The Independent Variable (Page 24)

🎼 Quitting Spotify, ethics, and pay per stream

I 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 the discussion. Just because there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, doesn’t mean you can’t try—especially when you can do so for the exact same price.

🤖 Inside the Creation of Tilly Norwood, the AI Actress Freaking Out Hollywood

WSJ

Over 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 person with any detail and look you desire. And why would someone pay a human actor $5 million when you can pay an AI actor $50 million. What on earth are we doing here???

🪿 Will Geese Redeem Noisy, Lawless Rock and Roll?

music

New Yorker

In 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

music

Birchtree

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.)

🖼️ There’s beauty in the question — Mohammed Sami

art

YouTube

Sami is a favorite to win the Turner Award for 2025, featuring the best in new developments in contemporary art in Britain. Getting to see Sami in his element, talking about his art, was wondrous. There is power and reckoning in the simplicity.

🧑‍💻 Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

tech

pketh

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 ‘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 “venture predation,” 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.

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🎼 Quitting Spotify, ethics, and pay per stream

🤖 Inside the Creation of Tilly Norwood, the AI Actress Freaking Out Hollywood

🪿 Will Geese Redeem Noisy, Lawless Rock and Roll?

🎵 Pay per stream is a messy metric

🖼️ There’s beauty in the question — Mohammed Sami

🧑‍💻 Why Sell Lifetime Plans, in a Default Subscription World?

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