81–90 of 350 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
3+hours? I remember being able to download roughly 10 songs in an hour.
Look. It was 25 years ago. I’m an old man now. My memory of that time is a haze of multiplayer Quake strategy. How about I rephrase it: it FELT like 3+ hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd phrase it as: pop art and culture have been optimizing themselves against the human psyche for so long (much longer than engineering and law and planning) that we have a pretty firm bead on what an every-person will like (mathematically-speaking). There's tons of avant garde art, but on average it's less popular (because that's not what it's optimized for). I wouldn't be surprised if GenAI commoditizes pop art, b…
By its nature, pop art and culture reduce itself to the common expectations of everyone. And as such has only few knobs to tune. But humans can appreciate a wide range of qualities and the more you play on these dimensions, the more reduced the people that will "get" it and appreciate it. GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create something unique to you or another person, and it will fail miserably.
GenAI is just a tool. Creating unique art with unique perspectives is going to be more accessible to more people.
Not everyone will put the work in, but there's a new opportunity in a world full of opportunity cost.
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement. In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
In contrast companies like Spotify don’t care about the music at all. They would just as well sell you white noise if it would somehow give them the slightest improvement in growth or margins.
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, regularly makes statements that suggest he’d rather see professional musicians disappear. Most recently:
https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-fans-and-artists-hit-ba...
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…
3+hours? I remember being able to download roughly 10 songs in an hour.
subversive and evergreen. genuinely useful and hard to kill.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, but don't discount media lobbying gov't, and trying to generate moral outrage about AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety, etc to make sure only big corps control AI.
>AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety This isn't generated outage, it's genuine, and objectively justified. Trying to find clients was hard enough for artists to begin with. We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art and human interaction, but instead we're automating art and interaction so we can focus on slaving away even harder. This is somehow worse than any traditional dystopia story. G…
Subjectively.
GenAI is just a tool.
Artists learn the craft of analogy, allusion, satire, and storytelling. These are portable to new forms and methods of creation, and they'll continue to serve artists that use GenAI.
Software engineers have been constantly reinventing themselves since forever. The stack and frameworks you learn won't last forever, and the field continually gets easier to enter year over year. This is no different than what artists now face.
And now bigger forms of automation and process are available to artists. They don't need studios or big budgets to achieve monumental works - they'll be making movies and games soon. (Without publishers!) And the 99% of non-artists aren't going to put the work in.
These tools are going to be incredible for the artists that adopt them. We're going to see a whole bunch of Vivienne Medranoses, Zach Hadels, and Michael Cusacks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could still have been 3 hours as you would have been constrained not only by your own download speed, but also the peer’s upload speed, and they might have been on an even crappier dial-up line or sharing their bandwidth with other uploads.
Curious to hear more informed thoughts from old ISP folks, but afaik one of the things that made Napster possible was that 56kbps connections were roughly symmetrical (~33kbps up?). By capitalizing on the oft unused upload bandwidth, Napster provided a benefit at little cost. Would be fascinated to hear what this looked like on the PSTN backend load side, ~2000.
I don't think so, asymmetry was the innovation that made 56K possible on POTS (plain old telephone sevice, with only enough bandwidth for squawky voice)
And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock stars, are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either Spotify or YouTube. It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else. But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging all of the music industry down into…
> It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else. Just becaus you don’t know them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There are way more than hundreds of “rock stars” that are getting rich now. There are also way more “rock stars” now than there ever was.
On the other side, in the first half of the 20th century, artists were more likely paid a one-off pittance to come into a studio and record a song, and then the record labels profit from it to this day.
Music is worth less now because the supply is vast and the demand is relatively limited. Pretty simple economics. And most artists have always made their money from touring...while concert prices are more eye watering than ever.
And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock stars, are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either Spotify or YouTube. It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else. But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging all of the music industry down into…
Ariana Grande, Adele, Billie Eilish, etc. I believe someone called Kendrick Lamar has been popular recently?
Are they rock stars? No, people tastes are a bit different now, but they are stars and they are rich. You not knowing them is a different problem.
Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”. I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun. Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an ar…
> And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version How so, when most of these products are digital to begin with? If you have the quality of the studio master, then there’s nothing to improve.