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The Ballad of the Blog

June 3, 2019 · Leave a Comment

Writer Alan Jacobs has some strong words for those of us still using social media:

The decision to be on Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) is not simply a personal choice. It has run-on effects for you but also for others. When you use the big social media platforms you contribute to their power and influence, and you deplete the energy and value of the open web. You make things worse for everyone. I truly believe that. Which is why I’m so obnoxiously repetitive on this point.

Jacobs’ attitude is in line with my previous thoughts on intention and the depersonalization of ‘newsfeed culture.’ The reality of supporting a corporate behemoth that’s up to no good is also something I struggle with. I’ve picked up my Twitter usage over the past few months, not decreased it, telling myself it’s a useful tool for networking. And I’m still paying for Facebook ads on my label releases. I feel like a little part of me dies every time I send a dollar to Facebook.

It’s remarkable that — though admittedly part of a tiny minority — we’re all asking these questions at the same time. And this is a conversation we need to have, whether supporting artists outside of Spotify or finding promotional and networking avenues that don’t involve Facebook. I’m not the only one to plant a flag in these issues. But I’d like the blog to talk more about how we wrestle with the tension between the independent creative community and the corporate interests propped up as gatekeepers. Music’s place in the 21st century, indeed.

Filed Under: Commentary Tagged With: Social Media

We Would Call That a Demon

January 27, 2019 · Leave a Comment

On a fascinating episode of Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast, “technologist, futurist, inventor, and mage” Mark Pesce has a fascinating observation about social media’s knack for social engineering:

What is Facebook doing? It’s watching your responses to build a simulation – simulacra, really – of you and then it can check against that simulacra what your emotional state is. Okay, so, it’s built an A.I. that can essentially read and tamper with your emotional state. If this were the 14th century and I talked about evoking something that could then tamper with you emotionally and that you would feed energy that it would feed back to you in a different form – we would call that a demon.

There’s also a meatier-than-usual post on Kottke.org by Tim Carmody about where the web went wrong and how the spirit of blogging might point to the desired way forward:

A lot of the efforts to reshape social media, or to walk away from it in favor of RSS feeds or something else, are really attempts to recapture those utopian elements that were active in the zeitgeist ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago. They still exercise a powerful hold over our collective imagination about what the internet is, and could be, even when they take the form of dashed hopes and stifled dreams.

These days I’m thinking about this stuff all of the time. I know I’m hardly the only one.

🔗 → Ep. 116 Live at Civic Hall Pt. 2: A Demonology of Algorithms with Mark Pesce
🔗 → How to Fix Social Media by Injecting A Chunk of the Blogosphere

Filed Under: Items of Note Tagged With: Blogging, Douglas Rushkoff, Podcast, Social Media

Immune to Misinformation

January 8, 2019 · Leave a Comment

I’m happy that John Green is doing this Crash Course series on Navigating Digital Information. This is important and I look forward to all the episodes.

John recently gave up all social media for a year. Here’s his first-day video and here’s his one-month follow-up. In the latter he states: “Now I have sometimes believed that I’m like immune to misinformation but I’ve come to understand that such a belief actually makes you more susceptible to it.”

Filed Under: Items of Note Tagged With: Information, Internet, Social Media, The Battle for Your Mind

Ceding Control to an Unseen Force

May 27, 2017 · Leave a Comment

A reminder from Music 3.0 blog:

A website many times gets overlooked as an integral piece of your digital promotional life because there are so many other places that you can use as your online focal point. Having a Facebook page or Tumblr blog, or relying on another social network as your online central focus has a number of potential flaws, not the least is control of your message.



When you depend on a social network for your online presence, you’re ceding control to an unknown, unseen force that can change its will at any time with no regard to your online well-being. If you rely on an external network, sooner or later you’re going to get burnt. It’s the nature of the Internet to constantly change, and it’s too early to get a feel for the life span of even of the largest sites and networks.



An artist’s website is the only place online that you can control the look, feel, and information and never have to worry about it changing unless you want it to. Don’t trust your online presence to social networks.



This mirrors the first piece of advice I give every time I start consulting an artist or label. Relying solely on social media (or not having social media posts consistently point to the artist’s website) is the most common and harmful mistake out there.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Marketing, Social Media

Delving Into HyperNormalisation

February 5, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Acclaimed documentarian Adam Curtis is at it again with HyperNormalisation, another stab at explaining the many forces responsible for the confounding state of our present world. Hyperallergic has a fascinating analysis of Curtis’s latest project and pulls this frightening / enlightening quote from the documentary’s narration:

The liberals were outraged by Trump, but they expressed their anger in cyberspace — so it had no effect. The algorithms made sure it only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets benefited the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. As one analyst put it, ‘angry people click more.’ It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the Internet no longer had the power to change the world.



Going a bit off path (if you’ll indulge me, as this is primarily a music biz blog), we can also read this as a warning against putting all of one’s promotional efforts into social media. There are indeed many potential listeners to reach through, say, Facebook but there are limits. And those limits – determined by an algorithm you can’t control, and reaching into a bubble of the already converted – won’t give your project much expansion outside of your current circle. It’s low hanging fruit in the short term as you’re hitting those who are into ‘similar music’ (at least those that pay attention to Facebook), but once that’s exhausted there’s nowhere to go, at least organically. Your own site and outside promotional efforts should always be a focus, with social media simply a tool to point the way. Treat social media like another – albeit quite effective – form of newsletter, instead applying the bulk of your energy where it matters and potentially affecting more people.

But I digress. HyperNormalisation is fantastic though IMO not as masterful (or convincing) as 2015’s Bitter Lake. But that’s a high bar, and HyperNormalisation is effective and affecting, with many brilliant examples of Curtis’s hallmark montages and expert music selections working in tandem to wordlessly implant his message. I watched it before the presidential election and its themes continue to haunt (and scar) my thoughts afterwards. If you’re in the UK you can view HyperNormalisation now on the BBC iPlayer. If you’re not, have a look on YouTube and you might just see it pop up now and again.

Artspace recently interviewed Adam Curtis, focusing on HyperNormalisation‘s assertion that a rise in individualism (epitomized in the film by Patti Smith and the ’70s NYC art scene) created an un-unified weakness in liberal movements.

{Curtis:} We look back at past ages and see how things people deeply believed in at the time were actually a rigid conformity that prevented them from seeing important changes that were happening elsewhere. And I sometimes wonder whether the very idea of self-expression might be the rigid conformity of our age. It might be preventing us from seeing really radical and different ideas that are sitting out on the margins – different ideas about what real freedom is, that have little to do with our present day fetishization of the self. The problem with today’s art is that far from revealing those new ideas to us, it may be actually stopping us from seeing them.



This might be quite a difficult one to get over, but I think this is really important: however radical your message is as an artist, you are doing it through self-expression – the central dominant ideology of modern capitalism. And by doing that, you’re actually far from questioning the monster and pulling the monster down. You’re feeding the monster. Because the more people come to believe that self-expression is the end of everything, is the ultimate goal, the more the modern system of power becomes stronger, not weaker.



That whole Artspace interview is a mindfuck, as is pretty much Adam Curtis’s entire output. If this is new to you then prepare yourself for the rabbit hole.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Art, Current Affairs, Film, Social Media

Taming Facebook’s Fake News Problem

November 16, 2016 · Leave a Comment

The Guardian:

Facebook has been accused of potentially swinging the election … by failing to acknowledge the fact that its algorithm was promoting fake news to millions of users. According to Buzzfeed news, more than 100 pro-Trump fake news sites were being run from a single Balkan town in the run-up to the election.

Cutting off the revenue to such sites by limiting the amount of money they can make from advertising may help limit their proliferation. But Facebook in particular faces a more fundamental issue given the ways in which its algorithm selects posts: if users engage more with fake news than real news, as seems possible, then Facebook’s algorithm will promote the fake news.



Tech2:

Called the B.S. Detector, this Chrome extension claims to identify and flag news that seems to be fake.The new project was released on Tuesday and can identify articles on Facebook that seem to be from a questionable source. When a user scrolls over an article that seems to be fake, a warning appears informing the user that the source of the article may not be from a credible source.



“I built this in about an hour yesterday after reading [Mark Zuckerberg’s] BS about not being able to flag fake news sites. Of course you can. It just takes having a spine to call out nonsense. This is just a proof of concept at this point, but it works well enough,” said {creator of the extension Daniel} Sieradski.

  



Update: via The Verge:

Today, Google announced that its advertising tools will soon be closed to websites that promote fake news, a policy that could cut off revenue streams for publications that peddle hoaxes on platforms like Facebook. The decision comes at a critical time for the tech industry, whose key players have come under fire for not taking neccesary steps to prevent fake news from proliferating across the web during the 2016 US election. It’s thought that, given the viral aspects of fake news, social networks and search engines were gamed by partisan bad actors intending to influence the outcome of the race.




“Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose of the web property,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement given to Reuters. This policy includes fake news sites, the spokesperson confirmed. Google already prevents its AdSense program from being used by sites that promote violent videos and imagery, pornography, and hate speech.



Update 2: solid think piece from Slate:

People tend to read, like, and share stories that appeal to their emotions and play to their existing beliefs. Without robust countervailing forces favoring credibility and accuracy, Facebook’s news feed algorithm is bound to spread lies, especially those that serve to bolster people’s preconceived biases. And these falsehoods are bound to influence people’s thinking.




And yet, in the days following the election, as criticisms of the company mounted, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed and denied the issue—a defensiveness that says even more about the company than the fake news scandal itself. Zuckerberg’s response points to a problem deeper than any bogus story, one that won’t be fixed by cutting some shady websites out of its advertising network. The problem is Facebook’s refusal to own up to its increasingly dominant role in the news media. It’s one that is unlikely to go away, even if the fake news does.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Facebook, Politics, Social Media, The Media

Moving Past The Jukebox Model

January 22, 2016 · Leave a Comment

Wired:

Spotify announced today that it’s acquiring two companies: Soundwave and Cord Project. Both are small-ish startups, founded in the last couple of years, that have won accolades for their design chops. Soundwave in particular makes perfect sense for Spotify. It’s a social tool for finding, sharing, and talking about music, which are all things Spotify would like to be as well. Cord Project is a more curious fit: it’s an audio-first messaging app, a sort of walkie-talkie for the smartphone age.



What Cord really did—what founders Thomas Gayno and Jeff Baxter do best—is design audio experiences. “For years,” Gayno says, “we’ve been listening to music on phones and on laptops kind of the way we listen to music on our hifi stereo, by just looking for a song and hitting play.” We find and listen to music like we’re at the world’s biggest jukebox. Spotify has recently started experimenting with variations on that form, with features like Running and Party and the brand-new Behind the Lyrics feature it created with the folks at Genius. They’re trying to do more than just find you music you’ll like—they want to change the way you experience it altogether. That’s a hard problem to solve.



Through The Echo Nest’s incredibly detailed tech and its years of usage data, Spotify has a ridiculous trove of data about much more than just music. The Cord crew is the start of a new team at Spotify dedicated to turning that data into entirely new kinds of auditory experiences, “leveraging all the amazing technology that is available on my MacBook Pro, on my iPhone, all these things,” Gayno says. “The accelerometer, the geo-localization, all the social network data I have provided, is available for Spotify to create a compelling music experience.”



“The place to innovate is on the consumption side,” Baxter says. “So we’re still working on that. It’s still, what are unique ways that you can serve up audio to people, on phones, but also on devices of the future?” It’s not enough to have 30 million tracks in your library anymore. The streaming wars will be won by the company with the best experience, the best discovery, the best tools for listening to the right thing at the right time in the right way.



As SoundCloud seems to be moving towards Spotify’s model, Spotify in turn appears to be implementing tools for more SoundCloud-like interaction among users. And the idea of playlists and suggestions based on one’s activity, location, and such is intriguing. The streaming wars are apparently moving on from who’s the best at ‘discovery’ and into the social, user-experience terrain. Apple has had a history with social integration in their music services but, with the failure of Ping and the underwhelmed reaction to Connect, it’s an area that’s still up for grabs.

Soundwave presents some interesting concepts that Spotify could easily adopt. Here’s an interview with Soundwave co-founder Craig Watson on an episode of the Music Biz Podcast from a few months back:

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Social Media, Spotify, Streaming

The Sad Economics Of Internet Fame

December 15, 2015 · Leave a Comment

Fusion:

The disconnect between internet fame and financial security is hard to comprehend for both creators and fans. But it’s the crux of many mid-level web personalities’ lives. Platforms like YouTube mirror the U.S. economy’s yawning wealth gap, and being a part of YouTube’s “middle class” often means grappling daily with the cognitive dissonance of a full comments section and an empty wallet.



Fan-funding sites like Patreon are at the center of a communal movement to fund “smaller YouTubers.” But that definition gets blurry. Is someone with 50,000 subscribers worth supporting financially? How about 200,000? What if people assume you’re too successful to need money, and you’re too proud to tell them otherwise?



Like many other areas of the economy, YouTube has a basic supply and demand problem. Everybody wants to be there, so fledgling performers put up with a lot because they want to be famous.



“It’s not surprising that the failure rate on YouTube would be higher because people aren’t good judges of their own abilities,” [economist Jodi N.] Beggs said. The result is that the market is oversaturated, and subscriber numbers, which rarely make any sense, become the gatekeepers of financial success.



In a 2013 speech, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan Krueger said the increase of knowledge about a performer’s life and beliefs due to social media has led to not being able to charge as much for concert tickets. Besides, he said, “most people do not want to think of their favorite singer as greedy,” he said. “Would you rather listen to a singer who is committed to social causes you identify with, or one who is only in it for the money?” If an artist—a YouTuber or Instagram star, for instance—is committed to championing the little guy, they can’t very well look like they’re taking money for their work.



The recent phenomenon of the internet ‘star’ continues to fascinate. These folks sound like the YouTube equivalent of rock bands that van-tour the country by the seat of their pants … sold out shows a thousand miles away, but grueling and necessary day jobs waiting at home. The crucial difference is that the entertainers in this article are relying on third-party platforms outside of their control for their fame, which is partly why their trade is often seen as a calculated, hopeful stepping stone to more traditional media.

(h/t Jon Curtis)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Social Media, YouTube

“You Don’t Own Your Fanbase. You Rent Them.”

August 16, 2015 · Leave a Comment

5 Magazine:

It’s been said that we live in an era of “access” – a kind of golden age of artist communications and marketing. Rather than rely upon the faulty medium of the journalist or the tabloid, artists can now talk “directly” to their fans without any intermediary. Well, except for SoundCloud, or Twitter, or Facebook, or…



The reality is that you don’t own your fanbase. You just “access” them. You rent them in exchange for your data. And at moments like this – when you want to end your lease and move to another block – it becomes incredibly clear what the distinction is.



The important thing to realize is that these barriers between fan and artist are entirely artificial. There’s really no reason why they need to exist, other than to impede you from doing exactly what SoundCloud’s frustrated producers want to do: leave.


Terry Matthew’s insightful piece could almost serve as a thesis statement for our blog here. Musicians now live in an incredible time, when autonomous promotion, presentation, and distribution are all completely attainable. But why are so few artists choosing this? As I’ve opined here before, these tools (Facebook, SoundCloud, etc.) are useful, but should compliment the artist’s subservient infrastructure rather than serving as that infrastructure.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Social Media

The Music Web Is Now So Closed, You Can’t Share Your Favorite Song

August 10, 2015 · Leave a Comment

The Next Web:

Music curation community This Is My Jam is shuttering its service next month. Co-founders Matthew Ogle and Hannah Donovan explained in a blog post that, in addition to wanting to move on to other projects, it became difficult to keep up with changes to services like YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter and more that the site depends on.



Over 2 million tracks have been shared over the last four years of This Is My Jam’s existence. When it launched, it focused on careful curation over frequent sharing — and that’s what made it special.


Create Digital Music:

If you pull apart some of the backstory behind the end of a service called “This Is My Jam,” you’ll come across an unnerving reality of the way music on the Web is evolving (or devolving).



Apart from This Is My Jam, I still have to think that independent producers and labels ultimately benefit from a more open Web. Embedding players means more data about would-be fans and listens, data that’s hugely valuable to musicians. It means the flexibility to easily get your music where you want it. And ultimately, it means easily facilitated sharing, which is vitally important in an age of abundant music from around the world.



I don’t mean to suggest that we should go back to the tools we had. But simply giving up the possibilities of sharing is a retreat, not an advancement. We ought to be able to do more with the Internet.


I’m probably like a lot of people out there in that I really like This Is My Jam, but I don’t use it that much. That’s too bad as it was a fine, though ultimately flawed, idea. Now and then I’d recall a song that I love and that would inspire me to post it to This Is My Jam, eventually making my account serve as a repository of these great songs that pleasantly interrupted my days. I also know someone who would post a song every morning as a sort of ‘good morning, friends!’ message. Things like this made TIMJ a warm and personable way to share music, a lot more so than what is available on the other music services. Additionally, TIMJ’s main feature which gave you a stream of your friends’ favorite songs — and just their favorite songs, as was the unwritten rule — made for some appealing and educational sonic excursions, especially if you kept your ‘friends’ list limited to those whose musical taste you admired.

But, alas, TIMJ relied on other services that were outside of its control. TIMJ created its stream of music from shares of content already posted on YouTube, SoundCloud, and a few others who are understandably working to drive traffic to their own sites and services. It was an easy peasy work-around from having to cough up licensing fees (technically, it was the host of the original stream paying). So, for reasons described in the Create Digital Music article, TIMJ is doomed as the world of online music becomes more insular within its specific services. Cymbal, who I’ve mentioned previously, will also likely meet this fate.

The oft-repeated moral of the story: relying on all these different services whose only goal is to make profit from your content is sure to end in heartache. I’m not saying to abandon them, but be very aware of your place in their solar system. Rather than having your fan outreach dependent on external services, have them compliment your own self-reliant architecture — preferably based around your own site — which can’t be screwed with.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Social Media, Streaming

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8sided.blog

 
 
 
 
 
 
8sided.blog is a digital zine about sound, culture, and what Andrew Weatherall once referred to as 'the punk rock dream'.

It's also the online home of Michael Donaldson, a slightly jaded but surprisingly optimistic fellow who's haunted the music industry for longer than he cares to admit. A former Q-Burns Abstract Message.

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