You’re in a bar in Bucharest during the summer, its about midnight and you can’t speak Romanian. The bar is quiet enough but outside in the smoking area its pretty busy.
At the bar you spot a man with a dummy leg in his back pack. Its hardly discreet, as its sticking out the top like a beacon. I imagine most would note it and carry on drinking, like everyone else.
Of course thats not me, my curiousity is peaking and I strike up a conversation in english with the man.
We talk about the leg and why? I mean why go to a club with one dummy leg. Why only one? These are the questions in my head. Turns out he’s a local artist and the bar tender also knows him. We have a good natter, his english is good and the bar tender’s english is perfect.
During the conversation (about 20mins) and drinks, the artist drew me a doodle on the back of my bar reicipt. Something that will stick in my mind when ever I think about Bucharest again.
Its the little things which make life fancinating and wonderful, you just need to engage.
Dear musicians who make £0.0033 per stream on our utopian music platform, haha, hahahaha – Spotify. Thanks, 2016 we made lots of money via Jason Lytle
It was Mike who sent me a link to this classic piece of culture jamming seen in Bristol. Of course it’s not by Spotify, but they (whoever is responsible for this work of genius) went as far as to use their logo and typeface.
It was only less than 24 hours previously at my new years eve party, when a couple of people wanted to control the music playing. I know wanting to control the music isn’t anything new; but I’m finding people are assuming the music is from Spotify.
Before the holidays, I was at a party where the music was chosen by people typing names into a laptop connected to the sound system. As you can imagine, people would select a few tunes and queue them up. Then someone else would come over and select more. Some would then shift around the playlist to move their tunes to the top, etc. It was a bit of mess with different people deleting other people’s selected tunes and others hogging the playlist. The inner DJ in me, choose to turn my back on everything and ignore the chaos.
The mindset has changed and although I love what Pacemaker are doing. I do slighly wonder about the future of mixed music. Theres a sense of instant gratification in playing track after track in a playlist and bumping things up and off the list, rather than trusting a mix to take you on a great journey. Maybe this is why I never use spotify and use mixcloud more? Delayed gratification is something which seemed to go right out the door with the increase in blood alcohol levels
Of course this is absolutely nothing compared to whats happening with the artists of course. Which leads right back around to the culture jamming in Bristol. Like Uber, the big behemoths across the sharing economy (if thats what we are to call it) are most likely to feel pressure in the long run from more humane practices such as Juno. Or at least I certainly see becoming true…
There is a blog draft which I’ve had saved about the state of business now and into the future. Its big and likely needs slicing into smaller blogs but cooperatives are certainly a big part of it.
Ian, are you against these companies making money/turning a profit? I’m curious how you otherwise see them paying for both the innovation and the on-going costs of running the service?
I replied without the links (but now I can finally put them in)…
