N+N 173
Enjoy it!
Research
Immediate Rewards Predict Adherence to Long-Term Goals
Around the web
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Mary Oliver
People Hear Music Very Differently. Some Can’t Enjoy It At All: “To say that musical tastes vary widely is quite an understatement.”
…don’t feel guilty if you are still drawn to songs of the past. This is an urge that’s been with humans since the dawn of recordings. Nevertheless, you should still check out some new stuff too. You might miss out on your next favorite song.
If you asked a pre-teen today to sit through a 45-minute concept album, they’d look at you like you were asking them to read the dictionary in a single sitting. It’s not even a lack of curiosity; it’s more of a neurological heist. Our youth are the new high-velocity junkies, twitching for a micro-hit of instant gratification because the alternative is a silence they’ve never been taught to inhabit.
We’ve traded the story for the stimulus.
It’s this cumulative exhaustion with the digital world, the burnout from online overstimulation and the depressing proliferation of AI that has led to the explosion of interest in going analogue
Most of us aren’t actually going analog… we’re performing analog for our online audience - and it’s not entirely our fault. The same platforms that burned us out are now selling us the cure. I hate to say it, but you can’t escape overconsumption by buying an ‘analogue starter pack’ or packing your ‘analogue bag’.
Since 2010, almost 800 libraries have closed across the UK. Arts Council England data shows that since 2016 alone, one in twenty libraries has shut its doors, with deprived areas four times more likely to lose access altogether. Join your local library. Support independent bookstores instead of defaulting to Amazon. Utilise second-hand shops and charity stores to source physical media, places where culture still circulates without demanding spectacle, status, or proof of taste. Make zines at home with your friends from stacks of old magazines you might already have as a form of self-care. Physical media isn’t about performing for a trend, it’s a chance to finally log off.
In the UK, a House of Commons committee special report, Fan-led review of live and electronic music: “Part of the appeal of live and electronic music is the collective experience. Whether it’s attending events with friends, family, or by themselves, fans describe gigs, concerts and club nights as shared moments that stay with them. Many find a sense of community, forming friendships that last for years. Time and again, fans told us that live and electronic music helps address loneliness, with venues of all sizes offering spaces in which fans feel they belong, can participate, and express themselves freely. This collective experience is a key driver in cultural citizenship, where fans can develop a sense of pride and place-based identity, allowing them to feel at home and connected to where they live. These shared, in-person spaces are also part of the UK’s wider social infrastructure at a time when participation in many other community activities is in decline.” - Lord Brennan
Wave 1 - immediate price shock to oil, energy and agriculture.
Wave 2 - rising cost of touring this summer (fuel, airline prices).
Wave 3 - rising venue costs (energy, food, artist guarantees, lower fan spending).
Wave 4 - rising ticket prices and more consolidation.
Spain’s live-music industry grew 11.2% to €807.2m last year
France’s recorded music revenues hit $1.21 billion in 2025, up 3.9% YoY
In the US, and at long last, a jury in New York City ruled on state and Federal charges that Live Nation/Ticketmaster is an illegal monopolist. What happens next? Live Nation: “The jury’s verdict is not the last word on this matter.”
Chicago Music Fan Uploading Collection of More Than 10,000 Live Recordings to Internet Archive. Here’s the archive
Zane Lowe interviews James Blake about his new album
[untitled] - “A sacred place for your work-in-progress music”
Feels - “send short-form music snippets to express emotions, think of it like a gif with music”
Hostile Volume: set the volume to exactly 25% and hold it there for 3 seconds
Wired headphone sales are exploding. What’s with the Bluetooth backlash?
In the UK, an AI-generated artist named Eddie Dalton reached number two on the (niche) Official Singles Sales Chart (sales only), not the Official Singles Chart (sales and streaming). Streaming is by far the more significant in terms of music consumption.
Suno launches MILO-1080 (“Model-Integrated Loop Orchestrator”), a browser-based 16 track, step sequencer, populated with samples generated by Suno’s AI models and the user’s Suno library
Listening and watching
Things we’re interested in
Ideas mostly come from the slow, quiet accumulation of seemingly banal and obvious habits. It’s just doing the right things to make sure your mind and your life are brimming with hearty compost.
Russell Davies
I can genuinely work on music from 9 to 5, whether I’m inspired or not. Sometimes that means preparation and designing sounds, chopping up records, just listening to music and chopping samples. There's always something to do within the software. It doesn’t necessarily have to be making a song.
👉 Sound design is the most ignored art form in games
Several interesting interviews with the Battlefield 6 audio team discussing their audio strategy:
there's "a lot of demand" for high-quality game soundtracks, and players are "interested in boutique experiences"
"We go to great lengths to record real sounds, because it's easier to record reality than to try and replicate reality" - they accompanied the Swedish military on exercises, making reference recordings throughout
"The campaign has the most amount of music in it because it's thematic, it's where we're telling the stories of our characters… When we move into multiplayer, we have to scale the music back quite a bit to reinforce the most important moments… You want to be able to hear the enemy running up behind you, right?”
The importance of “small musical stingers” in key moments.
The Programming Era of Music: music will adapt in real time… [and] be programmable, which means:
clear ownership rights
machine-readable metadata
instant licensing
automated payments
Which means: Trust becomes a new critical value lever in music.
Most music is not built for this future.
Rights are fragmented.
Metadata is inconsistent.
Licensing is slow.
Videogames as Architectural Archives
Dolby Atmos gave me the opportunity to create a theatrical haunted house amusement park ride for you and your friends to experience together
Upcoming slasher film Slay Day puts audiences in control of who lives and dies. The film uses CtrlMovie technology to transform the presentation into an interactive event, with audiences voting in real time via their smartphones.
Stories matter! “The crisis these stories orbit is not simply external chaos, but the internal labour required to metabolise it, to remain informed and hold moral positions. Opting out, in this context, begins to look less like apathy and more like self-preservation. The partitioning of the mind, the chemical smoothing of emotion, the dissolution into a polite collective, each offers a way to reduce the psychic load. In this context its not that thought isn’t valuable, its just that the volume has become relentless.” - Lucinda Bounsall
For contrast, Happy Map
The status quo has an advantage over alternatives to the status quo in the sense that it is familiar, and it is certain. It’s the devil we know. Whereas alternative social arrangements, utopian social systems, et cetera, these things often raise more questions than they answer… Thinking about how to improve things is a luxury that we can only really have as a society when we’re feeling like things are pretty good… When there’s a lot of discord, when there’s a lot of uncertainty, when there’s a lot of insecurity or threat, it’s difficult for people to think about alternatives.
Worry has a habit of disguising itself as preparation. It feels like doing something useful, when often it’s just going over the same ground again and again. Preparation moves you forward; worry mostly walks you in circles. Sometimes the best preparation is the next small step.
Be gentle, because life is hard enough!
Question
Is AI music actually fooling people?
Closing notes
You are reaching the end of the newsletter. Thanks so much for reading!
I hope it’s not been too much of an intrusion and if you liked this issue of the newsletter, please share or recommend to a friend or colleague.
There may be an occasional typo. Woops! There isn’t much I can do once the email has sent, but I do try to correct and update the web version.
Until next week…
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