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Best costume ever. Happy Friday, FutureParty people. If you're in need of some last-minute inspiration for this weekend’s Halloween festivities (we all can’t be Weird Barbie at the party), check out this recent Reddit post that takes couple costumes to a whole new level. We’re going to need to step up our game…
In other news… Spotify revamps its royalty model, new image tools fight against generative AI, and Neal Agarwal makes the internet fun again.
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MUSIC
Bank of Spotify // Illustration by Kate Walker
Spotify plans royalty-model update to benefit “working artists”
The Future. Spotify is changing how its song royalty pool gets allocated. Instead of being restrictive, the changes may be a relief for the average artist, who could allegedly get a larger check for the same number of streams (still pretty tiny at $0.003 per play per month). With Warner Music Group also working with Deezer on a new revenue model, the next decade may be all about making music streaming a more sustainable and equitable living for artists.
Song sustainability
Spotify is making three changes to its “Streamshare” royalty system next year, according to Music Business Worldwide.
They are…
“Introducing a threshold of minimum annual streams before a track starts generating royalties on Spotify — in a move expected to de-monetize a portion of tracks that previously absorbed 0.5% of the service’s royalty pool.”
“Financially penalizing distributors of music — labels included — when fraudulent activity is detected on tracks that they’ve uploaded to Spotify.”
“Introducing a minimum length of play-time that each non-music ‘noise’ track must reach in order to generate royalties.”
The changes are meant to curtail monetization for the millions of tracks on the platform that don’t even get 200 plays a year (a move that could put $40 million back in the royalty pool annually), punish people who try to game Spotify’s payout system with AI tools or “stream farms,” and keep white-noise artists from gobbling up cash just because people are listening to their playlists all night while they sleep.
Spotify has reportedly already been talking with labels about the changes, promising the new guardrails should route $1 billion over the next five years back to the musicians who make up the platform’s backbone.
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Courtesy of Leica
Hardware and software fight against AI
The Future. Photographers and illustrators are getting more tools to deter AI systems like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E from using their works in training data without credit or authorization. If they’re able to make enough of a dent in the culture, they could set the criteria for how the general public should view media. But with smartphones making it very easy to use AI to edit photos however people see fit, it’s yet to be seen how important the distinction between original and manipulated works means to the public — apathy with major consequences.
Click credentials
From the moment a photo is captured to the time it’s uploaded, humans are getting new tools to fight against the rise of generative AI.
Leica’s new M11-P camera can add “Content Credentials” — an image-verifying metadata that Adobe and Microsoft are also using — the moment a photo is taken.
At $10,000, that may not be a very accessible tool. But camera makers Canon, Nikon, and Sony are also members of the initiative behind Content Credentials, so they could add the capability soon as well.
Chip-maker Qualcomm said its new high-end smartphone chip can also add similar labeling to photos taken with devices… but it’ll be up to smartphone makers, app developers, and consumers to use the capability.
A software tool called Nightshade takes things further, allowing artists to add a “poison pill” pixel to images so AI systems can’t read what they are.
Glaze, another tool from the Nightshade developers, allows artists to upload their images so it can hide the artist’s style — like “making a normally realistic drawing into something cubist.”
While lawsuits against generative AI companies wind their way through the courts and the Copyright Office works on updating its rules, it may come down to rogue artists using these tools in the meantime.
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TECHNOLOGY
Neal Agarwal in his element // Illustration by Kate Walker
Neal Agarwal tries to make the internet fun again
The Future. Neal Agarwal, a 25-year-old coder who’s been going viral for his off-kilter websites since childhood, is using his site to archive and build on the kitschy insanity of the early internet — an internet that could’ve still existed if it weren’t for smartphones. But as hanging out online has become a tailspin of toxicity, doom, and minefields, an incoming generation of internet users may take social networking private and rebuild the web as a place of pure, weird creative expression.
Let chaos reign
Insider breaks down what makes Agarwal’s website, neal.fun, both the most fun place on the internet and a time capsule of the beautiful strangeness the world wide web once was.
neal.fun is a repository of all of Agarwal’s pet projects, including a bevy of Flash-like games that recall the simple yet groundbreaking absurdity of Flash-based sites like Homestar Runner and the Helicopter Game.
That includes viral game webpages like “Asteroid Launcher” (where you can hurl space rocks at your hometown) and “Spend Bill Gates’ Money” (exactly what it sounds like) — just a vault of fun, time-sucking distractions.
It also contains a virtual museum called “Internet Artifacts” that lets users trace the origin of the internet, with recreations of Ask Jeeves, Myspace, and Napster.
The archive takes users up to 2007 — the year Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone and ushered in a new online era.
Why did the internet change so much? Insider’s Brian Barrett says it was two forces: Apple essentially de-platforming Flash on the iPhone because of its security bugs (taking away the tool of creativity) and the preference for platforms over websites (which gave everyone a fixed canvas for said creativity).
In other words, to boost access to online connectivity, we dimmed the internet’s feeling of limitlessness. neal.fun won’t revolutionize the internet, but it may at least remind people of the Wild West it used to be.
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Highlights
The best curated daily stories from around the web
Media, Music, & Entertainment
Paul McCartney has announced the last new song from The Beatles (yes, those Beatles) will be released on Thursday, November 2nd — a feat made possible by using AI to clean up a demo from the 1970s of John Lennon’s vocals and an old recording of George Harrison on guitar. Read more → deadline
Jason Kilar, the former CEO of WarnerMedia (now Warner Bros. Discovery), has some extensive thoughts on how to create Hollywood’s greatest hit and make the streaming industry sustainable. Read more → variety
Hipgnosis, the music rights firm that led a frenzy in buying legacy artist catalogs, is set to undergo a major overhaul after its shareholders voted for the board to fix the troubled company. Read more → billboard
Fashion & E-Commerce
Amazon is giving merchants on its platform a new suite of AI tools to help them advertise on the e-commerce site. Read more → theinformation
Adidas is pausing the rollout of its remaining Yeezy stock (a financial thorn in the side of the brand) — a move potentially influenced by the current political climate. Read more → hypebeast
Ulta Beauty is installing smart vending machines in its retail stores so loyalty-card members can access free samples of products. Read more → bof
Tech, Web3, & AI
OpenAI is assembling a team to study “catastrophic” AI risks… perfect timing after Boston Dynamics put ChatGPT in its robot dog named Spot. Read more → techcrunch
The UK’s thorough and controversial Online Safety Act has been signed into law — although there’ll be a tiered timeline for full compliance. Read more → theverge
Uber is now letting people order autonomous Waymo vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona. Read more → cnbc
Creator Economy
Martin Scorsese is now on Letterboxd — officially making him the coolest follow on the platform. Read more → indiewire
Twitch and YouTube are reportedly getting slightly more conservative about those big-money deals for livestream gaming talent. Read more → bloomberg
Generative AI startup 1337 is paying people to help build a roster of virtual influencers (yes, you can now influence influencers). Read more → techcrunch
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Copy edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.