9to5Mac: “Apple Music’s Spatial Audio royalties mean a pay cut for Indies, say labels”

When Apple Music said it was paying 10% more in Spatial Audio royalties, there were those among us who cynically wondered whether this meant everyone else would be paid less.

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But a Financial Times report says that the total royalty payout is remaining unchanged, so the 10% extra for Spatial Audio tracks comes at the expense of other musicians.

The tech group is not paying more money in total: rather, that extra 10 per cent will come out of a fixed pot of money. As a result, songs that are not “spatial” will receive less money.

Indie labels say this means it benefits the big labels – who can afford the added production expenses – at the expense of independent ones, who can’t.

Ben Lovejoy

Shoutout to Apple die-hards who keep claiming that the company pays more royalties than the competition, while understanding next to nothing about the music business, and thus is allegedly ‘more supporting of artists’. Here is a clearcut example of Apple leveraging its position as a streaming provider to prop up its own proprietary music format – and taking money from artists in the process, as if it were a struggling startup, not the company with the highest valuation on the stock market. A move that manages to be at the same time blatantly greedy, anticompetitive, and hostile to musicians.

Social Media Today: “Instagram rolls out Achievement Awards for Creator Milestones”

Instagram’s trying out another way to incentivize creators, with a new “Achievements” display, available in “Creator Mode” in the app, which allocates different badges for engagement milestones, like reaching 100 total post likes, 1,000 video plays, and more.

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The most immediate example that springs to mind Snap Streaks, which have almost become religion to many Snap users over the years. To start a Snap streak, you and a friend have to send a Snap to each other every 24 hours for three days, then keep sending reciprocal Snaps every day to uphold the streak.

Some Snap users have maintained 6 year long streaks (and counting), and that compulsion has kept many users coming back to the app.

Andrew Hutchinson

And just like that the gamification of Instagram is complete! Apparently, it was not enough to chase likes, comments, and views, now Instagram wants to become Steam as well…

The Atlantic: “What is Joe Biden doing on TikTok?”

On Monday evening, Jon Stewart returned to the hosting chair of The Daily Show after nearly a decade away—and he spent a nontrivial portion of his opening segment roasting Joe Biden’s first TikTok video. That post, which the Biden-Harris campaign uploaded during the Super Bowl on Sunday, featured the president answering silly, rapid-fire questions about the big game: Jason Kelce or Travis Kelce? The performance was cheeky but decidedly low energy. Biden’s voice is a little raspy, and at one point, he gets very excited about chocolate-chip cookies.

Stewart played the clip in the context of the press’s multiday fixation on Biden’s age. When it ended, he eyed the camera and offered some advice to the campaign’s social team. Fire everyone, he deadpanned. Everyone. How do you go on TikTok and end up looking older? The audience howled.

Charlie Warzel

The Biden campaign joining TikTok is the final nail in the coffin for any meaningful regulation of TikTok in the US – not that this was in any way likely to begin with. Leave it to US politicians to always put their electoral chances above the interests of the constituents they’re supposed to represent.

The American Prospect: “The Airbus Advantage”

In the wake of the midair blowout of a door on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 earlier this month, the lead that Airbus has taken over Boeing in the manufacture and sales of the world’s commercial aircraft has, not surprisingly, grown. It’s actually been growing for some time: Last year, Airbus delivered 735 new planes to airlines and leasing companies, The New York Times reported, while Boeing delivered just 528. Airbus had an order backlog of 8,600 new planes, against Boeing’s 5,626. This month’s blowout reinforced the public’s—and consequently, the airlines’—doubts about Boeing’s commitment to safety, which soared after two disastrous crashes of its 737s in 2018 and 2019.

Harold Meyerson

After the fatal crashes a couple of years ago, more issues with Boeing’s 737 Max planes have come to light this past month, leading to more aircraft being grounded and inspected. And, unsurprisingly, this erosion of trust in Boeing’s quality and safety protocols has made customers reconsider their orders and gradually shift to the (European) competition. In an industry with extra-long cycle times from order to final delivery, it will be that much harder for the company to reestablish trust and turn things around.

Wired: “I found David Lynch’s Lost ‘Dune II’ Script”

Inside the folder lay the stuff of fans’ dreams, never made public until now: 56 pages dated “January 2nd-through-9th, 1984”, matching Lynch’s “half a script” statement. Complete with penned annotations by Herbert, the Dune II script shows Lynch was still enthusiastic about the material, lending new significance to minor details in the ‘84 film. He also cracked a way to tell the complex story of Herbert’s 1969 novel Dune Messiah, easily the least cinematic book in the series due to its emphasis on palace intrigue over action, along with the inner turmoil of a reluctant dictator (Paul Atreides) in place of a traditional hero’s journey. It may ring of sacrilege to some, but Lynch’s Dune II would have bested Herbert’s book—and been one hell of a movie.

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Scytale’s 12-year odyssey reanimating “dead Duncan Idaho” into the ghola named Hayt on the nightmarish Bene Tleilax world (mentioned by Paul in Dune) constitutes the entire opening 10 minutes of the script. Lynch calls the planet Tleilax a dark metal world with canals of steaming chemicals and acids. Those canals, Lynch writes, are lined with dead pink small test tube animals. Initiating Dune II with a focus on Scytale foregrounds him to primary antagonist, unlike Herbert’s book where myriad conspirators work against Paul.

Max Evry

I’m deeply skeptical of people claiming that a particular movie adaptation would best the original work – especially an adaption from which we only have an unfinished script and nothing else. The passages describing Lynch’s vision for the Tleilaxu are surreal, but for me they are quite removed from Herbert’s admittedly scarce description. My impression of the Bene Tleilax in the books is that they are disciplined and immensely secretive – very much opposed to the gaudy style of the Harkonnens. Their main area of expertise is genetic engineering – so flesh alterations: yes; machinery: not so much; even flesh alterations would be uncommon, as the Tleilax always strive to not draw unwanted attention to themselves and their agents.

The Guardian: “Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire review – Zack Snyder’s Netflix disaster”

In film school, some professors use the familiar example of Star Wars to teach Campbellian mythmaking, the theories that identify and codify the narrative units re-contextualized since Grecian times. Snyder demonstrates a clear fluency in these concepts with his classically minded scripting, except he forgot the part where the archetypes are meant to be refreshed through novel contexts. On the humble farming planet of Wherever in the galaxy of Who Cares, the broad outline of a Hero (Sofia Boutella, terse and humorless and physically perfect, just how Snyder likes ’em) must defend her village from a faraway notion of an Evil Empire. They rose to power in some great cataclysm of yore during which our Hero’s family was killed, and the Final Boss took her in to teach her the combat skills she’d one day use to take her revenge. Snyder mistakes exposition for world-building, the lugubriously delivered reams of backstory removing the audience from the fantasy rather than immersing them in it.

To topple the Mini-Boss (Ed Skrein, his British accent and high cheekbones marking him as a baddie) come to appropriate her people’s grain, she and her Sidekick (a neutered Michiel Huisman) bop around the cosmos rounding up sympathizers to their cause, including a self-interested yet caddishly likable mercenary we’ll call Not Han Solo (Charlie Hunnam, more visibly awake than most of his scene partners). They are most easily referred to by their function both because they exist as little more than sketches, and because the muddy sound mix isn’t doing viewers any favors, but especially because their names are often long and difficult to retain.

Charles Bramesco

As I wrote down a couple of impressions on Saltburn, I might as well mention Rebel Moon too, since I bothered watching it last December on Netflix. While I wouldn’t rate it as low as one star as the article above does, I largely agree with the assessment that this movie is a dull and self-serious mess.