Arch

02022-07-14 | Art, Music, Reading

Ai Weiwei unveils cage-like Arch installation in Stockholm:

Appearing to break through the steel bars that surround them, these characters represent the “free passage of all populations, and appealing for a world without borders,” said creative foundation Brilliant Minds, which organized the installation.


This is a beautiful sculpture by Ai Weiwei. The foundation Brilliant Minds was created by the man who became unfathomably rich by founding first Pirate Bay and later Spotify. Someone should put a sticker on the Arch that says paid for by musicians everywhere.

I am reading Ai’s book “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows”. For me the book became really interesting after he arrived in New York, in February of 1981.

There were tens of thousands of artists in New York, but only a few dozen who were making money. For a certain subset, art had become a
target of speculation and just part of the race to find the next new thing.
Art had long been a consumption commodity, a decoration catering to the
tastes of the rich, and under commercial pressures it was bound
degenerate. As artworks rise in monetary value, their spiritual dimension
declines, and art is reduced to little more than an investment asset, a
financial product.

and

Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover. If they were not going to behanging on someone else’s wall, they didn’t count as anything at all.

I highly recommend the book.

Spotify Fail

02011-09-27 | Uncategorized

Can you sign up for Spotify without Facebook?
There seems to be nowhere on Spotify’s website that lets you sign up for Spotify without a Facebook account. The sign up links ask to to log in to Facebook or create a new Facebook account.

Is there a hidden link anywhere on the website that lets you sign up without linking it to a Facebook account?

You can read many ineresting comments here.

As an early adopter I was able to get a Premium account before Spotify put all of their chips on Facebook this week, but I smell a rat. Having done this I don’t feel I can trust them anymore. It’s an epic fail.

Spotify Premium is about $120/year. That equals iCloud at $25/year PLUS the purchase of about 10 CDs. And CDs still sound quite a bit better than Spotify.

I cancelled my account this morning.

Contrast

02009-05-30 | Internet, Music

From the BBC:

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Spotify streams for music lovers
Music streaming service Spotify is only a few months old but it has already attracted much attention from music lovers.

The site allows its members to create and listen to heir own playlists of songs streamed to them online.

The same peer-to-peer technology as found in file-sharing is used to deliver near-CD quality and tracks that playback almost instantly.

The service is free for listeners willing to hear audio and on-screen adverts (which appear between roughly every five songs), although users can otherwise pay £10 per month for a premium service which enables them to listen to songs without adverts.

And from guitarist Robert Fripp:

Robert Fripp’s Diary for Thursday, 21st May 2009
The industry-word is that Spotify currently has little advertising to support it & few punters are signing up for the subscription service. In my view, Spotify provides an exemplary model of how the new, emerging music industry of digital provision works against the interests of music’s originators & generators.