Internet – Page 13 – HELLO, I'M SETH WERKHEISER

YOUR NEXT BIG BREAKTHROUGH WILL HAPPEN WITH OTHER CREATIVE PEOPLE

Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton spoke recently about the streaming landscape and how Apple Music could be fixed.

Lots of people are writing about the death of Pitchfork.

Bandcamp saw 50% of its staff laid off last year.

In 2017, Spotify’s RapCaviar was the “most influential playlist in music.” Now, folks at major labels have “seen streams coming from RapCaviar drop anywhere from 30% to 50%” because “editorial playlists are losing influence amid AI expansion.”

There’s a Taco Bell commercial featuring Portugal. The Man – not for their actual music, but as a “feature” to highlight how broke the band was, but at least they could eat at Taco Bell.

It’s almost as if Seth Godin knew what I was going to write about today:

“When things don’t go the way we hope, one alternative is to look hard at the system that caused the problem. And another productive strategy is to figure out what to do with what we get, instead of seeking to find the villain that’s causing our problem.”

Right now, phones can shoot music videos, laptops can become studios, taking pictures with a disposable camera is chic, and we can post everything to the internet in seconds.

But the days of posting something on social media and getting 10,000 people to see it are over. That ain’t coming back.

If you’ve been a subscriber, you know I always say this – it will never get easier to reach your fans on social media.

Don’t blame Spotify, or Apple, or Meta – these are all companies that were built to make money for shareholders. They’re doing their job; are we doing ours?

Are we making the best art that we can?

Are we writing 1000 words a day?

Am I practicing my bass for 15 minutes a day? (No, I’m not)

If you were the lone creative weirdo in high school back in the day, well…, you’d better read some books and find some magazines because you’re on your own.

Now we have websites, Zoom, internet radio, email, and a thousand messaging apps – there’s no reason to do any of this alone.

We know the villains in the current landscape. We know what we’re up against.

Time to stop playing games we don’t want to play (and can’t win), and figure out what’s next.

My three quick ideas on that:

Write a good newsletter to your fans that they’ll want to read
Set up a website and fill it up with all the cool stuff you do
Delete the social media apps from your phone this week

Will that raise streaming rates and bring back organic reach on Facebook? NOPE. But it’s action, something we can do right now, and it’s a step toward new possibilities.

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED GONE

Pitchfork is going away, so why not Sports Illustrated, too?

“The publisher of Sports Illustrated has notified employees it is planning to lay off a significant portion – possibly all – of the outlet’s staff after its license to use the iconic brand’s name in print and digital was revoked.”

Absolutely wild that this wasn’t actually the company, but the name was licensed.

(via, ESPN)

MUSIC IS A BATTLEFIELD

So this happened today.

“Condé Nast is merging Pitchfork, the digital music publication it bought in 2015, with men’s magazine GQ — a move that will result in layoffs at Pitchfork, including the exit of editor-in-chief Puja Patel.”

As Ted Gioia wrote in response, “Put faith in the music, not the business.”

In the early 2000s we had music blogs, today we’ve got AI generated playlists.

Not sure how this gets any better.

ALSO:

“In 2017 Vulture called Spotify’s RapCaviar playlist “the most influential playlist in music.” Among other things, it’s credited for launching the career of Cardi B.

But as Ashley Carman reported at Bloomberg this month, even RapCaviar’s influence is now on the wane. The reason, of course, is artificial intelligence.”

From “How platforms killed Pitchfork‘

In an effort to completely remove myself from social media, I am moving my WORK HISTORY from LinkedIn to my site, which is a platform I own and control. This will help me tell more of the story of my work experience. I hope it’s helpful. Enjoy.

In April of 2006 I started my very first for-real web job, as a web producer at AOL Music. It was just a three month contract gig, covering for someone on maternity leave, with zero guarantee of anything afterwards.

I got this gig because I put my music blog (Buzzgrinder) on my Monster dot com resume, and a headhunter found me. I left a full time job with five weeks paid vacation for this gig, and looking back it was one of the best moves I ever made.

This was someone else’s set up, but I was able to plug in my iPod and listen to my own music while I worked. I wrote copy for weekly new songs and videos features, built and scheduled music main page graphical elements, and wrote daily headlines for Music Main news section.

Some of the people that worked at AOL Music recognized me from the referral traffic that Buzzgrinder sent them, which blew me away.

I remember seeing artists come in and perform acoustic in conference rooms, which was sort of the start of AOL Sessions.

I had typos on pages that were seen by millions. This is where I learned a valuable lesson from a co-worker, when he was sitting beside me while I got “talked to” for my mistake – “we’re not saving lives!”

Oh yeah, I auditioned to host The DL, which was AOL Music’s “music show,” but Sara Schaefer got the job and MURDERED IT. They picked the right person for the job on that one.

My time with AOL Music music last just 3-4 months (I can’t really remember how long it was), but I met a lot of amazing people along the way.

Oh yeah, around this time in 2006 the #1 music site on the internet was MySpace. Wild, right?

SHOW DON’T TELL

I’d imagine one reason people don’t sign up for email newsletters is because if they can’t see your email newsletter, they’re going to assume it looks like all the other shit newsletters out there, so why sign up?

This is why something like Substack works so well. It’s literally the secret sauce. You see what you’re going to get before you sign up.

Not so with Mailchimp or the countless other shit newsletters we sign up for from artists we like.

We blindly sign up and get tossed a product catalog every few weeks.

Meanwhile, the same artist shovels 19 posts a week up on social media, filled with jokes, rants, photos, and stories.

Email subscribers are only worth sales, apparently.

BIG SKIES

WordPress is telling me I’ve published 1,000 posts.

A few hundred people a month read things I write here.

No likes, no comments, no “engagement.” Just me posting for the sake of posting. It’s a digital journal of sorts, I guess.

I’ve been publishing things on the internet since 1995 or so, which is about my earliest memories of the “commercial web.”

I had a Packard-Bell computer that I bought at Sears on credit, and it was about $3,000. Had Windows 3.1, and I think I had mIRC on there.

Met a lot of people via #pasxe.

We’d find out about shows like that back in the day. We’d make plans there to hang out and meet at diners. Then AOL Instant Messenger came along and fucked everything up.

I’m so frustrated by all the platforms these days. The tie-in. Streaming music services where you rent music. My Photos app has over 300GB of photos, and my new laptop has just a 512GB HD. I moved my photo library to my external HD, but now it won’t do the iCloud Photos thing.

This is why I go for walks. Today I walked about six miles, spread across three jaunts. “When in doubt, go for a walk” is my mantra for 2024.

BURN IT ALL DOWN

Music blogs in the mid-2000s were a power (I was there). A good review could help sell a ton of albums.

After that, we ditched our iPods and piled onto social media and streaming playlists.

It’s all burning down.

I’m surprised how anyone is upset at this. Unlike popular DJs that would make radio shows, the people making these playlists were somewhat “hidden.” Yeah, sure, we knew who some of them were, but it’s not like the big prominent names and faces that we see in the world of radio, you know?

So how then are we surprised that they just replaced everyone with computers anyways?

None of these companies want to actually pay money for editorial discernment. If they did they’d have a full staff of amazing writers, like how Bandcamp used to operate.

Email lists and vinyl records will outlast social media, and I’m adding DSPs to that list now, too.

(via, Bloomberg)

THE TRUTH WILL FIND YOU

Fight Club and The Matrix are two very important movies for me, mostly because I was in high school in the early 90s.

So yeah, I may watch these two movies a lot. I even have a Matrix tattoo.

Something struck me recently. Near the end of Fight Club, when Edward Norton is beginning to realize that he’s Tyler Durden.

“You work nights because you can’t sleep. Or you stay up and make soap.”

Now, the scene where Neo meets Trinity for the first time:

“I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night you sit at your computer.”

Neither of these main characters can sleep. They’re searching for something. Your next life, who knows?

And then each character expands because they start hanging around people.

Edward Norton was fighting with himself in the parking lot of Lou’s Tavern, when that guy walked up and said, “can I be next?”

Neo was searching, living alone, living on his computer. But his pals dropped buy for a miniDisc, right?

This then leads to Neo meeting more characters that wear all black and do stuff with computers.

This is an absolutely incomplete line of thinking between the two movies, the two characters. I’m not saying they’re connected, or in the same universe.

But the concept of not sleeping, or searching for meaning in some way outside yourself… I don’t know where this is going, so please stand by.

SO MANY PHOTOS

I’ve been thinking of getting a new laptop by the end of the year, sort of for tax reasons, but mostly because I’ve never been in love with my current MacBook Pro from 2020.

That said, I love having a 1TB harddrive. What I don’t love, though, is my Photo’s file over 350GB in size.

The baseline MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip comes with a 512GB HD.

So now I’m dragging my photo file thing over to my 2TB external HD.

I’ve got photos that are 20 years old in the Apple photos app.

From when I moved to NYC. Screen shots from my iPhone 4. Photos from when I biked across most of the US.

So many photos of my life, yet when I pass away this external HD will just get tossed in a dumpster and no one will remember any of it.

Happy New Year!

Category: Internet