PLEASE Stop Evaluating Streaming Services Over How Much They Pay Per Stream
*Taps the Sign (Again)
Today I saw this video, that has a premise I really like: A tier list of different music streaming services, mostly based on ethics.
However, this reinvigorated my annoyance with the over-reliance on the payment per stream metric.
Check out my grand idea for music streaming here.
And also check out what I've written about streaming payment previously here.
The most straightforward reason for why this metric is useless is that that’s simply not how the deals with the music streaming companies work. At all. It’s not like there’s a set payment per stream (that’s lower on Spotify than Tidal), and if my band got streamed twice as much next month we’d earn twice as much.
Every streaming service I know of does just about what Spotify does:
- They collect the revenue, and keep 30% of it.
- They then pay the rights holders 70%. Let’s call this the rights holders' share (RHS).
- They divide the RHS by grouping together all streaming on their platform — and if Taylor Swift had 1% of all streaming on the platform, she would get 1% of the RHS.
I get that it’s a metric that makes sense to people. But that doesn’t beat out the fact that it doesn’t reflect the reality.
Here’s what I, both as a user and artist, want to know when evaluating services:
- How large is the RHS?
- How does the service balance increasing the revenue per customer and reaching more customers?
- How do they split the RHS among rights holders?
- What effect does the service have on artists, through AI, artist relations, etc.?
- And of course: Is the service owner someone you want to support or not?
Quick Recommendation #12: UFO 50
Modern Retro Gaming Masterpiece
Imagine if someone, especially someone who likes retro gaming, told you: «What’s the NES? I’ve never heard of it, or played any of the games.» And then imagine you could tell them they could buy the 50 best games for just €25. What a treat they’d be in store for! Dusting off old classics, and exploring a treasure trove of retro gaming they haven’t seen before…
Cue UFO 50
If you told me about this game/project, available for Steam1 and Switch, I would brush off as too ambitious to ever become a reality. However, it’s actually done, and here today!
A group of indie devs went together and created a fictional developer, called UFO Soft. The story is that this “company” released a bunch of games for their consoles, LX-I, LX-II, and LX-III, between 1982 and 1989. And you’ve just discovered 50 games, spread across the lifespan of the company, that you can play in any order you’d like.
UFO 50 is a collection of 50 single and multiplayer games from the creators of Spelunky, Downwell, Air Land & Sea, Skorpulac, Catacomb Kids, and Madhouse. Jump in and explore a variety of genres, from platformers and shoot ‘em ups to puzzle games and RPGs.
— From the game’s website
The game menu starts out like this. 👆🏻 The games are sorted from oldest (Barbuta, 1982 — currently selected) to newest. When you click the game, you dust it off, and start it up. And here’s the thing: These are full games!
My Compact Stereo Bass Pedalboard
On the side, I do a bit of pedalboard building. And finally, I’m done with my own board — so I wanted to present it here! I’ll also go into all the pedals and why I chose them.
Board and I/O
The board itself is the smallest size made by Temple Audio.
On the right side of the board, I can plug in power for all the pedals and Input A and B. I play with two basses live: My 1961 Fender P-Bass and Fender Japan Fretless Jazz Bass — and having them both plugged in is nice.
The power supply is the Canvas Power 8 🖇️ from Walrus Audio, which I’ll show when I get to the underside of the board.
The left side has a USB-C charging port, forwarded from the Canvas supply, balanced stereo out (the two XLRs), and a jack output from the left channel.
«Wait, stereo for bass??»
I only have two stereo effects: Chorus and delay. But I think it’s really cool! Lately, my «sound» has gone on to always involve some saturation (usually fuzz and/or a cranked preamp) and chorus. Here’s a little taste of the sound (isolated bass), from a demo my band is working on.
So, that’s why I send a stereo signal (with the XLRs) to front-of-house. However, I’ll never bother with two amps — so that’s why there’s only one jack output. My DI does have the option to sum the left and right channel, but that doesn’t work with my chorus. So what I do is that I just send Left to the amp, and then asks for the Right channel in my monitor.
The signal chain
Oh No, I Think I Might Have to Move to Home Assistant
And Other Major Life Changes
The last few months have been pretty wild… In April, my wife and I moved out of our tiny Oslo flat (41 m²) into her childhood home. This is a large (for us) 290 m² house in a smaller town. On the first night in the new house, with things pretty up in the air, our first baby decided he wanted to be born 3.5 weeks ahead of schedule. He’s a lovely guy! But it’s fair to say moving, renovating, selling a flat, and taking care of a bundle like that, is pretty intense — hence why I haven’t written the last few months.
I do want to refrain from posting a lot of our son online — but hopefully saying that his name is Alfred, and posting the pretty anonymised photo below is OK ☺️:
I got to make the house smart 🫶🏻
As part of the deal of us moving to «my wife’s» house and hometown, we agreed that I was allowed to make the house smart. Not that she was that difficult to convince, as she doesn’t find a smart home annoying. Especially if I manage to follow my own principle: Smartness should always be in addition to regular functions. There should always be a button to toggle a light — and then you can add smarts on top.
The current plan is to have the following be smart:
- Lights
- Blinds
- Heating
- Main door lock
- Garage door
Playing With Icon Composer and the Bike Icon
One of my favourite apps to use, is Bike Outliner by Jesse Grosjean/Hogbay Software. It’s simply delightful through-and-through.
He’s hard at work on a really promising 2.0, and I wanted to play with Apple’s new Icon Composer. So I wanted to see if I could contribute and adapt Bike’s icon to the new style.
Not optimal
The original Bike icon (which I don’t love as much as the app itself) isn’t optimal for this style. If you look at Apple’s documentation, it’s especially clear to see that it’s easier to get a nice result with few largish objects you can layer.
Also, I’m absolutely not a designer. But I did my best to create:
A first draft
One thing I’ve thought about the original icon, is that the spokes on the wheels are many and small. On the sizes where the icon is actually used, this makes them blur into each other. However, this isn’t necessarily something negative. (And I know Jesse likes it.) To me, it gives an impression of the bike being in motion.
Here’s what I did:
- I redrew all the elements (except the head) to make them thick enough so that the glass effect in Icon Composer would apply.
- Then I separated them into the maximum of four layers Apple allows:
- The spokes and wheels at the bottom,
- then a layer of transparent circles that blur the spokes,
- then the frame,
- and lastly, the seat and handlebar on top.
Quick Recommendation #11: StarCraft 2 (Video Game)
When Blizzard Was the Best in the Business
Growing up, I played a lot of the original StarCraft. (Even more than Broodwar.) So I was obviously hyped when StarCraft 2 launched 12 years later, in 2010.
This was back when Blizzard Entertainment only made great games (even though I’ve never been into Word of Warcraft), and hadn’t discovered microtransactions and undercooked remasters. I both played through the campaign and was mediocre on the ranked ladder,1 and it was great!
Even though the game is 13 years old, there’s still an active pro scene and community. And recently, the YouTube algorithm decided to serve me a really charming channel: WinterStarcraft. His bread-and-butter is him casting pro matches, and I just love it. (To actually give the videos a chance to reach new viewers, the titles and thumbnails are really click-bait-y. But the content is good!)
For a place to start, I can recommend this video and match. (The third game is especially great.)
I highly recommend playing the Starcraft 2 campaign in 2025.
The game went free-to-play, via Battle.net, in 2017 – and this also includes the first part of the campaign: Wings of Liberty. That’s 20+ hours of gameplay right there – and if you’d like, you can then pay to unlock the rest of the single player content (Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void + Nova Covert Ops). This is also included in Xbox Game Pass.
Even though real-time strategy can be a bit daunting, the Starcraft 2 campaign is really accessible. It teaches you the game in a great way, feeds you mechanics bit-by-bit, and has a lot of challenge adjustability with difficulty levels and optional objectives. I just really like the world and story. (The Zerg, admittedly quite inspired by Xenomorphs, are some of the coolest things created.) And the game is just so polished.
This was also when Blizzard ported their games to Mac.
So even though it isn’t very optimised for Apple Silicon, it still works great on my M1 Pro. However, I did have an issue with the sound – but it’s fixable:
For some reason, the sound output would crackle if the microphone is active.2 However, barring StarCraft 2 access to the microphone, through Privacy and Security in System Settings, fixed it. (I also have to close SoundSource.)
GL HF!