1/ Let's start with something controversial: the music industry is inverting.

2/ In 1781, Mozart moved from Salzburg to Vienna, the cultural capital of Austria, to advance his music career.
3/ At this time, Mozart could not record music, which made it scarce.

If you wanted to hear him play, you had to listen in person. Fans had personal relationships with their favorite musicians.
4/ This changed when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.

For the first time, music was infinitely replicable and could last forever. Since fans didn’t have to listen to music live, they could support their favorite musicians in new ways.
5/ Power and attention centralized.

Artists lacked the skills and capital required to distribute their music. They had to live in NY, LA, or Nashville, where they did favors for industry insiders and paid their dues.

Small groups of “expert” executives called the shots.
6/ Labels had all the power.

Their business models depended on mass market reach and distribution, so they financed music for people with “average” taste.
7/ With strong connections to radio stations, record stores, and television networks, artists could not garner attention without the labels.

The big got bigger, but it was hard for small artists to break in.
8/ This system worked well for decades until the rise of illegal streaming.

The internet changed things. Consumer spend on recorded music plummeted, falling 71% from 1999 to 2014.
9/ My favorite example is Soulja Boy’s Crank Dat.

He used to make Top 40 playlists and upload them to torrent sites. Then, he slipped his own track in there and people thought it was a hit.

Perception became reality when I started dancing to it at Bar Mitzvahs 😂😂
10/ On the internet, there’s little scarcity.

The laws of supply and demand no longer work when there’s infinite supply and replication is easy.

The music industry needs a new revenue stream.
11/ The answer: concerts.

Today, 87% of revenue now comes from concerts versus recorded music. Live music is the bedrock of artists’ income streams.
12/ Because of YouTube and streaming services, modern artists are using new strategies to reach their fans.

Playlists trump albums and there's a new set of rules:
1) Release music more often.
2) Focus more on singles, and less on albums.
3) Record videos to connect with fans.
13/ Fans are discovering songs in new ways:
1) Playlists
2) Viral videos and memes

Power has shifted from gatekeepers to the wisdom of the crowd.
14/ It’s a song based economy. With his album journals, Justin Bieber released one song at a time until the full album was out.

Why?

Each song generated millions of social media impressions, downloads, and streams. No song left behind.
15./ On social media, artists are re-inventing what it means to be a celebrity and finding new ways to connect with fans.

They’re brilliant community builders — they’re real, accessible, and engage fans directly.
16/ Audio and audio are coming together on YouTube, minting global superstars.

Gangnam Style was so popular that tourism to South Korea increased more than 15% the year after it was released.
17/ The music business is inverting.

Music used to be the bottom of the funnel, but now, it’s the top of the funnel.

With brand deals, startups, and merchandise sales, artists are building a portfolio of revenue streams. People don’t just buy music — they buy the brand.
18/ Today, we’ve returned to the days of Mozart, but this time it’s global.

Artists are building passionate communities.
Fans have direct relationships with their favorite artists.
19/ Artists communicate like friends, not businesses.

We watch them make music, they share their secrets with us, they’re always with us on social media, and they come to our hometown to play music for us.

They’re our best friends.
Thanks to @mrsharma for thinking through these ideas with me 😎

He said it. I wrote it.
Turned this into a blog post

"Naked Brands: The Future of Music"

🎶 https://t.co/JruLcSYPCr 🎶

More from All

How can we use language supervision to learn better visual representations for robotics?

Introducing Voltron: Language-Driven Representation Learning for Robotics!

Paper: https://t.co/gIsRPtSjKz
Models: https://t.co/NOB3cpATYG
Evaluation: https://t.co/aOzQu95J8z

🧵👇(1 / 12)


Videos of humans performing everyday tasks (Something-Something-v2, Ego4D) offer a rich and diverse resource for learning representations for robotic manipulation.

Yet, an underused part of these datasets are the rich, natural language annotations accompanying each video. (2/12)

The Voltron framework offers a simple way to use language supervision to shape representation learning, building off of prior work in representations for robotics like MVP (
https://t.co/Pb0mk9hb4i) and R3M (https://t.co/o2Fkc3fP0e).

The secret is *balance* (3/12)

Starting with a masked autoencoder over frames from these video clips, make a choice:

1) Condition on language and improve our ability to reconstruct the scene.

2) Generate language given the visual representation and improve our ability to describe what's happening. (4/12)

By trading off *conditioning* and *generation* we show that we can learn 1) better representations than prior methods, and 2) explicitly shape the balance of low and high-level features captured.

Why is the ability to shape this balance important? (5/12)

You May Also Like

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)