music
A complex character but this piece of writing from 1993 changed how I saw the world and shaped my philosophy around extractive systems based on exploitation, power dynamics and the siren song of desire
Music has no purpose, it merely brings together people’s dreams, fragilities, licentiousness and weirdness. It can bring masses of people together through that. As much as those in the underground find each other, so do the Swifties and The ARMY. Scale, here, doesn’t stop the human capacity of bonding through music and the exchange of identity.
Maarten Walraven • ✘ The Illusion of an idea - a scaled-down music industry
The goal of this series is not to present music as disposable background noise to be mostly ignored or tuned out , but the complete opposite — the goal is to present music that can engulf the listener, carefully selected works that can be fully appreciated (perhaps even enhanced) despite sometimes only having peripheral attention paid to them.
MusicForProgramming.net
This study identifies 33 as the tipping point for sonic stagnation , an age where artistic taste calcifies, increasingly deviating from contemporary works. But wait, there's more. Spotify data indicates that parents stray from the mainstream at an accelerated rate compared to empty nesters—a sort of "parent tax" on one's cultural relevancy.
When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
For these communities, hearing a generative model spit out a synthetic gospel track or an AI-generated country twang is not just an artistic affront, it can feel like outright blasphemy, proof that tech elites would rather manufacture culture than nurture it.
✘ Populists vs. Tech Titans: The Battle Over AI and the Future of Music
We don’t have poetry anymore we have songs
