Month: May 2016

iTunes Gets an Update

Jason Tate

iTunes received an update today. They’ve refreshed the look a little bit and fixed some bugs. Overall it looks pretty good, but I’m already annoyed I can only view my “recently added” screen in the “album format.” I liked the list view.

OS X 10.11.5 is likely to be the last major point update to El Capitan. All versions of OS X since Apple switched to a yearly release model have gotten five major point updates followed by a couple years of security-only updates. Work on major new features and improvements at this point has presumably shifted to the next version of OS X, which Apple will demo publicly at WWDC next month

A Moon Shaped Pool of Money

Radiohead
Jason Tate

M.G. Siegler, writing on Medium, about the release of Radiohead’s new album and the idea of “up-selling” to your die-hard fans:

But the Radiohead release points to another way forward. One I’m far more excited about as a fan. Distribute broadly, upsell deeply.

That is, put your album out there for all (or most) to hear, but then pull in your truly die-hard fans to buy exclusive content at a premium. That is a natural extension of what Radiohead did in 2007 with In Rainbows. You know, the “pay-what-you-want” album. The clever call out to a soon-to-be-dying model was even more ingenious in hindsight. Now this reality is here.

How to Spot Fake Amazon Reviews

amazon
Jason Tate

Lauren Dragan, writing for The Wirecutter:

The compensated-review process is simple: Businesses paid to create dummy accounts purchase products from Amazon and write four- and five-star reviews. Buying the product makes it tougher for Amazon to police the reviews, because the reviews are in fact based on verified purchases. The dummy accounts buy and review all sorts of things, and some of the more savvy pay-for-review sites even have their faux reviewers pepper in a few negative reviews of products made and sold by brands that aren’t clients to create a sense of “authenticity.”