Colin Meloy asked ChatGPT to write chords and lyrics for a new song from his band, The Decemberists. The result is a fairly lifeless, cliche-ridden composition that reads like a parody... and Meloy went ahead and recorded it. You can listen over at his Substack. His takeaway from the experience: “[ChatGPT] has data, it has information, but it has no intuition.”
[colinmeloy.substack.com]
The show, which joined our friends at the Vox Media Podcast Network last year, looks inside the process of how businesses get funding, speaking with entrepreneurs and investors to see how it’s really done. New episodes arrive every Wednesday.
Last year, TikTok was the event’s main sponsor, highlighting a major shift in the creator video space. This year... YouTube is back. (And surely, it’ll want to remind creators to use YouTube Shorts.)
Of course, buying a sponsorship ≠ maintaining cultural dominance. Shorts has its work cut out. But showing up to VidCon still means something — it tells creators that YouTube cares.
PetaPixel reports that Kodak prices could rise up to 40 percent in the near future. This is after years of spiking costs and dwindling supply. In a chart last year, Fstoppers showed how prices have ballooned, with a roll of Kodak Gold jumping from around $4 to over $10.
As someone who just wants to shoot the cheap stuff, even the cheap stuff is getting a little too rich for me.
The company has announced its next “Stream On” event, where it plans to share updates on “creator tools, features, and programming.” The last event, in 2021, was used to lay out Spotify’s business vision in podcasting, music, and other arenas.
As my colleague Chris Welch reminded me, “This is where they announced HiFi!” Here’s hoping it actually arrives this time.
You might have noticed a bunch of new monitor announcements from Samsung this morning. Well, get ready, because there’s a lot more where that came from. CES kicks off Wednesday, and that means gadget announcements are about to come flying fast as soon as tomorrow.
Want to stay up to date? You can follow along here.
Here’s Jeremy Zimmer, head of the United Talent Agency, in an interview with Financial Times:
“A show that does really well will get more advertisers and more revenue will flow to Netflix,” he added. “Therefore, our clients who created that show should be compensated for that additional revenue.”
I’d expect Netflix to fight this request in a serious way — the whole point of this ads tier was to help it make more money, after all. But Zimmer has a point: Netflix has been cutting deals under different terms; now that those terms look more like traditional TV, it’s reasonable that creators would ask for something different, too.
