Spotting Bops, Locking In, and Suing YouTube: Link Drop
The news, podcasts, albums, and ephemera that I've enjoyed in the last month.
Can’t Get Much Higher’s link drop is a monthly series for paid subscribers where I discuss art, news, and stories that have gotten me thinking and laughing in the last 30 days. This month, we talk about a bunch of lawsuits, the death of TikTok’s music streaming service, music’s royal family, playlists generated by artificial intelligence, how John Philip Sousa played over 15k concerts, and so much more.
Fun & Games
Bop Spotter by Riley Walz
This is probably the coolest music project that I’ve heard of in a while. I’ll leave it to its creator Riley Walz to explain:
I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below.
Heard of ShotSpotter? Microphones are installed across cities in the United States by police to detect gunshots, purported to not be very accurate. This is that, but for music.
This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.
Not only can you scroll through the songs being identified, but if you click on one, you can listen to a recording of what the phone picked up and then listen to the studio recording of the song on either Spotify or Apple Music.
News from Inside the Music World
“TikTok to Shut Down Short-Lived Music-Streaming Service” by Gareth Vipers & Sherry Qin (Wall Street Journal)
TikTok, the multi-billion dollar short-form video platform that has remade both social media and the music industry, has decided to shut down its music-streaming service, TikTok Music. The service didn’t make it that far. It only went live in Indonesia, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, and Mexico. Running a profitable music streaming business is hard.
“Revealed: Atlantic Music Group’s new leadership structure under incoming CEO Elliot Grainge” by Murray Stassen (MusicBusinessWorldwide)
It was recently announced that 30-year-old Elliot Grainge, the founder of the label 10K Projects, would be the new head of Atlantic Music Group, a large conglomerate of labels under the Warner Music Group banner. If you are even passively interested in music as an industry, Elliot’s last name will be familiar. That’s because he’s the son of Sir Lucian Grainge, the CEO of Universal Music Group. I’m sure father and son running two of the world’s largest rivals won’t lead to any issues.
“Your Favorite Musician’s Favorite App Is About to Disappear” by Nitish Pahwa (Slate)
MakeMusic, the company behind “the pioneering and popular music-notation app” Finale, announced that they will be winding down the famed software used by thousands of composers and artists. As is often the case, Finale’s demise is at least partially connected to private equity: LaunchEquity Partners purchased the company behind Finale in 2013 and changed the business model to be “more focused on its cloud services than on prioritizing an already-aging service like Finale.”
Reply Guys
Every month, I come across a few interesting prompts on social media that are flooded with fun replies. In this new segment, I’m going to highlight one of those questions, along with my favorite responses.
The Beatles released their entire catalog of music between 1963 and 1970.
Between 1604 and 1606, Shakespeare wrote Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.
At the age of 23 in 1666, Sir Issac Newton invented calculus, proved the binomial theorem, formulated a theory of color, and postulated the law of gravitation.
In about 20 years, game designer Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, F-Zero, Star Fox, Super Smash Bros., and Pikmin.
Film director Victor Fleming directed both Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz in 1939.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published results around the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the special theory of relativity, along with establishing the mass-energy equivalence (i.e., E = MC^2). Each of these four discoveries helped lay the foundation for modern physics.
News from Outside the Music World
“Gen Z Has Regrets” by Jonathan Haidt & Will Johnson (New York Times)
While this article was a good reminder that I need to spend less time on social media, the thing that really stuck out was a chart about halfway through claiming that between 40% and 50% of young people surveyed say they wish social media platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter did not exist. It’s hard to think of another pervasive technology from the past that would elicit a response like that.
Musical Trends to Keep an Eye On
“Spotify’s AI playlist feature rolls out to the US and more markets” by Lauren Forristal (TechCrunch)
There have been a million stories about AI and music this year — many of which have been discussed in this newsletter — but this is one of the more intriguing ones. Spotify is rolling out an AI-powered playlist curator. You type your request into a little prompt box, and it spits back a playlist. While I hope something like this can eventually be used to find forgotten gems, my first attempt did not go well. I asked for covers of Bob Dylan songs, and it spit back two songs that had the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter’s name in the title but were not written by him.
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