Newsletter, January 6
Music Business
It’s Getting Harder to Deny that Payola 2.0 Is Alive and Well in The Music Streaming Era (Headphone Honesty/Andy G.)
Canadian Court Pauses So-Called ‘Streaming Tax’ on Companies Like Spotify, Amazon and Apple (Billboard/Richard Trapunski)
What the Algocrats Want You to Believe (MusicTech Solutions/Chris Castle)
Is Vivid Seats Selling? Ticketing Platform Reportedly Attracts Private Equity Takeover Interest Amid Continued Live-Sector Enthusiasm (Digital Music News/Dylan Smith)
No Bots, No Billionaires: StubHub’s Grotesque IPO Demonstrates Another Artist Ripoff By Our Tech Oligarchs (MusicTechPolicy/Chris Castle)
Jay Gilbert and Rob Abelow discuss music’s biggest problems (Your Morning Coffee Podcast)
Inside The Portfolio Of Businesses Owned By Downtown Music – The Company Universal Is Buying For $775m (Music Business Worldwide/Murray Stassen)
Artificial Intelligence
Beware the Intention Economy: Collection and Commodification of Intent via Large Language Models (Harvard Data Science Review/Yaqub Chaudhary and Jonnie Penn, Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence) (Conversational AI agents may develop the ability to covertly influence our intentions, creating a new commercial frontier that researchers call the “intention economy”.)
Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies (CNN/Allison Morrow) (Reaction to Facebook AI created fake user profiles)
The Human Cost Of Our AI-Driven Future (Noema Magazine/Adio Dinika)
AI vs. Copyright: A Legal Showdown Shaking the Foundations (OpenTools/Mackenzie Ferguson)
AI Still Lacks Common Sense 70 Years Later (Marcus on AI/Gary Marcus & Ernest Davis)
Social Media
Mass tort litigation to watch in 2025 (Reuters/Brendon Pierson) Social media addiction multidistrict litigation against YouTube, Facebook, Google, TikTok, Snapchat.
Meta’s Zuckerberg not liable in lawsuits over social media harm to children (Reuters/Jonathan Stemple)
World News
Trudeau expected to announce exit as party leader before national caucus meeting Wednesday (subscription) (Globe and Mail/Robert Fife & Marieke Walsh)
Will Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resign or prorogue parliament? What it means and how it impacts Canadians (Inside Halston/Staff Reporters)
Books (New or New to You)
Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist by Liz Pelly
Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge by Jean Noël Jeanneney