Sterling Proffer
@sterling
Sterling Proffer
The civic fathers who presided over the industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries—the Rockefellers and Carnegies who built the museums and libraries and concert halls—supported culture as an end in itself: a public good, a social value, a point of local and national pride. Today’s planners and plutocrats... See more
William Deresiewicz • The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech
In the 2010s, supply chain innovation opened up lifestyle brands. In the 2020s, financial mechanism innovation is opening up the space for incentivized ideologies, networked publics, and co-owned faiths. Liquid cryptocurrency tokens empower speculative cultural projects with monetary policies that create FOMO (e.g. Ethereum, FWB); NFTs enable... See more
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
Record labels are digging their own grave. They finally have achieved their dream—which is to make money while doing as little work as possible. But the end result is a world in which they add so little value that no successful musician will want them any longer.
Ted Gioia • Record Labels Dig Their Own Grave. And the Shovel is Called TikTok.
I suggested that Substack’s day of reckoning may still lie ahead. The bigger Substack gets, the more ideologically diverse its author pool becomes, the greater the chances for highly inflammatory, potentially harmful content.
Joe Pompeo • “There Has to Be a Line”: Substack’s Founders Dive Headfirst Into the Culture Wars
“A writer,” said Thomas Mann, “is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” More difficult, because there is more for you to do, more that you know how to do, and because you hold yourself to higher standards.
William Deresiewicz • The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech
The first TikTok stars were slow to realize how much negotiating power they actually possessed—they’re just youngsters, after all. So they got dazzled by the promise of a big upfront payment from a label. But in the last few months, many have started to figure out that the so-called ‘advance against future royalties’ is actually just a loan under a... See more
Ted Gioia • Record Labels Dig Their Own Grave. And the Shovel is Called TikTok.
Product teams by nature are power users of their own product. The parts of the product that the product team uses, tend to automatically get improved as the pain is right in front of them. But this leads to building for yourself (or your friends). While that can feed the ego, if you are only building for yourself or power users, you won’t grow. You... See more