When I work with a team designing products, I always try to start the exploration in the same place. A blank screen. The ideal user experience is “none”. A perfect user experience on any product would read your mind, and from that execute what you’re asking it to do, without…

Last night I witnessed something really special. On the Internet, Twitch even. That in and of itself seems rare. In the middle of the Reddit mess, the writers strike, AI fear and tech moral panics, to see something just…nice… felt good. I’ve written about a now 20 year old Twitch…

Art is a refraction of the artist through our own lens. In some cases — in many in fact — the work for the artist to make that light bend is difficult. Sometimes fatal. Always painful. But it happens, and somehow when it works we’re all better for it. The…

I’m starting somewhere new, which I will talk about soon, but I wanted to first talk about something I’ve been thinking about a lot: what happens when you leave. I’ve left four jobs in my life, five if you count my short stint at Gracenote, and have noticed the “leaving”…

The GPT freak out and moral panic is really about the power of language. This is not about AI; AI is all around us, and we interact with the technology behind it (whether neural networks, collaborative filtering, linear regression, etc.) throughout our day, whether we know it or not. Every…

I’ve spent forty three years walking the planet, and a majority of them as a working professional. In that time, I’ve learned a few things about navigating time, managing teams, and being a team member. I wrote most of this in September of 2020 and never posted it, but here it is. Living No one cares about you much after they stop seeing you You control the segmentation of your own time Physics and biology dictates your movement through the world, your mind dictates to what extent you capitulate and accommodate these limits.

Music is more than a list of data. It has to be. I read this tweet and tweeted a few snarky responses. Sorry for that. But in my defense, nothing, and I mean nothing represents what is wrong with the current state of music and how we value it…

The National released a new single today with perfect execution. It was still a clusterfuck; a symbol of an industry unapologetically eating itself by chasing streams instead of listeners. Let’s get one thing out of the way first: I love the National. I have since 2002 or so when I…

A few days ago, an old friend from my early days at Warner Bros. Records came to visit, and as usual for two “veteran” music executives, we got to talking about all of the new things effecting the music business. So lets go through them: Streaming killed piracy through near…