Could the Next Netflix or Spotify Be an Artists-Owned Cooperative?
And other YouTube videos I'm enjoying right now
I regularly share the best recent YouTube videos with premium subscribers. But today I’m removing the paywall, and making this available to everyone.
Enjoy!
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Could the next Netflix or Spotify be an artists-owned cooperative?
This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. Most of the arts and entertainment ecosystem is migrating to open platforms built on indie talent—that’s how YouTube, Substack, Bandcamp, and others are prospering.
In this new world, creative individuals have more leverage than they realize. Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler looks at how this shift could put traditional media companies and platforms at risk, and open the way for powerful artist collectives.
Young people are drinking less alcohol—but why?
The change here is huge—and I’ve seen it firsthand. Gen Z drinks 20% less than Baby Boomers or Millennials. Meanwhile Chris Williamson describes (in this video) a street music party in Austin where attendees wait in a 250-yard-long line to buy their beverage of choice—which is now coffee.
What a brave new world with such young people in it!
Tom Segura digs into the reasons for this new sobriety in his conversation with Williamson. And they cover the full range from optimistic to depressing. I have some thoughts on this matter that I may share in the future. In the meantime, I’m recommending this video on the subject.
Wes Anderson explains every Wes Anderson Film.
I’m disappointed to see Wes Anderson sitting in an entirely beige room—that just feels wrong.
But every other aspect of this video meets with my approval.
Here the ultra-stylized director sits down, under the auspices of Vanity Fair—but with no interviewer in sight—and spends an hour describing his various movies.
A look at the last artist lofts in New York.
Joshua Charow is working to preserve the last remaining New York artist lofts on film—so we will have at least some visual documentation of these inspiring habitats. He released this new video two days ago.
The loss of these creative spaces is tragic. Here’s another video he uploaded three weeks ago.
Harvard economics grad wins the Cliburn Piano Competition.
When I was at Stanford, I often joked that the best student musicians were rarely music majors—and I could share many stories to back that up. And I’ve heard similar rumors about Harvard.
But here’s more evidence. Harvard graduate Aristo Sham just won the coveted Van Cliburn International Piano Competition—maybe the biggest honor a young concert pianist can earn in the US. But he studied economics at Harvard.
And he also did a minor in French.
I need to be fair to Aristo, who (despite his last name) is no sham. He is much, much more than a Harvard economist. He also pursued a formal music education at the New England Conservatory of Music and Juilliard. But give him credit for digging into monetary theory and financial analysis in the Ivy League. I hope he gets a chance to apply those skills in managing his own rising career.
Today I want to focus on his impressive rendition of Rachmaninoff’s arrangement of Bach’s Suite from Partita No. 3 in E Major. He performed this during the semifinal round of the Cliburn competition, and it’s presented here with the score embedded in the video.
Artists really are walking away from major label contracts—and here’s why.
Sony Music is the largest music publisher in the world, and the second largest recording label. Musicians once dreamed of getting a deal with Sony, and Chandler Juliet got that chance.
A producer with the label was “blown away” by her songs, and promised a contract, connections, opportunities to license songs to Netflix, and a budget for a music video. Listen to her story and count the number of broken promises—and see how little the final offer resembled the initial pitch.
Is that really a violin?
I thought I’d seen every kind of musical instrument. But physicists at Loughborough University just built a violin thinner than a human hair.
In fact, it looks tiny compared to the hair.
They made it out of platinum. That’s an expensive metal—but not when it weighs less than a speck of dust.
Here’s a video on how it was done.
What did we lose when we abandoned hi-fi audio?
During my lifetime, the audio quality of music has collapsed. People now listen to music off phones and other tiny devices. The cheap sound system I owned in high school is superior to almost everything I encounter nowadays, and truly high-end audio experiences are hard to find.
But we’ve lost something more than just high fidelity, claims music producer Isaac Brown. The audiophile experience is richer. It’s more immersive. And it’s absolutely more enjoyable.
He asks you to compare two different audio setups, and pick which one looks more fun.
The high-end audio setup on the left might be more cluttered, but it’s far more inviting.
So why don’t people care? Why do they settle for less?
Why opera is misunderstood.
My brother Dana released this view three days ago. Here he draws on some of the key tenets of his recent book on opera Weep, Shudder, Die. (I shared some of it here recently.)
What was Pat Metheny like at age 14?
One of my favorite music books of recent years is Carolyn Glenn Grewer’s account of Pat Metheny’s childhood and early music career.
It made me feel good about my own past struggles when I saw that this huge jazz star had to take gigs at a Ramada Inn lounge in a Missouri suburb—and got the lowest billing on the roster.
Now Metheny’s biographer tracks down three of his teenage friends, and encourages them to share stories.
Here’s a tale of Pat as a young guitar student:
“John [Elliott] had developed this system for bitonal chords—split chords, different triads over bass notes. Really advanced stuff. He showed it to Pat and thought; “Okay, this going to take a little time—tie him up for a while….Pat comes back the next week with everything John asked, and ten more things. John is flabbergasted. He goes: “How could you do this in one week? How is that possible”
Pat said: “I was so excited, I stayed in my room all week. My mom brought food up to me. And I worked on this stuff non-stop.”
That’s what the path to greatness looks like up close. It’s not glamorous—instead it’s a story about Ramada Inns and hasty meals in a bedroom. But that’s how the journey often begins.
Why is the Internet getting worse?
I’ve shared videos from Jared Henderson in the past, but I recently discovered that he lives near me, and we’ve gotten to know each other. He’s an impressive individual—smart, articulate, and erudite.
We will probably collaborate on some future projects. So be on the lookout for Jared at The Honest Broker.
In the meantime, here is his latest video.
Lost Gal Costa music released after 53 years.
The late Gal Costa (1945-2022) is one of my favorite Brazilian vocalists. And I’m not alone in my admiration. How many popular singers get invited to share a piano bench with Herbie Hancock?
During her storied career, Costa performed and recorded with all the leading stars of Brazilian commercial music, and gained international renown as an exponent of the Tropicália style.
Now—out of the blue—Universal Music releases three tracks that have been sitting on the shelf since 1972. These capture Costa at absolutely peak expressive power.
Here she sings a Gilberto Gil song with production by Roberto Menescal. What a loss for music fans then, but such a gain for us today.
When Leonard Bernstein met Eric Dolphy—and CBS captured it on camera.
Did you know that Leonard Bernstein shared the stage with short-lived jazz legend Eric Dolphy. It happened exactly 120 days before Dolphy died (from undiagnosed diabetes).
That surprised me. But the most amazing part of the story is that CBS showcased this event on a national TV broadcast.
You couldn’t imagine this happening today.
Along the way, the general public got to see Gunther Schuller, Don Ellis, Richard Davis, and Benny Golson. Bernstein himself reads a narrative script written by the eminent music critic Nat Hentoff.
If something like this happened once, it could happen again. In the meantime, you can enjoy this video, uploaded on to YouTube a few weeks ago by Bret Primack, who many of us simply refer to as the “Jazz Video Guy.”
That’s all for now. If you have any video recommendations, please share them in the comments.
Bandcamp is slowly, but surely, shifting towards favoring streaming service shareholders, since the company which now owns it IS a shareholder. Check out Subvert, as it actually is a member-owned cooperative launching later this year!
Ahh, hi-fi. I have a medium end audio system, records and cds, but it is satisfying to these old ears. Ear buds, phones, blue tooth, and other inferior listening modes remind me of transistor radios.