Frank Hecker

I recently contributed to a (ultimately successful) Kickstarter campaign for a new music service, Mirlo. I've also been reading off and on articles on the furialog blog, written by Glenn McDonald, who used to work at Spotify before he was laid off, and who (among other things) created the Every Noise at Once site mapping musical genres. McDonald’s latest post, “10 aspirational rules for the moral operation of a music service,” is particularly relevant to Mirlo and other would-be alternatives to Bandcamp, Spotify, etc.

You can read the full list yourself, but I was particularly struck by #3, “The feature goal is to connect individuals to communities. Music is a social energy.” This echoes things the folks in 65daysofstatic have been saying to the effect that music is always and everywhere a community phenomenon, in contrast to the view of music as “content” that LLMs can generate as well or better than people. It also reminds me of McDonald’s own comments that “[musical] genres are communities” that cannot be adequately captured by machine learning algorithms looking at sonic similarities.

McDonald has a book coming out later this month, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. It looks interesting; I’ve preordered it.

Recently I stumbled across a blog post by Julian Gough. His post is both long and heartfelt, but the bare facts are follows:

Upon being solicited by Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson, Gough agreed to write a text — the End Poem — to be displayed to players who beat the game in survival mode. After much back and forth, Persson’s company Mojang paid Gough GBP 20,000 for his work, but never got a formal copyright assignment, Gough having rejected the proposed contract as being too one-sided and not respecting his role as the writer.

Before the acquisition of Mojang by Microsoft was announced, Mojang executives again approached Gough to try to get him to sign a formal contract, but he again refused. Eventually after much agonizing — and some resentment of the financial rewards realized by Persson and others at Mojang — Gough decided to waive any rights he had with respect to the End Poem and dedicate it to the public domain.

There is much in this saga that touches on the topic of art vs. business; at its core it is a story of someone who thought he was an artist creating art trying — and failing — to communicate with people who thought they were businesspeople creating a product. But that topic is too big for me to discuss right now; instead I’ll focus on the reaction to Gough’s story, and then on the poem itself.