8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Spotify’s Podcast Ambitions Are Clear

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Recode:

Not only has Spotify acquired Gimlet Media, a podcast producer and network, for around $230 million but it has also bought Anchor, a startup that makes it easier for people to record and distribute their own podcasts.

The company says it isn’t done — it says it has other podcast acquisitions in mind, and that it expects to spend up to $500 million on deals this year.

Engadget:

Spotify is taking the Netflix model, in short. As the company grows, it’s inevitable that established record labels will start charging higher licensing fees. Podcasts, however, is something that Spotify can buy and own as exclusive content. If it green-lights the right shows, it could pull users away from third-party podcast apps and then slowly persuade them to take out a premium subscription. Anchor, too, gives Spotify the potential to rapidly build a YouTube-style distribution network.

The Gimlet Media deal is a glimpse of where Spotify is headed, but, coupled with the Anchor acquisition, we’re seeing the platform’s transformation into a different kind of company. As Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek says in a press release, “These acquisitions will meaningfully accelerate our path to becoming the world’s leading audio platform …” Thus, it’s no longer a music platform.

🔗→ Spotify has bought two podcast startups and it wants to buy more
🔗→ Spotify finally made a profit and spent big on its podcast future

Spotify Strenghtens Podcast Hopes with Gimlet Media

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The Hollywood Reporter:

Spotify is in talks to acquire Gimlet Media, multiple sources tell The Hollywood Reporter, as it sets its sights on becoming a bigger player in the podcasting space.

The move by the music streaming giant signals just how seriously it is taking its push into other forms of audio entertainment. Spotify and Gimlet representatives declined to comment. […]

By acquiring Gimlet, Spotify would tap into a podcasting production powerhouse that has churned out such hits as Heavyweight, scripted series Homecoming and Reply All.

This is an interesting development and adds extra context to our earlier post regarding how Spotify can rebrand as an audio platform rather than solely a music platform. Gimlet is a smart company. I am sure they would not agree to this arrangement without assurance that Spotify will prioritize and enhance the podcast experience on the service.

The report notes that Gimlet owns its intellectual property (thus, the content of its hosted shows) which the company can leverage into film and television adaptations, among other possibilities. That adds an extra dimension to Spotify’s plans. One of those shows is StartUp, which, at times, documents the inner workings of Gimlet in real time. I’d love the network to add new Gimlet-related episodes that follow the progress of this Spotify deal.

By the way, I’m a fan of the Gimlet show Reply All. If you haven’t heard it yet, this episode about an Indian telephone scammer is fantastic.

🔗→ Spotify in Talks to Acquire Podcast Startup Gimlet Media

SoundCloud’s Rebirth

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Rolling Stone:

Per the fiscal 2017 filing, SoundCloud has taken “significant steps to improve its financial health,” including renegotiating certain rightsholder contracts, retiring outstanding debt and cutting major operating expenses, and it achieved positive operating cash flow in 2018.

While its 2018 results will not be available until later this year, SoundCloud says it has surpassed its 2018 growth plan and remains focused on two major ideas: expanding its creator business with a suite of useful artist tools and offering a unique listening experience for its “young, trendsetting, global music fans.” The latter will be increasingly tough as Spotify, Apple Music and other big streaming services solidify their place as market leaders, but the former — a focus on music creation — is something in which SoundCloud remains unsurpassed.

SoundCloud is a popular subject on this blog and, yes, there was a time when we contemplated the service’s possible demise. It’s astonishing that SoundCloud once made a go at Spotify and Apple Music, and the ensuing failure was arguably the direct result of an overreach to attract a mass audience.

I’d say ‘SoundCloud rap’ saved the platform’s bacon. This phenomenon was bubbling hard during the depths of SoundCloud’s financial woes and surely pointed the way out: by doubling down on a core user-base of creators, and looking to lead and create trends rather than passively following behind as a mainstream digital service provider. I continue to root for SoundCloud.

🔗→ SoundCloud, Making $100 Million a Year, Is Back on Solid Ground

We Would Call That a Demon

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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

Blocked on Spotify: The Public Has Spoken

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via Thurrott:

With an upcoming update, Spotify will let you block music from any artist you don’t like throughout the app. This means it will block music from that artist on your personal library, playlists, automatically curated playlists, charts, radios, and everything else. In fact, you won’t be able to manually play music from an artist you’ve blocked even if you wanted to — and you’d have to unblock an artist before you can play a certain track from them.

I’ve seen this being sold as a way to no longer hear artists that annoyingly keep popping up in algorithmic playlists — the feature is touted as “much-requested” and I think that’s originally why it was requested — but it’s obvious this is Spotify’s way of dealing with deplorable artists on the platform. It’s a passing of the buck, if you will, after Spotify’s disastrous attempt at self-censorship.

I can’t say I blame Spotify for putting this decision in an individual user’s hands. At least they’re responding and doing something. Knowing Spotify, I’m sure there’s some data-gathering at play, too. It would be in the platform’s best interest to learn of artists that are being blocked en masse by its users. Then Spotify would be able to quietly downplay those artists in playlists and features. The public has spoken.

Update: Another take, Spotify’s New Mute Feature Is a Patronizing Misstep

Word of the Day: Chimping

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A candidate for ‘word of the day,’ via Shutter Muse:

What is Chimping?

Chimping is the act of looking at your camera’s LCD screen as soon as you have taken a photo. The term is jokingly derived from the noises that photographers often make when they see a shot they like on the back of the camera (oooh ohh), followed sometimes by “ape like” hand motions for others to take a look.

I look forward to my first opportunity to use this phrase in the wild. Also, it must be noted that Shutter Muse doesn’t necessarily consider ‘chimping’ a bad thing.

Put It Into the Fire Without Reading Any Farther

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Brain Pickings reproduced a fan letter that Bram Stoker wrote to Walt Whitman and I’m going to steal its opening text for the greatest cold email template ever:

If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther. But I believe you will like it.

The Culture-Changing Rollable TV

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Chances are you heard about the 2019 International CES debut of this revolutionary television:

As the host notes, these will be super-expensive at first, no doubt. But flat-screen TVs were expensive as well, and now almost everyone has one. Likewise, I think this ‘rollable’ TV (and the inevitable competing versions) will catch on in a big way. What interests me is how our culture is affected when the TV is no longer the centerpiece of our living rooms. A TV that’s made to be hidden— replaced by a painting or whatever is behind its previously allotted space — proposes a mindset that’s foreign to almost every generation. Can you imagine a house where a big screen isn’t the focus of the primary social room’s furniture and all the attention?

Immune to Misinformation

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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.”

It’s Hierarchy in Disguise

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Via The New Yorker, last night I read this thought-provoking profile of Elizabeth Anderson, a philosopher of growing renown in that male-dominated field. She’s working to disconnect the inverse relationship between freedom and equality. That is, the idea that freedom is expanded at the expense of equality and vice versa. I never thought about the ‘left vs. right’ debate boiling down to that underlying assumption. From the article:

If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them. […]

The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.

The piece is a long one (Pocket estimates 38 minutes), but it’s worth the read, sometimes heady but entertaining throughout: The Philosopher Redefining Equality

On a side note, mid-way through the article there’s a New Yorker cartoon that’s the most bizarre one I’ve ever seen.