I’m starting an experiment today: I’m writing a novel in Instagram posts. I’m not sure how many times a week I’m going to post new mini-chapters (Instagram’s limit is allegedly 2,2000 characters per caption), but every week following the chapters, I’m going to post the full chapter here.
Here’s why:
Central Park on a warm autumn night is cool on the skin, the tang of changed leaves fluttering in soft breezes. Runners and cyclists and couples circle around the loops of pavement weaving between trees, but the real breath of the park is in the dark forest trails where it’s empty except for lights as snow-white as crystals melting in the sun.
The tunnel of purple-dark trees is blanketed with changed leaves: oranges and golds and scarlets flicking in the fingertips of wind brushing the treetops.
Apple Music has gotten a lot of attention since being announced on June 30.
Personally, I haven’t been convinced that Apple is offering anything new with the service. If you’re just a distributor, that really only gives you so many options when it comes to distinguishing your service from another service.
So how does it really compare when it comes to paying out royalties, music discovery, and more? Megan Liscomb of TakeLessons offered me this great infographic that broke down Apple Music’s offerings when compared to Pandora, Spotify, Tidal and YouTube.
Apparently, Pandora is dead last in song selection and YouTube pays the worst royalties (although ad money on YouTube has the potential to make you a YouTube millionaire).
Check out the infographic below:
Apple Music is the latest and greatest to enter a crowded space: the streaming music market. Like the other big new competitor, Tidal, Apple Music is only going to offer paid subscriptions, instead of ad-sponsored free music.
But why? Why is any company even bothering to enter this space?
There is no streaming music market. Period. Really, there’s no proof that people are wiling to pay for digital music at all.
A few weeks ago, a journalist met the President. The journalist was a blogger who took photographs and talked to people. He’s also the author of The New York Times bestseller, “Humans of New York.” His name is Brandon Stanton and, in late January, he managed to help raise over a million dollars for Mott Hall Bridges Academy in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a school in one of New York City’s most impoverished neighborhoods… and helped the students and principal meet the President of the United States.
He told the story on a blog. He told the story through Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. And, above all, he told the story through photographs of people talking about life.
Stanton is making a living taking photos and reporting on things. He’s not associated with any media publication. He took the tools technology has made available and used them to make a huge impact.
Stanton’s success isn’t just inspirational, it’s a powerful indictment of the cynicism permeating the art world when it comes to social media, art, and the digital world.
Media companies are having a hard time trying to get people to pay for digital news. When there are so many sites that just provide headlines and a few paragraphs of sensational context (which is what most people want, anyway), it’s difficult to convince readers that “news” is a product that’s worth any money.
That’s why media companies have come to rely on advertising so heavily. Right now, 69% of all domestic news revenue is tied to advertising. And how do media companies ensure that they get the most potential exposure for advertisers? They bring in traffic. Lots and lots of traffic.
Facebook is responsible for a huge amount of that traffic, so it should be no surprise that the social media giant is enticing publishers with promises of lots of traffic and engagement in exchange for a deal in which, according to The New York Times, “media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.”
