Ted Gioia

I'm not sure how this addresses the fundamental problem, which is that Spotify pays a very low price per stream, so you have to be a huge star to make any money, and Spotify is taking a large part of the proceeds in the meantime.

Also there's the secondary problem that Spotify has an incentive to produce easy-to-digest content in house for which it pays lower (or no) royalties [0].

For you, the equivalent of problem #2 is your incentive to make deliberately addictive content of no artistic merit. Easy to say you won't do this, a lot harder when your backers demand growth and your analytics team demonstrates that Angry Birds For Tots will maximize engagement.

Don't get me wrong, I think you have a cool idea and I hope it works, but everything you say about your commitment to devs is cheap talk, and in my experience, such ideals tend to get discarded during, e.g., difficult funding rounds.

good luck!

[0] https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-fake-artists-problem-is-much

Related:

– Mark Fisher: The Slow Cancellation Of The Future
https://youtu.be/aCgkLICTskQ

- Ted Gioia: Society Without a Counterculture
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F4937458-ted-gioia&utm_medium=reader2

I don't know whose, if anyone's, explanation, I believe. The phenomenon (of cultural stagnation) is real, though.

This Gucci 'homage' to Stanley Kubrick struck me as an excellent example of the problem: https://youtu.be/pk1oThKRxdo

It's not just that it cribs from the past, but the cynicism: an ad that inserts some giddy fashion model into Clockwork Orange, and saps the scene of its irony. Kubrick pulled that film from the UK market after release for fear it had inspired a rape and a murder. An 'homage' doesn't turn a cautionary tale into an aspirational commercial.

I agree, but with a small exception.

There is value in saying "here's the number of a guy I know and trust". Curating options is valuable. Basically you need to be a honest broker: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-broker

There is also value in preparing leads with good information, filtering out tire kickers, and abstracting marketing or billing away. Some people want to work on their craft without thinking about SEO and the like.

For example, I work with people I trust to take over when the information on my website is not enough. "This is all I know. If you need a lawyer, call Fiona, she helped me a lot and I trust her advice". For some of the people I recommend, I get a kickback. As I see it, everyone in this transaction gains something.

Ghost[0] Seems like it more or less fits what you're describing. I first heard about it on an episode of Indie Hackers.[1] It was an especially interesting and unusual episode. I remember him talking about positioning with open source and also him going on these crazy international sailing trips while running the company.

Also I can't comment on a post about substack without mentioning my favorite substack post of all time![2]

[0] https://ghost.org/

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-john-onolan-grew-his-publishing-platform-to-750-000-year-14e5bac2fa

[2] https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-broker?s=r

haha that's definitely a big component of it all.

But the engaged clickable web is anyways dead. This post is a static HTML file hosted on IPFS with no back links to my carefully curated blog and media presence. No branding. It's because I've accepted that people's bullshit-radar is sensitive towards overly optimized engagement content. Rather I want my text to be read and those that care will anyways online-search me. It's not my idea btw. The web has reached peak clickability: https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/has-the-internet-reached-peak-clickability

And yet Steve Jobs transformed Apple from 90 days to bankruptcy to the biggest company in the world. Was he worth $200 million in compensation? Hell yeah. Because he is responsible for that wealth creation.

This kind of turnaround also happened at Barnes & Noble, all due to one man - the CEO, James Daunt.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

CEOs get paid a lot because they are crucial to the success (or failure) of a company. Yes, they did build it.