Newsletter 10/21/2022: Venture Capital and Vocaloids
From the Desk of Dennis:
Fandom can be a gift and a curse.
The gift is when your IP of choice is so far removed from reality that your membership in the fandom tribe can be richly rewarded with a breadth of high-production value content to consume without threatening to get you ostracized if you don’t geek out too hard in public about it.
The curse is when your IP of choice lets its reality shine through (and all IP does this inevitably - we can’t watch a play without being aware of the stage and the backstage), and when it conflicts with your own reality so hard that it squanders any goodwill it might have built up in the past. This is a natural result of our brains trying to heal some cognitive dissonance - how does this thing I love so much suddenly seem so at odds with my beliefs? Some hardcore fans can look past such an offense, but others are going to look for their entertainment elsewhere.
TGIF,
Dennis A. Wilson
This Week in Marketing and Technology:
TorrentFreak, “RIAA Flags ‘Artificial Intelligence’ Music Mixer as Emerging Copyright Threat”
“There are online services that, purportedly using artificial intelligence (AI), extract, or rather, copy, the vocals, instrumentals, or some portion of the instrumentals from a sound recording, and/or generate, master or remix a recording to be very similar to or almost as good as reference tracks by selected, well known sound recording artists,” RIAA writes.”
Before you get your golden records in a bunch, here’s a reality check on the current state of AI-generative music technology. We’re a long way off from artificial being able to come up with a lyric as clever as anything on either of the new Taylor Swift albums, but if there’s one thing I know about the pop machine, the RIAA members are as excited to use artificial artist tech as they are afraid of it - Hatsune Miku has been selling out arenas since 2016.
TechCrunch, “And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2022 is…Minerva Lithium”
“Minerva says that it can extract one metric ton of lithium using just 30,000 gallons of water, and it can do it in three days.”
This is the state of Big Tech jubilance in 2022: No robots, no social media sites, just raw manufacturing efficiency. I’m taking this as an economic headwind.
CNBC, “Semafor debuts in a tough media environment, with an aim toward decluttering the news”
“All stories, with the possible exception of breaking news, will adhere to a “Semaform,” featuring five sections: “The News,” “Reporter’s View,” “Room for Disagreement,” “The View From” and “Notable.”
My language arts teacher said it in 9th grade, and it still holds true: the five paragraph essay is an extremely powerful format and can even be a helpful structural concept for long-form writing. That said, I don’t know that helpful(?) titling is going to solve the contradictory messages that news consumers receive on a daily basis. It is also acknowledged in this very article that media is a slow-growth industry in a recession, so I wish the founders of Semafor the best of luck in charting new paths for “gotta hear both sides” discourse.
