I'm not really supposed to do self-promotion here... but I was featured on What's in my NOW? if you care to give it a gander.
Kevin Kortum
99 postsPosts by Kevin Kortum
🧻 I hate the Pantone color of the year
designIn fashion language, white suggests luxury, like, you don’t have to work, because if you worked, you’d wear a more practical color that won’t get stained within 5 minutes. Staying clean is a privilege — the aristocracy keeps their hands clean and the working class gets dirty for them.
I’m going to go out on a limb and play the contrarian: I kinda like the color of the year. But I do think they are on to something here when it comes to privilege, white nationalism, etc. Especially as the class gap continues to grow
🎼 Quitting Spotify, ethics, and pay per stream
musicI don’t think it’s ethical to use Apple Music, but I DO think it’s unethical to use Spotify. I don’t think the “How to quit Spotify” article made any point other than finding a more ethical alternative to Spotify, which isn’t hard… and yes, pay per stream has to be a part of that equation.
Related to the previous entry on pay-per-stream, in typical Crucial Tracks fashion, Jason nails everything here, including why Spotify isn’t a great place to be and why you can’t just shrug off the pay-per-stream part of
🤖 Inside the Creation of Tilly Norwood, the AI Actress Freaking Out Hollywood
aiOver the next six months, Van der Velden toiled with her 15-person team to nail down the look of her leading lady, creating 2,000 iterations of an actress unbound by the limits of physical ability, age or talent.
In recent weeks, she has signed about 60 nondisclosure agreements for hybrid movies (with real actors), full AI films and Tilly-specific projects, most of them in the $10 million to $50 million range.
This is so embarrassing. It took a 15-person team to “nail down the look”??? There are thousands (if not millions) of individual artists who can draw a
🪿 Will Geese Redeem Noisy, Lawless Rock and Roll?
musicIn the months since Geese released its third studio album, “Getting Killed,” the band has been rhapsodically heralded as the redeemer of a certain kind of noisy, lawless rock and roll.
Spoiler alert: Getting Killed is making my top ten albums of the year. Easily. I wasn’t a huge fan of their last album, but singer Cameron Winter released his debut solo album, Heavy Metal, which made my top ten last year, and they’ve done a great job of combining the sounds and styles to make something that’s absolutely wonderful.
🎵 Pay per stream is a messy metric
musicSo 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
