Tag: streaming

Old, by Twitter Standards, But A Useful Read on Hotstar

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Etc: Links for 15th November, 2019

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  1. Bibek Debroy about Abhijit Banerjee’s father. This was fascinating!
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    “There were people who didn’t have an exceptional publication record. They were simply superb teachers.Dipak Banerjee was one of them. Except for a paper on utility he wrote while he was at LSE (London School of Economics), he rarely published. He was an exceptional teacher who produced exceptional students. Bhaskar Dutta, Subhashis Gangopadhyay, Dilip Mukherjee and Debraj Ray should be familiar names. They (all Dipak Banerjee’s students) edited a collection of essays in his honour in 1990. Mihir Rakshit primarily taught us macroeconomics and Dipak Banerjee primarily taught us microeconomics. Mihir babu’s teaching was precise. He never deviated from the topic. Dipak babu’s teaching was also precise, but he deviated from the topic and told us “stories”, especially at tutorials. In the course of these stories, we learnt he had two sons. He wasn’t worried about his younger son, who was “street smart”. But he worried about his elder son, who wasn’t that street smart. We learnt this elder son was called Jhima and that he had a middle name of Vinayak because he was born in Mumbai and because his mother (Nirmala Banerjee) was a Maharashtrian.”
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  2. A short article about the “perils” of Amazon Prime
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    “”Because of multiple Prime orders, Amazon has had to think more about packaging. Recognizing some customers’ “wrap rage,” they are using more bubble envelopes. Aware that the excessive space occupied by smaller inexpensive items increases transport costs, they’ve been developing algorithms that match box size to contents to avoid “over-boxing.” And they want manufacturers to know that online packaging needs to be compact rather than attractive.”
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  3. “We therefore predicted that reactivating previously unsolved problems could help people solve them. In the evening, we presented 57 participants with puzzles, each arbitrarily associated with a different sound. While participants slept overnight, half of the sounds associated with the puzzles they had not solved were surreptitiously presented. The next morning, participants solved 31.7% of cued puzzles, compared with 20.5% of uncued puzzles (a 55% improvement).”
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    Fascinating is an understatement – Alex Tabarrok on being productive while sleeping.
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  4. “For me, sleep is the #1 important factor for my cognitive productivity. I typically get between 6½–7¼ hours per night. Much less, and I feel my brain turning to goo when I try to do anything cognitively demanding. I track my sleep with a fitness tracker so I can anticipate when I should expect a “bad day” and plan accordingly.”
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    On the importance of sleep, and holidays. Please look up Jensen’s inequality as well.
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  5. “…music streaming subscriptions are typically far cheaper in emerging markets than they are in the US and Europe, but hardware built to play that music – often from the very same companies running the music services – is significantly more expensive.”
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    I pay 179 INR per month for Spotify – for six family members. INR 189 per month for YouTube Premium – for six family members.

Etc: Links for 28th June, 2019

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Five articles on the state of the music industry today

 

  1. “A “middle tier” of new artists, operating away from the million-dollar advances of streaming’s biggest acts, are increasing their share of the format’s economics. Or, to phrase it another way, streaming, slowly but surely, is creating a commercial ecosystem in which more artists are able to make a living — and forcing the biggest-earning megastars on the planet to share a chunk of their annual wealth.”
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    I’d recommend a deeper dive into the data for sure, but an interesting article nonetheless. Who is earning the streaming dollars?
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  2. “If we were to rewind just a few years ago, the idea of Spotify delivering drive-optimized playlists interspersed with news may not have sounded totally outlandish but it would nonetheless have only felt a distant possibility. But now that Spotify has extensive podcast capabilities under its belt and a very proven willingness to insert podcasts throughout the music user’s experience, the concept of what constitutes a playlist needs rethinking entirely…largely because that is exactly what Spotify has just done. The industry needs to start thinking about playlists not as a collection of music tracks but instead as a targeted, personalized and programmed delivery vehicle for any combination of content. In old world parlance you might call it a ‘channel’, but that does not do justice to the vast personalization and targeting capabilities that playlists, and Spotify’s playlists in particular, can offer.”
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    If you haven’t heard of anchor.fm – they were recently purchased by Spotify (as was Gimlet Media). Both of these are in the podcasting business. This article makes clear why Spotify acquired them.
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  3. “Please write. And I don’t say that because my podcast is all written. Even shows in the venerable genre of Two People Talking About Stuff become so much tighter, so much more listenable if you take the time to write an introduction to the conversation to orient the listener. Tell them where they’re going. Make them want to go there with you. And then get going.”
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    This advice applies to more than just podcasts. But speaking of podcasts and audio in general, a somewhat useful set of advice regarding starting one of your own.
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  4. “Without Madonna, we don’t have Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and maybe even Janelle Monae. The doubles she played with during each of her transformations — not only the religious Madonna but the virgin, boy-toy, material girl, dominatrix, dancing queen, mom, yoga mom, adopting mom and, now, sexagenarian claiming her space among artists two generations younger — were fun-house representations of conventional femininity. They refracted and reflected a future most of us didn’t know was coming before she showed it to us.”
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    On the importance of Madonna to culture at large today, and her ongoing importance to the music industry.
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  5. “Six years ago, when Thom Yorke memorably expressed his feelings about the music industry by calling Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse,” it was hard to argue with him. At that point, global sales of recorded music were headed for their 13th decline in 14 years, with the overall value of the industry nearly cut by half since the turn of the century. It looked like the digital revolution really did turn the music business into a moldering husk. But now, like any good zombie during an apocalypse, the industry is once again primed to devour the world on a massive scale.”
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    And as a fitting coda to the series, reflections on the Phoenix like rise of the music industry, and where it might head to in the years to come.

Links for 16th May, 2019

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  1. “The other risk of a huge centrally planned response to climate change is that of a huge centrally planned response to anything: clumsy megaprojects chosen for their political or bureaucratic acceptability rather than because they deliver the biggest results for the lowest cost.”
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    In which the ghost of Pigou is found to be giving a contented chuckle. Pigouvian taxes is a term you should learn about, and read this article to find out how and why the idea continues to resonate.
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  2. “With casuals being the next wave of streaming adopters, their impact will increase. But despite being ‘more valuable’ they will also reduce royalties, because more streams per user means revenue gets shared between more tracks, which means lower per-stream rates. The music industry thus has an apparently oxymoronic challenge: it is not in its interest to significantly increase the amount of media consumption time it gets per user, but instead it will be better served by getting a larger number of people listening less!Current market trajectory points to more streams per user, which – for subscriptions, where royalties are paid as a share of revenue – means lower per-stream rates.”
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    Have you read The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson? Read it (or about it), and then read this article to learn about the problems that will arise in a world full of long tails.
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  3. “The answer is no and yes. The views of Piketty and Blanchard can indeed be reconciled, because they are talking about different interest rates. While Blanchard focuses on the rate on low-risk government bonds, Piketty is concerned with the return on risky capital investments. Because the two interest rates are separated by a risk premium of roughly five percentage points, it is entirely possible for the rate on government bonds to be below the economic growth rate, while the rate on capital is above it.”
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    Barry Eichengreen on the return (as he puts it) of fiscal policy. A short article, but a useful one to understand macroeconomics better.
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  4. “When historians in the distant future look back at our era, the name Alfred Sauvy may appear in a footnote somewhere. Sauvy was a French demographer who coined the term “third world” in a magazine article in 1952, just as the Cold War was heating up. His point was that there were countries not aligned with the United States or the Soviet Union that had pressing economic needs, but whose voices were not being heard.”
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    The always excellent Tim Taylor on the nomenclature for “third world” countries – how it came about, what it means, how it might change going forward – and ends with a clarification about how it may not have been what we have thought all along!
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  5. “I have to tell you, I’m a pretty lazy person, I don’t work more than 40 hours per week. What I’ve discovered helps me is to not compartmentalize – because if I thought of my life as, “there’s teaching, there’s research, there’s writing on my blog, there’s X, Y and Z…” then you very quickly run out of hours in the day. But almost everything I do spills over into almost everything else I do. So I’m constantly looking for ways to take whatever I do and get it to serve three or four or five purposes.”
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    A fascinating interview with Aswath Damodaran – a person you must know more about if you want to study finance. The entire interview is worth reading – but this excerpt is for you even if you are not a student of finance – his view about what qualifies as work, and what doesn’t.