8Sided Blog

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Decoding the Age of Fear

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Neil Strauss in Rolling Stone:

Around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the U.S., life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it’s been in a decade, and despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991. As reported in The Atlantic, 2015 was “the best year in history for the average human being.”



So how is it possible to be living in the safest time in human history, yet at the exact same time to be so scared?



Because, according to {The Culture of Fear author Barry} Glassner, “we are living in the most fearmongering time in human history. And the main reason for this is that there’s a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears.”



Inherent in the ways the news is both reported and received are a number of biases that guarantee people are not informed, but rather misinformed. The first problem with the news is that it must be new. Generally, events that are both aberrations from the norm and spectacular enough to attract attention are reported, such as terrorist attacks, mass shootings and plane crashes.



But far more prolific, and thus even less news-worthy, are the 117 suicides in the U.S. each day (in comparison with 43 murders), the 129 deaths from accidental drug overdoses, and the 96 people dying a day in automobile accidents (27 of whom aren’t wearing seat belts, not to mention the unspecified amount driving distracted). Add to these the 1,315 deaths each day due to smoking, the 890 related to obesity, and all the other preventable deaths from strokes, heart attacks and liver disease, and the message is clear: The biggest thing you have to fear is not a terrorist or a shooter or a deadly home invasion. You are the biggest threat to your own safety.



It would make logical sense, then, that if Americans were really choosing politicians based on their own safety, they would vote for a candidate who stresses seat-belt campaigns, programs for psychological health to decrease suicide, and ways to reduce smoking, obesity, prescription-pill abuse, alcoholism, flu contagion and hospital-acquired infections.



But our fears are not logical.

I highly recommend reading the full article.



Vox:

A cognitive scientist and linguist, {Harvard psychology professor Steven} Pinker focused his study of human nature on our propensity for violence — and conversely, cooperation — in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. In the book, Pinker meticulously documented a steady decline in violence over the last several centuries, which he writes, “may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species.”



[Steven Pinker:} Pessimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. While we have to be realistic about changes both up and down in rates of violence, we have to remind ourselves that violence is a problem we can deal with, that we have dealt with, and what’s important is to look at it realistically. To keep track of when it goes up, when it goes down, and what causes it to go up and go down and do more of what causes it to go down. We know over the last couple of years that it has gone down, so we should figure out what we did to achieve that and do more of it.



Lifehacker:

Yes, 2016 was full of some awful news. Let’s not forget all the good stuff that happened in 2016, though. Can’t think of anything? This website will jog your memory.



The site, 2016.promo, is based on an article by Angus Hervey: 99 Reasons 2016 Was a Good Year. The site is a month-to-month list of positive, non-crappy headlines from 2016.

Chin up. Happy new year!

Streaming’s Two-Sided Effect on Downloads

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TorrentFreak:

From the beginning, one of the key software engineers at Spotify has been Ludvig Strigeus, the creator of uTorrent, so clearly the company already knew a lot about file-sharers. In the early days the company was fairly open about its aim to provide an alternative to piracy, but perhaps one of the earliest indications of growing success came when early invites were shared among users of private torrent sites.



“People that are pirating music and not paying for it, they are the ones we want on our platform. It’s important for us to be reaching these individuals that have never paid for music before in their life, and get them onto a service that’s legal and gives money back to the rights holders,” {Spotify Australia managing director Kate} Vale said.



Of course, hardcore pirates aren’t always easily encouraged to part with their cash, so Spotify needed an equivalent to the no-cost approach of many torrent sites. That is still being achieved today via its ad-supported entry level, {General Counsel of Spotify Horacio} Gutierrez says. “I think one just has to look at data to recognize that the freemium model for online music consumption works.”



Spotify’s general counsel {also} says that the company is enjoying success, not only by bringing pirates onboard, but also by converting them to premium customers via a formula that benefits everyone in the industry.



The Guardian:

The digital download, ushered in to the mass market more than a decade ago by Apple’s iTunes music store, is in rapid decline as people shift to streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.



So how much longer do downloads have? A few years and they’re dead, says Mark Mulligan, music analyst at Midia Consulting: “It’s going to die before the CD. The CD has a fairly universal player, where there’s always at least one in a house. And the people who grew up buying CDs are the older music consumers – the CD will literally die out only when they do.”



“There’s no end date … our music iTunes business is doing very well,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of internet software and services, told Billboard magazine in June. “Downloads weren’t growing, and certainly are not going to grow again, but it’s not declining anywhere near as fast as any of them [in record labels] predicted. There are a lot of people who download music and are happy with it and they’re not moving towards subscriptions.”



But in the long run, streaming is the only game in town – along, perhaps, with the CD and vinyl. The download once looked like the future; now, the question is how much more of a future it has.

The Gatekeepers of Streaming’s Long Tail

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Harvard Business Review:

Digitization has brought new strategic challenges, and falling revenue, to the industry. Yet it has also brought new opportunities to a wider variety of artists. By reducing search costs, the digitization of music makes it easier to discover new artists and albums. It is {also} less costly to release new music, leading to unpredictable successes from artists who might not have been discovered or produced an album in an earlier era.



With subscription pricing and the ability to easily skip among artists (as opposed to per-album or per-song charges, which were the norm), streaming pushes users to listen to explore new artists. This has the potential to reduce the concentration of the very top artists and albums, while also helping music lovers find what economists refer to as the “long tail” of the industry.



The Guardian:

“Spotify has democratised the universe,” is the dramatic, understandably Spotify-centric view of Spotify’s George Ergatoudis, who joined the service this year after a decade as pop’s most powerful tastemaker at BBC Radio 1. “One of our editors can find something, believe in it, put it in a playlist, see an interesting result from the audience then accelerate the song.” Systems inside Spotify automatically create playlists of what Ergatoudis describes as “emerging stories” (songs) which editors then trawl through when they’re compiling the playlists vital in achieving true hugeness. “There’s a lot of human curation time spent on saying, ‘Right, there’s some noise there, but what do we think about it editorially?’” Ergatoudis says.



It’s reassuring that discovery isn’t left entirely to algorithms, but this editorial aspect creates another question. Namely: has streaming liberated new artists from the constraints of regimented radio playlists and the whims of ego-crazed music critics, only to replace that system with a different set of gatekeepers? “The term ‘gatekeeper’ assumes we’re blocking something worthy coming through,” Ergatoudis insists. “I’d argue we’re not doing that. We’re letting good stuff through, and amplifying it.”



Ergatoudis argues that the gate being kept is now an extremely large one, or perhaps a load of different gates, through which different artists can pass. Demographics differ from service to service – Apple Music and Tidal skew urban – but as streaming services aren’t restricted by hours in a day, like mainstream radio stations, we’re looking at the possibility of multiple concurrent musical zeitgeists. For the first time, something like the UK’s long-trumpeted guitar-music resurgence wouldn’t have to come at the expense or, say, grime’s increasing popularity.

‘Independents Are Front and Centre’

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Check out this lengthy interview with Merlin BV CEO Charles Caldas on [PIAS]’s fine blog, worth reading in full. A couple of excerpts:

[PIAS]: Did Spotify save the music business?



Charles Caldas: I don’t really subscribe to the ‘silver bullet’ view of the music industry. But Spotify’s certainly led the way to helping people to understand that there are different ways to monetise these rights. They showed you could marry those disruptive technologies with real commercial opportunities – not just threats.



Now if you look at the value Apple Music, Amazon and Google Play is bringing into the streaming business, you’re starting to see that’s shaping what the future of the business will look like.



[PIAS]: A lot of people are saying streaming isn’t mainstream yet.



Charles Caldas: That’s an important point. When I was younger, I was trying to sell records into HMV in Australia which was the epitome of the mainstream retailer. Let’s be generous and say there were 10,000 titles in that store. If you weren’t in those 10,000 titles you were invisible to the people in that store.



Now, the mainstream is whatever is on the services – every bit of music ever released. That’s why independents are front and centre in the market today. We’re not relegated to the specialist retailers or to the back of the shop.



Look into it from a consumer point of view: you can come into an environment like Spotify and what you’re discovering is no longer limited to what you hear on the radio, saw on television or read about in the press.



What we call over-indexing today is to me the rightful performance of independent music in the marketplace. The days of ‘if only the record store would stock this record’ have gone.

Eno Achieves the Endless

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Brian Eno:

“Recordings – whether vinyl, cassette or CD – are limited in length, and replay identically each time you listen to them. So in the past I was limited to making the systems which make the music, but then recording 30 minutes or an hour and releasing that. ‘Reflection’ in its album form – on vinyl or CD – is like this. But the app by which ‘Reflection’ is produced is not restricted: it creates an endless and endlessly changing version of the piece of music”.



Complete Music Update:

Brian Eno has revealed that his new album, ‘Reflection’, will see him achieve a long held goal to create an ambient record that does not end.



As well as releases in time-limited standard formats, the album will be available through apps for iOS and Apple TV on which the music on the record will play endlessly until the sun explodes and destroys all evidence of the human race having ever existed. Either that or until you get bored and turn it off. Whichever comes first.



Reflection is released on January 1. In the meantime, this video from Pitchfork spotlights a previously time-constrained Eno:

Watch on YouTube

DJ Shadow Dissects “Mutual Slump”

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The often excellent Song Exploder podcast has dropped an episode featuring DJ Shadow pulling apart his seminal 1996 track “Mutual Slump”:

It’s difficult to overstate just how much of a creative gut-punch DJ Shadow’s early recordings were to those of us producing electronic music at the time. I remember how the pre-Entroducing singles on Mo’Wax – such as “Lost & Found (S.F.L.)” – totally blew my mind and forced me to raise my studio game. I know I wasn’t alone.

I met Josh Davis / DJ Shadow at a record show in Austin in the early 2000s before one of my gigs. After introducing myself he laughed and said, “ohhh, now I know what my friend meant when he told me DJ Q-Bert was in town.”

Quick Take: Breaking a Monster

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Breaking A Monster, a fine documentary on the signing and marketing of ‘tween metal band Unlocking The Truth, is now streaming on Netflix:

Watch on YouTube



This ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style documentary is filled with behind-the-scenes music industry clichés, but only because unfortunately many of these clichés exist and thrive. The closed door meetings with the record company execs are especially uncomfortable. That said, it is amazing how self-aware these kids are. Kudos to them for realizing they need to take a stand, especially against adults out to intimidate them into caving to the record company’s contrived vision of how a young, African-American rock band should be presented. For example, the band shoots down a music video idea that doesn’t ‘match the song’ (despite heated push-back from management) and belligerently and repeatedly keep their team focused on the band’s priority: actually getting to work on their album in a recording studio. I was also struck by how at ease the band is playing Coachella early on, like they’ve played on stages that size dozens of times before. Though I knew of them, I hadn’t followed Unlocking The Truth so I was expecting a ‘screwed over by record label’ downfall to occur in the third act, but the documentary just ended in the midst of the band’s rise. That third act may be yet to come … or maybe not. Regardless, I think these three smart and talented young rockers will do just fine.

Quit the News

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Co-signing this article found on Raptitude:

The news isn’t interested in creating an accurate sample. They select for what’s 1) unusual, 2) awful, and 3) probably going to be popular. So the idea that you can get a meaningful sense of the “state of the world” by watching the news is absurd.



Their selections exploit our negativity bias. We’ve evolved to pay more attention to what’s scary and infuriating, but that doesn’t mean every instance of fear or anger is useful. Once you’ve quit watching, it becomes obvious that it is a primary aim of news reports—not an incidental side-effect—to agitate and dismay the viewer.



Curate your own portfolio. You can get better information about the world from deeper sources, who took more than a half-day to put it together.



I quit watching TV news (and reading the more opinionated news sites) several years ago and I can attest that my life, outlook, and – I truly believe – knowledge of the issues have improved. I used to watch daily news shows that mirrored my liberal preference and thought they were rationally informing me, unlike those ‘other’ news shows. All it took was a month-long media break to clear my head and, upon returning to TV, see these shows for what they were. I was surprised to realize they were just as alarmist, loose with the facts, and conflict-oriented as their conservative counterparts.

How do I stay informed? I subscribe to two fine email newsletters that I read on my lunch break: The Week’s 10 Things You Need To Know Today and Vox’s Vox Sentences. If there are any stories in those that I want to learn more about then I’ll easily find additional articles for a deeper dive. I try not to read news any earlier than the afternoon as my mornings are sacred, dedicated to setting the day’s tone and working undistracted on my most important tasks.

I highly recommend quitting the news.

YouTube, Unpaid Royalty, and Missing Metadata

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The New York Times:

In a persistent problem for the online music business, large numbers of songs have missing or incorrect data about their songwriters and which music publishers represent them, leaving what is widely estimated to be millions of dollars unpaid. The publishers’ association has made a series of deals to address the problem, most recently with Spotify.



On Thursday, YouTube, which is by most estimates the most popular destination for music online, announced that it had reached a settlement with the National Music Publishers’ Association, a trade group, over the complex issue of unpaid songwriting royalties.



The agreement with YouTube {estimated to be worth more than $40 million} will give participating publishers — the companies that traditionally manage songwriting rights, which are separate from those of recordings — access to a list of songs for which YouTube has missing or incomplete rights data. YouTube will then pay any accrued royalties from a fund it has set aside for this purpose.



Again, the services get the all the blame but messy data collection and management within the industry itself is a major part of the problem.

Previously and Previously.

Don’t Believe The Vinyl Hype

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The Guardian:

Earlier this week, it was widely reported that vinyl is outselling digital downloads in the UK for the first time since the iTunes store was launched here in 2004. The real story is that sales of downloads are dropping not because vinyl is wooing back digital listeners but because streaming is becoming the default way of consuming digital music.



The relentless spin on the so-called “vinyl revival” is getting ridiculous – as the Daily Mash pointed out in a piece about how vinyl has become more popular than food. The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) has been spinning this line for the last couple years, since taking over the reins of Record Store Day. Unless you are reissuing Foo Fighters albums to be sold in the supermarket chains that have jumped on the vinyl-revival bandwagon, the situation is nowhere near as VG+ as ERA is suggesting.



We have to ask ourselves why people prefer to buy old records. Is it because vinyl is essentially a retro format, so people naturally look backwards instead of forwards? Is it because the whole culture of music – from the BBC 6Music playlist to festival lineups – is so focused on reliving past glories? I’m guessing it’s because these things are a known quantity, and that is what people want from their records: familiarity, nostalgia, a warm and cosy signifier that can be used in ads for banks, cars and clothes.



Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that people are still buying vinyl, and it’s no bad thing that it’s becoming more widely available. But it seems to have had very little impact on the industry at large, apart from making things even more difficult.