Streaming offers the tantalizing illusion that these laborious steps have been eliminated by technology. But really they haven't. Music is an attention economy. The dominance of the biggest attention companies used to be reinforced by constraints of physical distribution, but it mostly survives the format shift. Most of the songs on the biggest pla... See more

The reason that per-artist subscriptions don’t make sense for fans is basic maths: multiply the number of artists you really care about by the subscription fees and the costs soon seem unrealistic, resulting in fans investing in one artist at the expense of another. And once listeners are locked in, there is a level of guilt associated with cancell... See more

Music-streaming subscriptions in the US would have a federal government fee of 50% added to them...

This ought to be in the headline of every article covering this story. "Make Streaming Pay", the UMAW slogan for this effort, sounds like a vendetta against streaming services, especially coming from the same people who brought us "Justice at Spotify... See more

Katie describes 1.2x as “just a little quicker and livelier” as well as that “it’s nice to get through it slightly faster.” But to me it sounds like the perfect speed to get distracted and do something else while listening. We’re so used to having a second screen around and to listen and watch from multiple sources. This goes beyond specific sonic ... See more

Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.

It’s precisely the kind of work that is uncomfortable for most artists, who by definition concern themselves with what it means to be a person in the world, not what it means to be a brand.

Unlike a more classic European operatic takedown of capitalist America—like Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s brutal “Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny”— these productions seem committed to imitation rather than meaning. They never elevate their scattered details to the level of myth. The productions are a collection of curios, a dress-up that se... See more

For a millennium, rivalries between and among Byzantine noble families propelled public life, with the kind of bloody factional maneuvering that makes the Tudors look like the Waltons in comparison.

Though political power was usually a male privilege in Byzantium, a striking feature of the Byzantine tales is the prominence of women as political play... See more