point]

Law is a surgeon who needs some light in his life. Then Luffy happens.

The Other Side by methoxyethane (T)

Luffy gets sent to an alternate dimension and only has one thing on his mind when he gets there. Seeing Ace one more time.

Video calls in quarantine by anniedeodair (G)

The worst thing about not being able to leave the house was boredom and not seeing his friends or Law. Luckily there are video calls and until the quarantine ends, Luffy would talk to them through the camera.

Stolen Kisses by leafyxthiefy (G)

Someone has stolen Luffy's kisses. So of course, Ace will be there to avenge his beloved little brother! AU Implied LawLu, MarAce. One Shot. Light cursing, some OOC-ness and minor characters.

He’s mine! by libubs (NR)

Where Luffy is a famous pro gamer; millions of subscribers and social stats through the roof. But it’s not only his gaming skills and charming personality that make him so popular — it’s the mysterious “guy” who often appears in his streams, deep voice, and tattooed hands. His husband. But that’s a secret.

Sixth time's the Charm by katia-anyway (E)

5 times Law thought he was completely messing up wooing Luffy and 1 time he realized Luffy had been seduced all along!

What's A 'Closed' Sign Between Friends by teaandtumblr (G)

A tired, hungry surgeon drops in after hours once and Sanji doesn't have the heart to turn him away. What he doesn't expect is for his friend and this doctor to fall in love right under his nose. A 5+1 story.

A Strange Place to Meet New Friends by aspiringtrashpanda (G)

Nami drags Luffy to accompany her speed dating. Luffy's only in it for the hot chocolate. Good thing the handsome barista has just what Luffy needs.

Keep This Close To Our Hearts, Love by riverofnara (T)

It's amazing how a simple prank can be an expression of things unsaid.

-Mod Gigi

[heejinkwan]

[ STELLARS — a guide to astella’s fandom . ]

WHAT ARE STELLARS ? ˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥ stellars is the name given to the fanbase of kpop idol astella , the name was given to fans on january 10th , 2022 – three months after her debut . the fanbase is known for being fairly nice to get along with , only getting rowdy when it’s time to ‘ defend heejin ‘ . they’re very loyal , quite literally known for getting astella out of ‘ nugudom ‘ , convinced her company to have her perform at coachella , although she didn’t headline , it was still an amazing achievement for her . they even have their own community on twitter (x) , called stellars!

THE OFFICIAL STELLARS COLOURS ! ... the official colours for stellar are the swan ( #FCD417 ) , the sun ( #FF709C ) &&. the cyclop ( #FE8650 ) . each color is meant to represent astella’s growth ; her time in promise being the swan , first year as a soloist being the sun , and the cyclop being her revenge (reputation) era , the one she’s currently in .

THE OFFICIAL STELLAR LIGHTSTICK ( insp. venusvity ) ! ... THE FIRST lightstick , also known as the stellabong , was the very first light stick that dropped 2 months after astella’s initial debut in 2021 and came free with the physical album copy . stellars absolutely loved the design of the lightstick , it’s chargeable and can change into three different colors when you press the button , it is still available on astella’s website to this day .

THE ORIGINAL lightstick was released a month after the stellabong , it’s the only lightstick that stellars have where there is a handle. it’s known to be the least favorite light stick out of the the generations , although it is still used when astella performs on inkigayo or music bank , this really played into the mermaid feel a little bit , her international fans aren’t very fond of it , but her korean fans like it . the current retail price is $34 USD ( ₩45,307 ) , although as of 2024 it isn’t bought as much . however , at concerts astella still uses it whenever she can!

THE LATEST stellabong was release early june 2022 , just in time for astella’s performance at lollapalooza paris , replacing the previous one after a year run to mark the start of the ‘ revenge era ’ . simply being a modified version of the first gen stellabong , fans enjoyed improved shaping and quality , they definitely think this one is the best lightstick out of all three , it looks pretty , and just like the first one can change colors! the current retail price is 65$ USD ( ₩86,617 ) , astella likes to keep the prices of the lightstick’s in range so that most of her fans are able to afford it . but , there are still resellers in the fandom who either sell the lightstick for more or a cheaper price .

WHAT IS STELLARS FAVORITE ERA? ... NOBODY KNOWS is the most popular era out of all of astella’s comebacks so far , she gained tons of fans during this era and going viral almost every day thanks to her beauty . in a fan vote , 50.5% of stellars said they liked this era the best . ever since this era started , stellars started to get the ‘ stellars are so toxic ‘ treatment , they don’t care , they obviously act the way they do because of all the things heejin has been through . she also is active a lot on bubble and instagram threads , where she talks abiht things behind the scenes .

SUGARCOAT comes second in terms of popularity , having been voted by 45.1% of fans . most of this popularity stems from the fact that she just got out of her contract with her old company , almost getting blacklisted , and her name being infamous for the amount of months she was gone , a lot of the streams from this song , which garnered over 70 million views , came from people hate watching , wanting to see what’s all the hype about , but they ended up loving the song . before nobody knows became the best era in stellars eyes , sugarcoat was their roman empire .

QUEENDOM , is in third place , with a whopping 5.05% , queendom was the era of heejin being in promise , stellars don’t even want to talk about astella being the group . a lot of them like to pretend she was never in the group and was always a soloist after finding out in the lawsuit she made against her old company of the way she was treated , stellars don’t hold anything against the girls! a lot of them are still fans of them , they just won’t hesistate to hate on the company , a lot of ‘ toxic stellars ‘ would berate the members , saying they should’ve said something about her mistreatment but seeing how they really had no power stellars understand why the girls didn’t say anything . but it is thought to be known that the members still support her and astella does the same .

very much inspired by @mvneaten btw! it’s this post!

[ckret2]

i know you’ve talked about bill’s music tastes before, but do you have any head cannons for other characters’ music tastes?

i.e. do you think mabel would listen to vocaloid?

Mabel: here's what we know about her tastes.

She loves Dream Boy High; Dream Boy High's VCR tape design has nods to Jem & the Holograms, which has a million songs per episodes; Mabel has Xyler & Craz play synth music to defeat Bill; Mabeland plays 80's music. She's into extremely 80's-sounding synth-heavy pop. The music she plays in dream realms is the music closest to her heart. This is the core of her musical tastes.

There's something subtly, inexplicably different about music made for cartoons vs contemporary popular music, even when they're trying to portray the same genres. I can't describe what that quality is, but it's there. Anyway, if the core of Mabel's musical tastes is rooted in or near Dream Boy High, then she probably listens to other 80s cartoon soundtracks.

She's into 2010s acts that are throwbacks to late-1990s boy bands. She'd probably also like actual 90s boy bands.

She's fluent in modern top 40 music—which is no doubt where she she picked up Sev'ral Timez. I see her as the kind of kid who just keeps the radio on all the time. (And I do mean the radio—she didn't get a phone til the end of last summer, we see her with CDs, she probably had a radio long before she tried streaming.)

She's also fluent in classic rock ballads, but it's not her preference. She's a "grew up listening to the radio stations her parents picked on a car ride" kid. I suspect her dad plays 70s/80s pop in the car (cementing her primary musical tastes) because there's another Pines into synth pop so I've decided it's genetic, and her mom plays the classic rock. Mabel knows Don't Start Unbelieving from Mabel & Mom karaoke nights.

Dipper: if Mabel grew up listening to her parents' picks on the car radio, so did he. This is where he picked up his love for BABBA. From this we can deduce that, if their dad is the 70s/80s pop music parent, their dad probably drives them around more than their mom. I think you could safely give him other disco bands as well.

He plays the sousaphone but every band kid I've ever known treats band more like a musical sport than like a musical genre—the super passionate ones might practice extra and might watch other bands' performances, but they didn't just sit around listening to marching band music for fun. However, he also practices during the summer, even though he's in another state and obviously not participating in any summer band activities, which suggests an unusual passion for marching band. I still don't think he just listens to marching band music for fun but he probably keeps hearing songs and going "oh wow I've never heard the original before, only the band version."

He picked up a couple of indie folk bands to try to impress Wendy but he's not super into them.

Ford: He was on the absolute cutting edge of new wave & synth pop in the 80s. He was into the obscure stuff. Somewhere in the shack is a pile of cassettes by new wave acts the rest of the world has completely forgotten. He and Mabel trade music recommendations: he gives her the obscure as hell stuff and she tells him about all the cool new* (*post-1982) bands he never got to see. Mabel prefers peppier songs and he prefers moodier songs but there's a HUGE overlap between their tastes.

In a better, portal-less world, Ford's taste in new wave would have had time to drift into dark wave and cold wave, and from there slid over sideways to discover goth rock. There's an unhatched trad goth somewhere in his soul. He should have been listening to Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus, and The Cure. He should have gotten a black trench coat because he thought it would make him feel cool, not because he was an interdimensional criminal on the run. It's not too late for him to discover it now, but by now he should have made it miles beyond the major 80s goth rock acts, gone down half a dozen increasingly obscure genre alleys, and be burrowed deep into some weird sub-sub-sub-genre of EBM you and I have never heard of.

He has a love/hate relationship with All Star.

Stan: He liked hanging out at a 50s-themed diner in the 70s. He likes 50s music. I also think he picked up a fair amount of Spanish-language 50s rock-and-roll while abroad. Once like five years ago Soos overheard Stan playing a record and singing a song Abuelita plays and it cemented his ambition to reverse-adopt Stan as his dad.

Soos: Popular hip hop and anime/video game soundtracks. Every rap song he knows has been on the Billboard Hot 100 but on the other hand he has the demo version of the extended version of the ending theme of an anime from 2001 that was never fully released outside Japan and he's probably got a fifteen-minute story about why he knows this song even exists. He's puzzled through the shipping info of a Japanese CD website to get the official soundtrack of the most dogshit anime you could imagine. He's spent a week pouring through anime convention forums trying to track down a song he overheard someone use as their background music at a cosplay contest. Lots of 8-bit.

Wendy: You know the stomp clap hey genre? That. I have nothing further to add, you know what I'm talking about. Her heart yearns to escape to hipster city. She didn't even like Robbie's music when they were dating, she just thought it was cool he made it.

I'm not gonna go through every character I have headcanons for, you don't need all that on one post. Anyway, have a work in progress playlist. It's rigorously organized. "😀😀😀 Character Name 😀😀😀" is what each character would like listening to, "😀 Zodiac Symbol 😀" is songs about each character, "🪐🪐🪐 Flatland 🪐🪐🪐" is backstory stuff, "🌎 Earth 🌎" is either songs I need on this playlist for the vibes or songs that belong in one of the other categories but I haven't sorted them yet. Some of the sections are still empty. I think this is forgivable since the playlist is already 11 hours long.

[acepumpkinpatrick]

I really do wonder if y'all realize that, just because you're ignoring it doesn't mean it's getting better? It is in fact getting worse!

In less than 30 days, a whole year would have past a live-streamed genocide.

Over 70% of homes are uninhabitable because they’re completely leveled. (X)

There hasn't been clean water, or even enough water, since the first 3 weeks of the genocide. (X) (X)

The level and speed of starvation of over 2 million is unprecedented. (X)

Every single person has some kind of a disease or illness now. POLIO is back!! (X) (X)

It's already raining and the tents that didn't hold up 6 months ago are not gonna hold up now! (X)

And over all of this, the bombing has not stopped for a single day in 10 months.

Do not let yourself be desensitized or normalize Israel's crimes. Intricate with Palestinian stories and news and lives. Immerse yourself in community and solidarity.

[you-need-not-apply]

What are you favourite artists really getting paid?

A comparison of streaming platforms

Music plays an incredible part in shaping our society. From protest songs, educational rhymes, folk, classical, rock, techno, indie and disco music, it shapes our world view in a unique and powerful way. The way of listening to music has changed dramatically over the last one hundred and fifty years, from live bands on corners, to the invention of the radio, record players, CD’s, tapes, electronic music and now live streaming.

However, in a world where everything is about profit and popularity, the competition between streaming services is stiff. The pay ranges from awful to poor and as the algorithm evolves to recommend new artists to you, who is really making the most money?

The obvious answer is the streaming platform itself. Spotify wracked in a $18.68 billion (AUD) revenue in 2022 alone. Although Spotify don’t post their net profit, they did report a $391.2 (AUD) million loss in 2022, assuming this loss came from their initial revenue, Spotify should, theoretically, have made a staggering $18.28 billion dollar profit.

This leads us to the artists themselves, with such a large amount of profit and roughly 11 million artists on Spotify, we can only assume that split evenly and leaving a $2 billion (AUD)  dollar profit for Spotify themselves that each artist would be paid an average of $1480 AUD per year.

This is not the case. Spotify pays around $0.003 - $0.005 USD per stream, a pitiful amount. In fact, per 100,000 streams on Spotify an artist can only hope to gain around $300 - $500 USD. On top of this already insanely low number, Spotify practices a 70/30 model with an average of 70% of profit going to the artists themselves, while they take an additional 30%. This leaves us with around $210 - $350 USD profit.  The remaining royalties are then divided between the songwriters, publishers, and owners of the master recording. This could include the artist themselves, but it could also be the label they're signed to, leaving an even smaller profit for the artists themselves.

One of the most popular artists in the world, Taylor Swift, makes around $0.0043 USD per stream on her music. The highest paid artist, Drake, makes around $0.0049 USD per stream on his music. To be considered for having a ‘good number of streams’, an artist needs around 10,000 to 50,000 monthly listeners, however only 213,000 artists have hit this threshold out of the initial 11 million we discussed earlier.

In conclusion, Spotify is a scam. Buy physical items, such as CDs, records, merch, concert tickets etc, to truly support your favourite artist. And for god’s sake, don’t use Spotify

[tea-earl-grey]

the more i think about it, the more i like the fact that in Prodigy (and prospectively in shows set beyond then) the galaxy in Star Trek is much more connected, known, and easy to traverse than in the tng era shows. it makes sense that the legacy of ds9's forays into the Gamma Quadrant and particularly Voyager's journey through the Delta Quadrant would result in way fewer unknown parts of the galaxy and Starfleet's position shouldn't be about exploring but rather about forging connections with each other; trying to understand and learn rather than mindlessly spread outwards. (there's also something to be said about trying to alter the imperialist foundations of Star Trek and whether that can be done but that's another post.)

and from the point of view of technological development, it does make sense that a post-Voyager trek would have to deal with all this new tech Voyager came up with to speed up its 70 year journey. like yeah, of course Janeway would have a slip-stream drive installed on the Dauntless (one that is hopefully less likely to throw your ship into an ice planet). of course members of Voyager's crew (like Chakotay) would join the Protostar project to keep exploring faster than warp travel after 7 years of doing just that. of course there would be abandoned parts of the Borg transwarp networks still around and usable (as we see in Picard s1) after the network was fractured in Endgame. and as much as we joke and meme about Tom breaking the Warp 10 barrier like. that is still a significant scientific breakthrough that would have consequences. and it would certainly be in Starfleet's interest to try to maintain the relationships Voyager forged in the Delta Quadrant.

idk i would love to see Prodigy (and any other post-Voyager trek) actively dig into that idea a little bit more. like yes we boldly went or whatever but how are those people on those "strange new worlds"? do we still talk to them? do they like us? what sort of trade do we engage in with them? is it ethical trading? how are Federation diplomatic envoys dealing with like a million new states and cultures to negotiate with? how common is faster than warp travel now? what about outside of the Federation? how many people have been stranded 50 years from home after their engine died? what innovations have there been in communication systems? and most importantly – is Neelix still ambassador to the Delta Quadrant?

[shakira-fan-page]

Shakira's ''Loca'' (feat. Dizzee Rascal) has reached 70 MILLION streams on Spotify.

This is her 54th song to achieve this on the platform.

[centrally-unplanned]

Its fucking 2 AM lets keep ranting about this! Genshin isn’t popular the way people think its popular. It is currently one of the most financially successful games ever:

But it doesn’t make 20 quadspillion dollars by being the game with the highest player count - and certainly not by being the game with the highest player count in Japan. It has a ton of players, don’t get me wrong - looking like 60 million monthly users.

That isn’t that much though! 

All the big games clean its clock - and it looks even less pretty in Japan itself:

Mobile games ranked by installs. Do you even know what that second game is, by the way? 

Uma Musume Pretty Derby: Horse Girl Racing & Breeding game, absolutely more popular than Genshin in Japan on mobile (which most people estimate is how Genshin is played in Japan & China, vs PC in the US). Which I am singling out specifically, because beyond just ‘numbers’ you have metrics like intensity of the fanbase, how much do the devotees talk about the game and such. That sets trends more than numbers do, right? And hey look Comiket in Japan just happened, what do you got for me - lets rank number of doujins sold at comiket in the gatcha-style games category:

Type-Moon: 848 

Uma Musume: 728

Hololive: 620 (Vtuber)

Kancolle: 654

Touhou: 596

iDOLM@STER Starlight Stage: 474

Blue Archive: 446

iDOLM@STER Shiny Colors: 232

Genshin Impact: 230

Nijisanji: 194 (Vtuber)

Touken Ranbu: 192

Project Sekai: 172 (Includes Vocaloid)

Arknights: 123

Azurlane: 120

Girls und Panzer: 118

Fuck yeah Girls und Panzer. But anyway 9th place? Pretty good! Very respectable...and fucking wrecked by the HORSE GIRL BREEDING MOBILE GAME Uma Musume

How about some streaming data! Japan only ofc:

So now here its pretty low, but I will grant that its the best ranking anime-style game. Genshin is popular, for sure. But all this taken in, Genshin just aint that big - its a very popular game, probably the most popular “fantasy fluffy anime game”, but its not like, insanely popular, running the show.

The reason you think its popular is two-fold; one is that its a gatcha game, so it is monitizing its player base way above other large games. Not crazily so btw, the average Genshin player has probably spent $70 dollars on the game, the normal price of a game - but still its competing with other “free” games which always have much bigger player bases, its hitting hard in relation. It is, absolutely, one of the most financially successful games ever. And the second reason is its cross-country popularity - its really rare for a game to be huge in China AND Japan AND America. The fact that its a top game in all three countries is a big feat, and it makes you hear about it, it gives it a playerbase scale from the sheer market size.

But if you are Japanese company Nintendo, making a game that is *not* a gatcha game, for a company that is famously pretty parochial about branding their games for the Japanese market uber alles, that is making a *console* game on a console that famously did not sell well in China...why would Genshin stand out to you? Its just one of the games, competing with a totally different model, on a totally different device, and in totally different markets. It is a trend, but it is not driving trends, it is not the trendsetter - certainly not for a Switch game. Engage would have no reason to try to copy it over other game styles.

TL:DR Fire Emblem Engage is taking inspiration from the horse fucker game and if you can’t prove that wrong I don’t want to hear it.

[lol-jackles]

https://twitter.com/CreationEnt/status/1763754174766792962

Jensen already signing on for 2025 cons?? CE is clearly fishing for money (the cruise and now selling packages for this new 2025 con) which tells me 2024 is in the red or close to it. It reeks of desperation to be pushing 2025 cons when they haven't even had a 2024 con yet (when I sent this message at least).

And Jensen signing on so early.... do you think he's feeling pressure about the future? Maybe he's not landing the jobs he thought he would and is lining up cons just in case?

Link. to be fair it's early 2025 so far, but...yeah.

As you know, peak-TV is over even though TV business still accounts for 80% of the total advertising revenue. And we are supposedly in the "third act of the streaming wars" as streaming services are struggling to reach profitability. The movie box office sales are expected to be $8 billion in 2024, which is down 10% from 2023, and down 30% from 2019.

All this means is number of scripted shows will be halved, from peak 633 in 2022, then 481 in 2023, to 300 in coming years (source: market research firm Ampere Analysis). Development executives are taking longer to greenlight shows, even for projects from established showrunners.

So yeah, acting gigs are going to be tougher to come by and Jensen is taking the best current option.

I've always thought that everybody decided to lose their minds and dump millions into streaming services and shows that didn't have a chance in hell of being profitable.

Phase One: Streaming by borrowing money from Silicon Valley banks, get into massive debts by making whole bunch of shows that nobody watch in order to crowd out competitors.

Phase Two: Profitability. This means less shows, and an introduction of advertising.   So you aren’t getting unlimited content for 10 bucks a month forever. The math never made sense

Phase Three: Production spending will fall and budget for "prestige drama" will be cut from $10 million to $4.5 billion per episode. You know, like the good old days before everybody decided to lose their mind over streaming.

On the plus side, there could be another Indie boom akin to the '70s and see really weird niche genres like disco themed movies and artsy odd experimental ones, etc.

[fly-pow-bye]

First, there was Batgirl. Then, there was Scoob Holiday Haunt. Now, it's Coyote vs. Acme, a Roger Rabbit-styled take on a New Yorker article about Wile E Coyote suing Acme, that is getting written off for taxes. Originally supposed to be released in July only to be replaced with Barbie, now this finished film can only be seen in the alternate universe where people are reminiscing about Coyotenheimer.

This film was considered finished, it was screened to test audiences to their approval, and all of the hard work made for this film will now rot in a Warner Bros vault. This was all to get 30 million dollars on a movie that cost 70 million to make. With a choice to either release the movie in theaters, release the movie straight to Max, or sell the movie to another streaming service, the Zaslav-run Warner Bros Discover decided to lose 40 million and make sure nobody gets to see it.

There was a nice crew reel showing a bunch of behind the scenes footage of this now unreleased movie, but it turns out having a movie written off for taxes does not mean Warner Bros Discovery cannot copyright strike it down.

[hldailyupdate]

‘Defenceless’ by Louis Tomlinson just hit 70 MILLION streams on Spotify! (11 October 2023)

[chailattehotte]

Cha Cha Cha broke 70 million streams on Spotify :)