Microsoft is shutting down Skype in May and replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will be able to log in to the Microsoft Teams app and have their message history, group chats, and contacts all automatically available without having to create another account, or they can choose to export their data instead. Microsoft is also phasing out support for calling domestic or international numbers.
Smaller, purpose-driven communities are the future. The desire for smaller, more intimate communities is undeniable. People are abandoning massive platforms in favor of tight-knit groups where trust and shared values flourish and content is at the core. The future of community building is in going back to the basics. Brands and platforms that can foster these personal, human-scale interactions are going to be the winners.
Seems like a good idea; someone should try it. Maybe we could call these things … forums?
I enjoyed this story from Niléane over at MacStories about combining a new found love of vinyl with technology:
Allow me to spoil the ending of this story for you: in the end, unboxing this turntable escalated into a legitimately awesome tech upgrade to our living room. It’s now equipped with a docked 11“ iPad Pro that acts as a shared dashboard for controlling our HomeKit devices, performing everyday tasks like consulting the weather and setting up timers, and of course, broadcasting our vinyls to any HomePod mini or Bluetooth device in the apartment. This setup is amazing, and it works perfectly; however, getting there was a tedious process that drastically reinforced my long-standing frustrations with Apple’s self-imposed software limitations.
The app that powers it, Quanta, is one I’ll have to check out.
Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 is selling his Banksy:
Read More “Mark Hoppus Selling Banksy Painting”“We loved this painting since the moment we saw it,” said Hoppus, who bought the artwork with his wife, Skye Everly, in 2011. He said the painting – “unmistakably Banksy, but different” – has hung in the family’s homes in London and Los Angeles.
Hoppus said he would use the proceeds of the sale to buy work by upcoming artists. Some will go to the California Fire Foundation, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and Cedars Sinai Hematology Oncology Research.
LMNT:
The cast of characters in the Super Mario universe is vast. Insetting their badges on low-poly, color-coded Super Mario blocks makes hard drives look super fun. My only regret is not having 34 drives to use them all!
Oh, wow, these are great.
AP:
Outdoor apparel seller Liberated Brands, which has operated stores for surfer and skater-inspired labels like Quiksilver, Billabong and Volcom, filed for bankruptcy this week — and plans to shutter its locations across the U.S.
Liberated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware court on Sunday. In court documents, the California-based company said it would be winding down and liquidating its North American business after struggling with a series of macroeconomic shocks, supply chain troubles and falling profits due to “fast fashion” rivals.
And a generation of mall cruising pop-punk kids with bleached tips are hit right in the feels.
Spotify Technology reported its first ever full year of profitability, fueled by record user growth and austerity measures after years of heavy spending on growth initiatives such as podcasts.
Its fourth-quarter earnings are a sign that the company has been able to wean itself off years of intense investment and transform from a music-streaming service with tough margins to a full-service audio company.
Shares in the company rose 10%, and are up about 29% on the year.
“It only took 18 years for us to get here, but we’re here,” Chief Executive Daniel Ek said in an interview.
In fairness, no one really knows if Anderson would navigate our current social media environment with more or less grace than the current bozos.1 He left the game in 2009, when social media was still widely and unreservedly viewed as a force for social good. His scandals were of the comical and momentary sort; his politics — if he has them — have always seemed wan and vague.
But the fact that Anderson did retire from tech, and at the tender age of 38, testifies to a political philosophy and a set of values that feel almost radical today. People like Musk and Zuckerberg are hell-bent on amassing unprecedented, indecent stores of power and wealth. Anderson isn’t exactly curing cancer, by comparison … but he’s at least bucked the gospel of infinite extraction.
H/T: Nick Heer
Wonderful story over at The Washington Post:
Since September, the 24-year-old Polish Canadian woman has held a daily “listening party” on her Instagram and TikTok pages, @soundwavesoffwax, to explore decades and genres of music that her father, Richard, loved — punk, disco, pop, jazz, techno, new wave and ’60s psych rock. The project has exploded online, resonating with more than 460,000 followers combined so far — and she still has nearly 10,000 records to go.
“I hope to listen to them all,” Jula told me on a blistering winter day from her home in Alberta. “This has been such a beautiful experience for me sonically and emotionally.” Jula spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that only her first name be used out of concern for her safety. Her last name has not been publicized.
S.E. Smith, writing for The Verge:
This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be.
Liz Pelly, writing for Harper’s Magazine:
For more than a year, I devoted myself to answering these questions. I spoke with former employees, reviewed internal Spotify records and company Slack messages, and interviewed and corresponded with numerous musicians. What I uncovered was an elaborate internal program. Spotify, I discovered, not only has partnerships with a web of production companies, which, as one former employee put it, provide Spotify with “music we benefited from financially,” but also a team of employees working to seed these tracks on playlists across the platform. In doing so, they are effectively working to grow the percentage of total streams of music that is cheaper for the platform. The program’s name: Perfect Fit Content (PFC). The PFC program raises troubling prospects for working musicians. Some face the possibility of losing out on crucial income by having their tracks passed over for playlist placement or replaced in favor of PFC; others, who record PFC music themselves, must often give up control of certain royalty rights that, if a track becomes popular, could be highly lucrative. But it also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which—as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler—the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.
And:
Another former playlist editor told me that employees were concerned that the company wasn’t being transparent with users about the origin of this material. Still another former editor told me that he didn’t know where the music was coming from, though he was aware that adding it to his playlists was important for the company. “Maybe I should have asked more questions,” he told me, “but I was just kind of like, ‘Okay, how do I mix this music with artists that I like and not have them stand out?’ ”
Business Insider has published a report about how a bunch of very well off artists abused Covid grants. It’s behind a paywall, but there’s a good breakdown on Twitter/X:
Alice in Chains members paid themselves $3.4M from grant the same year they made $48M selling their catalog. Meanwhile, their longtime guitar tech Scott Dachroeden — the exact type of worker this grant was meant to help — had to rely on GoFundMe when he got cancer.
And a summary on Stereogum:
Lil Wayne got a taxpayer-funded $8.9 million grant, and he “spent more than $1.3 million from the grant on private-jet flights and over $460,000 on clothes and accessories, many of them from high-end brands like Gucci and Balenciaga.” Wayne also reportedly used $175,000 of that money on “a music festival promoting his marijuana brand, GKUA” and also used the grant for “flights and luxury hotel rooms for women whose connection to Lil Wayne’s touring operation was unclear, including a waitress at a Hooters-type restaurant and a porn actress.”
Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy talked with BroBible about trying to bring tennis to the masses:
For Wentz, tennis isn’t just a hobby—it’s personal. “I love tennis. I grew up with it. Tennis has enriched my life,” he told BroBible in an interview at the LA event. “But it also has this air of being impenetrable. It’s not just elitist; it feels like something only certain people are allowed to be part of. The goal of this club is to change that. To make tennis accessible, interesting, and even a little rock-and-roll. If you want to try it, you should try it.”
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross sat down with IndieWire to talk about scoring films and the state of the music industry:
“What we’re looking for [from film] is the collaborative experience with interesting people. We haven’t gotten that from the music world necessarily, for our own choice,” Reznor said. “You mentioned disillusionment with the music world? Yes. The culture of the music world sucks. That’s another conversation, but what technology has done to disrupt the music business in terms of not only how people listen to music but the value they place on it is defeating. I’m not saying that as an old man yelling at clouds, but as a music lover who grew up where music was the main thing. Music [now] feels largely relegated to something that happens in the background or while you’re doing something else. That’s a long, bitter story.”
Gita Jackson, writing on Aftermath:
Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.
I didn’t realize how important that was until I started my own website, and I didn’t even learn it from helping to run the damn thing. When I meet people at events, they tell me that they’ve set Aftermath as their homepage. People tell me they love interacting with other people in the comments. They tell me it’s one on a small list of websites, not social media, that they check in on every day. People, it seems, actually like going to a website, and they like that we made one.
This entire article speaks to me.
I’ve recently seen similar sentiments from others, like Louis Manta:
In the last 15 years, many people (myself included) were drawn to third-party solutions for presenting ourselves. For our résumés, LinkedIn. For portfolios, Behance and Dribbble. For blogging, Tumblr, Medium, and Substack. Instead of forums, Discord and Slack. But despite each of these advertising some amount of autonomy, in reality you have very little.
By centralizing not just your content, but yourself, on these sites, you rob yourself the opportunity to be more authentically you. In addition, a peer or competitor might appear next to you. It may not be great for you to have your competitor one click away from your own profile.
As I’ve pulled (way) back from social media over the past few years, I’ve found having a place for my writing, that I control, own, and can present how I want even more appealing.
