The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.
Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch. And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.It comes as little surprise that the muzak companies behind this have close financial ties to Spotify, and are also starting to lean into AI-created music, because of course they are.
I run a label that has direct deals with certain major DSPs. We do over a billion streams a year.Not to be a snob, but... (I am a snob) listen to real fucking music, people.
The entire “wellness” music category is programming driven. Much of my energy is spent building and maintaining relationships with the programmers, even with our direct deals. We take a reduced payout on the master side in return for preferential treatment on playlist positions.
I have an active roster of extremely talented producers. It’s a volume play. I’ve made tracks that I’m quite proud of in 90 minutes that have done 20+ million streams.
It’s a wild system but we’ve made it work. Not really a critique or an endorsement - just making a living making music.
Edit: fun fact, Sleep Sounds is generally the #1 streamed playlist on the entire Apple Music platform.
I had to go tell the hardware guys, the people who made hardware accelerators, that fundamentally the math was wrong on their cards. That took about two-and-a-half years. I could not convince the guys, finally we hired Gary McTaggart [from 3DFX] and Charlie Brown and those guys had enough pull and enough… I have a fine arts major, nobody's gonna listen to me. ...This reddit explains the technical side of things.
The problem was, when I pointed this out to the graphics hardware manufacturers in '99 and early 2000s, I hit the 'you've just pointed out that my chips are fundamentally broken until we design brand new silicon, I hate you' reaction. That wasn't a fun conversation. It went through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, etcetera, all in rapid succession with each new manufacturer.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.Love live the fantasy of the scholar cloistered in their tower library, a hermit buried in their arcane work. I hope I can one day rise to the level of no-fucks-given that I have relegated receiving communication to something done only as whimsy, when all other entertainment avenues have run dry.
You remember the Bored Apes. Maybe. These were the dumb ugly worthless JPEGs of, like, dressed-up cartoon apes that various suckers and dolts were buying—or, like, investing in?—very loudly a couple of years ago. This was in 2021, back when NFTs (non-fungible tokens) were only a laughingstock among people capable of critical thinking.
Apple's camera click sound ... comes from Reekes' old 1970s Canon AE-1 that he purchased in high school. He recorded his camera and then slowed down the shutter speed in order to build the custom sound. ... He said he has attempted to use it as a pickup line in a bar as well. 'Hey, I made that sound!' But Reekes said it mostly just results in a strange look.
So, for those using the ANALOG output, open a terminal window and type 'alsamixer'. Use the right arrow to move all the way to the 'Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack' (keep an eye on the Item value in the top left of the window). Now, hit the 'M' key to toggle the value between On and Off. This switches the digital output on and off. Since I was using the Analog output, I needed to have this OFF so I could listen to stuff. Worked like a charm!
Slowly exploding in front of the world since September is WordPress's leadership. WordPress, for anyone who doesn't know, is software used to make and run websites. A lot of websites. Something like 43.3% of the websites on the internet. Everyone from your neighborhood cafe to the State of California to Sony Music. (the brandensite does not use WordPress – I find it bloated and burdensome.) And while WordPress is an Open Source project, it's de facto controlled by its creator, Matt Mullenweg. This hasn't mattered outside of project leadership – Matt's direction has rarely courted controversy – until recently.
Because recently, Matt decided that one of the big for-profit WordPress hosting companies, WP Engine, even though they were obeying their contracts and agreements, still wasn't contributing to the WordPress project enough money, wasn't giving back enough to the community. So he used his control over the WordPress project to throw a public tantrum and shut down their link to WordPress, stranding all their customers' websites. WP Engine responded like the adults in the room, with a PR-crafted letter and lawyer-crafted lawsuit, and the courts have since forced WordPress to play fair. So Matt, who is worth somewhere around $400m, in turn threw another public tantrum and shut down all WordPress.org account registrations.
Which is what spurred Joost de Valk, probably the second-biggest name at WordPress, to write the linked blog post, where he basically says (in polite words) that it's time for WordPress to get rid of Matt Mullenweg and move to proper board-of-directors-style leadership, and oh yes also that he's actually already taking the steps to do so. Matt commented on Joost's post: Which I read as a very polite "fuck off."
Of course, if you check on Matt Mullenweg's website yourself, this is all a smear campaign and Matt's of course being a completely reasonable dictator and all his dictatorial actions are justified. Naturally.
Yet still, you can't tell me it's better for this software that's so massively important to the web to be under the control of one person, especially one person who acts like a spurned child on a playground lashing out against the people with whom he's offered to share his toys when they play with his toys in a way he doesn't like.