Aug 5, 2016

The juice is worth the squeeze.

By Cherie Hu • Issue #2 • View online

What a time to be alive.

CNN is basically a 24-hour Trump reality show (I sit right underneath a TV at work, and without fail the word “TRUMP” is on screen every time I look at it).

It takes Kanye West going on a Twitter rant for us to get a clearer sense of where the streaming music wars are going.

KIDZ BOP is now on vinyl (my editor received one in the mail for some reason)—indicating that desperately hipster parents are indeed taking over the world.

I now own a scarf, given to me by Steve Forbes, that is emblazoned with Forbes’ unintentionally tongue-in-cheek catchphrase “Capitalist Tool.”

All of this to say: stay weird, friends. Weirdness can be uncomfortable—and, in politics’ case, destructive—but should also encourage us to seek out the stories no one thought to live, the crevices no one thought to fill. The world is weirder than ever now, so we might as well shape our own weirdness for the better.

Before I continue, thought I would mention that I’m in San Francisco this weekend—please send any tips you have for great restaurants and/or sightseeing, and let me know if you’re around!

Writing:

Lots of dolla $igns and cool tech this time around. I’m also super excited for the stories I’m publishing next week—including but not limited to Part 2 of my YouTube-Music series and a feature on OZY Fusion Fest and other editorially-driven pop culture festivals. Stay tuned! :)

At $41 Billion, Q2 Media & Entertainment Deal Value Breaks 12-Month Record

Growing interest in high-quality content, innovative formats and complementary distribution channels brought last quarter’s media, entertainment and communications deals to their highest value since last year.

www.forbes.com • Share

With This Wearable Subwoofer, You Can Now Carry The Bass Line Wherever You Go

Fresh out of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Lofelt is building a smartwatch-size subwoofer called the Basslet (I tried it out at Sónar+D in June and absolutely loved it!!).

www.forbes.com • Share

Keeper of the Flame: How Miranda Lambert Made $18 Million in 2016

Lambert is one of only four women to make this year’s Country Cash Kings—a sub-list of the Forbes Celebrity 100 that features the world’s highest-paid country musicians.

www.forbes.com • Share

The Inaugural RightsTech Summit: Forward-Thinking Optimism, With Few Music Publishers In Sight

The technology for smarter, faster rights management is already here—but does everyone have an incentive to take part?

www.forbes.com • Share

Events: RightsTech Summit

For more details about the programming itself, you can read my review for Forbes, linked above. Here, I just want to share a few photos, as well as a funny mantra that was thrown around all day at the summit: “The juice is worth the squeeze.” In other words, the sweet, streamlined glory of the result (cleaner and more transparent ownership data) is worth the messy, embarrassing struggle of the journey (fundamental reform of decades-old practices and power structures). The music industry tends to throw around such metaphors without actually acting upon them…

Me derping around with music tech guys. On my left (your right): Stephen White, CEO of Dubset. On my right: Darryl Ballantyne, CEO of LyricFind.

Robert Levine (left) and Benji Rogers, two great thinkers and doers, discussing the blockchain (and that's me with my laptop in the foreground :P).

What I'm thinking about:

Chat bots. I’m not convinced by them, and certainly not in a music context. I’ve been playing around with Hardwell’s Messenger bot, which is more commercially driven (buy merch, attend concerts, etc.), but it’s not going anywhere / can get pretty buggy. There are also several discovery-oriented music chat bots in operation, like Music Rover and AudioShot, that I probably am never going to use. Most chat bots require users to write messages like a quasi-programming language—i.e. communicating only with commands. This seems difficult to accomplish for something as emotion-driven and anti-formulaic as music consumption and music tastes. Other areas of e-commerce might be easier.
Interscope Records recently launched its own wine brand, Electric Sky, and no one’s talking about it. Literally no one (if you can find one news outlet that covered it aside from the spammy PR Newswire, please link me). Is it really that tacky? I personally think it’s one of the strangest but also most brilliant music-brand partnerships around—especially because the wine is aimed at festival-goers, who are usually willing to shell out cash for cool, Insta-worthy drinks. Smart diversification on Interscope’s part, IMO. Hey, I might even write something about it.
I ended up buying another actual CD last weekend, at a hole-in-the-wall record store in Boston called In Your Ear Records. The minute I walked in, this irresistibly catchy, chill, almost supernatural groove started playing over the loudspeakers. Pulling out Shazam on my phone, I found out that the tune was “Mysterious Vibes” by jazz/funk/R&B fusion group The Blackbyrds. Soon after, I spotted the Blackbyrds’ Greatest Hits CD on the R&B shelves, and bought the record immediately on impulse. I keep thinking back to this moment because I hadn’t felt so spontaneous yet strong of a connection with a piece of music playing in the background in a long, long time. It’s likely the result of my increasingly pixelated, immaterial experience with the music I “love"—only on screens, only through wired headphones, seldom truly owned.

Great reads/vids:

Publishers and the Smiling Curve

Why publishers today are like Acer, i.e. not worth that much.

stratechery.com • Share

If you want to learn to code, don't learn to code

A great piece by Bas Grasmayer, the mind behind MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. “If you want to learn to code, start with a purpose.”

www.musicxtechxfuture.com • Share

“social” versus “Social”

Silicon Valley’s idea of “social” is rather different from everyday human social life, but we keep conflating the two (this is a pretty old piece from 2012, but still pertinent).

thesocietypages.org • Share