11 ms·

Panic Among the Streamers

46 points by blueridge 3y ago

TylerE 3y ago
This would be a great time for one of big guys to write a big check to the BBC for full rights to their archives.
barney54 3y ago
This article is weak sauce. All I hear everywhere is that AI will take over the world and yet somehow Netflix is "hellbent on replacing creative professionals with bots" because they want to hire some good AI talent for $900k a year. And then there's the end about music and the problem with Spotify losing money and generally sucking. He writes, "There is a fix for this. But it won’t be easy. It starts with creating an exciting music interface that celebrates artistry and creativity. If they do that, then it’s easy to boost the monthly rate." Sure. So Ted Gioia, if you have the vision, then work hard and do it.
guardiangod 3y ago
So my challenge to the writer is, why shouldn't the media companies pay $900k to hire AI gurus? If the companies think paying $900k to writers has a better return, they'd do it in a heartbeat, so why aren't they?
- mannykannot 3y ago
  FOMO+CYA. No-one thinks AI can substitute for writers now, and this posting does not suggest otherwise.
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  It's a welfare position for some exec's cousin. Slap the AI buzzword in the title and it makes it sound like a plausibly serious job, so others buy in.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  My challenge is why is this relevant? We pay anesthesiologists a lot more than baristas, we pay lawyers more than teachers, we pay civil engineers more than accountants. It’s about labor markets and paying the price an individual will accept vs their other opportunities given their skill set and the market demand. I would note the writer vs ML product manager roles aren’t related. If you click through there’s nothing about generative AI or LLM or SD or anything related to content generation. Looks like run of the mill ML role, likely associated with recommendation engines or some other engagement generation role. N.b., I don’t think they would pay $900k for a writer unless the writer is some heavy hitter star power writer. Rather than a salary my understanding is these roles draw down royalties, which as a variable annuity can be worth far more or far less, but encompass a lot more risk. Also amongst the creative talent they often make the least afaik.
  - kerkeslager 3y ago
    > My challenge is why is this relevant? We pay anesthesiologists a lot more than baristas, we pay lawyers more than teachers, we pay civil engineers more than accountants. It’s about labor markets and paying the price an individual will accept vs their other opportunities given their skill set and the market demand. Maybe it's relevant because it's yet another example showing that leaving wages up to the market isn't creating good results. There's no doubt in my mind that a society which paid teachers more than lawyers would be a better society than the one we have.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Who do you propose dictates wages by profession? We need far more teachers than lawyers and the skills required to, say, teach second graders, are not as advanced as those required to pass the bar exam. I’m all for public support of teachers, but it’s easy to say you don’t value a lawyer until you need one. Having fewer and worse lawyers means we will have worse laws and more injustice. To wit, public defenders make on average slightly less than a teacher. Given the quality of justice you can expect from a public defender, and the severe lack of them, is this a positive outcome? If you were accused of something falsely would you voluntarily use the public defender vs hiring the best you can afford?
- jerf 3y ago
  I see little evidence "quality of writing" is on their agenda at all at this point. I couldn't even list the movies responsible for billions in losses that had great music, acting, special effects, marketing, and everything else, and fell down only in their absolutely atrocious writing. It's a snarky thing to say, but I'm quite serious in my snark as well. It seems to me Hollywood holds writing quality in contempt. And I don't mean things that took a risk that failed to pay off. I mean things that you could take to a Writing 101 class after eight weeks and the students could savage based on what they were taught... and there's no excuse like "the authors understand the rules enough to transcend them", the writing is bad on the standard measures and also had no other redeeming values either. It's actually sort of weird that they see this as some sort of cost center to be managed. They already don't seem to care about it at all. From that point of view, using AI makes sense; they don't seem to care how bad the writing is, so why pay for it at all? Though it seems to me the effort put into AI would cover an awful lot of writing no matter how you slice it. That one $900K job won't be the only one. Will a team of super highly paid AI specialists absolutely be cheaper than actual writers? It would be super ironic to start an "AI writing startup" and then do what a lot of the AI startups have done behind the hood and hire humans to do the initial work. Why invest in risky tech? Just AI-wash the writing! Everybody wins!
deleted 3y ago
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skybrian 3y ago
Not a lot there, and there’s an assumption about what Spotify is supposed to be that doesn’t fit my experience. I don’t use it to find random new music. I search by artist or song name for something I discovered elsewhere (or I’m already familiar with) and make my own playlists. It seems to work fine as a cloud jukebox? The price increase is unwelcome, but when you get interested in a musician who made many albums, it’s a lot cheaper than buying them all.
- morkalork 3y ago
  As a single person, sure. But the price for a couple or family is still an absolute steal. Where I live the monthly price of the duo price is just under the cost of one meal at a down town food court for 1 person. Skip lunch once a month and in exchange not have to think about torrents or iTunes? For me and my spouse? Done with no debate at all.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  It doesn’t fit your experience because you are one of those people who are truly passionate about music, precisely as Gioia was talking about. But from what I have been seeing from listeners both young and old that I am acquainted with, people are often just putting their trust in the algorithm to play them something nice as a background music.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  > it’s a lot cheaper than buying them all. And thus the artists get screwed. Let's face it, the real reason Spotify is popular is because folks see music as a commodity and fairly compensating artists as unaffordable. And so Spotify lives on despite its many many flaws.
  - spamizbad 3y ago
    > And so Spotify lives on despite its many many flaws Spotify is going down the same path as the ride sharing companies: burning private and public monies to subsidize consumer habits, then jacking prices up to maintain cashflow. I fully expect Spotify pricing to increase fairly regularly at this point forward, especially if they continue to grow their subscriber base despite higher prices. The problem is, the hole is so deep your non-major label artist won't be in a good position to negotiate a better deal - the lion's share will go to major labels licensing their massive catalogue to Spotify.
prepend 3y ago
> But almost at that same moment, Netflix has listed a $900,000 job opening for an AI guru. That doesn’t feel like a balanced approach to me. I think this is a dishonest comparison. This is a very high end position, one of the best in the world. It would be like saying “Netflix is paying the Rock $50M for a movie, so actors definitely have the upper hand.” There’s way fewer actors and writers than programmers so it’s hard to compare, but I don’t think cherry picking salaries and then generalizing very useful (for more than blog views).
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  On top of that, the listing said the salary was $300k-$900k. I would bet money that the actual person who gets hired will not be making $900k right off the bat.
- zitterbewegung 3y ago
  The job description seems to imply that you aren’t replacing screenwriters but to augment the decision making on what to green light anyways .
Aurornis 3y ago
The article claims Netflix is hiring AI positions to "replace creative professionals": > It looks like they’re hellbent on replacing creative professionals with bots, and the faster the better. The linked AI job listing doesn't say that at all. You can find the listing here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/278437235 https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/278437235 It says: > Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence is powering innovation, from personalization for members, to optimizing our payment processing and other revenue-focused initiatives. The author has either ignored the facts or imposed their own ideas on to the situation. This take breaks down as soon as you check any of the facts.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  The article they link to about the job says as much so I'd say the author is very much trying to drive a narrative to push an agenda even if one doesn't exist.
- BaseballPhysics 3y ago
  "other revenue-focused initiatives" could mean literally anything. I'd say the author is being necessarily and reasonably cynical given what we've seen in just the past year (for example, the SAG and WGA aren't striking for nothing).
SoftTalker 3y ago
I hope there will be a requirement to identify "AI" in the writing credits. I would not want to subsidize any movies that were written by an AI. The human writers are pretty bad, but at least they are people and deserve to earn a living.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Define AI.
  - pizzafeelsright 3y ago
    Spellcheck Boggle.
  - redwall_hp 3y ago
    "Text was generated by a computer using a means more complex than a trie-traversing spell check algorithm." Grammarly can get lost too. Hell, let's exclude things that were written by a committee's input instead of 1-2 professional writers.
marcinzm 3y ago
> But almost at that same moment, Netflix has listed a $900,000 job opening for an AI guru. That doesn’t feel like a balanced approach to me. They listed a $900k position for someone who does machine learning platform planning. Every single recommendation you see on Netflix is powered by machine learning and has for a long long time. It is the core of their business and impacts every single user interaction with the product. And as the linked article itself notes the job isn't about content generation. Tying this into the AI hype is really disingenuous. edit: And looking at level.fyi Netflix was paying the same last year for ML talent.
- skytrue 3y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out. It’s been driving me crazy that there’s all these sensationalist articles using that as the “smoking gun”, implying that Netflix specifically wants an AI product manager to produce television shows. As somebody who has worked to create an AI-generated show, and who is also a PM at a big tech company that is using LLMs for non-creative purposes, I can tell you that the “PM” work I do with these LLMs is vastly different than the creative work I do with them. It’s an entirely different frame and discipline. I’d start to be concerned once we see job listings that explicitly look for creators, with technical backgrounds in generative AI. The creator/creative talent part comes first before everything else.
  - marcinzm 3y ago
    Yeah, Netflix pays this much not because it will replace a near minimum wage writer but because optimizing their advertising tier by 1% will pay back more than the PMs salary every 30 days.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  It would be fun is your feed could e recommended by other humans and or friends. I find my Netflix feed to be complete trash so some other approach would be nice.
- Jasper_ 3y ago
  > Every single recommendation you see on Netflix is powered by machine learning and has for a long long time. Huh, I would have thought it was some guy sitting down once a month and picking 5 random things that don't match any of my preferences based on what I get.
jrockway 3y ago
People outside of tech have really latched onto that $900k figure, but there are two things going on: 1) They are legally required to list the pay range for anyone they could possibly hire. If they are hiring a PM intern in Chicago, they will not be making $900k. If they are hiring a Google Fellow away from Google in San Francisco, then the $900k might be on the table. 2) Yeah, it's tech. No doubt there is someone at Netflix who runs their batch job scheduling system or some inane detail that nobody outside of tech even knows exists that makes $900k, and nobody freaks out about that. ("Efficient job scheduling is is going to kill CPU designers! Won't someone please think of their children!") It's more common than people outside of FAANG think. When I was a lowly Senior Software Engineer at Google over 5 years ago, my W2 comp was around $300k. Are there some people that are 3x more productive than me 5 years ago? It is a certainty. Money well spent if you find them!
- lokar 3y ago
  You won’t get a google fellow for 900k
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Yeah, that's a great point. Truly a case of "I've forgotten how to count that low."
Animats 3y ago
Who listens to music any more? That is, focuses primarily on the music, while not doing anything else. Most "listening" today is timepass while driving, or walking around wearing iDweebs. Sure, there are the people who read The Absolute Sound and buy overpriced audio cables. They're under 1% of the customer base, and they mostly listen to classical, anyway. If you want blah background music, I recommend Radio Coast.[1] This is an amusing exercise in copyright avoidance. Seeburg, the jukebox maker (1900 or so to 1979, bankrupt), had a side business in background music. To avoid paying royalties to record companies, they had their own orchestra and recording studio in Chicago. They'd license the underlying song, which is a compulsory license with a statutory rate. Then Seeburg made their own phonograph records, running at a nonstandard speed, with a nonstandard groove width, and a nonstandard hole size, to be played on a special Seeburg 1000 player. The player played a big stack of records over and over; it wasn't random access, like a jukebox. The records were not copyrighted, because that required a filing back when they were doing this. So someone got one of these obsolete machines, refurbished it, and collected enough of the special records to set up a free streaming service. [1] https://radiocoastcom.godaddysites.com/ https://radiocoastcom.godaddysites.com/
- unmole 3y ago
  > timepass Completely off topic but was this a typo or has this expression now gained currency outside the subcontinent?
  - Animats 3y ago
    It wasn't a typo.
- jrm4 3y ago
  I definitely do. And this absolutely furthers your point because I hate Spotify and all streaming services for this purpose. It's just not a thing like streaming tv. I need to know I have the song forever, I need to know that I will not be interrupted. Meaning, I have a separate mp3 player. For the car, the USB drive is EASILY the best thing that ever happened. Youtube and friends on social media is more than enough for discovery. As for acquiring, well, don't ask don't tell?
deleted 3y ago
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TX81Z 3y ago
It seems his perfect music platform is Quboz, which is fantastic as a music enthusiast, and I love it, but it’s overkill for most people. Back in the gatefold vinyl days how many people were saying “oh wow my favorite recording engineer worked on this?” Virtually nobody is likely the answer. I think his real problem is most people aren’t as in ti music as he is, have bad taste, are bland, and content with a normie life full of normie songs and normie shows. But that’s a big market.
- ddingus 3y ago
  Lol, almost nobody. But I did, along with a few very nerdy music friends. Nobody else even knew or cared.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Engineers? Probably only a few anoraks cared. But people were definitely paying attention to who produced the album. After all, that is why Nirvana wanted to work with Steve Albini, who had produced the Pixies. It is why music fora often feature debates on whether a particular producer improved a particular album, or ruined it. Similarly, if an album had string arrangements, or extra horns or percussion, and the performers were listed in the album art, ordinary listeners did follow up on that and seek out those performers’ own recordings.
omgmajk 3y ago
His Spotify boredom theory doesn't match my experience at all, maybe because I am a person who actually seeks out music that I know and want and have huge playlists that gets regularly added to manually. It works fine for me, has been working fine for a long time. If there was a better solution out there I would use that instead.
4oo4 3y ago
This articulates really well all the things I don't like about Spotify. I've always been someone that reads liner notes and researches a band I like and I really hate when I hear a cool song and want to listen to the rest of the album or more from the same band but Spotify forces me into some bland anonymous algorithmic playlist. I'm happy for the algorithm to show me things but I want to actually know what I'm listening to and listen to a whole album at a time. What's even more frustrating is that Plexamp is stealing all of Spotify's design cues and has similar algorithmic playlist creation. I do get more control over sticking with the same band but it doesn't always respect this setting and it still tries to give me anonymous playlists I didn't ask for. It is my library and I have a decent familiarity with what's in it, but I use Plexamp specifically to avoid all the things I hate with Spotify instead of just a private Spotify. I never thought about Spotify's search feature being shitty on purpose but it makes perfect sense. Despite all this and how terribly it treats artists I still pay for premium because of peer pressure, so I can share Spotify links with friends and play Music League. Every time I've tried to explain my reasons for barely using Spotify to them I always sound like an entitled crazy person. I just hope something better replaces it in the near future, since they will never be profitable, but I'm not optimistic.
- noduerme 3y ago
  I don't think it's "entitled" at all to expect these platforms to deliver the experience they say they're selling. Getting deeper into an artist's work is and always will be a fundamental aspect of appreciating any kind of music. Insofar as that goes against their business model, they're just a new form of "muzak". I refuse to subscribe to any of them. I still find new music by listening to college radio. I'll buy CDs or records or download MP3s, but I won't let anyone control my collection. Maybe people who came of age in the streaming world don't even know what they're missing, which is sad. But on the other hand, the vast majority of people have never really cared about music. That's why the top 40 has pretty much always been milquetoast trash, all the way back.
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  The original A[[;e music was very much centered around artist and particularly albums. And people hated it. Now it's just bland, but at least it let's you browse to an album from the current song, and it does have a little blurb for most artists.
smarkov 3y ago
Sure, Spotify's interface can be bad. It's unintuitive at places, wildly inconsistent in its features between platforms and it feels like it takes forever for any new meaningful things to be added to it. However... > It starts with creating an exciting music interface that celebrates artistry and creativity. It's a music player. You play/pause and scrub or go next, how are you supposed to make that more exciting? I don't want unnecessary visuals or music lore on my screen, I want a music player. And so do most other people who put music on, minimize the app and do something else.
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  albums weren't sold in blank sleeves. Lot's of stuff around the album was there to make it more exiting. Album design, liner notes, and even record stores are all part of a past "exciting" music listening experience, that author argues Spotify do not want to bring to their users.
Snild 3y ago
> you’re like the person at the all-you-can-eat buffet who goes back for a third helping. They make the most money from indifferent, lukewarm fans I don't think this is correct. Spotify doesn't pay a fixed rate per stream. Instead, they reserve some part of revenue for artist compensation, and then divide that based on the amount of streams and artist- or label-specific deals. Straight from the horse's mouth: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/ > We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders. To calculate net revenue, we subtract the money we collect but don’t get to keep. This includes payments for things like taxes, credit card processing fees, and billing, along with some other things like sales commissions. From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare. > We calculate streamshare by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder. > Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors. Though I guess that means that lukewarm users with few streams cause higher per-stream rates, which might be indirectly beneficial to Spotify. That's not to say that the system is completely fair. Presumably, bigger artists and labels get preferential treatment in share calculations. Also, if I listen to only Ben Prunty's FTL soundtrack for a month, he doesn't get all the net revenue from my subscription; those streams are diluted in the global stream counts.
jrm4 3y ago
"There is a fix for this." There really isn't, not an easy or simple one, anyway. People across the board are forgetting the fundamentals. You USED to need studios and distributors because it actually did used to cost significant money to make a movie or show (film and cameras etc) , or to record and distribute an album (putting songs on plastic artifacts.) NONE OF THIS IS TRUE TODAY. You literally can make a movie or show or song or album FOR FREE and have it go everywhere FOR FREE. This is the internet. That's what it does.
overvale 3y ago
This article is weak for so many reasons (mentioned my others), but I'll just point out this nonsense: > Netflix could buy 10 top quality screenplays per year with the cash they’ll spend on that one job [$900k]. They must have big plans for AI. Most films Netflix makes have a budget of over $5M. According to the WGA agreement with the studios writers get paid a MINIMUM of $175k for those films. Which means you could buy 5 of the cheapest screenplays on the market for $900k. But if you think paying WGA minimums will get you top quality scripts you're in for a surprise. [ref]: https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/min20.pdf https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/min20.pdf
paradox242 3y ago
Spotify has had a terrible product from the very beginning, I couldn't be bothered to use even when it was free. I could not find half of the artists I was interested in, and of the other half they would only have one or two albums, usually something weird like a live album or remix album. Unless you are a fan of top 20 pop it's just a waste of time.

46 points by blueridge 3y ago

This would be a great time for one of big guys to write a big check to the BBC for full rights to their archives.

This article is weak sauce. All I hear everywhere is that AI will take over the world and yet somehow Netflix is "hellbent on replacing creative professionals with bots" because they want to hire some good AI talent for $900k a year. And then there's the end about music and the problem with Spotify losing money and generally sucking. He writes, "There is a fix for this. But it won’t be easy. It starts with creating an exciting music interface that celebrates artistry and creativity. If they do that, then it’s easy to boost the monthly rate." Sure. So Ted Gioia, if you have the vision, then work hard and do it.

guardiangod 3y ago

So my challenge to the writer is, why shouldn't the media companies pay $900k to hire AI gurus? If the companies think paying $900k to writers has a better return, they'd do it in a heartbeat, so why aren't they?

mannykannot 3y ago
FOMO+CYA. No-one thinks AI can substitute for writers now, and this posting does not suggest otherwise.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
It's a welfare position for some exec's cousin. Slap the AI buzzword in the title and it makes it sound like a plausibly serious job, so others buy in.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
My challenge is why is this relevant? We pay anesthesiologists a lot more than baristas, we pay lawyers more than teachers, we pay civil engineers more than accountants. It’s about labor markets and paying the price an individual will accept vs their other opportunities given their skill set and the market demand. I would note the writer vs ML product manager roles aren’t related. If you click through there’s nothing about generative AI or LLM or SD or anything related to content generation. Looks like run of the mill ML role, likely associated with recommendation engines or some other engagement generation role. N.b., I don’t think they would pay $900k for a writer unless the writer is some heavy hitter star power writer. Rather than a salary my understanding is these roles draw down royalties, which as a variable annuity can be worth far more or far less, but encompass a lot more risk. Also amongst the creative talent they often make the least afaik.
- kerkeslager 3y ago
  > My challenge is why is this relevant? We pay anesthesiologists a lot more than baristas, we pay lawyers more than teachers, we pay civil engineers more than accountants. It’s about labor markets and paying the price an individual will accept vs their other opportunities given their skill set and the market demand. Maybe it's relevant because it's yet another example showing that leaving wages up to the market isn't creating good results. There's no doubt in my mind that a society which paid teachers more than lawyers would be a better society than the one we have.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Who do you propose dictates wages by profession? We need far more teachers than lawyers and the skills required to, say, teach second graders, are not as advanced as those required to pass the bar exam. I’m all for public support of teachers, but it’s easy to say you don’t value a lawyer until you need one. Having fewer and worse lawyers means we will have worse laws and more injustice. To wit, public defenders make on average slightly less than a teacher. Given the quality of justice you can expect from a public defender, and the severe lack of them, is this a positive outcome? If you were accused of something falsely would you voluntarily use the public defender vs hiring the best you can afford?
jerf 3y ago
I see little evidence "quality of writing" is on their agenda at all at this point. I couldn't even list the movies responsible for billions in losses that had great music, acting, special effects, marketing, and everything else, and fell down only in their absolutely atrocious writing. It's a snarky thing to say, but I'm quite serious in my snark as well. It seems to me Hollywood holds writing quality in contempt. And I don't mean things that took a risk that failed to pay off. I mean things that you could take to a Writing 101 class after eight weeks and the students could savage based on what they were taught... and there's no excuse like "the authors understand the rules enough to transcend them", the writing is bad on the standard measures and also had no other redeeming values either. It's actually sort of weird that they see this as some sort of cost center to be managed. They already don't seem to care about it at all. From that point of view, using AI makes sense; they don't seem to care how bad the writing is, so why pay for it at all? Though it seems to me the effort put into AI would cover an awful lot of writing no matter how you slice it. That one $900K job won't be the only one. Will a team of super highly paid AI specialists absolutely be cheaper than actual writers? It would be super ironic to start an "AI writing startup" and then do what a lot of the AI startups have done behind the hood and hire humans to do the initial work. Why invest in risky tech? Just AI-wash the writing! Everybody wins!

deleted 3y ago

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skybrian 3y ago

Not a lot there, and there’s an assumption about what Spotify is supposed to be that doesn’t fit my experience. I don’t use it to find random new music. I search by artist or song name for something I discovered elsewhere (or I’m already familiar with) and make my own playlists. It seems to work fine as a cloud jukebox? The price increase is unwelcome, but when you get interested in a musician who made many albums, it’s a lot cheaper than buying them all.

morkalork 3y ago
As a single person, sure. But the price for a couple or family is still an absolute steal. Where I live the monthly price of the duo price is just under the cost of one meal at a down town food court for 1 person. Skip lunch once a month and in exchange not have to think about torrents or iTunes? For me and my spouse? Done with no debate at all.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
It doesn’t fit your experience because you are one of those people who are truly passionate about music, precisely as Gioia was talking about. But from what I have been seeing from listeners both young and old that I am acquainted with, people are often just putting their trust in the algorithm to play them something nice as a background music.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
> it’s a lot cheaper than buying them all. And thus the artists get screwed. Let's face it, the real reason Spotify is popular is because folks see music as a commodity and fairly compensating artists as unaffordable. And so Spotify lives on despite its many many flaws.
- spamizbad 3y ago
  > And so Spotify lives on despite its many many flaws Spotify is going down the same path as the ride sharing companies: burning private and public monies to subsidize consumer habits, then jacking prices up to maintain cashflow. I fully expect Spotify pricing to increase fairly regularly at this point forward, especially if they continue to grow their subscriber base despite higher prices. The problem is, the hole is so deep your non-major label artist won't be in a good position to negotiate a better deal - the lion's share will go to major labels licensing their massive catalogue to Spotify.

prepend 3y ago

> But almost at that same moment, Netflix has listed a $900,000 job opening for an AI guru. That doesn’t feel like a balanced approach to me. I think this is a dishonest comparison. This is a very high end position, one of the best in the world. It would be like saying “Netflix is paying the Rock $50M for a movie, so actors definitely have the upper hand.” There’s way fewer actors and writers than programmers so it’s hard to compare, but I don’t think cherry picking salaries and then generalizing very useful (for more than blog views).

Rebelgecko 3y ago
On top of that, the listing said the salary was $300k-$900k. I would bet money that the actual person who gets hired will not be making $900k right off the bat.
zitterbewegung 3y ago
The job description seems to imply that you aren’t replacing screenwriters but to augment the decision making on what to green light anyways .

Aurornis 3y ago

The article claims Netflix is hiring AI positions to "replace creative professionals": > It looks like they’re hellbent on replacing creative professionals with bots, and the faster the better. The linked AI job listing doesn't say that at all. You can find the listing here: https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/278437235 https://jobs.netflix.com/jobs/278437235 It says: > Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence is powering innovation, from personalization for members, to optimizing our payment processing and other revenue-focused initiatives. The author has either ignored the facts or imposed their own ideas on to the situation. This take breaks down as soon as you check any of the facts.

marcinzm 3y ago
The article they link to about the job says as much so I'd say the author is very much trying to drive a narrative to push an agenda even if one doesn't exist.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
"other revenue-focused initiatives" could mean literally anything. I'd say the author is being necessarily and reasonably cynical given what we've seen in just the past year (for example, the SAG and WGA aren't striking for nothing).

SoftTalker 3y ago

I hope there will be a requirement to identify "AI" in the writing credits. I would not want to subsidize any movies that were written by an AI. The human writers are pretty bad, but at least they are people and deserve to earn a living.

marcinzm 3y ago
Define AI.
- pizzafeelsright 3y ago
  Spellcheck Boggle.
- redwall_hp 3y ago
  "Text was generated by a computer using a means more complex than a trie-traversing spell check algorithm." Grammarly can get lost too. Hell, let's exclude things that were written by a committee's input instead of 1-2 professional writers.

marcinzm 3y ago

> But almost at that same moment, Netflix has listed a $900,000 job opening for an AI guru. That doesn’t feel like a balanced approach to me. They listed a $900k position for someone who does machine learning platform planning. Every single recommendation you see on Netflix is powered by machine learning and has for a long long time. It is the core of their business and impacts every single user interaction with the product. And as the linked article itself notes the job isn't about content generation. Tying this into the AI hype is really disingenuous. edit: And looking at level.fyi Netflix was paying the same last year for ML talent.

skytrue 3y ago
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s been driving me crazy that there’s all these sensationalist articles using that as the “smoking gun”, implying that Netflix specifically wants an AI product manager to produce television shows. As somebody who has worked to create an AI-generated show, and who is also a PM at a big tech company that is using LLMs for non-creative purposes, I can tell you that the “PM” work I do with these LLMs is vastly different than the creative work I do with them. It’s an entirely different frame and discipline. I’d start to be concerned once we see job listings that explicitly look for creators, with technical backgrounds in generative AI. The creator/creative talent part comes first before everything else.
- marcinzm 3y ago
  Yeah, Netflix pays this much not because it will replace a near minimum wage writer but because optimizing their advertising tier by 1% will pay back more than the PMs salary every 30 days.
ChatGTP 3y ago
It would be fun is your feed could e recommended by other humans and or friends. I find my Netflix feed to be complete trash so some other approach would be nice.
Jasper_ 3y ago
> Every single recommendation you see on Netflix is powered by machine learning and has for a long long time. Huh, I would have thought it was some guy sitting down once a month and picking 5 random things that don't match any of my preferences based on what I get.

jrockway 3y ago

People outside of tech have really latched onto that $900k figure, but there are two things going on: 1) They are legally required to list the pay range for anyone they could possibly hire. If they are hiring a PM intern in Chicago, they will not be making $900k. If they are hiring a Google Fellow away from Google in San Francisco, then the $900k might be on the table. 2) Yeah, it's tech. No doubt there is someone at Netflix who runs their batch job scheduling system or some inane detail that nobody outside of tech even knows exists that makes $900k, and nobody freaks out about that. ("Efficient job scheduling is is going to kill CPU designers! Won't someone please think of their children!") It's more common than people outside of FAANG think. When I was a lowly Senior Software Engineer at Google over 5 years ago, my W2 comp was around $300k. Are there some people that are 3x more productive than me 5 years ago? It is a certainty. Money well spent if you find them!

lokar 3y ago
You won’t get a google fellow for 900k
- jrockway 3y ago
  Yeah, that's a great point. Truly a case of "I've forgotten how to count that low."

Animats 3y ago

Who listens to music any more? That is, focuses primarily on the music, while not doing anything else. Most "listening" today is timepass while driving, or walking around wearing iDweebs. Sure, there are the people who read The Absolute Sound and buy overpriced audio cables. They're under 1% of the customer base, and they mostly listen to classical, anyway. If you want blah background music, I recommend Radio Coast.[1] This is an amusing exercise in copyright avoidance. Seeburg, the jukebox maker (1900 or so to 1979, bankrupt), had a side business in background music. To avoid paying royalties to record companies, they had their own orchestra and recording studio in Chicago. They'd license the underlying song, which is a compulsory license with a statutory rate. Then Seeburg made their own phonograph records, running at a nonstandard speed, with a nonstandard groove width, and a nonstandard hole size, to be played on a special Seeburg 1000 player. The player played a big stack of records over and over; it wasn't random access, like a jukebox. The records were not copyrighted, because that required a filing back when they were doing this. So someone got one of these obsolete machines, refurbished it, and collected enough of the special records to set up a free streaming service. [1] https://radiocoastcom.godaddysites.com/ https://radiocoastcom.godaddysites.com/

unmole 3y ago
> timepass Completely off topic but was this a typo or has this expression now gained currency outside the subcontinent?
- Animats 3y ago
  It wasn't a typo.
jrm4 3y ago
I definitely do. And this absolutely furthers your point because I hate Spotify and all streaming services for this purpose. It's just not a thing like streaming tv. I need to know I have the song forever, I need to know that I will not be interrupted. Meaning, I have a separate mp3 player. For the car, the USB drive is EASILY the best thing that ever happened. Youtube and friends on social media is more than enough for discovery. As for acquiring, well, don't ask don't tell?

deleted 3y ago

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TX81Z 3y ago

It seems his perfect music platform is Quboz, which is fantastic as a music enthusiast, and I love it, but it’s overkill for most people. Back in the gatefold vinyl days how many people were saying “oh wow my favorite recording engineer worked on this?” Virtually nobody is likely the answer. I think his real problem is most people aren’t as in ti music as he is, have bad taste, are bland, and content with a normie life full of normie songs and normie shows. But that’s a big market.

ddingus 3y ago
Lol, almost nobody. But I did, along with a few very nerdy music friends. Nobody else even knew or cared.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Engineers? Probably only a few anoraks cared. But people were definitely paying attention to who produced the album. After all, that is why Nirvana wanted to work with Steve Albini, who had produced the Pixies. It is why music fora often feature debates on whether a particular producer improved a particular album, or ruined it. Similarly, if an album had string arrangements, or extra horns or percussion, and the performers were listed in the album art, ordinary listeners did follow up on that and seek out those performers’ own recordings.

omgmajk 3y ago

His Spotify boredom theory doesn't match my experience at all, maybe because I am a person who actually seeks out music that I know and want and have huge playlists that gets regularly added to manually. It works fine for me, has been working fine for a long time. If there was a better solution out there I would use that instead.

4oo4 3y ago

This articulates really well all the things I don't like about Spotify. I've always been someone that reads liner notes and researches a band I like and I really hate when I hear a cool song and want to listen to the rest of the album or more from the same band but Spotify forces me into some bland anonymous algorithmic playlist. I'm happy for the algorithm to show me things but I want to actually know what I'm listening to and listen to a whole album at a time. What's even more frustrating is that Plexamp is stealing all of Spotify's design cues and has similar algorithmic playlist creation. I do get more control over sticking with the same band but it doesn't always respect this setting and it still tries to give me anonymous playlists I didn't ask for. It is my library and I have a decent familiarity with what's in it, but I use Plexamp specifically to avoid all the things I hate with Spotify instead of just a private Spotify. I never thought about Spotify's search feature being shitty on purpose but it makes perfect sense. Despite all this and how terribly it treats artists I still pay for premium because of peer pressure, so I can share Spotify links with friends and play Music League. Every time I've tried to explain my reasons for barely using Spotify to them I always sound like an entitled crazy person. I just hope something better replaces it in the near future, since they will never be profitable, but I'm not optimistic.

noduerme 3y ago
I don't think it's "entitled" at all to expect these platforms to deliver the experience they say they're selling. Getting deeper into an artist's work is and always will be a fundamental aspect of appreciating any kind of music. Insofar as that goes against their business model, they're just a new form of "muzak". I refuse to subscribe to any of them. I still find new music by listening to college radio. I'll buy CDs or records or download MP3s, but I won't let anyone control my collection. Maybe people who came of age in the streaming world don't even know what they're missing, which is sad. But on the other hand, the vast majority of people have never really cared about music. That's why the top 40 has pretty much always been milquetoast trash, all the way back.
wodenokoto 3y ago
The original A[[;e music was very much centered around artist and particularly albums. And people hated it. Now it's just bland, but at least it let's you browse to an album from the current song, and it does have a little blurb for most artists.

smarkov 3y ago

Sure, Spotify's interface can be bad. It's unintuitive at places, wildly inconsistent in its features between platforms and it feels like it takes forever for any new meaningful things to be added to it. However... > It starts with creating an exciting music interface that celebrates artistry and creativity. It's a music player. You play/pause and scrub or go next, how are you supposed to make that more exciting? I don't want unnecessary visuals or music lore on my screen, I want a music player. And so do most other people who put music on, minimize the app and do something else.

wodenokoto 3y ago
albums weren't sold in blank sleeves. Lot's of stuff around the album was there to make it more exiting. Album design, liner notes, and even record stores are all part of a past "exciting" music listening experience, that author argues Spotify do not want to bring to their users.

Snild 3y ago

> you’re like the person at the all-you-can-eat buffet who goes back for a third helping. They make the most money from indifferent, lukewarm fans I don't think this is correct. Spotify doesn't pay a fixed rate per stream. Instead, they reserve some part of revenue for artist compensation, and then divide that based on the amount of streams and artist- or label-specific deals. Straight from the horse's mouth: https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/ https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/ > We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders. To calculate net revenue, we subtract the money we collect but don’t get to keep. This includes payments for things like taxes, credit card processing fees, and billing, along with some other things like sales commissions. From there, the rightsholder’s share of net revenue is determined by streamshare. > We calculate streamshare by tallying the total number of streams in a given month and determining what proportion of those streams were people listening to music owned or controlled by a particular rightsholder. > Contrary to what you might have heard, Spotify does not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors. Though I guess that means that lukewarm users with few streams cause higher per-stream rates, which might be indirectly beneficial to Spotify. That's not to say that the system is completely fair. Presumably, bigger artists and labels get preferential treatment in share calculations. Also, if I listen to only Ben Prunty's FTL soundtrack for a month, he doesn't get all the net revenue from my subscription; those streams are diluted in the global stream counts.

jrm4 3y ago

"There is a fix for this." There really isn't, not an easy or simple one, anyway. People across the board are forgetting the fundamentals. You USED to need studios and distributors because it actually did used to cost significant money to make a movie or show (film and cameras etc) , or to record and distribute an album (putting songs on plastic artifacts.) NONE OF THIS IS TRUE TODAY. You literally can make a movie or show or song or album FOR FREE and have it go everywhere FOR FREE. This is the internet. That's what it does.

overvale 3y ago

This article is weak for so many reasons (mentioned my others), but I'll just point out this nonsense: > Netflix could buy 10 top quality screenplays per year with the cash they’ll spend on that one job [$900k]. They must have big plans for AI. Most films Netflix makes have a budget of over $5M. According to the WGA agreement with the studios writers get paid a MINIMUM of $175k for those films. Which means you could buy 5 of the cheapest screenplays on the market for $900k. But if you think paying WGA minimums will get you top quality scripts you're in for a surprise. [ref]: https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/min20.pdf https://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/contracts/min20.pdf

paradox242 3y ago

Spotify has had a terrible product from the very beginning, I couldn't be bothered to use even when it was free. I could not find half of the artists I was interested in, and of the other half they would only have one or two albums, usually something weird like a live album or remix album. Unless you are a fan of top 20 pop it's just a waste of time.