Author: Edouard Chazal

$2 Billion and Counting

Daniel Ek, Founder and CEO of Spotify, on Taylor Swift, revenues and the myths about the streaming industry.

He properly nailed it.

It’s not about Spotify and others not paying artists fairly, it’s about fans not willing to pay and play it the old way.
$2 billion, not a bad number.

In the long run how much is worth your favorite CD or your one-time iTunes purchase to the artist compared to decades of playbacks on that same album ?
I betcha my Led Zeppelin IV would be platinum-plated if Spotify existed at that time.

Why link free and paid? Because the hardest thing about selling a music subscription is that most of our competition comes from the tons of free music available just about everywhere. Today, people listen to music in a wide variety of ways, but by far the three most popular ways are radio, YouTube, and piracy – all free. Here’s the overwhelming, undeniable, inescapable bottom line: the vast majority of music listening is unpaid. If we want to drive people to pay for music, we have to compete with free to get their attention in the first place.

→ Spotify

Why the Chess Computer Deep Blue Played Like a Human

What Kasparov might have sensed when he played Deep Blue is something that appeared like that creative randomness, which he took to be a “human” intuition of danger. Deep Blue programmer Feng-Hsiung Hsu writes in his book Behind Deep Blue that during the match, outside analysts were divided over a mysterious move made by the program, thinking it either weak or obliquely strategic. Eventually, the programmers discovered that the move was simply the result of a bug that had caused the computer not to choose what it had actually calculated to be the best move—something that could have appeared as random play. The bug wasn’t fixed until after game four, long after Kasparov’s spirit had been broken.

→ Nautilus

San Francisco Is Smarter Than You Are

A good environment and a greener living is like the energy to innovate.

If people are to cities as neurons are to brains, and cities (unlike brains) do not have any known limit to their size, then gigantic cities of the future might produce innovations on a scale that wouldn’t be possible for the cities of today. Faced with pollution, disease, and scarcity, should we be looking to creative environments rather than to individual innovators?

→ Nautilus

Fast Traders Are Getting Data From SEC Seconds Early

The SEC uses Tradeworx datas to analyze the market and causes of flashcrashes, while high-frequency traders get a prime access to the SEC’s datas to place bets. Fair trade.

Hedge funds and other rapid-fire investors can get access to market-moving documents ahead of other users of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s system for distributing company filings, giving them a potential edge on the rest of the market.

→ WSJ