Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
Listened to this on mydrive home today, and it was just fun hearing all the different zigs-and-zags on the subject of AI, particularly that a lot of writing that used to be on a subject (like “how do I write a good newsletter?”) can now tailored via AI to be specific about the platform you want to use, the style in which you want to write it, and all sorts of other hyper-specific points in a way that no single “how to” article could ever provide.
And that’s fascinating to me.
The streaming music platforms will soon follow the lead of the streaming video platforms and continue to raise their rates, which I’m sure will be helped along by the record labels that increase their licensing fees because they want as much of the action as the video streaming platforms.
The whole ecosystem will eat itself, and we’ll all go back to pirating music again (but the cool kids will keep buying vinyl and CDs and digital copies off of Bandcamp).
I’ve been seeing it mentioned in comment threads on some of the sites that have posted about Disney raising the rates again, notably MacRumors and I think something similar on The Verge. Monthly rates will continue to go up. Meanwhile, external hard drives and basic MP3 players are cheaper than ever on Amazon. It’s inevitable.
The beauty about keeping a blog is you have an archive about certain subject and quotes from certain people.
I’m hosting Sean Cannon today (Aug 21, 2025) on my Escape Pod Zoom call, a weekly gathering of the paid members of my Social Media Escape Club.
I searched his name on this blog, and found this post “Streaming Problems,” from January of 2020.
I clicked the source link, his Twitter feed, and then found this gem, regarding Spotify:
“So you have the biggest company in the space creating “fake” music to drive up margins, trying to create user habits that promote NOT interacting with artists or their songs, and trying to crowd music out of everyday users lives.”
Oh, how unaware we were at the time at how fake the music would get! He was talking about “fake bands” that made music for a fee, thus removing the royalty aspect. Fill the playlists with “freelance” bands, and profit!
But here we are five years later, and Spotify is littered with music created by AI.
“We are not worried about the meme situation,” said photographer Antonio Guilliem in a 2017 interview with Intelligencer.
Oooh, a wonderful resource of SLASH PAGES:
“Slash pages are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like
/now,/about, or/uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the site and are distinguishing characteristics of the IndieWeb.”
Thanks Mikey Seay.
Olivia Rafferty on one of the ways you can gamble… er, I mean invest in your career:
His course on Meta adverts for Spotify conversion was £150. Plus I’d have to have at least £10 a day to spend on adverts.
It’d be worth it, to get the numbers on Spotify up. Worth it, to get new ears on my songs. Worth it, to look credible to future bookers and collaborators.
It was a good investment into my art.
£300 to Zuck, £150 to this guy, and… minus £450 to me.
Worth it, right?
I’d be sending money to Mark Zuckerberg’s platform, to then drive engagement to Daniel Ek’s platform, so that I could receive…
£0.003 per play.
Worth it… right?
Thankfully Olivia went to the Austrian alps instead.
Being your best, whole, most complete and fulfilled self will help your career more than giving your money away to the techbro industrial complex.
Here’s an interview I did with Olivia, talking about how she quit Spotify and made her latest album.
“But what if there’s another way? We’re clearly starving for something different online. A 19-minute ambient song with a static image of a whale has 3.1M views on YouTube – people choosing to spend nearly 20 minutes with literally nothing happening while the rest of the platform optimises for peak stimulation. This is evidence of a deep hunger for ‘digital quiet’. Online spaces that offer contemplation instead of consumption.”
This from “The Restaurant with No Music” by Simon James French.
He also linked to this Google Doc called ‘Ambient-ish music to do work to,’ with all sorts of links to playlists and albums and.. Plants.fm??
That’s right – there’s a device you can buy called Plant Wave.
“PlantWave measures biological changes within plants, graphs them as a wave and translates the wave into pitch.
With PlantWave, every single note you hear is a real-time expression of a shift in a plant. The more active a plant is at any particular moment, the more notes you’ll hear. When a plant is less active, it will often drone or even stop producing notes.”
I literally just want to hook one of these up to a plant next to a creek, set up my camera, and take a nap for an hour.
I bought my parents this iMac back in 2008. They’ve both passed, and now it’s mine. I was able to retrieve most of the old photos and such from it, but without the iCloud password I wasn’t able to update anything, or even allow some location service settings.
I tried to reinstall OS X Leopard, but even finding the right file was difficult. Then trying to set up a “bootable USB drive” became a nightmare. Formatting, terminal stuff, nothing worked out.
Then I got curious and started to look to see if I could install another OS, and well, turns out installing ChromeOS Flex on the iMac was super easy.
Setting up the boot disk was easy. Then rebooting the iMac to the thumb drive was a snap, installation was a breeze, and now I have a machine where I can update it and make it secure as needed – at least for a Google OS machine.
I’m mostly going to use it to display Weather Star 4000 while working. It’s just so soothing having that going in the background. I may also use it for notes and such for Zoom calls. Something that’s not tied directly to the machine that I use for my growing Zoom call meetings.
It all comes back to the web:
“The web platform … offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino. The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.”
In this piece Robin Sloan also speaks of choosing to pay to send his newsletter, rather than doing it for free via Substack. Ahem.
That last part, though… how the web “offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.”
That’s where we hear the biggest whining. Oh, how it’s so difficult to be found, to be discovered. To do so, you must play the game. You must be a part of the casino, and the house always wins. And even if they lose, so do you (unless you built an email list in the process).
Now, if you just want to send a tiny newsletter, blog a bit, sure… have at it. Just know that there are forces at play consolidating and monetizing every pixel and every button. You won’t get bit today, but there’s no promise you won’t get bit tomorrow.
I’m on Substack long enough to move my original posts to my own WordPress site. I export my email list near daily at this point. My paid membership is now handled by Memberful. Someday my email list will be moved to Buttondown.
Yes, my website could go down. So could Buttondown. The power could go out. The sun will someday expand to engulf planet earth, too. This isn’t about perfect systems, it’s about creating a system I can live with, and feel okay about. Capitalism is rotten, and I wish I didn’t need to make all these moves and pay all this money, but this is reality, and groceries ain’t getting any cheaper.
Link via Brad Barrish
When I saw how fragile social media was, I knew I needed to exit. It was terrifying to see people lose access to their accounts. I can’t imagine how isolating it would feel to wake up and be unable to reach your fans or readers.
When I saw Lucy Werner’s Substack experience, how an inadvertent click destroyed most of her work, including her paid subscriber base, and being told there’s no way to fix it? No way.
I used to believe in having everything under one roof. One website for everything. Now I’m not so sure.
I signed up for Transistor to host my interviews. You can’t embed Substack podcasts on your site. That makes sense to drive people to Substack to increase subscriptions, but what about my own site?
I moved all my paid subscribers to Memberful, which I’ve used before. They’re owned by a solid company (Patreon) and do memberships. I pay them monthly, so if anything goes wrong, I have one company with a dedicated support team to contact.
Next is my email list. Linking to Memberful violates Substack’s terms of service.
“You may not circumvent your payment obligations to us by soliciting payment from a Reader outside of Substack or by using any alternative method to collect subscription payments. This includes receiving payments for your publication through links to PayPal or a separate Patreon page.”
True, I don’t “charge a subscription fee for your publication,” but I could wake up one morning to find my account suspended for linking to an “alternative method to collect subscription payments.”
This means I can’t promote my weekly Zoom calls to the 6,500 people on my email list.
In early 2024, I wrote “maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.” Putting all our marketing eggs into the social media basket wasn’t a great idea, and I’m beginning to think the same of Substack.
