culture
14. All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds.
Ted Gioia • 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture
To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body odor... See more
Who Killed Creative Writing?
The Keatsian endeavor has never been popular, but is particularly unfashionable today. Religious fundamentalists reject it on the grounds that revelation and commitment are needed to orient oneself in the world. The amorality of a poet who is a “thoroughfare for all thoughts” risks heresy or destabilization. Tell me where you stand, where your loya... See more
Zohar Atkins • The Liberal Arts Are Dying Because Liberalism is Dying
The merging of personalisation and generation represents the ultimate optimisation for media production. Everybody satisfied, all of the time.
But such a simplistic optimisation overlooks the broader implications – those that differentiate entertainment from culture. They inspire a cascade of questions, such as how is human culture changed if we los
... See moreJon McCormack • The cost of feeding the entertainment machine
In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major label... See more