My head is full of songs, my fingers spilling letters, my eyes lost in landscapes →
Latest Writing
A Disposable Commodity
I’ve been reading Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly. It’s a pretty damning synopsis of the streaming giant’s reshaping of our musical landscape, significantly assisted by major record labels.
I was particularly surprised to learn of the popularity of Spotify’s curated “mood” playlists, probably because I couldn’t be less interested and have never engaged with them. However, their massive audience is all the fuel Spotify needed to take them over with its own “Perfect Fit Content” (PFC) songs: toothless imitations of songs by actual artists pumped out by a raft of production studios. These significantly cheaper songs give the boot to artists that Spotify would have to pay actual royalties.
The more surprising revelation is exactly how Spotify got the idea to start the PFC program in the first place: research! As Spotify looked at how music was being streamed on the platform, they discovered that there were playlists attached to certain moods that listeners played in the background of other activities, usually on a loop. That’s why their play counts are so high. The fact that listeners are treating these playlists as functional music provides the perfect environment for swapping songs created for the love of music with ones created to bypass royalty payouts. Since all these listeners seem to care about is the vibe these playlists create, why would they care who was making the music, or any kind of artistic merit? All that matters is that these scab songs sound similar to what they replace.
Featured Work
Roxo Delivery Bot Touchscreen App
DEKA is a research and development company that has been working with FedEx to create Roxo, an autonomous delivery robot. Build atop DEKA’s iBot wheelchair base, Roxo will be able to easily navigate urban terrain like sidewalks, curbs, and even stairs.
Roxo has a 6-inch touchscreen for use by both employees who will prepare Roxo to make a delivery and ordinary folks who will be receiving deliveries. Users will either type a PIN code or scan a QR code to securely open Roxo’s doors. DEKA’s strength lies in its talented hardware development teams, so in order to produce a user-friendly proof of concept touchscreen application for FedEx to use in its initial delivery tests, they reached out to my employer.
Over the course of 3 months, I worked with DEKA’s Roxo team to produce an optimal user experience for both user types. This project was really fun and presented challenges that I hadn’t come across before. For example, Roxo will be used in a variety of lighting environments, from dim, indoor fluorescent lights to full-on sunshine, necessitating some branching of the FedEx design system to increase the size and contrast of text and buttons.
Latest Links
AI wants to rule the world, but it can’t handle dairy.
Greg Storey: “If Google’s AI can’t even fact-check the popularity of a cheese, how the hell is it supposed to take over someone’s job? What is the value of having an assistant that does an amazing job 60% of the time—every time? And how is it going to do good work if it can’t find the data because it’s still on spreadsheets on a laptop somewhere?”
Floor 796
This site is getting bounced around more than a beach ball at a Nickelback concert, and for good reason. “Floor796 is an animated scene showing the lives of characters from various works on the 796th floor of a huge space station. The animation is regularly expanded with new blocks (rooms) and characters from movies, TV series, games, anime, memes, etc.”
Tickets, Please
“For Hayward, the tickets represent a vanishing analog art form and a nostalgia for an iconic era of rock-n-roll. 'I look at these tickets as mini works of art: the font selection, the layout, the color, the copy. All done with careful consideration to detail'. Each stub is a fragment of history—their haphazard tears and distinctive creases emblematic of what is widely considered the golden age of music.”
Deezer deploys cutting-edge AI detection tool for music streaming
“Generative AI has the potential to positively impact music creation and consumption, but its use must be guided by responsibility and care in order to safeguard the rights and revenues of artists and songwriters. Going forward we aim to develop a tagging system for fully AI generated content, and exclude it from algorithmic and editorial recommendation.” Bravo.
The people should own the town square
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko is beginning to “transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.” We need more of this in the world.
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