“This scientific study of scientific bias would ignite a romance of the mind, one that spanned several decades and ended up transforming both psychology and economics. Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky went on to show that mistakes in human judgment are not exceptions but the rule, resulting from a host of mental shortcuts and distortions that cannot be avoided. We do not behave like “rational actors,” as economists once presumed; rather, we’re predictably misguided—subject to a “bounded rationality.” Tversky went on to win a MacArthur “genius” grant on the basis of their work. Kahneman would get a Nobel Prize.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Streaming Is Changing The Art Of Music
Streaming music services such as Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal are shifting not just how music is consumed, but increasingly how it is funded, created and marketed. The talk of the industry is increasingly about playlists and how labels and artists can seed their music into high-rotation mixes on streaming services to blend their new offerings with old favourites.
Seriously? Alt-Right Racist Leader Gets $250K Book Deal From Simon And Schuster
Milo Yiannopoulos has parlayed his ban from Twitter — and some controversial appearances on college campuses and cable TV shows — into a $250,000 book deal with Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, The Hollywood Reporter learned on Thursday.
The Church Of Efficiency Is Making Us Anxious
“The quest for increased personal productivity – for making the best possible use of your limited time – is a dominant motif of our age. And yet the truth is that more often than not, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay. The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have.”
Is Streaming Helping Musicians Be Artists Again?
“With streaming rather than downloads, access replaces ownership and the commitment is of time, not money. That’s still significant, but it doesn’t feel so irrevocable. Where downloads and playlists favored the lone song, streaming gives the artist and the album a fighting chance again. Anyone interested in a particular artist, from die-hard fans to novelty seekers, can listen to a whole album repeatedly — not just song samples, not just YouTube choices — and let subtler material sink in.”
Mapping Our Political Divide By The TV Shows We Watch
“When we looked at how many active Facebook users in a given ZIP code “liked” certain TV shows, we found that the 50 most-liked shows clustered into three groups with distinct geographic distributions. Together they reveal a national culture split among three regions: cities and their suburbs; rural areas; and what we’re calling the extended Black Belt — a swath that extends from the Mississippi River along the Eastern Seaboard up to Washington, but also including city centers and other places with large nonwhite populations.”
Midgette: Kennedy Center Honors Demonstrate Marginalization Of High Art
Anne Midgette: “My keenest experience of the Kennedy Center Honors this year had to do with the marginalization of the high arts. This is not usually my position: I have no problem celebrating the artistry of popular culture, placing Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” above the level of many works of contemporary art music or recognizing the quality of “The Wire” and other high-level made-for-television series. And I have been comfortable with the idea that in what is essentially a knockoff awards ceremony, the Kennedy Center should seek to honor the best of American art. But fully recognizing just how marginalized my field is, both before and during the ceremony, was sobering.”
Claim: Denver Loves Artists – But It’s Leaving Them Behind
“Denver has boomed over the past decade. The city is bigger, richer and more interesting than ever. Public- and private-sector investment is through the roof, and neglected neighborhoods are springing back to life. And in all of this, artists have been left behind.”
Are “Liberal Elite” Performers Missing The Point?
“The all-encompassing liberalism in popular culture might not be hurting the performers’ financial bottom lines (so far), but it’s certainly not doing anything to help their political causes, either. As we learned this election, we ignore whole segments of the population at our peril.”
Algorithm-Driven Art – How Netflix Is Changing The Way Artistic Decisions Are Being Made (Or Not)
How do you calculate the value of art? In the TV and movie business, given the size of budgets involved and the number of tickets that need to be sold, the commercial business calculation is paramount. A worthy artistic project won’t get very far if the potential audience calculation isn’t right.
Of the many ways Netflix is changing the TV and movie business, calculating audience behavior might be the most revolutionary. Netflix uses an algorithm to calculate how viewers choose what to watch, what they’re watching, when, and for how long they’re tuning in.
When determining how cost-efficient a program is, Netflix analyzes its share of viewing relative to its share of the cost budget, and other factors like impact on acquisition, total raw viewing hours, critical acclaim, and awards performance.
Of course, Netflix doesn’t release audience viewership data, so competitors can’t tell which Netflix projects are doing well and which aren’t, which in itself upends the popularity charts that typically power pop culture and guides producers and studios in which projects get made.
This article suggests that Netflix is also using its viewer algorithms in negotiating how much it will offer producers for projects, though Netflix denies the practice:
Like other entertainment entities, it (Netflix) looks at things like the talent attached to a project and the audience for a particular genre to estimate how much a film or show might be viewed compared to its cost. Every project, Netflix said, is assessed differently.
But why, really? Any studio makes a series of calculations when deciding on what it will buy. Netflix, by virtue of the granular way in which it can chart audience behavior, undoubtedly has the data to be able to algorithmatize the process to its benefit. What does it say that Netflix feels the need to deny it about how we think about the artistic process?