Means of Creation

Li Jin
Means of Creation

Work is changing. The old structures that dominated the 20th century are gradually being replaced by platforms and cultures that have grown up on the internet that aim to help people do what they love for a living. Li and Nathan unpack this new passion economy in a weekly conversation with guests at the forefront of this change.

  1. 30/06/2023

    Documenting the Creator Economy with Avi Gandhi

    Over the past year, several platforms have revised their agreements with creators. Twitch slashed its streamers’ revenue share from 70% to 50%. Substack canceled creator health-insurance stipends while lowering guaranteed payment amounts. Meta got rid of its creator bonus program for Reels altogether. Chronicling it all is Avi Gandhi. A longtime digital media talent agent and former head of creator partnerships at Patreon, Avi now consults for companies that want to form lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with creators. He also writes his own newsletter, “Creator Logic,” about how the top names in the industry choose platforms, organize their operations, and maximize monetization. In this episode, we talk about what platforms need to understand about how creators make decisions, what Silicon Valley gets wrong when investing in creator platforms and tools, and how creators should protect themselves in a shifting platform landscape. (00:00) Episode Preview (02:09) Avi's background in the creator economy: WME, Wheelhouse, and Patreon (06:42) The knowledge vacuum around creators and their stacks (09:58) The path forward for the creator economy (18:32) Building for creators: opportunities and innovations (23:47) Building a creator partnerships function (35:23) Can a creator middle class ever exist? (44:54) Tensions between creators and existing platforms (47:14) Creator economics and audiences (57:49) AI creators vs. human creators (61:45) Avi's recommended resources

    1 h 5 min
  2. 31/05/2023

    AI music with Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Jesse Walden

    Last month, in April 2023, a song that used the AI-generated voices of Drake and The Weeknd went wildly viral across social media before being taken down from streaming services for breaching copyright. Shortly after, Grimes took a more permissive approach, launching a platform to help fans create derivative music using her AI voice model, called Elf.Tech.  In the midst of these developments in AI music, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst stand out as veterans who have have been on the forefront of the intersection of music, community, technology, and AI for many years. In 2021, they released a DAO-governed AI voice twin of Holly’s, called Holly+, and their more recent project, Spawning, offers tools for creators to manage their AI identities. In this conversation, we’re also joined by Jesse Walden, who originally got his start in crypto through music, by being a music manager before co-founding Mediachain, a startup which sought to attribute every piece of media on the internet using blockchains. We weave through the economics of AI music and derivative creation, the impact AI will have on the distribution of creator success, how hyper-personalization maps to listener behavior, industry regulation, impacts for record labels, and more. Jesse and Li are cofounders and General Partners at Variant, an early-stage web3 venture firm. Learn more at https://variant.fund/ Links: https://spawning.ai/https://holly.plus/ Timestamps: • (00:00) Episode preview • (02:27) Spawning a baby and a startup • (04:07) Holly+ & AI-driven content creation • (07:02) Community participation & creation using Holly+ • (11:16) Grimes & the economics of derivative works • (17:32) Crypto in the evolution of AI music • (21:03) Jesse Walden’s journey from music to crypto • (25:41) How AI impacts the power law of music success • (36:53) Music consumption modes: passive vs. active • (39:47) Hyper-personalization of music  • (47:45) Updates on Spawning: AI tools for artists • (50:19) AI, data, and creator consent • (53:14) Regulation & adaptation for record labels • (58:59) Worldcoin, voice models, and digital identity • (01:03:31) Prediction for the future of music: what will stay the same?

    1 h 13 min
  3. 15/02/2022

    Is Crypto *Actually* Destroying the Planet?

    In this second episode of our new web3 explainer series we ask an important, and hard to answer question: is crypto *actually* destroying the planet? Over the last year, crypto has witnessed mainstream adoption, with billions of dollars of value exchanged across different blockchains. But this shift has created a pressing problem: the current process of mining blocks and validating decentralized networks is extremely energy intensive. This means that running popular networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum has a massive carbon footprint. For instance, a single transaction on the Ethereum blockchain is equivalent to the power consumption of an average US household over 7.86 days. Researchers at Cambridge University have estimated that the global mining of Bitcoin uses more electricity than entire countries—countries the size of Argentina, Sweden, or Pakistan. An increasing number of artists, creators, collectors, and environmentalists have voiced their concerns around crypto’s impact on our climate and the need to spur change. But is their concern well-founded? In this episode, we take a step back to fundamentally understand the problem. Is crypto actually destroying the planet? How is it doing so? And more importantly, what can we do about it? We're joined by Joseph Pallant, the founder of the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, which is aiming to “put the Paris Agreement on the blockchain.” Joseph has been operating in this space for multiple years—his work, insight, and advocacy makes him the perfect guest to unpack this divisive topic with refreshing nuance.

    39 min

Notes et avis

5
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13 notes

À propos

Work is changing. The old structures that dominated the 20th century are gradually being replaced by platforms and cultures that have grown up on the internet that aim to help people do what they love for a living. Li and Nathan unpack this new passion economy in a weekly conversation with guests at the forefront of this change.

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