Good Morning,
Two big stories for a Monday. First a landmark licensing deal between an AI company and industry-wide music publishers. (Music Business Worldwide). This is the first pact to value songs and recordings equally as training fodder, an admission that the human-made original is the scarce input the machines can’t generate themselves (yet). AND it means the first framework for how music will be compensated by AI companies is now set. This is a huge story that will impact musicians everywhere.
The second big story is Fox’s acquisition of Roku, the streaming interface, for $22 billion. The deal will create one of the world’s largest TV companies. It resets the new TV/video/streaming landscape.
Elsewhere, evidence keeps accumulating that the slower human version of creativity and cognition delivers something efficiency strips out: neuroscientists report measurable cognitive gains from reading physical books over screens (Psypost). Bookstores, improbably, are booming even as literacy declines, though the essay we link to today is clear-eyed that the boom is a class story, of an aspirational demographic doing what it always has while the reading crisis plays out elsewhere (LitHub).
None of this is really nostalgia. It’s the creativity markets discovering that when machines can make something, the value migrates to the context and provenance that human creators provide.
And just for fun: The Knicks, for their part, just turned all of New York into an impromptu dance floor (The New York Times).
Doug
