Research
"Forward flow": A new measure to quantify free thought and predict creativity
Around the web
“…creative ideas are more likely to emerge from combinations of concepts that are further apart in the mind’s conceptual network. The greater the distance between two ideas, the more original and surprising their combination tends to be.” - Keith Sawyer
👉 80+ Music Startups: “Fans today expect a level of creative participation, especially generations of music fans who have grown up regularly creating and uploading content of their own. Co-creation and remix apps root the experience in something familiar and more accessible to more types of fans.”
“We’re witnessing a seismic flip: IP is no longer a fortress. It’s becoming shared infrastructure. Fandoms have gone from subcultures to just… culture.
Fans aren’t your audience anymore. They’re your collaborators. Your quality control. Your distribution. Your future.” - Zoe Scaman
6 ways live music could help combat the loneliness epidemic
In the UK, a proposal for a £1 levy on all tickets to major stadium and arena concerts that would then be funnelled back to small venues around the country. Meanwhile, the government’s 2025 Spending Review offered nothing for live music at the grassroots.
Related: Who is behind the great rock’n’roll ripoff?
The DJ circuit is more competitive than ever
Contemporary electronic music producers are looking to the past to help unlock the present
RIP: Brian Wilson and Sly Stone
OK 🤷 Timbaland is launching a company to generate artificial pop artists creating a new genre called artificial pop: “I’m not just producing tracks anymore, I’m producing systems, stories, and stars from scratch.”
“Nothing galvanises communities like music” - Maria Egan, Global Head of Music at Riot Games
Listening and watching
Things we’re interested in
"Microphones reveal layers of intricacy, intelligence and beauty. Sound is a way into worlds we could never imagine exist." - Ellie Williams
Research: CHORDONOMICON: A Dataset of 666,000 Songs and their Chord Progressions
Meshuggah: 30 tracks of guitars!
Sound and music in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - an audio director’s perspective
In the UK, the government’s AI copyright plan has been defeated for a fourth time
Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly scarping the contents of the site without consent. Reddit’s court filing suggests Anthropic has “two faces” and “despite what its marketing material says” the company has little concern for the rules. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, insists Anthropic “measures and mitigates its risks.” [Archive link] Amodei’s economic prophecy (noted last week) where we have fast economic growth and mass unemployment is certainly a puzzler. If we’re all unemployed, who is going to buy the stuff?
Carole Cadwalladr speaks to Jon Stewart on AI: “it’s just theft… they are selling absolute BS… it is not inevitable, it is based on illegal behaviour.”
Good data: The generative AI con
Hollywood and generative AI: “After sitting in meetings between studios and other AI companies, the VFX artist had come to a conclusion: Sometimes they were selling possible futures, not finished tools — promises that, in a few months or years, the technology would be able to generate anything from sophisticated action sequences to entire performances. Some of the meetings he’d attended lately had disturbed him. “I’ve listened to execs say, ‘So we can load a season of scripts into AI and it can churn out a show in a day?’ And I’m just like, Is that what you want? Meanwhile, all the people under them, who are also invited to listen, walk out of those meetings wanting to take a shower.”" [Archive Link]
Google wants Hollywood to make AI less doomsday [Archive Link]
I’m done thinking about genAI (for now): “I find the vast majority of the aesthetic properties of genAI to be intensely unpleasant… ”
Would an AI lie to you? A really impressive project pitting leading AI models against each other in a game of Diplomacy. Result: The models that did the best learned to lie, deceive, and betray their fellow players. Video review of the project
“We ravage every quiet moment with noise—podcasts, social media, the nonstop churn of news—anything to avoid stillness. Silence has become our nemesis, so we desecrate it with a constant stream of distraction. We scroll and consume until our minds are overloaded and our spirit feels mutilated, hollowed out by the very content meant to keep us entertained.” - Poetic Outlaws
“When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.” - Craig Mod
“We live in an age of lexical abundance. More words, more access, more content than at any time in human history. And yet something essential is slipping away… we are cultivating habits of skimming, scanning, and superficial intake. Modes better suited to consuming than to understanding. This is not merely a shift in preference; it is a rewiring of cognition.” - Carl Hendrick
“It’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.” - William Gibson
Question
What if the artistic impulse is wisdom from the future?
Closing notes
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Until next week…