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Kevin Kortum

274 posts

Posts by Kevin Kortum

šŸŽµ Pay per stream is a messy metric

So I’ll ask again, would you rather have had your music listened to by more people and you earned more money, or would you like to have had fewer people listen and make less money?

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. The whole point of the conversation is to move people off of Spotify and to other places. If more people move to other streamers, those streamers will start paying the artists more… So if an artist had a choice of where they’d prefer people listen to their music, they’d choose the one that pays more per stream every day. This is even before getting into the real ethical issues with Spotify when it comes to how they do business and the actions of their leadership. Plus, if you have only now heard of Qobuz, then it’s clear this isn’t actually a topic you’ve spent much time on or cared about before… (For the record, I use Apple Music because we pay for Apple One as a family.)

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šŸ§‘ā€šŸ’» Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

When that happens, companies (especially the VC-backed kind) now need to contrive new and increasingly stick-like reasons for customers to pay again. From made-for-marketing ā€˜features’ that suck to use IRL, to breaking compatibility with older versions, to spamming you with marketing notifications and embedded ads. Their relationship with customers goes from symbiotic to parasitic.

Pirijan, the creator of Kinopio, is always incredibly thoughtful with his approach to building and his writing—this is no exception. Longtime readers will know my distaste for where the economy is going with ā€œventure predation,ā€ and the growth-at-all-costs approach in the tech and financial spaces. As Pirijan notes, it all leads to parasitic relationships. Rather than build the best product that users want to use and pay for, they do their best to look flashy, attract new users, and trap them in their ecosystem.

šŸŽ‰ 5 literary magazines for sci-fi and fantasy readers

Anyone can start a literary journal, but it takes dedication and care for one to prosper and grow into something with potential. Foofaraw Press is an independent zine of surreal storytelling and worldly observations. Though there is an argument to be made that all of the magazines on this list are ā€œindependent,ā€ Foofaraw Press stands out for their accessibility to emerging authors.

My litmag, Foofaraw, was featured alongside Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and two others in this list, which is truly an honor.

šŸ’£ Will Congress rein in Pete Hegseth and his boat-bombing campaign?

Many of the new lawyers installed in senior posts over recent months ā€œdon’t care what the right answer isā€, bemoans the former senior JAG. ā€œThey spend all their time trying to figure out what the administration wants and then reverse engineer how to get to it.ā€

I called it out a while ago, but at a minimum, Trump is guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, and now I think it’s pretty clear he and Hegseth are guilty of international war crimes as well. Since Trump is such a great ā€œbusinessman man,ā€ he should be familiar with vicarious liability and his predecessor’s motto: ā€œThe buck stops here.ā€

šŸ“ ProNotes

So this is a genius app/extension to Apple Notes that works on top of Apple Notes to give you better formatting tools, markdown, slash commands, backlinks, and templates. It has me rethinking where I keep my notes—currently in iA Writer—especially with the idea of the Forever Notes framework for Apple Notes.