Space disco, Kate Bush, and more: the ASI's best of 2014

Ben:

Song: #####.1 by #####

Album: It's Album Time by Todd Terje

Musician: The Pizza Underground

Movie: Grand Budapest Hotel, but I'm ashamed to say I only saw five

Book: Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Restaurant: Rex and Mariano, Soho (runner up The Manor, Clapham)

Favourite article: I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, by Scott Alexander

Favourite moment: #Gamergate

Favourite person: Scottish highlander on BBC Question Time

Kate:

Song: Wild Child by Kenny Chesney, with Grace Potter

Album: 1989 by Taylor Swift

Musician: Jason Aldean (for continuing his tradition of writing songs about trucks)

Movie: Magic in the Moonlight

Book: Goodbye, Mr Chips by James Hilton (1939)

Article: Bring Back the Girls - Quietly by Peggy Noonan (WSJ)

Political moment: #Bridgegate

Person: Senator-elect Cory Gardner, CO (I have now forgiven Colorado for their nightmare decision in 2012. Ohio, on the other hand, I am still not speaking to)

Charlotte:

Song: minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix] by Aphex Twin (because it only took 13 years to come out proper)

Album: Rivers of the Red Planet by Max Graef (jazz/hip-hop/house, good background music)

Musician: Kate Bush (the year I got round to listening to her albums)

Movie: Under the Skin (amazingly shot)

Book: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind (one of the few I actually read)

Restaurant: Bone Daddies, Soho (who can't love a huge bowl of pig fat & garlic)

Article: The Socialist Origins of Big Data - The New Yorker (on Chile's project Cybersyn)

Political Moment: The world thinking Kim Jung Il's public absence was because he broke both his ankles because he ate so much Emmenthal (because obviously)

Person: Shia LaBeouf (for everything he's given us)

Sophie:

Single: Shake It Off by Taylor Swift (I do not enjoy this song but LOVE watching Charity, one of my best friends and Swift’s greatest fan, singing it)

Album: Artpop by Lady Gaga (the pop genius’s works are not only the epitome of freedom of expression and individualism but Gaga demonstrates the natural force with which the world sucks up anything walking into a gaping hole in the market)

Musician: Kate Bush (my eyes opened to her brilliance and creations this year by Sam, her sounds and voice open creative avenues in my mind)

Movie: La Grand Bellezza (released 2013 but watched this year, you MUST see this, it’s an indulgent party for the senses to devour)

Book: The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (only read this year though it was released in 2010)

Restaurant: Le Relais de Venise, Mansion House (holds fond memories of both an amazing steak and my first time dining with the ASI team)

Political moment: remaining a United Kingdom (were endless obscure and hilarious ones in 2014, though building up to the referendum for two years and the elation experienced at the result makes this undoubtably number 1)

Person: Malala Yousafzai (the 17-year-old global role model is courageous, ambitious and hard-working, existing to fight for others’ education—I was reduced to tears of inspiration when she spoke at my university)

Nick:

Song: Fancy by Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX (albeit for entirely non-I-G-G-Y related reasons)

Album: Kenny Dennis III by Serengeti (see No Beginner, Off/On)

Musician: Jonwayne (partly for being the neckbeardiest rapper/producer going - see Andrew, Be Honest)

Movie: Locke (of the four or so I watched)

Book: Time's Arrow by Martin Amis (1991) or The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) by Matthew Young (honourable mentions to We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1921) and Girl, 20 by Kingsley Amis (1971))

Restaurant: Jam Jar, Jesmond, Newcastle, if only for their Cow vs. Pig burger

Article: ‘Tories should turn their backs on Clacton’ and ‘Voters, not the politicians, are out of touch’ by Matthew Parris, King of trolls (Times)

Political moment: The UKIP defections and the resulting betting, which netted me a sum of no less than £10

Person: For me, 2014 was the year of the unimullet (s/o r/YoutubeHaiku)

Sam:

Song: Attachment by Hannah Diamond (My top 50 singles of the year are here, Youtube playlist link here)

Album: It's Album Time by Todd Terje (Thanks Ben for introducing me. I also enjoyed FKA Twigs's album LP1 and got into Susanne Sundfor in a big way this year)

Musician: AG Cook / the PC Music grouping in general

Movie: Interstellar (but I only saw about 5 films all year)

Book: Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies (Worth it for the chapter on the Kingdom of Dumbarton Rock alone. Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, on the evolutionary biology of sex, was a close runner-up)

Restaurant: Santana Grill (a burrito stand on Strutton Ground near the office—just delicious; I also ate at KFC at lot)

Article: An open letter to open-minded progressives, by Mencius Moldbug (I disagree with much of Moldbug's work, but I can't think of a more interesting contemporary political thinker)

Podcast: Serial

Political moment: Shinzo Abe storming to victory in Japan (also for his amazingly awkward handshake with Xi Jinping)

Person: Richard Dawkins (boring as an atheist, brilliant as Social Justice Warrior-bait)

Philip:

Song: Turn Down for What by DJ Snake and Lil Jon

Album: Syro by Aphex Twin

Musician: Matador

Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy

Book: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett

Restaurant: Gymkhana, Mayfair

Article / blogpost: How Farming Almost Destroyed Ancient Human Civilization by Annalee Newitz

Political moment: The landing of the Rosetta spacecraft's Philae probe on Comet 67P

Person: David Sinclair (for his work on lifespan extension)

Don't be so swift to criticise streaming

The big news in the entertainment world this week is that Taylor Swift was never (ever, ever) really that much of a fan of Spotify, and as her album 1989 takes worldwide charts by storm, she’s taken her entire back catalogue off the music streaming service. She explains :

...everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I'm not willing to contribute my life's work to an experiment that I don't feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.

If Spotify is a ‘grand experiment’, it’s one with everyone’s attention. Its ‘freemium’ model yields 50m active users and 12.5m paid up subscribers, and Spotify royalties have recently overtaken iTunes download earnings in Europe. Other companies want in, too. Apple have recently acquired Beats in an move to host a streaming service of their own, whilst both SoundCloud and YouTube have announced plans for a premium subscription service. Streaming accounts for an ever-increasing proportion of music revenue, with consumers increasingly choosing access to a wide range of music over the ownership of specific albums or tracks.

The CEO of Spotify Daniel Ek has responded to Taylor’s commercial-cum-ethical decision, taking pains to cast Spotify as the enemy of piracy and champion of artists. It’s well worth a read, but what's interesting is the blame he levels at the wider music industry in response to Taylor’s claim that streaming fails to fairly compensate artists:

The music industry is changing – and we’re proud of our part in that change – but lots of problems that have plagued the industry since its inception continue to exist. As I said, we’ve already paid more than $2 billion in royalties to the music industry and if that money is not flowing to the creative community in a timely and transparent way, that’s a big problem.

Around 70% of Spotify’s revenue goes straight to the rights holders of the music they stream in the form of royalties, and these rights are invariably held by an artist’s record company. On average, record labels keep 46% of CD sale revenue, and 68% of download revenue. Creators receive around 9% and 8% of this revenue respectively. (Gowers Review, p.51)

At major labels at least, artists seem to receive a similar proportion of streaming royalties (and are allegedly victim to a few dirty legal tricks along the way). In addition to royalties, many labels demand advance minimum payments which can vastly exceed the actual royalties actually generated by plays, with no guarantee that artists will see any of this surplus. So whilst Spotify might pay out three to four thousand dollars for 500,000 streams, an artist might see less than 10% of that.

Of course, money isn’t really the issue for Taylor Swift, who can easily afford to take her music off of the streaming service; whilst her entire catalogue was on track to generate $6m in royalties this year, 1989 made around $12m in sales in its first week. For large artists, removing music from sites before a release or holding off streaming for a couple of months could make fantastic business sense.

But money is an issue for the majority of artists, and it's reasonable to critique what income they receive from streaming. Though some like Swift, David Byrne and Thom Yorke attack streaming for what they consider meagre payouts per play, they'd be better off focusing their attention not on the upstart ‘disrupter’, but the entrenched music industry which Spotify claims it is actively trying to save.

Spotify certainly has a challenge there. The size of the streaming industry is currently nowhere near big enough to compensate for the long-term decline in physical (and now digital) sales. And whilst it is growing rapidly, Spotify is yet to turn a profit in its 6 year history. This is largely a problem of scale, as the more users and the more plays the company attracts, the more it must pay out in royalties. Some analysts think it just needs more users to pay up. Others worry that the high proportion of their revenue forked over to rights holders makes them intrinsically unprofitable. In this scenario, streaming services might simply become loss leaders for larger companies like Apple and Google, or get taken over by the music labels themselves. In which case, perhaps Thom Yorke is right that streaming is the “last desperate fart of a dying corpse” after all.

But what part of the music industry is dying, and is it really worth saving? The entrenched record labels and collecting societies have long warned that technological advances, piracy and copyright infringement are destroying the livelihoods of creators. They expend significant time and resources lobbying for government protections like DRM and copyright extensions, multinational treaties like ACTA, and forcing ISPs to police their users' activities. Yet if you look past these vocal and influential legacy organisations, the music industry is actually flourishing. A study by Mike Masnick points out that the global value of the broader music industry has grown from $132bn to $168bn between 2005 and 2010. The number of new albums produced each year is rising rapidly, concert sales tripled over the past decade in the US and entertainment spending as a function of income has risen by 15%.

The music scene is evolving, and with the low costs of digital production and distribution becoming more competitive. There’s going to be some who lose out and see their old business models change. Certainly,  Spotify alone cannot revive label's revenue to the heyday of CD sales, and nor is it their responsibility to. But it is shortsighted to suggest à la Taylor Swift that to stream music is to consider it valueless. And if artists are concerned by the lack of revenue reaching them, the best place to start complaining is to their own labels. The growth of the music ecosystem in non-traditional areas shows that they're already lagging behind the times despite all their billions in intellectual property, and it would be such a shame to see them have their breadwinners turn against them, too. I for one wouldn’t want to feel Taylor’s wrath.

From the Annals of Bad Research: rock stars die younger

Around here we're all culturally savvy enough to have heard of the 27 Club: the list of those rocks stars who have died or drink, drugs, suicide etc at the age of 27. We've always taken this to be a rather cheery finding: that if you give some 18 year old all the money, booze, drugs, success and sex they could possibly want then it still takes them 9 years to kill themselves through overindulgence. Rather puts into perspective the prodnoses complaining about our having a second glass of sherry before dinner. However, we've just had the release of a report indicating that popular musicians do indeed die younger, on average, than the general population. And thi8s really should be included in our compendious volume, The Annals of Bad Research. For the contention is that the average age at death of rock and roll, rock and pop, stars is lower than that of the general population. But as Chris Snowden points out, we cannot actually know that:

You see the problem here, I expect. Rock stars didn't exist until the 1950s and since many of them are still alive, we don't know what their average age of death is. It wouldn't be at all surprising if they die earlier on average, but the graph above tells us very little about whether this is so. When Chuck Berry (aged 88), Jerry Lee Lewis (aged 79) and Little Richard (aged 81) pop their clogs, the average is going to go up, especially if they keep breathing for another twenty years.

And, who knows? They might. Perhaps the higher risk when young is counter-balanced by the boost to longevity of having lots of money and the best healthcare in old age?

Be that as it may, you clearly can't work out the average lifespan of a rock star until at least the first generation of rock stars are dead.

Quite: you can only work out the average age of death of any particular cohort when all of that particular cohort are dead. If you try to do it before that has happened then you'll be counting all of those who die young but not all of those who don't: meaning that what you've actually calculated is the average age at death of those who die young. And, you know, people who die younger die younger isn't really all that amazing of a research finding.