It is an eternal regret of mine that I never got to see Sufjan Stevens live on the Illinois tour. This bootleg, compiling various soundboard recordings from his shows on that run, is therefore a real treasure.
The quality is amazing, the songs are utterly beautiful, and, trivia fans, the female performer you hear alongside him is a pre-St Vincent Annie Clark. Glorious.
I’ve been a user of Arc browser since it launched. It was far more capable than Chrome and soon became an essential part of my workflow. It annoyed me then, when the makers basically mothballed it in favour of a new AI-infused browser called Dia. Earlier this week, they went even further and basically announced the browser was being fully shut down.
Enter Crest. I installed it last night and so far it’s been a like-for-like replacement. It even has a migration feature to import your Arc spaces, extensions and history. Very effortless. Worth a look if you’re also an Arc user wondering where to go next.
My colleague Harry shared this in our company Slack: Dortmund FC are rewarding fans with loyalty points for keeping their phones locked during a game.
“Dortmund are offering signed jerseys and gift cards for club merchandise to fans who use an app which measures how often they unlock their phones at their stadium.”
Could bands adopt this? In theory, yes. I love it as a concept.
One issue that keeps coming up for me as a business owner employing 30+ people is how you control the use and deployment of AI, and equally, how you understand exactly what people are using tokens for.
Currently, it feels woefully underserved across the major AI providers, so this concept from the team at Make strikes me as very much recognising the gap in the market. Worth a look.
The part I am still not quite figuring out here is how all these parts hang together. At some point I assume One Platform To Rule Them All will emerge, but until then this all remains quite a messy area in terms of governance.
40% of Gen Z say that they wish social media had never been invented.
63% of Gen Z adults now intentionally unplug—the highest rate of any generation
44% of the time, when people go online, they get sucked into scrolling and end up somewhere they didn’t intend to be
I love this line: “Don’t reinforce the loop. Design the exit.”
I couldn't agree more. It's why here at Motive Unknown we're focusing far, far more on elevating experiences that live on the artist's own website, and ideally tying those to IRL experiences where there is infinitely more value and connection attributed to it.
Loving the new material from Bicep. This has been on repeat. Love the video too! Feels like classic Bicep to me, which as a massive fan of their first two albums, is a welcome thing indeed.
Really keen to see how the SLUG album lands; I have high hopes for this one!
I mentioned Reverse Engineer Anything in a previous post. As the name suggests, it allows you to decompile firmwares and binaries, thus allowing you to then create your own firmware or cloned version of an app.
What I like about this video is it very easily unpicks all the implications of reverse engineering things - and there are many to consider.
P.S. I have to also shout out this comment, though, which did make me laugh:
Of late, there has been a tidal wave of ‘new’ unofficial firmware patches popping up for music hardware. The trend has sped up all the more since the release of Reverse Engineer Anything, which allows one to turbo charge Claude et al with even more ability to, well, reverse engineer anything.
I don’t own a great deal of music hardware these days, but with only a couple of exceptions, every piece of kit I own now has some kind of modded firmware available. The Arturia MicroFreak now has Superfreaker. The Polyend Tracker now has Tracker RE. My 1010 Blackbox now has an SP1200 mode thanks to new firmware. The list goes on.
In short then, the walled gardens are coming down. What was once off limits and only accessible with serious amounts of labour is now almost trivially easy to achieve.
Amid so much talk about what AI can and cannot do, I find myself going back to songs (and videos) like this one from Cardiacs, and take huge comfort in the fact that AI won’t create anything even close (both sonically and visually) in a million years.
AI generated music is an echo chamber. This is humanity at its finest: gloriously imperfect, batshit crazy, wholly original and totally exciting to behold. RIP Tim Smith.
I have published two new guides over on Soundtrack The Page. The first is for Simon Reynolds’ excellent “Still In A Dream” book that covers “shoegaze, slackers and the reinvention of rock 1984-1994”. The second is for Dan Hancox’s brilliant “Inner City Pressure” charting the history of grime.
I would express surprise at Meta’s move here, but really it’s exactly what I’ve come to expect from them. In short, any users of Business accounts will, by default, consent to their sites being scraped for AI training.
Expect this to get a robust legal challenge.
Random thought: if a site is hosting music (e.g. an artist website) does that mean this gives Meta carte blanche to train on that too? 🤔
Mia Koden is a true head. Her passion for music is matched by her deep, deep knowledge of it, as evidenced by anyone who has seen her play or heard her mixes.
Any new release is a treat then, and this is no exception. My only crit is that it arrived with little to no fanfare, and I nearly missed it!
AI is taking jobs from the bottom of companies, not the top. Technology, therefore, isn't threatening senior roles. Yet most of these latest redundancies are senior positions - which makes financial sense as they save the most money. However that suggests a company desperate to save money because it cannot deliver the necessary profits by the usual means, i.e. growth. Curious to see what so many senior execs do next, too. Hopefully, start interesting new businesses to bring more competition to the marketplace 🤞🏻
