[ed. Not AI, but still unbelievable.]
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 21, 2026
Monday, October 19, 2026
On Audiophilia: Heaven’s Melodic Strains
I am a sick man. I have skipped Friday night plans to spend hours repositioning the speakers in my living room, by inches and degrees. I have squandered small fortunes on silver and black boxes that most people couldn’t identify, whose purpose they wouldn’t understand. I have disfigured my apartment with hulking foam panels to improve the room acoustics. I have shelled out for a high-resolution music streaming service with an unpronounceable name. I have frittered days and nights trawling the back pages of online forums to find the optimal tonearm mass for a certain phono cartridge, or the suitable crossover frequency for a particular model of subwoofer.
More than anything, I have spent long passages of this earthly life sitting on my ass, listening. I listen to music, but what I hear is sound. Texture, timbre, and tone; clarity and detail; space and depth. And I hear, even more acutely, what thwarts sound. Shrill treble, muddled bass — for me these are worse than peeves. They offend hearing. They diminish the human sensorium. Earbuds repulse me; laptop speakers grate; a tabletop Bluetooth unit is a kind of vandalism.
The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?
Audiophilia was born in gimmickry, and has never fully risen above it. Starting in the 1940s, a sudden onrush of consumer audio innovations — wide-range speakers, FM radio, long-playing vinyl records — created an equally sudden demand for whiz-bang demonstrations of “lifelike” sound. [...]
The word audiophile — etymologically, one who “loves to hear” — has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate, but sometimes an ugly shoe fits. Like similarly suffixed psychopathologies, the term suggests a state of warped dependence, of inbent sublimation. I didn’t set out to be this way, but neither have I ever sought help. My symptoms are apparent, their causes obscure. What, after all, do we love when we love sound?
Audiophilia was born in gimmickry, and has never fully risen above it. Starting in the 1940s, a sudden onrush of consumer audio innovations — wide-range speakers, FM radio, long-playing vinyl records — created an equally sudden demand for whiz-bang demonstrations of “lifelike” sound. [...]
Audiophiles obsess, tinker, tweak, and upgrade, their gear addiction now served by a global subindustry of specialty brands, most of them unknown to the broader public; there are still record labels whose main marketing draw is their audio quality. And more than a little of that midcentury zealotry survives in subsequent sonic novelties that tease and amaze the ears with their “realism”: spatial audio, high-res audio, surround sound. Sound snobs would plotz at the comparison, but when an audiophile tests their stereo with the sawtooth jag of a guitar or the spelunk of a low bass note, what — besides thousands of dollars’ worth of gear — makes them any different from a teenager mainlining the rustles and gurgles of ASMR videos on YouTube? When we submit ourselves to sound for its own sake, something elemental, infantile, awakens.
Yet unlike most cultic formations, audiophiles know, deep down, that their god is a false one. Recorded songs are finite temporal events, but in the audiophile dream, or delusion, the record holds an infinity of retrievable detail, a renewing depth that can always be heard better, truer — if only we have the right tools. Audiophiles, the High Fidelity magazine cofounder C. G. Burke once wrote, are simply “people [who] wish an oboe to sound unmistakably and completely like an oboe.” That word like is key. All audio playback — mono or stereo, analog or digital — is at base an imitation, a simulacrum. Choose your sound and you choose your illusion. And almost as soon as naturalistic audio entered the American home, the wars of illusion began. Do you want to feel like the band or orchestra or DJ is here in your room, or like you’re there, in the studio or concert hall? Do you judge a system’s sound by its nearness to live performance, or to the recording? And how would you tell?
All subcultures suffer their schisms, and for audiophiles, a defining split is between subjectivism and objectivism in listening — between those who trust their ears and those who trust their measurements. In a 2004 academic article, the ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman framed it as a conflict between “golden ears” and “meter readers.” The golden ear, in Perlman’s lavishly adjectived definition, claims an “intimate, embodied, personal, inalienable, charismatic superiority of aural discrimination,” a master listener’s ability to distinguish and rank audio equipment by the subtlest gradations of sonic quality. His rival, the meter reader, prizes “rationalized,” “impersonal,” “scientific” authority, by way of spiritless, lab-testable criteria that don’t depend on the vagaries of human hearing: signal-to-noise ratio, crossover distortion, dynamic power output.
No love is lost between these camps. To Robert Harley, editor of the flagship golden-ears monthly The Absolute Sound, meter readers are philistines “who reject the listening experience,” for whom “nothing more can be known about an audio component beyond its technical performance.” Upmarket mystics like Harley are in turn a favorite punch line among the echt meter readers of Audio Science Review, an online database whose contributors meticulously test and rank components — 1,986 and counting — based on measurements, no ears required. In their respective languages, both extremes circle an epistemic cul-de-sac. A meter reader’s greatest compliment for a piece of gear is that it “measures well”; the golden ear’s highest praise, tautologically, is that it sounds “musical.” From a certain height, the problem becomes one of knowledge itself: Do you believe what you hear, or do you hear what you believe?
These warring phenomenologies also play out in silicon and copper. Perlman’s binary maps roughly onto the divide between — bear with me here — solid-state audio equipment, which uses semiconductors, like nearly all consumer electronics since the 1970s; and vacuum-tube gear, a throwback design where power is transmitted by electrodes in glass cylinders. Meter readers bade good riddance to tubes decades ago, but golden ears can’t quit them. Psychoacoustic lore holds that the kind of harmonic distortions associated with tubes — subtle overtones that smooth certain frequencies, as if steeping the music in a sepia mist — sound gentler, “warmer,” than the granular accuracy of solid-state equipment. Likewise, while digital media long ago conquered analog in the rest of the world, among audiophiles the contest has never been settled. Objectivists point to the quantifiably superior stability and fidelity of digital codecs, while subjectivists cherish the earthy sonic “presence” of records and reel-to-reel tapes. Today digital sources and solid-state parts almost always measure better; yet untold money and ingenuity go into the design of new turntables and tube amps, and demand is only growing. [...]
Who are these audiophiles? We are — overwhelmingly, smotheringly — men, skewing older but not geriatric, often but not always white, with at least a little disposable income, sometimes far too much. I haven’t discerned a socio-professional pattern; audiophiles are dentists and bartenders, lawyers and mail carriers. Curiously (or not), the proportion of musicians and audio engineers seems not much higher than in the general population.
Such, anyway, is our outward appearance. As for our inner life, no piece of writing depicts it with more tough love than the great — the only? — audiophile novel of our time, Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak, published in 2012 and translated into English by Canaan Morse in 2016. “The name ‘audiophile’ has never sat well with me,” its protagonist, Cui, confides unconvincingly near the start of the book. “I’m just a craftsman.” A master maker of custom tube amplifiers in Beijing, Cui wearily plies his trade while sinking ever deeper into a middle-age, postdivorce funk. Building tube amps, he muses, is “probably the most insignificant industry in China today”; he guesses that in the whole city there are no “more than twenty of us.” Yet the boutique marginality of what he calls his “racket” puts him in close contact with China’s new class of yuppies and executives, eager to outfit their homes with artisanal sound. The novel follows Cui from one nouveau riche living room to another, where clients are reliably entranced by his setups, “as if listening to heaven’s melodic strains.” “Five or six of these ‘victims’ a year,” he tells us, “is enough to keep my pathetic business hobbling along.” Cui isn’t much for introspection, but in his gripes and regrets, in making a modest living from something he enjoys immodestly, he inhabits a melancholy that any sick man will recognize. As we hold life and sound apart, they only join closer.
Short and episodic, the novel’s narrative patterns match those of the audiophile mind. Liberally scattered amid childhood flashbacks, scenes from a failed marriage, money troubles, and family quarrels — in a word, life — are gearhead reveries on the glories of hi-fi, named by brand and model. Cui admires a set of Amati Anniversario speakers, their cabinets “lacquered and buffed to the tones of a violin and a mirror’s shine”; one type of RCA vacuum tube is nicknamed “The King,” another “The Pillar of Heaven.” A prized pair of vintage Tannoy Autograph speakers seduce him “like gorgeous twin sisters,” with an “intoxicating allure,” an “unbelievable fullness” and “flawless piano timbre.” When Cui’s wife asks for the divorce, his only request is “that she leave me all the audio equipment, including the Autograph speakers.” She agrees.
I linger on Ge’s novel in part because the field of recent hi-fi writing is otherwise so desolate. In this century the American audiophile press, like most print media, has withered to bare life. Long gone are the postwar années glorieuses of Audio and Stereo Review, High Fidelity and Audiocraft, with their ten-page features, critical essays, how-to guides, and no-fluff component tests, serving professionals and consumers, snobs and novices alike. (I mean, Ralph Ellison wrote for High Fidelity — as did Nat Hentoff, Aaron Copland, and Jacques Barzun.) Today readers have a choice of just two ad-heavy monthlies, each offering a thin digest of industry-friendly gear takes and skimpily reported columns. Stereophile maintains a pretense of objective rigor; product reviews include results of tests by the magazine’s “technical editor,” full of graphs and charts. In The Absolute Sound, meanwhile, quality is more or less measured by price. The most offensively expensive gear sends the magazine’s credulous shills into transports of Hildegardian ecstasy. For $89,000, you can make mystic communion with the “engrossing, enlightening . . . awe-inspiring” 300-watt Goldmund Telos 800 power amplifier, with its “dynamic envelope that seems to have no bounds,” and “transient attacks . . . more powerful than you had imagined possible” — fittingly, the magazine calls its annual product awards the Golden Ears.
However editorially atrophied, these magazines continue to carry authority, at least for the moneyed boomers who dominate the high-end market. For everyone else, there’s the internet. A sun-starved terrarium of forums, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts serves every niche and extremity of the audiophile audience. As repositories of technical nous and venues for arcane bickering — are idler-wheel turntable motors really superior to belt-drive designs? — the forums fill some of the void left by the decline of hi-fi journalism, but it takes a hardy scroller to sift the useful from the inane. And most audiophile vlogs are little more than meandering infomercials for products that brands have sent hosts to “review.” I should know, because I’ve watched so many of them.
Perlman’s dyad needs updating for an American economy more slanted than ever toward Sardanapalian excess. Among audiophiles, the bitterest battles now rage over the unconscionable cost of high-end hi-fi, and the outlandish claims made for the priciest gear. An unusually reflective recent Stereophile editorial lamented audio’s unchecked “premiumization.” How, not just as a matter of value but a question of science, can any consumer amplifier cost $150,000, like the 225-watt, 400-pound Statement 450i iQ? (The Absolute Sound: “resplendent,” “superb,” “extraordinary.”) Speakers readily reach the half-million mark; you can spend a year’s salary on audiophile power conditioners, audiophile equipment racks, audiophile Ethernet cables. At the scammiest fringe, things enter RFK Jr. brainworm territory: crystals, orbs, and amulets alleged to improve acoustics, reduce static buildup, and perhaps open a channel to the divine. [...]
Since long before the advent of high fidelity, the historian of recording Greg Milner notes, audio adepts have “believed that the key to perfect sound was to simplify the process.” One fewer link in the chain means “one less chance for the original sound to be corrupted.” (The legendary speaker designer Stewart Hegeman reportedly defined a perfect amplifier as “a straight wire with gain.”) Audiophiles thus devise their most elaborate contraptions in pursuit of simplicity. A fully loaded high-end home system might include a turntable with a freestanding tonearm, a step-up transformer, a phono preamplifier, a stereo preamplifier, two power amplifiers (one for each channel), a streamer, a music server, a digital-to-analog converter, a CD transport, two loudspeakers, two subwoofers, and assorted peripherals, not to mention many feet of RCA, XLR, HDMI, optical, coaxial, Ethernet, and speaker cables. Each of these devices does one thing at a time and no more, the better to pass on a pure, unblemished signal. Of course, such a setup also makes for a complex, multinodal signal path, with more junctures where things can go wrong. A sane person would call it overkill. For the audiophile, it’s another reason to spend even more money. [...]
Yet unlike most cultic formations, audiophiles know, deep down, that their god is a false one. Recorded songs are finite temporal events, but in the audiophile dream, or delusion, the record holds an infinity of retrievable detail, a renewing depth that can always be heard better, truer — if only we have the right tools. Audiophiles, the High Fidelity magazine cofounder C. G. Burke once wrote, are simply “people [who] wish an oboe to sound unmistakably and completely like an oboe.” That word like is key. All audio playback — mono or stereo, analog or digital — is at base an imitation, a simulacrum. Choose your sound and you choose your illusion. And almost as soon as naturalistic audio entered the American home, the wars of illusion began. Do you want to feel like the band or orchestra or DJ is here in your room, or like you’re there, in the studio or concert hall? Do you judge a system’s sound by its nearness to live performance, or to the recording? And how would you tell?
All subcultures suffer their schisms, and for audiophiles, a defining split is between subjectivism and objectivism in listening — between those who trust their ears and those who trust their measurements. In a 2004 academic article, the ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman framed it as a conflict between “golden ears” and “meter readers.” The golden ear, in Perlman’s lavishly adjectived definition, claims an “intimate, embodied, personal, inalienable, charismatic superiority of aural discrimination,” a master listener’s ability to distinguish and rank audio equipment by the subtlest gradations of sonic quality. His rival, the meter reader, prizes “rationalized,” “impersonal,” “scientific” authority, by way of spiritless, lab-testable criteria that don’t depend on the vagaries of human hearing: signal-to-noise ratio, crossover distortion, dynamic power output.
No love is lost between these camps. To Robert Harley, editor of the flagship golden-ears monthly The Absolute Sound, meter readers are philistines “who reject the listening experience,” for whom “nothing more can be known about an audio component beyond its technical performance.” Upmarket mystics like Harley are in turn a favorite punch line among the echt meter readers of Audio Science Review, an online database whose contributors meticulously test and rank components — 1,986 and counting — based on measurements, no ears required. In their respective languages, both extremes circle an epistemic cul-de-sac. A meter reader’s greatest compliment for a piece of gear is that it “measures well”; the golden ear’s highest praise, tautologically, is that it sounds “musical.” From a certain height, the problem becomes one of knowledge itself: Do you believe what you hear, or do you hear what you believe?
These warring phenomenologies also play out in silicon and copper. Perlman’s binary maps roughly onto the divide between — bear with me here — solid-state audio equipment, which uses semiconductors, like nearly all consumer electronics since the 1970s; and vacuum-tube gear, a throwback design where power is transmitted by electrodes in glass cylinders. Meter readers bade good riddance to tubes decades ago, but golden ears can’t quit them. Psychoacoustic lore holds that the kind of harmonic distortions associated with tubes — subtle overtones that smooth certain frequencies, as if steeping the music in a sepia mist — sound gentler, “warmer,” than the granular accuracy of solid-state equipment. Likewise, while digital media long ago conquered analog in the rest of the world, among audiophiles the contest has never been settled. Objectivists point to the quantifiably superior stability and fidelity of digital codecs, while subjectivists cherish the earthy sonic “presence” of records and reel-to-reel tapes. Today digital sources and solid-state parts almost always measure better; yet untold money and ingenuity go into the design of new turntables and tube amps, and demand is only growing. [...]
Who are these audiophiles? We are — overwhelmingly, smotheringly — men, skewing older but not geriatric, often but not always white, with at least a little disposable income, sometimes far too much. I haven’t discerned a socio-professional pattern; audiophiles are dentists and bartenders, lawyers and mail carriers. Curiously (or not), the proportion of musicians and audio engineers seems not much higher than in the general population.
Such, anyway, is our outward appearance. As for our inner life, no piece of writing depicts it with more tough love than the great — the only? — audiophile novel of our time, Ge Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak, published in 2012 and translated into English by Canaan Morse in 2016. “The name ‘audiophile’ has never sat well with me,” its protagonist, Cui, confides unconvincingly near the start of the book. “I’m just a craftsman.” A master maker of custom tube amplifiers in Beijing, Cui wearily plies his trade while sinking ever deeper into a middle-age, postdivorce funk. Building tube amps, he muses, is “probably the most insignificant industry in China today”; he guesses that in the whole city there are no “more than twenty of us.” Yet the boutique marginality of what he calls his “racket” puts him in close contact with China’s new class of yuppies and executives, eager to outfit their homes with artisanal sound. The novel follows Cui from one nouveau riche living room to another, where clients are reliably entranced by his setups, “as if listening to heaven’s melodic strains.” “Five or six of these ‘victims’ a year,” he tells us, “is enough to keep my pathetic business hobbling along.” Cui isn’t much for introspection, but in his gripes and regrets, in making a modest living from something he enjoys immodestly, he inhabits a melancholy that any sick man will recognize. As we hold life and sound apart, they only join closer.
Short and episodic, the novel’s narrative patterns match those of the audiophile mind. Liberally scattered amid childhood flashbacks, scenes from a failed marriage, money troubles, and family quarrels — in a word, life — are gearhead reveries on the glories of hi-fi, named by brand and model. Cui admires a set of Amati Anniversario speakers, their cabinets “lacquered and buffed to the tones of a violin and a mirror’s shine”; one type of RCA vacuum tube is nicknamed “The King,” another “The Pillar of Heaven.” A prized pair of vintage Tannoy Autograph speakers seduce him “like gorgeous twin sisters,” with an “intoxicating allure,” an “unbelievable fullness” and “flawless piano timbre.” When Cui’s wife asks for the divorce, his only request is “that she leave me all the audio equipment, including the Autograph speakers.” She agrees.
I linger on Ge’s novel in part because the field of recent hi-fi writing is otherwise so desolate. In this century the American audiophile press, like most print media, has withered to bare life. Long gone are the postwar années glorieuses of Audio and Stereo Review, High Fidelity and Audiocraft, with their ten-page features, critical essays, how-to guides, and no-fluff component tests, serving professionals and consumers, snobs and novices alike. (I mean, Ralph Ellison wrote for High Fidelity — as did Nat Hentoff, Aaron Copland, and Jacques Barzun.) Today readers have a choice of just two ad-heavy monthlies, each offering a thin digest of industry-friendly gear takes and skimpily reported columns. Stereophile maintains a pretense of objective rigor; product reviews include results of tests by the magazine’s “technical editor,” full of graphs and charts. In The Absolute Sound, meanwhile, quality is more or less measured by price. The most offensively expensive gear sends the magazine’s credulous shills into transports of Hildegardian ecstasy. For $89,000, you can make mystic communion with the “engrossing, enlightening . . . awe-inspiring” 300-watt Goldmund Telos 800 power amplifier, with its “dynamic envelope that seems to have no bounds,” and “transient attacks . . . more powerful than you had imagined possible” — fittingly, the magazine calls its annual product awards the Golden Ears.
However editorially atrophied, these magazines continue to carry authority, at least for the moneyed boomers who dominate the high-end market. For everyone else, there’s the internet. A sun-starved terrarium of forums, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts serves every niche and extremity of the audiophile audience. As repositories of technical nous and venues for arcane bickering — are idler-wheel turntable motors really superior to belt-drive designs? — the forums fill some of the void left by the decline of hi-fi journalism, but it takes a hardy scroller to sift the useful from the inane. And most audiophile vlogs are little more than meandering infomercials for products that brands have sent hosts to “review.” I should know, because I’ve watched so many of them.
Perlman’s dyad needs updating for an American economy more slanted than ever toward Sardanapalian excess. Among audiophiles, the bitterest battles now rage over the unconscionable cost of high-end hi-fi, and the outlandish claims made for the priciest gear. An unusually reflective recent Stereophile editorial lamented audio’s unchecked “premiumization.” How, not just as a matter of value but a question of science, can any consumer amplifier cost $150,000, like the 225-watt, 400-pound Statement 450i iQ? (The Absolute Sound: “resplendent,” “superb,” “extraordinary.”) Speakers readily reach the half-million mark; you can spend a year’s salary on audiophile power conditioners, audiophile equipment racks, audiophile Ethernet cables. At the scammiest fringe, things enter RFK Jr. brainworm territory: crystals, orbs, and amulets alleged to improve acoustics, reduce static buildup, and perhaps open a channel to the divine. [...]
Since long before the advent of high fidelity, the historian of recording Greg Milner notes, audio adepts have “believed that the key to perfect sound was to simplify the process.” One fewer link in the chain means “one less chance for the original sound to be corrupted.” (The legendary speaker designer Stewart Hegeman reportedly defined a perfect amplifier as “a straight wire with gain.”) Audiophiles thus devise their most elaborate contraptions in pursuit of simplicity. A fully loaded high-end home system might include a turntable with a freestanding tonearm, a step-up transformer, a phono preamplifier, a stereo preamplifier, two power amplifiers (one for each channel), a streamer, a music server, a digital-to-analog converter, a CD transport, two loudspeakers, two subwoofers, and assorted peripherals, not to mention many feet of RCA, XLR, HDMI, optical, coaxial, Ethernet, and speaker cables. Each of these devices does one thing at a time and no more, the better to pass on a pure, unblemished signal. Of course, such a setup also makes for a complex, multinodal signal path, with more junctures where things can go wrong. A sane person would call it overkill. For the audiophile, it’s another reason to spend even more money. [...]
Yet among leisure-class hobbies, something about hi-fi remains apart, unassimilated. Where it touches other domains of luxury consumption, the results can only be absurd. In a recent TV commercial for Lexus’s new electric SUV, a handsome white man in loafers lounges in a wide, high-windowed living room. The space is almost empty, save for the Lexus itself, somehow parked in the corner, and, alone in the middle of the floor, a gleaming black and silver VPI Titan Direct turntable ($64,000), equipped with a VPI Shyla dual moving coil cartridge ($2,200). The stylus lowers, and the gossamer muted trumpet of Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” begins playing. In a close-up, twilight kisses the vinyl grooves, which fade into a view of the SUV doing slow, graceful donuts on the beach. In another close-up, the man turns his gaze downward, as if in contemplation. “The greatest measure of an automobile,” a bourbon-rich baritone voice rumbles, “is how it makes you feel.” The loafered man doesn’t seem to feel much. After twenty seconds of listening, he gets up and leaves. I would too if, like him, I had spent five figures on a turntable only to dump it on the floor, and placed my speakers against a wall of sound-reflecting windows, too far apart and approximately fifty feet away from my listening chair, which is also facing the wrong way.
by Colin Vanderburg, N+1 | Read more:
by Colin Vanderburg, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, The Dark Pool. 1995
Sunday, October 18, 2026
Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song
Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song
Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.
If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. [...]
Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.
If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. [...]
If you’re clever, you can do a lot with just four chords—via dynamics, beats, texture, or (as a last resort) shifting to a different four-chord pattern. Taylor Swift’s work offers many examples of how to achieve this variety in the midst of sameness. She represents today’s four-chord aesthetic at its peak.
But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.
But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: YouTube
Friday, October 16, 2026
Thursday, October 15, 2026
Saturday, October 10, 2026
The Dot and the Swarm
I generally think I have done a good job anticipating the direction and pace of AI over the few years I have been writing this Substack, but I think I recently got something fairly large wrong. In the last year I have been posting about how I suspected that humans would have to approach working with agents as a manager, deciding how to delegate work to agents and specifying how those agents should be organized. I thought that getting agents to work effectively as a group would take careful construction, akin to building a company, and that this would take time to figure out.
Nope.
I fell prey to The Bitter Lesson, the hard truth, learned over and over again, that things that we thought required elaborate human rules and thinking can be solved with the brute force of better machine learning systems and more AI. The Bitter Lesson is everywhere among AI startups and companies adopting AI. A huge amount of effort went into building elaborate computer systems to feed AIs the right information at the right time, but AI systems have learned to seek out information themselves. The same thing happened to prompting. People built elaborate templates and chains of prompts that walked the AI through a task one step at a time. Then newer models turned out to be better at planning the steps themselves, and, as our research shows, planning steps have much less value. The history of the Bitter Le—
— you know what? I don’t really need to explain the Bitter Lesson, I asked Claude to do it in a music video. With one prompt, Fable wrote the lyrics and submitted it to Suno; Opus 5.5 did everything else using code alone without any image generation (How did Opus 5.5 pull this off? The Bitter Lesson tells you!). I gave no feedback at all.
Nope.
I fell prey to The Bitter Lesson, the hard truth, learned over and over again, that things that we thought required elaborate human rules and thinking can be solved with the brute force of better machine learning systems and more AI. The Bitter Lesson is everywhere among AI startups and companies adopting AI. A huge amount of effort went into building elaborate computer systems to feed AIs the right information at the right time, but AI systems have learned to seek out information themselves. The same thing happened to prompting. People built elaborate templates and chains of prompts that walked the AI through a task one step at a time. Then newer models turned out to be better at planning the steps themselves, and, as our research shows, planning steps have much less value. The history of the Bitter Le—
— you know what? I don’t really need to explain the Bitter Lesson, I asked Claude to do it in a music video. With one prompt, Fable wrote the lyrics and submitted it to Suno; Opus 5.5 did everything else using code alone without any image generation (How did Opus 5.5 pull this off? The Bitter Lesson tells you!). I gave no feedback at all.
by Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing | Read more:
Image: AI and the author
Friday, October 9, 2026
Why Everybody Loves Glen Campbell
[ed. Nice tribute.]
But there was a catch—they weren’t his records. Campbell was just a member of the band, and the public didn’t know his name. Even so, what amazing company this young man kept: He now played guitar for Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Phil Spector, Nat King Cole, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr., the Everly Brothers, Doris Day, and dozens of other superstars.
He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I'd heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.
Campbell was that good.
There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.
He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.
But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked. [...]
Was there anything left to try? Yes, there was.
Around this same time, Glen Campbell rebranded himself as a surf musician, and got a choice gig with the Beach Boys. That’s quite a feat for a kid from a landlocked state. For a time, he actually replaced Brian Wilson as lead singer with the band. You might think this would turn him into a superstar, but fans wanted Brian back, and had no interest in celebrating his successor.
He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.
But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked. [...]
Was there anything left to try? Yes, there was.
Around this same time, Glen Campbell rebranded himself as a surf musician, and got a choice gig with the Beach Boys. That’s quite a feat for a kid from a landlocked state. For a time, he actually replaced Brian Wilson as lead singer with the band. You might think this would turn him into a superstar, but fans wanted Brian back, and had no interest in celebrating his successor.
At this point, I would have given up and gone back to Arkansas. Campbell had made enough cash from those Beach Boys gigs to lease a Gold Cadillac, and could have returned home in grand style. But he was determined to try his luck one more time, and Capitol Records—then flush with cash, due to all those Beatles hits—still had money to burn.
That’s when they finally struck gold, or a gold record, to be more precise. Gentle on My Mind, released in August 1967, not only got Campbell on the charts but earned him two Grammy awards. He was now on a rapid trajectory to stardom, and would never look back.
During the next 34 months, Campbell released twelve more albums. This staggering output not only happened while he was concertizing and touring, but Campbell was now also acting in Hollywood movies. Adding to the craziness, he launched his CBS television show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1969. [...]
That’s when they finally struck gold, or a gold record, to be more precise. Gentle on My Mind, released in August 1967, not only got Campbell on the charts but earned him two Grammy awards. He was now on a rapid trajectory to stardom, and would never look back.
During the next 34 months, Campbell released twelve more albums. This staggering output not only happened while he was concertizing and touring, but Campbell was now also acting in Hollywood movies. Adding to the craziness, he launched his CBS television show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour in 1969. [...]
Glen Campbell now saw his name in lights—as they say in show business. That was quite a change for someone who had grown up without any lights, or even electricity, in the family home. That was back in Billstown, a city so small that it didn’t show up on road maps.
His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”
In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:
He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.
But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.
In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.
The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.”
His father was a sharecropper, and the family only ate what they grew or hunted—and sometime there wasn’t enough for the large Campbell family (which produced twelve children). There were days when Glen stayed inside his classroom during school recess, because it was cold and he didn’t own a coat. “We didn’t just endure poverty,” Campbell recalled, “we wore it.”
In his autobiography, Campbell tells of the time his father gave up all hope, and decided to commit suicide. The story is half a tragedy, and half a miracle:
Dad couldn’t bear the pressure of not being able to provide the bare necessities for his large family any longer. So he took a shotgun and headed into the woods. He loaded the weapon and was about to put the barrel in his mouth when he was distracted by a squirrel running down a tree branch. He shot and killed it. Almost instantly another came down, and another. My dad was crying and shooting his gun, and the family had eight squirrels for supper….Dad lived an additional forty years.The father was a survivor, but his son was destined for greater things and, like Johnny B. Goode, that little country boy could play the guitar. He got his first instrument at age four—a three-quarter size Sears Roebuck model that cost five dollars—and was gigging and going on the road while still a child. He joined his uncle’s band and they made the move to Albuquerque when Campbell was seventeen. Six years later he came to Los Angeles. And six years after that, Glen Campbell was a superstar.
He enjoyed every bit of it. Campbell built the first million-dollar house in Laurel Canyon—a 16,500 square-foot home on seven acres. He later bragged that he had “stayed in smaller three-story hotels.” But he could afford it—he was now making $50,000 or more in a single night.
But the enjoyment soon turned sour. “There were times when I was too drunk to recall what I did or with whom I did it,” he later admitted. He sometimes got bad write-ups in the press for the times he faltered on-stage.
In his autobiography, Campbell admits his failings, but can’t resist pointing out that the same journalists who criticized him were also drinking and using drugs, although nobody called them out. But the reality was that Campbell was under the bright lights, front and center, night after night—undergoing a kind of scrutiny no music critic ever faces.
The pressure was intense. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t have a career,” he later mused. “My career had me.”
by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker | Read more:
Image: uncredited; publicity photo
Wednesday, October 7, 2026
Tuesday, October 6, 2026
A Place Among the Fiddlers
I got off Interstate 81 to give my soul a break. The back roads of southwest Virginia wind, crest, and plunge through lush valleys of oak, poplar, birch, and maple trees. It’s easy to lose track of time and distance there. People drive slower. Cows graze in pastures. And there are no placards festooned with Motel 6 and Starbucks logos, flattening the American landscape into a homogeneous blur. Any signs you might see are low to the ground and handmade, protesting a data center, for instance, or thanking Jesus.
I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.
The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.
There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.
One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. [...]
My first jam came on Day 0, after the rain abated and I’d set up camp. The Old Fiddler’s Convention wouldn’t officially start until Monday night, with the astoundingly good kids’ competitions—the reigning bluegrass fiddle champion herself, Hollace Oakes, was 14 when she won the adult contest last year—but everyone in Felts Park was eager to pick.
[ed. I used to play in song circles at parties in Alaska. They're fun. If you're not quite up to par (skills wise) just play a little softer and go with the flow. The groove will come.]
I’d gone to this rural pocket of the country for the 90th annual Old Fiddler’s Convention in Galax, an independent city of just under 7,000 near the North Carolina border whose population, for six days in early August, balloons to around four times that. They arrive in RVs and Casitas, camper vans and cars to stake out 20-by-35-foot plots in Felts Park, a 28-acre fairground in the heart of Galax, transforming it into a massive, muddy parking lot sprinkled with portable toilets and a cluster of food trucks, offering loaded potatoes, funnel cake, and blooming onions.
The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.
There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.
One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited. [...]
Tara wanted to introduce me to Bill and Nancy Sluys, a couple in their early 70s who’ve been going to Galax every summer for some 50 years. We walked to their site, where Bill, a towering figure with a steady voice and a long, white, braided ponytail, emerged from their Airstream to invite anyone who might “wish to partake” to join Nancy and a few others inside. I told Bill I’d thought of bringing edibles to Galax, but the convention website said state laws concerning drugs and alcohol are “strictly enforced,” and Google’s AI bot, Gemini, warned that law enforcement would be crawling Felts Park with K-9 units, even though recreational cannabis is legal in Virginia for adults over 21.
Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be.
A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun. [...]
An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.
Bill laughed and said that hasn’t been true in more than 40 years, though it used to be, on account of a music festival that happened once, half a century ago, about 15 miles up the road. Stompin 76 featured Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, and other big names from the time. The festival attracted a huge crowd, including a motorcycle gang that allegedly wanted to keep the party going after the festival wrapped, so they rolled into Galax on their hogs, stocked with methamphetamine, moonshine, and guns. Mayhem ensued. The authorities cracked down after that, ostensibly to maintain law and order in fiddleland. By the mid-’80s, they realized that the Old Fiddler’s Convention really was a family affair and let the fiddlers be.
A group of six or seven people had gathered outside the Airstream by this point, all brandishing instruments. Bill, who grew up on Long Island, assumed his position behind an aluminum upright bass from the 1930s, while Nancy, a fiddler and banjo player roughly half Bill’s height who grew up in Connecticut, emerged from the Airstream with her fiddle. She sat down on a folding chair, called “Soldier’s Joy” in the key of D, and kicked it off at breakneck speed. This was an old-time jam, and “soldier’s joy” was a Civil War-era euphemism for morphine. Galax had begun. [...]
An old-time jam goes something like this: Anywhere from two to umpteen musicians gather in a circle, knee-to-knee, and someone—usually the fiddler—calls a tune. Before you know it, you’re carried away by a cyclone of fiddles, mandolins, banjos, and guitars, all locked into a swirling rhythm that can, when it’s good, take you to church.
by David Alm, Longreads | Read more:
Images:Terry Eiler; David Alm
Sunday, October 4, 2026
Friday, October 2, 2026
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
The Creative Class is Being Decimated. Why?
America is Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs in Media, Film & the Arts. How Much is AI to Blame?
America has lost more than 200k jobs in “creative” industries over the last four years, with roughly 50k lost within the last year alone. That makes for one of the worst stretches for media employment in modern US history, with similar job loss intensity and duration occurring only during the major economic recessions of 2001 and 2008. Yet there’s no generalized recession today—instead, this period of job loss coincides with the rise of AI systems that can compose wholesale novels, photorealistic images, soundalike music, and practically every other form of digital art, en masse and at extremely low costs. Is this the fall of the Creative Class?
Proving the exact amount of AI-driven job loss in the arts is extremely difficult. Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights. The effects of AI are also hard to disentangle from other factors currently affecting arts businesses, like consolidation in Hollywood, offshoring of content production, or the continued displacement of traditional media providers in favor of social media creators. Yet perhaps the clearest evidence of AI’s influence is just that all subsectors of the digital arts industry are losing jobs, while in-person entertainment is still growing at a healthy pace.
Some of those digital job losses are just a continuation of prior trends, like in the publishing industry where technological change has been continually grinding away newspaper and magazine jobs for decades. Yet for sectors like live broadcasting, streaming, or graphic design, recent experience is an unusual downturn compared to the tranquility of years prior. Then there’s the worst-hit sector, movie & sound recording, which has been bleeding jobs at a nearly unprecedented pace over the last three years.
Hollywood has never seen a stretch as bad as the last four years, with the movie & TV industry losing more than 100k jobs, nearly one-third of the sector’s total. At the depths touched this summer, total employment was lower than at any point since the 2008 recession and approaching the lowest point in 30 years. The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows.
Overall, nearly half the media job losses of the last four years have been concentrated in the movie & sound recording sector that includes Hollywood. Written publishing has been the next-largest source of job loss, with employment down by more than 70k over the same time frame. Yet the job losses have by no means been contained to any particular part of media; instead they’ve hit nearly every subsector at some point. Nor do they show any sign of abating, with losses consistently hovering at around 50k per year and even accelerating in recent months. Will further AI development continue displacing workers in creative industries?
Can the Arts Business Model Survive?
To understand what could happen to the business of art amidst the rise of AI, it’s important to understand what did happen to it during the first digital transition, the rise of the internet.
It was the turn of the millennium, and Metallica had a problem. Demos of their upcoming, unreleased tracks were bouncing around radio and the internet, originally leaked onto a new internet file-sharing website called Napster. There they found thousands of files shared amongst hundreds of thousands of users, many of which were direct rips of albums that sold for $15 being offered for free. The most anticipated albums were often leaked online even before they were on store shelves. Metallica sued Napster for copyright infringement, and they were soon joined by separate suits from other prominent artists and eventually the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Much of the general public was understandably unsympathetic to Metallica, perceived as a bunch of already-successful millionaires trying to bilk even more money from listeners, and were even less sympathetic towards the RIAA, perceived as scurrilous middlemen who take from artists and fans alike. But the two of them easily won their lawsuit, forcing Napster into bankruptcy. Yet Metallica may have been right on the law but were on the wrong side of technology; the RIAA had won the battle but was losing the war.
The modern internet made file-sharing extremely easy, and no matter how much whac-a-mole companies played, they could not possibly catch every illegal upload. The perennial threat of piracy undermined their copyright and limited their ability to charge for music. Eventually, the value of individual songs fell to the point that companies like Spotify and Apple Music could swoop in to acquire massive catalogues, consolidate them, and charge a comparatively trivial fee for access. For what a single Metallica album would have cost in 2000, you can now get a month’s worth of unlimited access to nearly all human-made music.
The music industry has never returned to the heyday paydays of the peak CD era—even without adjusting for inflation, streaming revenue pales in comparison to ‘90s physical media sales. This was a massive boon to consumers, but it was also a squeeze on musicians that forced them to fundamentally change their business model over time. Instead of just selling records to earn money directly, music itself increasingly became a loss-leading advertisement for the live concerts (and merch) that provided a growing share of artists’ income. Tours got longer, venues got bigger, ticket prices skyrocketed, and musicians frequently took on roles closer to public influencers than isolated artistes. Were it not for rising concert sales, the business model of music would have completely collapsed, and the income going to musicians would have cratered.
Of course, there were still significant downsides to the transition into the streaming era. Bands (especially smaller ones) complain about the unending pressure to always be on tour. Musicians whose content was suited to home listening lost out to those more suited to giant festivals. Even accounting for concert revenues, musicians made less money than before. Yet musicians fared better than many areas of entertainment subsectors because there was a live component to fall back on—for many media industries, the digital era left no such comfort. [Chart]
Over time, the business of video has moved in the opposite direction of music—out of the theatre and into the home. Hollywood formerly made most of its money enticing customers to visit sold-out movie theatres, but these were gradually supplanted by broadcast TV, cable, and physical media. Yet because each successful technological leap increased total video watch time, the industry was still able to thrive amidst technological upheaval. That is, until the modern streaming era.
Today, the plethora of video options and the rise of social media have sent video producers into a vicious competition for limited attention. Even before adjusting for inflation, movie ticket sales ended last year down 25% from their 2019 peak, cable revenue is down 18% from its peak, and streaming revenue has not been able to compensate for the drop. The mountain of free user-generated content on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or social media was already presenting harsh competition for traditional video companies in the years before ChatGPT’s launch, and now streaming services are also competing with a flood of AI-generated content. The business model of video media is fundamentally getting squeezed, and unlike in the music industry, there’s basically no equivalent to live concerts that Hollywood can be used to ease the pain.
The actual worst-case scenario for creative workers amidst the AI revolution is something similar to what happened to the publishing industry after the advent of the internet—that is, near-total collapse of their fundamental business model. Newspapers used to employ roughly half a million people in the US, more than the entire oil industry, and now their payrolls are down nearly 85% and still dropping. Magazine publishers likewise have let 66% of their staff go since the 90s, while book publishers have lost 40%.
The routine informational updates that previously formed newspapers’ bread-and-butter were all de-bundled—box scores moved to sports websites, stock movements went to financial websites, forecasts went to weather websites—each loss compounding on itself to undermine consumers’ need to buy the paper. Search engines became the first place people looked to for information, and newspapers’ advertising revenue rapidly started flowing to companies like Google instead. The collective of social media users became faster at breaking any news story than a daily paper could ever hope to be. When papers eventually did start aggressively paywalling content, the internet made it trivially easy for people to just copy the articles’ content and share it beyond the paywall. The entire business model had collapsed, to the point that now only a select few major newspapers can even survive.
That scale of copyright dilution and forced unbundling is the worst-case scenario for media businesses in the age of AI. It’s possible arts jobs could survive via consumers’ deep-seated aversion to explicitly AI-generated content, but AI is increasingly being used throughout media in ways invisible to the average end consumer. Roughly 32% of workers in the overall arts, entertainment, and recreation sector use Generative AI to some extent, which is less than the 62% average across all industries, but still enough that virtually every major media project could have some AI within its workflow.
Indeed, AI is likely seeping into media production processes in ways large companies themselves would struggle to prevent even when they desire to—how can a TV studio be sure nobody in their writers’ room is consulting ChatGPT for jokes or any storyboard artist is generating concept art? And even if professional TV and movie studios do effectively hold out against temptation and prevent internal AI use, how long can they compete with the large mass of wannabe independent creators with much fewer scruples? Plenty of media businesses tried to hold out against the algorithmic content waves of the 2010s and were buried as a result.
by Joseph Politano, Apricitas Economics | Read more:
Proving the exact amount of AI-driven job loss in the arts is extremely difficult. Media firms are decidedly coy about their AI use, both to protect against public backlash and, more financially important, to preserve the legal basis for their copyrights. The effects of AI are also hard to disentangle from other factors currently affecting arts businesses, like consolidation in Hollywood, offshoring of content production, or the continued displacement of traditional media providers in favor of social media creators. Yet perhaps the clearest evidence of AI’s influence is just that all subsectors of the digital arts industry are losing jobs, while in-person entertainment is still growing at a healthy pace.
Some of those digital job losses are just a continuation of prior trends, like in the publishing industry where technological change has been continually grinding away newspaper and magazine jobs for decades. Yet for sectors like live broadcasting, streaming, or graphic design, recent experience is an unusual downturn compared to the tranquility of years prior. Then there’s the worst-hit sector, movie & sound recording, which has been bleeding jobs at a nearly unprecedented pace over the last three years.
Hollywood has never seen a stretch as bad as the last four years, with the movie & TV industry losing more than 100k jobs, nearly one-third of the sector’s total. At the depths touched this summer, total employment was lower than at any point since the 2008 recession and approaching the lowest point in 30 years. The streaming era has proven an extremely difficult transition, with traditional films and TV shows losing watch time to user-generated and increasingly AI-assisted or AI-generated content flows.
Overall, nearly half the media job losses of the last four years have been concentrated in the movie & sound recording sector that includes Hollywood. Written publishing has been the next-largest source of job loss, with employment down by more than 70k over the same time frame. Yet the job losses have by no means been contained to any particular part of media; instead they’ve hit nearly every subsector at some point. Nor do they show any sign of abating, with losses consistently hovering at around 50k per year and even accelerating in recent months. Will further AI development continue displacing workers in creative industries?
Can the Arts Business Model Survive?
To understand what could happen to the business of art amidst the rise of AI, it’s important to understand what did happen to it during the first digital transition, the rise of the internet.
It was the turn of the millennium, and Metallica had a problem. Demos of their upcoming, unreleased tracks were bouncing around radio and the internet, originally leaked onto a new internet file-sharing website called Napster. There they found thousands of files shared amongst hundreds of thousands of users, many of which were direct rips of albums that sold for $15 being offered for free. The most anticipated albums were often leaked online even before they were on store shelves. Metallica sued Napster for copyright infringement, and they were soon joined by separate suits from other prominent artists and eventually the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Much of the general public was understandably unsympathetic to Metallica, perceived as a bunch of already-successful millionaires trying to bilk even more money from listeners, and were even less sympathetic towards the RIAA, perceived as scurrilous middlemen who take from artists and fans alike. But the two of them easily won their lawsuit, forcing Napster into bankruptcy. Yet Metallica may have been right on the law but were on the wrong side of technology; the RIAA had won the battle but was losing the war.
The modern internet made file-sharing extremely easy, and no matter how much whac-a-mole companies played, they could not possibly catch every illegal upload. The perennial threat of piracy undermined their copyright and limited their ability to charge for music. Eventually, the value of individual songs fell to the point that companies like Spotify and Apple Music could swoop in to acquire massive catalogues, consolidate them, and charge a comparatively trivial fee for access. For what a single Metallica album would have cost in 2000, you can now get a month’s worth of unlimited access to nearly all human-made music.
The music industry has never returned to the heyday paydays of the peak CD era—even without adjusting for inflation, streaming revenue pales in comparison to ‘90s physical media sales. This was a massive boon to consumers, but it was also a squeeze on musicians that forced them to fundamentally change their business model over time. Instead of just selling records to earn money directly, music itself increasingly became a loss-leading advertisement for the live concerts (and merch) that provided a growing share of artists’ income. Tours got longer, venues got bigger, ticket prices skyrocketed, and musicians frequently took on roles closer to public influencers than isolated artistes. Were it not for rising concert sales, the business model of music would have completely collapsed, and the income going to musicians would have cratered.
Of course, there were still significant downsides to the transition into the streaming era. Bands (especially smaller ones) complain about the unending pressure to always be on tour. Musicians whose content was suited to home listening lost out to those more suited to giant festivals. Even accounting for concert revenues, musicians made less money than before. Yet musicians fared better than many areas of entertainment subsectors because there was a live component to fall back on—for many media industries, the digital era left no such comfort. [Chart]
Over time, the business of video has moved in the opposite direction of music—out of the theatre and into the home. Hollywood formerly made most of its money enticing customers to visit sold-out movie theatres, but these were gradually supplanted by broadcast TV, cable, and physical media. Yet because each successful technological leap increased total video watch time, the industry was still able to thrive amidst technological upheaval. That is, until the modern streaming era.
Today, the plethora of video options and the rise of social media have sent video producers into a vicious competition for limited attention. Even before adjusting for inflation, movie ticket sales ended last year down 25% from their 2019 peak, cable revenue is down 18% from its peak, and streaming revenue has not been able to compensate for the drop. The mountain of free user-generated content on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, or social media was already presenting harsh competition for traditional video companies in the years before ChatGPT’s launch, and now streaming services are also competing with a flood of AI-generated content. The business model of video media is fundamentally getting squeezed, and unlike in the music industry, there’s basically no equivalent to live concerts that Hollywood can be used to ease the pain.
The actual worst-case scenario for creative workers amidst the AI revolution is something similar to what happened to the publishing industry after the advent of the internet—that is, near-total collapse of their fundamental business model. Newspapers used to employ roughly half a million people in the US, more than the entire oil industry, and now their payrolls are down nearly 85% and still dropping. Magazine publishers likewise have let 66% of their staff go since the 90s, while book publishers have lost 40%.
The routine informational updates that previously formed newspapers’ bread-and-butter were all de-bundled—box scores moved to sports websites, stock movements went to financial websites, forecasts went to weather websites—each loss compounding on itself to undermine consumers’ need to buy the paper. Search engines became the first place people looked to for information, and newspapers’ advertising revenue rapidly started flowing to companies like Google instead. The collective of social media users became faster at breaking any news story than a daily paper could ever hope to be. When papers eventually did start aggressively paywalling content, the internet made it trivially easy for people to just copy the articles’ content and share it beyond the paywall. The entire business model had collapsed, to the point that now only a select few major newspapers can even survive.
That scale of copyright dilution and forced unbundling is the worst-case scenario for media businesses in the age of AI. It’s possible arts jobs could survive via consumers’ deep-seated aversion to explicitly AI-generated content, but AI is increasingly being used throughout media in ways invisible to the average end consumer. Roughly 32% of workers in the overall arts, entertainment, and recreation sector use Generative AI to some extent, which is less than the 62% average across all industries, but still enough that virtually every major media project could have some AI within its workflow.
Indeed, AI is likely seeping into media production processes in ways large companies themselves would struggle to prevent even when they desire to—how can a TV studio be sure nobody in their writers’ room is consulting ChatGPT for jokes or any storyboard artist is generating concept art? And even if professional TV and movie studios do effectively hold out against temptation and prevent internal AI use, how long can they compete with the large mass of wannabe independent creators with much fewer scruples? Plenty of media businesses tried to hold out against the algorithmic content waves of the 2010s and were buried as a result.
by Joseph Politano, Apricitas Economics | Read more:
Images: Joseph Politano
Sunday, September 27, 2026
Valentina Lisitsa
Valentina Lisitsa, Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata III Presto Agitato
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[ed. Bravo! Can't imagine what it must feel like to see this sheet music for the first time.]
Monday, September 21, 2026
Heavy Meta
Bands that have appeared on the lineup at Hellfest, an annual heavy-metal-focused music festival in Clisson, France, since 2023.
I Am Morbid
Insanity Alert
Blood Red Throne
Blood Fire Death
Napalm Death
Immolation
Suffocation
Sublime Cadaveric Decomposition
Cattle Decapitation
Cancer Bats
Castle Rat
Drug Church
Stoned Jesus
Rotting Christ
Judas Priest
Puscifer
Pestifer
Wormrat
Wormsand
Windhand
Clawfinger
Bloodywood
Septicflesh
Graveyard
Crows
Crowbar
Carcass
Ashen
Darken
Scowl
Loathe
Rancid
I Am Morbid
Insanity Alert
Blood Red Throne
Blood Fire Death
Napalm Death
Immolation
Suffocation
Sublime Cadaveric Decomposition
Cattle Decapitation
Cancer Bats
Castle Rat
Drug Church
Stoned Jesus
Rotting Christ
Judas Priest
Puscifer
Pestifer
Wormrat
Wormsand
Windhand
Clawfinger
Bloodywood
Septicflesh
Graveyard
Crows
Crowbar
Carcass
Ashen
Darken
Scowl
Loathe
Rancid
by Harpers | Read more:
[ed. What? No "Fluffy Bunny"? Paywalled after this but maybe you can figure a work-around.]
Tuesday, September 15, 2026
James Taylor
[ed. Great barn concert. Full playlist here. History of the Frozen Man here (do watch untill the end).]
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[ed. Everybody had the hots for Carly back then (and Linda Rondstadt). She actually came from a very wealthy family; you've heard of the publishing company Simon and Schuster? When she was young she thought her dad made shoes for a living (Shoe-ster). Hahaha...]
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