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glenn mcdonald Profile
glenn mcdonald

@glenn_mcdonald

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Fugitive from what I used to know yesterday.

Cambridge, MA
Joined March 2008
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
It is an amazing corporate touch to have celebratory swag, for having individually contributed to the company’s biggest yearly event, arrive AFTER you’ve been laid off from it. Wrapped, indeed.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
8 months
The world listens to music, and thus I feel like it should be obvious that the collective insights from this listening also belong to the world. Every Noise at Once was a way of helping this knowledge self-organize, and giving it back.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
11 months
Oh, I wrote a book! It's called "You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music". It doesn't come out until June 2024, but it was announced to the UK trade press today, so it's finally no longer secret. There's more info here:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
8 months
Honestly, at this point it would be a little reassuring to get a note from some decision-maker at Spotify telling me how much they always resented and distrusted my work, and how joyful and strategic it was to get rid of me. Give it some intent.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
Getting laid off sucks, there's no avoiding that, and it doesn't really help to get angry about it yourself. But it's obliquely encouraging to have *other* people get angry about it on your behalf.
@TechCrunch
TechCrunch
6 months
Spotify’s layoffs put an end to a musical encyclopedia, and fans are pissed
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
There is no way "A. Blinken" is not a Simpsons character @thatbilloakley and @joshstrangehill made up.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
I wrote about a feature I was never responsible for at the company where I am no longer responsible for anything.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
8 months
See today for a status update.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
If you look closely, you can tell I'm not working there any more.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
8 months
It's sad, but not too surprising, that a corporation might not see the value of this. But it has been reassuring to me to be reminded, here and elsewhere, that some people did. A few more reminders, this morning, here:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
It used to be my job to try to turn music-listening data into cultural knowledge. I think there are at least four fundamental forms of this: popularity, currency, similarity and community.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
Just taking a nostalgic moment to remember "ambience".
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
A thing I wrote at work about a thing I did at work!
@SpotifyEng
Spotify Engineering
2 years
If you ended your year with #SpotifyWrapped , you more than likely discovered what your listening personality is. But how did your listening personality actually come to be? @glenn_mcdonald breaks it down:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Want to try playing a just-barely-playable song-ID game? (You feed it a playlist, so you can make your own challenges for your friends...)
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 months
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
I use Spotify data and math to see what songs spike up in popularity after notable world events. Here's a playlist of what did this weekend. After the Counting
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
I don't have any news about New Releases by Genre, but if you're so interested in that topic that you would even read news about the lack of news about New Releases by Genre, here's some:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Evil seeks silence; we sing back. New songs from last week.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
8 months
This is a brutal headline that should make everybody working on algorithms in music stop and think about what they're doing, and what powers it serves.
@Mark_Mulligan
Mark_Mulligan
8 months
MIDiA’s 2024 predictions: The algorithm is not listening @midiaresearch
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
10 years
Write your code as if it will be maintained by someone less clever than you. You will appreciate this when that person turns out to be you.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
@eenz97 It’s like that, except spread out over three months of remote meetings instead of an actual room, and at the end 17% of you get laid off.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
Decided to take a break from the string of music books and read one from my science-fiction stack instead. It opens with a guy contemplating his record collection. There is no escape.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 months
Algorithms, genres, fraud and how people are both amazing and disappointing: I join Ari Herstand for a journey through curiosity and confusion.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 months
“Mechanical” music royalties are a great example of obsolete legal formulation. They attach songwriter payment to the “reproduction” of a recording of a song, because in the physical era that’s all we could track. 1/9
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
1 month
The day I stop saying “I wrote a book you can’t read yet” has arrived.
@CanburyPress
Canbury Press
1 month
Happy Publication Day to You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song by Glenn McDonald! @glenn_mcdonald Find out more at #canburypress #newreleases #book #nonfictionuk #streaming #musicstreaming #musicdata
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 months
I tried to get this out of my system with a short tweet-thread, but it didn't work. So here, if you're interested, is a much longer detailed analysis of the proposed Living Wage for Musicians Act.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 years
Music Streaming as an Economic Shift (a theory in 8 tweets):
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
8 months
@tedolsen @EveryNoise I keep opening the front door as if I'm going to check the mail or something, ready to pretend to be surprised at the cameras. Nothing yet.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
Spending the day pleasantly reading angry tweets about all the genres we supposedly made up that we totally didn't make up. Plus Escape Room, of course.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
Ever wonder what the most popular 10:00+ songs on Spotify are? I didn't. Until 10:00 ago.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
Opening the first VC round for my uncannily accurate music-categorization startup that secretly ignores the music entirely and just uses cover images.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 years
Algorithmically attaching photos to news stories: what could go wrong?
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Apparently the two ends of the human mood spectrum are "peaceful" and "flirty".
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 months
I complain about AI because it ought to be good for a lot more than plausible-sounding chatbots you can't trust. What, exactly? Ask me again when I've been working at @imbue_ai for longer than 1 day.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
If you're curious about how heavily the comparison of effective *average* per-stream rates between music services depends on plans and activity rates, you can do some illuminating math with Spotify public data.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
New Particles is either paused or finished, I haven't decided which yet, but if you're one of the few who anticipates the Xmas edition instead of skipping it, here it is.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
Math fun: public numbers suggest that for Spotify's global average per-stream rate across all tiers to reach $.01, the prices of premium plans would have to go up by a factor of ~3.5, and that's assuming no current subscribers would switch to free or a competitor as a result.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
Spotify launched in Russia yesterday! Here's a playlist of what got played more there than elsewhere on the first day:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
29 days
This is a very good article about the factors involved in streaming-music exposure and algorithmic recommendations in general. (In which I am quoted, but it's well informed from many directions.)
@rebexxxxa
rebecca jennings
30 days
i figured out why you cant escape certain up-and-coming pop acts on spotify
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
Today in music novelties, I set up an automatic playlist of the most popular songs with each numeric title from 1-10000 (no other characters allowed, and only 1/artist). So far only 4471 of 10000 slots are claimed, with 9 of the first 1000 still open.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
If you care about the recorded-music business, you will definitely want to read the newest IFPI Global Music Report, published here: and discussed here:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
My suspicion, not backed by data, is that when most people say things about "most people", they don't have data.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
The good news is that I made a daily 5-hour query take 1 minute, so now the idiot who wrote that query has to do my job for the rest of the month. But you can probably guess the bad news.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
Yes, please, governments, pass some laws requiring algorithmic transparency. I would love to tell you exactly how my algorithms work. You will have to pass even more laws to get me to *stop* telling you.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
13 days
Happy to start my day with this pull-quote.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
The structural problem with Twitter, reproduced exactly in all its clones, is that there is no shared experience. It’s only a side-effect of this that rebuilding ANY individual experience on a new clone is laborious.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
@tedgioia Seems like you're overlooking the biggest relevant change, which is that in streaming "old" listening is now tracked. Buy a new album on CD and listen to it for 20 years: nobody knew. Stream a 20yo song: we know.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
“It is not acceptable for a few major players to meet in secret, agree a self-serving business model and then present it to the world as a fait accompli.” Cogent that this is the first point. Resistance must confront the power-structures first.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Every once in a while, go through and listen to the whole top 50 as if it's your only advance knowledge of a planet you're about to land on in a ship almost out of fuel.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
The people you haven't met yet will look brightly familiar or darkly terrifying according to your light, not their colors. New songs from last week.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
I keep meaning to make a simple tool for comparing two Spotify playlists to find which songs are in both of them. Kept meaning.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
1 month
If you run a company that has something to do with music, you should probably order copies of this book for all your employees, and a couple extras for yourself. E.g. @eldsjal
@CanburyPress
Canbury Press
1 month
Happy Publication Day to You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song by Glenn McDonald! @glenn_mcdonald Find out more at #canburypress #newreleases #book #nonfictionuk #streaming #musicstreaming #musicdata
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
I don't believe that genres are dead, but I did just go from Sudanese-inspired violin-rap into a Romanian-named Swedish post-metal dirge without immediately realizing the song had changed.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 months
1000 True Fans sounds easier until you realize that most people won’t have the capacity to be True to more than one artist, so you need 1000 people who like you more than absolutely anybody else, including all the artists who work harder than you unless you are Taylor.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 months
Young putting his music back on Spotify now that Joe Rogan is available everywhere again is a pretty good snapshot of the state of the business. It’s hard for anybody embedded in these power-structures to do much better than anybody else, but it’s also hard to do worse for long.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 years
4 moral imperatives for personalization systems: Consent: personalization must be optional Transparency: personalized results must be labeled and explained Control: any implicit factor must be explicitly overridable Accountability: the collective results must be accessible
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
@_YoungTurbo_ Oh, the mistakes are automated. It's noticing and reporting them that requires attention and care.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
The contention that Trump is better able to handle COVID policy than Biden because he HAS it is idiotic, but it also explains why Trump thinks he's better at handling racism.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
After some math I have concluded that artists collectively believe the best album-length is 10 songs, but that listener patience supports 13.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
The average X-year-old person listens to music from, on average, when they were .75X-1.5.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
My PopCon contribution this year is not a talk, it's a web explorer for the music that defines, unites and distinguishes kids around the world. It's called The Aqueduct of Youth. You can be young at any moment.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
This is a really good piece about fear and nostalgia and human complexity and the difference between "algorithms" and control. I don't say this because my own work (sic) is mentioned, but it's obviously not a coincidence.
@carlzoilus
Carl Wilson
6 months
I affirm some and take issue with other parts of @newyorker writer Kyle Chayka's case on taste and recommendation algorithms, w/ particular nods to @glenn_mcdonald , in the jam-packed new issue of @Bookforum .
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Yes, these are definitely all unique works of diligent and profoundly necessary craft.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Oh look, it's me, enthusing about music in the corner of a screen, captioned and explained in French by @Etienne010101 !
J’ai le plaisir de lancer ce 6ème épisode de @DataBroadcast , dans lequel j’interroge @glenn_mcdonald , #Data Scientist chez @Spotify et créateur du formidable site “Every Noise at Once” 🎵Et vous pouvez même jouer à des blind tests entre les séquences
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
1 month
2 days until my book’s official publication date. Delivery reports have already begun, but technically you could still say you pre-ordered it if you did so right now.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
Ignoring music not sung in English is the eating-steak-with-ketchup of listening.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
This is a pretty good article about how streaming-music payments work and might work:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Before you're allowed to learn how to calculate averages you should have to take a class in when not to.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Can't remember all the ISO country codes? Here, this should help.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
All I meant to do is sit down and listen to one Big Bopper song, because I wasn't sure I knew any. But apparently I can't even do a simple thing without it becoming an essay about algorithms and hubris.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
In listening communities as in geographic ones, the ability to move between places and across borders doesn't cause places or borders to cease to exist...
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 years
Postscriptural notes: I work at Spotify, so I have both interests and data, but this theory is just mine. And I spent $1000s/year on CDs, so if I'm right, it's precisely people like me who no longer have disproportionate power.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
1 year
Using AI to add the "missing" parts of a photograph is an amazing example of not understanding an art form at all. I assume generating clothes into a porn scene will be next.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
8 months
This is the best terrible :45 song I have ever heard. Can you AI a viral TikTok dance for it, too?
@suno_ai_
Suno
8 months
@glenn_mcdonald @tedolsen @EveryNoise Hey Glenn, we're in Kendall. Want to come by for coffee sometime?
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
If you want to feel albumcentric and vicariously nostalgic for the almost-done year at once, here's a playlist of my 10 favorite 2023 albums:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
Go home and stay home. Otherwise yesterday's pictures of no toilet paper in supermarkets are three-weeks-from-now's pictures of no ventilators in hospitals, and you not laughing because your lungs can't breathe on their own. The math is the same.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 years
"AI is just us, in aggregate." Super-interesting Holly Herndon essay about music and people and AI.
@hollyherndon
Holly Herndon
5 years
Ok y’all @Grimezsz @ZOLAJESUS here is my 2c on AI and Interdependent music ⛲️ 🦾🎶🤝⛲️
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 months
2 upcoming appearances in LA: Talking about music data complications @ Music + Data Symposium, UCLA 3/8 Talking about streaming and memory @ the Pop Conference, USC 3/9 9:00am Both are free but limited; register in advance!
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
@ErickT_MX Apple doesn't even *have* Pet-Safe Bonfire.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
6 months
The thing about communities is that you don't each build separate ones.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
@aofd3_music Yes, this wasn't immediately obvious to me as I was setting it up, but seems clearly right. I'll change it.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
3 years
Hint: if you see anybody cite the amount that a music-streaming service PAYS "per stream", without also citing the amount it EARNS "per stream", then you know they have no idea what that amount means.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
5 years
In the unlikely event that you needed this, 38 versions of "Old Town Road".
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
Prayers? To a God that you claim to believe had the power to prevent this, but didn't?
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
ChatGPT is, finally, the tool to write all the missing, worthless, notional books in Borges' Library.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
But if your PDF reader is broken, I'll summarize it for you. Pages 1-5: Hi. Pages 6&7: Streaming continues to grow, and historical graphs always look better if we pretend inflation doesn't exist. Pages 8-17: IFPI represents labels. Pages 18-: Did we say labels? We did? OK.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
4 years
Seeing @ZOLAJESUS retweet @tagaq , then listening to Tanya covering Iron Maiden and Zola covering Black Sabbath, then wanting to know what a collaboration would sound like...
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
1 year
@JahHills Oh, sure, you selectively fail to mention all the great contributions of corporate lawsuits to music history.
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
7 months
This week's edition of Jeremy Bushnell's The Wednesday Investigations investigates genre-mapping, including an interview with me:
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@glenn_mcdonald
glenn mcdonald
2 years
When I take over completely I will enforce a policy of never listing songs without artists. "Wonderwall" here is Violet Orlandi's fantastic metal cover, not the excruciating original.
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