winternett

They've been around for a long time now, just another digital distributor that charges artists to upload music... They're also owned by a major industry entity, the same ones I'm posting about... Hardly a game changer. Major labels strangle independent artists and frustrate them to the point where they'll desperately sign weak big industry contracts and then get popular, but ripped off. The whole industry needs a major reorganization from it's current exploitation model.

If you, like me, have witnessed the shear idiocy and disinformative mess of comments and content on Reddit, TikTok, Instagram and other so-called data sets for Ai training that seek engagement and watch time, it's easy to see that training Ai on that data will never work right. besides that, no amount of scripting will make Ai tools be able to mimic human intelligence, it's going to be something far different that can build and improve on itself after a point, rather than just being scripting that is continually updated by humans.

Based on the shear malfunction I observe in mobile OS assistant apps, we're a long way from true Ai... Coupled with so many fraudsters trying to capitalize on the ideal, and how everyone is converting free services to paid services with common street=level-drug-dealing tactics, I think the biggest issue these efforts will face is loss of credibility and shear burnout on all the overblown marketing of Ai. Current products are vastly underwhelming, criminally overpriced, and low-value.... There's a long way to go.

Big industry and Ai companies are flooding the Internet with low-grade music. This is their tactic to holding far better independent music out of view, because if indie music took over, there would be no going back to big industry music.

Coupled with social apps like TikTok & Instagram and streaming companies like Spotify not allowing indie artists to grow without paying serious ad money, the larger industry is actively preventing independent music from being heard, and running undercover grifts on artists that aren't making a dime off of their work.

When people go to sites like YouTube and Spotify, it's very difficult to find an artists best work, these sites do everything to steer listeners towards big industry music, rather than helping independents to grow. Tech sites are grifting hard working musicians that aren't getting any reimbursement for their work, and there should be more accountability, because we're all being pelted with artificial and weak music as a result.

Kids love music, but they literally can't find the best of it anymore because of anti-competitive behavior by tech companies and the big music industry.

Agreed, I think the word "bias" kind of depicts the issue better in some cases... Bias, detailing an upbringing that is devoid of knowing, respecting, being conscious of, and considering cultures outside of one's own...

I don't think it becomes the larger (societal-level) instance of racism until it is willfully and intentionally applied towards holding others of a specific race down, or discriminating against the race of others in esteem.

Personal perspective is influenced by personal bias, we all have it.

Our dreams often include the participation of others, the may account for diversity, but often do not. As Elon pushes an anti-DEI narrative on his "dream" ventures (Like Twitter and Tesla) a lot, it's just one example of how racism (consciously or not) manifests in harmful ways, and can affect the lives of others negatively.

Following your dreams is directly linked to your ability to obtain funding.

This world has major problems in grasping different perspectives of others than the ones we're born with. When I do speeches for younger audiences, I always remind them to consider perspectives other than the ones they were raised in. It's baffling how many people walk around thinking that their perspective is fair to impose on everyone.

I think a lot of our current problems, especially wealth inequality, racism, and wars are driven by dreamers that only see their own personal vision, while also being driven by total blindness to the other perspectives affected around them.

I personally learned over many years and setbacks to live like a fisherman, not investing fully into any one category, just casting my reel in different spots and seeing if anything "bites"... If success bites, I fish in that area more, hoping that I will find enough success.

So far, I've mostly found success in embracing all the things I don't enjoy doing in order to fund the things I do enjoy... From my experience, most people (those not born into wealth & priviledge) don't earn great money unless they dive into doing things they don't enjoy...

I think it's important to be practical about it all.

The next phase of email should be for Federal and state governments to host it. We need to move it off of private infrastructure for essential services like payments and recordkeeping. There should be better penalties for misuse of email services and scams now that it handles so many important things, including authentication to many sites everyone uses. I wrote a whole rant on this a while back on my blog, despite objections, email can well replace the outdated physical mail delivery systems currently in place around the world, vital communication in the age of corporate surveillance and scams needs to be regulated if not run, regulated, and secured by more accountable government resources.

We have already seen how our personal information can be harvested and weaponized. Leaving important email services to strategically opportunistic companies like Google will not be wise into the future.

The industry should have started out with smaller cars and motorcycles with swappable battery cells. It would have solved so many problems in even deploying charge centers, but unfortunately, it means reduced profit. Tech Companies focus on monthly subscriptions and planned obsolescence to guarantee revenue streams so much now that it's making intentionally disposable products that will do far more environmental damage than fuel burning vehicles. We're making bike and bus lanes and speed cameras that bottleneck traffic, while wondering why no one wants to work. The lead EV manufacturing company is led by someone with astronomical wealth that is impulsive and erratic, despite having a faulty and way over-stylized product that many are buying, but most fail within the first 5-6 years, and sit dormant due to very high repair costs. Even the quality and long-term reliability of gas powered vehicles has declined for unknown reasons as they become primarily software-based, which some believe are the result of trying to encourage EV sales.

The reason why EV markets are faltering now are simple... They're just not very viable and reliable in their current form in comparison to traditional vehicles.

We all need to reject the "new mobile phone + plan every year" model of car ownership. Not only is it not sustainable, it's not environmentally safe.

The updates seem to all be geared towards corrective updates rather than expansion of capabilities. We're still typing prompts rather than speaking them into a microphone.

If it was truly Ai, why isn't it rapidly building itself? Rather than relying on scraping human content from wildly inaccurate and often incorrect social media posts? So much effort is wasted in trying to push news cycles rather than a careful, responsible, and measured approach to developing Ai into becoming tools that are highly functional and useful to individuals. The biggest innovation in Ai right now is how to make it modular and slap a fee on each feature, and that's not practical at all into the future.

I'll begin to believe that consume Ai is making strides when Siri and Google Assistant stop missing commands, and actually can conduct meaningful conversations without an Internet connection and monthly software updates, which in my opinion is at least 5-10 years away. Right now what is presented as "Ai" is usually often incomplete sensor-aware scripting or the wizard of Oz (humans) hidden behind the curtains operating switches and levers, a bunch of underwhelming tools, and a heap of online marketing. If they keep that act up, it erodes faith in the entire concept, just like with Full Self Driving Tesla Trucks.

There are so many sites that all follow the same template... To sell sponsorships & ads and to companies, and then slap the illusion that public participation is vibrant. The only good model for a social site these days are smaller communities specialized around a niche, like specific cars or musician communities based on genres.

Even back in the day, people had extensive problems with community forums because operators usually worked based on collusion and favoritism and ad profit. There are far too many agendas involved in major "social" communities, and social is in quotes, because if you look at the tools dedicated to communication on these platforms, they barely facilitate communication and connection beyond public fandom, a lot of that is based on bot traffic.

If you look at live streaming, a ton of generic comments flood celebrity sessions, many operate chat bots to make their live streaming sessions look "active" with users. I think users are now beginning to wise up to the façade that social media is not really helpful once it grows big.

Does the app feature music by musicians? As a musician that's what I'd expect to see myself, because seeing a bunch of people only talking about what they do is useless in terms of conveying style and skill. It also enables scammers and fraud if people aren't required to at least upload a video of themselves in action.

Back in the old days, we had a local paper that allowed musicians to connect from a classified section, and boy was it scary meeting some of the strangers that posted in there to jam.

These search companies should have hired moderators to manually browse results and tag them based on keywords instead of leaving tagging up to content and info creators. The entire results game became fixated on trending topics and SEO spam that it became a game of insider trick trading, that's what makes results everywhere so terrible now.

In a bid for attention, only the fraudsters are winning, well, the platforms are winning lots of money from selling advertising, I guess that's why they're perfectly fine with not fixing results and ranking for many years now. I'm not sure there is a way back to real relevance now, there's no incentive for these large companies to fix things, and the public has already become used to the gamified system to go back to behaving themselves.

The beauty is in using email and document scanning, technologies that for the most part are pretty well known and tested (outside of modern email UIs that smash in ads everywhere)

The recommendation is simply the right thing to do regardless on adoption... Just for better alignment with environmental preservation (All the paper & junk mail saved), and how it would take personal information & data mis-use out of the hands of private companies (GMAIL) alone, it could easily become a tech game-changing government mandate.

If every citizen of each country had an official personal email address they could use for their government related affairs, even driver's licenses and emphasis on physical home addresses would become a thing of the past. Purchases and payments could be far better managed through them, and the IDs could easily be used to create terminals for managing all kinds of things from taxes, to voting, to payroll in a far more accountable manner. This has always been a missed mark and the "failure of government" gap on this not being in place becomes wider each year.

Even when we had Internet forums (PHPBB and whatnot) the admins would assert their influence and moderate unfairly. Only turning back to an ecosystem of individually owned sites would counter the over moderation, but even then, you still have the issue of SEO and Search Result manipulation to battle. :/

I don't think most of the Internet realizes the competition factors going on across social media right now... Content creators and even scholars compete against people who live in 3rd world countries, massive corporations, kids in their bedrooms, and many political and economic interest groups for attention over the entire internet.

People living in economically depressed conditions are eager and happy to make $10 off a creator fund, or even $5 for selling a user account with 1 million followers to a kid in America who wants to look like a fashion or music industry influencer... These platforms are not full of honest business people struggling to create public awareness for their brand, they're full of jaded honest people, corporate influence, political influence, and scammers.

There are tons of people literally creating drab content, and often lying in it about success secrets and tips to succeed on platforms as well. There are also tons of ad-sponsored posts run by everyone from scammers to people selling goods manufactured in sweat shops on top of all the legitimate (honest) product and service sellers.

The people competing to gain social media attention are as diverse as the schemes they generate, and that's inversely what is destroying any possible productivity for honest content, contributors, and artists on social media.

There is an endless stream of people that are eager to capture public consciousness, and the platforms weaponize it to make investors and management rich -- Just like a farmer's market, the landlord can basically sit back and charge everyone for rent, while the booth operators all furiously scramble to position themselves and sell enough to make a living. The platforms have grown to be far too large for anything great to come out of them for honest operators.

The problem is that he bought a Hyundai. They are deeply flawed in terms of reliability and safety, and that's how the company saves money. Problem solved.

There is a ton of manipulation on all social media now. If you look at the profits company execs and investors make from it, it's easy to see how they're funneling revenue out of these platforms into their pockets without really investing in the communities at all with features that create opportunity and utility. The model for large social platforms has been corrupted to the point that there's a blueprint for them, similar to casinos, where only the house wins.

I think the main reason why Elon turned Twitter into hell was to get most of the people on older accounts to quit because they had EULAs that weren't compatible with his profit plans. Now, older accounts don't grow, and they languish in a sea of whatever content Elon wants to trend. There is incessant spam about crypto, celebrities, boring music, police chase and fight clips, KPop, a ton of things that no one is interested in, while the site just also loses money.

It's symbolic of social media altogether, as Instagram, TikTok, etc. have all turned on users to just push ads, and they announce features that nobody wants. It's the height of tone deafness that will cause everyone to migrate completely off of social media... They did it to themselves. It was their ego, not any sort of utopian vision, when you think only from your own limited social perspective, there's no way you can lead a platform of millions of people with differing perspectives and backgrounds.

Facebook & Instagram have had tons of Congressional scrutiny over the past decade, the problem is they never really did much to fix issues with the platform as a result.

The mere fact that these social media CEOs are building vast bunkers and amassing billions of dollars highlights the issue that they are literally shoveling value out of these platforms into their own pockets, and those of their investors, while preying upon the instincts of all their users in a deeply psychological manner.

Personal web sites have been around for ages. Things worked better before when there was a proper search related to individual web sites and music blogs. There was also a lot less obsession with minute-to-minute updates from artists and scams to get on playlists and for likes and followers.

I'm a musician myself, and social media is totally overburdening the music economy with scams for musicians like paying for ads and bot services just to get visibility. Social Media overall is considered to be a wasteland dedicated to promoting only artificially engineered celebrity music and stories right now in the opinion of many.

I'm looking forward to more regulation of social media to be honest... All of the algorithms only end up working against the entertainment and educational factor of it all anyway. I'm thoroughly convinced that the social media mega-platforms have all moved out of algorithms to just pushing sponsored ads all day. Many of these ads repeat far too often every time I log in, and it's been making me want to ban all the apps anyway...

I listen to anything new I can get my hands on without a bunch of ads disrupting the vibe.. YouTube is my favorite music resource these days, as the videos are better in telling me more about whether an artist is genuine (non Ai, and non-industry-plant).

The genre is not really defining in most cases for me, because so much is mislabeled, or not even labeled at all, and I've found in searching music by genre, that most of the recommendations are flooded with SEO spam, and typically never the best music within the genre to begin with...

Ai recommendations will also primarily be based on what makes platforms and their partners the most money, which is often coincidentally the generic sounding pop drivel we're all so used to being played in every retail outlet around us, the best music I've noticed is often hidden below 10k views or less.

I was referring to specific people who use the computers to look at Pr0n, which does not at all indicate whether they are homeless or not.

In my city certain people are often using them and leaving... uh... errant trace elements of themselves on said resources, especially the public-use computers... :/

I'm not really a germaphobe, but in the age of the pandemic, I think public resources like libraries are under serious threat, just like busses and public transit. It would be nice if there was some sort of reassurance that cleaning and disinfecting was taking place between each use.

I am a professional musician, you'd be surprised, most musicians aren't making serious money in the streaming age. many popular musicians aren't making much as well. Record labels are losing money and the Industry is in meltdown mode right now. I'm lucky to have other business ventures that pay my bills.

Most musicians are only getting booked at large festivals which don't pay well, they're often the only ticket in town post-pandemic, as they pack volumes of artists together onto one big lineup. The smaller events rarely provide a good return on investment. Lenny Kravitz for example invests in NYC real estate these days, and has brand deals.

I like Prince, have since I was a kid, but I'm not a "Fan" of Prince... I like his music. The problem is that Pop musicians grow and cultivate fans maybe, kids and people that will buy and collect anything an artist sells... Problem is that those Pop fans quickly grow out of it as they get older and often find there's no benefit in collecting things from a fallible character persona. They the artist either retires and fades away (until their unfortunate demise is reported on the news), or keeps going on tour until some embarrassing things begin to happen, like stage tumbles and mental breakdowns.

As a musician myself, I don't want fans, I just want a vast audience to hear my music so that a percentage of people out of it connect with it and collect it. No merchandising involved beyond the music, and streaming it is free... Social media dictates that all musicians need fans to grow, and that is toxic towards good authentic music happening. Major labels manufacture artists, and assemble teams of people that take actors and turn them into musicians, then the marketing machine makes up entire stories, and even lies about these musicians that can't hold up when the budget runs out. If you recall Milli Vanilli, that's just one instance of manufactured artistry. Now with Ai, it's just Milli Vanilli without collateral damage and artists to pay, the good thing though is the whole charade only works for Pop music, and it may entertain fans for short periods of time, as seen with pretty much all the BackStreet Boys, No comebacks Alright!

I'm glad I don't make Pop music, and I'm working to make timeless music, the POP life is not for me.

TikTok, as well as many other Social Platforms became heavily extortionist upon content creators in the last 3 years... Because they created advertising capability, which is essential to build an audience within their closed walls, they no longer had any incentive to permit organic growth, as ad revenue earns them Billions of dollars. There is no way to verify the return on investment for buying ads on these platforms, the majority of ad views could well be bot and inauthentic accounts, so the value of spending heavily on ads is also a farce.

These apps have turned into casinos, where only the house really wins, and creators and businesses only find out after they've spent far too much on closed-platform advertising with shrinking sales, as less viable customers log in because they find a lack of opportunity and entertainment due to all the ads now displayed. Even the influence r economy is drying up, as viewers consider influencers inauthentic when they shill consumer products.

TikTok has turned into television, where there are little choices, little relevance to the vast audience of viewers, and tons of commercials. TikTok has been dying for a while now, just like FaceBook, and Twitter. People can do without it, though it may be painful at first, most of the earnings on TikTok were for the company on ad revenue, not for businesses and creators, and that is evidenced by declining markets and higher unemployment filings over time. A lot of the creators touting massive earnings is the result of the "fake it till you make it" ethos pushed by Social Media since it's inception.

Many of the people evangelizing platforms now are paid actors and sponsored under the table.... There is little means to detect when it's happening because the algorithms appear to be mysterious, but the primary "algorithm" running on most of these platforms now is based on who pays the most money to be seen.

It will be interesting to see what comes next, but users are beyond worn out on these casino ad-based social media business models, as evidenced on Meta Threads (a non-ad-based) platform, and on black-hat hacker forums, many complain about how platforms no longer work properly, and how they no longer even log in to them. The social media platforms may say otherwise, but we are experiencing a conscious shift away from mega-platforms back to smaller message boards and individual websites, which may be a good thing, let's hope the siege on consciousness of social media is in it's last laps, purely to end repetitive ads, gimmicky music clips, success tips, lack of pay for work, and influencer wealth lies... And to also cull all the political, cultural, and medical disinformation at least.

Monetizing passions is essential these days... The music studio doesn't really improve unless you generate money to build it up, computers, guitars, mixing tools, studio monitors etc., all cost an enormous amount of money. A hobbyist is far different from an enthusiast, and I think thats the distinction that many of people who say "I don't need to make money for my work" simply don't get... By spending money generated elsewhere on passions, you threaten your ability to survive by reducing savings and survival funds. It's not egotistical at all to expect for passions to at least earn back their investment because most creatives aren't born rich. I work to dispute that toxic & low aiming mindset every day. no one should ever have to work for no expectation of returns.

I have been doing so for a long time, but man, hosting costs are rising, and they really don't give me much storage to host community functionality at all. :|

http://www.ruffandtuffrecordings.com/

The songs that algorithms push on social media and that Major record labels are promoting are more simple... There are plenty of independent works out there that have great complexity and depth to them, but now that the Internet is firewalled, most people don't see the deeper and more talented works out there.

Independent artists are working furiously just to be heard, but now that payola is the ruling model for music, it's become really hard to find better music.

Until the dominance of large companies controlling visibility of what the public sees changes, we'll be stuck in the dark ages for good music. It's a shame.