This is really striking, isn't it? We've all certainly seen demos of things on this list or very similar things, and there are startups that have spent years and billions of dollars attempting to exploit existing LLMs to develop useful products. Yet most of the products don't seem to exist. The ones that you see in everyday life never seem to work nearly as well as the demos suggest.
So what's going on here? Do the products exist but nobody (or very few) uses them? Is it too expensive to use the models that work sufficiently well to produce a useful product? Is it much easier to create a convincing demo than it is to develop a useful product?
It is too expensive to reach the right audience. I remember talking to agencies about ads for a fintech app, and all of them said the same thing:
You need to burn around 20k a month on ads for 3 months, so we can learn what works, then the CAC will start decreasing, and you can get more targeted users.
Once you turn ads off, there is no awareness, no new users, and people will not be aware of the product's existence.
I'm not entirely convinced by the artists' argument, but this argument is also unconvincing to me. If someone steals from you, but it's a negligible amount, or you don't even notice it, does that make it not stealing? If the thief then starts selling the things they stole from you, directly competing with you, are your grievances less valid now since you didn't complain about the theft before?
Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used without their permission. The thing being used is an idea, not anything the artist loses access to when someone else has it. What is there to complain about? Why should others listen to the complaints (disregarding copyright law because that is circular reasoning)?
"Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used without their permission"
Yes and no. Sure, the artist didn't loose anything physical, but neither did music or movie producers when people downloaded and shared MP3s and videos. They still won in court based on the profits they determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly high. How is this different? An artist's work is essentially their resume. AI companies use their work without permission to create programs specifically intended to generate similar work in seconds, this substantially impacts an artist's ability to profit from their work. You seem to be suggesting that artists have no right to control the profits their work can generate - an argument I can't imagine you would extend to corporations.
"The thing being used is an idea"
This is profoundly absurd. AI companies aren't taking ideas directly from artist's heads... yet. They're not training their models on ideas. They're training them on the actual images artists create with skills honed over decades of work.
"not anything the artist loses access to when someone else has it"
Again, see point #1. The courts have long established that what's lost in IP theft is the potential for future profits, not something directly physical. By your reasoning here, there should be no such things as patents. I should be able to take anyone or any corporation's "ideas" and use them to produce my own products to sell. And this is a perfect analogy - why would any corporation invest millions or billions of dollars developing a product if anyone could just take the "ideas" they came up with and immediately undercut the corporation with clones or variants of their products? Exactly similar, why would an artist invest years or decades of time honing the skills needed to create imagery if massive corporations can just take that work, feed it into their programs and generate similar work in seconds for pennies?
"What is there to complain about"
The loss of income potential, which is precisely what courts have agreed with when corporations are on the receiving end of IP theft.
"Why should others listen to the complaints"
Because what's happening is objectively wrong. You are exactly the kind of person the corporatocracy wants - someone who just say "Ehhh, I wasn't personally impacted, so I don't care". And not only don't you care, you actively argue in favor of the corporations. Is it any wonder society is what it is today?
It was an analogy, ie a comparison of the differences between pairs. The relevant bit then is the damages suffered by the party stolen from. If you fail to pursue when the damages are small or nonexistent (image classifiers, employee stealing a single apple, individual reproduction for personal use) why should that undermine a case you bring when the damages become noticeable (generative models, employee stealing 500 lbs of apples, bulk reproduction for commercial sale)?
This is precisely where the analogy breaks down. The victim suffers damages in any theft, independent of any value the perpetrator gains.
Damages due to copyright infringement don't work this way. Copyright exists to motivate the creation of valuable works; damages for copyright are an invented thing meant to support this.
That would only be a relevant distinction if the discussion were specifically about realized damages. It is not.
The discussion is about whether or not ignoring something that is of little consequence to you diminishes a later case you might bring when something substantially similar causes you noticeable problems. The question at hand had nothing to do with damages due to piracy (direct, perceived, hypothetical, legal fiction, or otherwise).
It's confusing because the basis for the legal claim is damages due to piracy and the size of that claim probably hasn't shifted all that much. But the motivating interest is not the damages. It is the impact of the thing on their employment. That impact was not present before so no one was inclined to pursue a protracted uphill battle.
I dunno, man. Re-read your comment but change one assumption:
> They still won in court based on the profits they determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly high.
Such court determinations are wrong. At least hopefully you can see how perhaps there is not so much wrong with the reasoning, even if you ultimately disagree.
> They're training them on the actual images artists create with skills honed over decades of work.
This is very similar to a human studying different artists and practicing; it’s pretty inarguable that art generated by such humans is not the product of copyright infringement, unless the image copies an artist’s style. Studio Ghibli-style AI images come to mind, to be fair, which should be a liability to whoever is running the AI because they’re distributing the image after producing it.
If one doesn’t think that it’s wrong for, e.g., Meta to torrent everything they can, as I do not, then it is not inconsistent to think their ML training and LLM deployment is simply something that happened and changed market conditions.
I hear this type of statement often, but people rarely mention the scope or who the brain drainees are. In my experience, it's exceptionally rare that American talent comes to Europe compared to the opposite, and I see little reason why that would change in the near future. When it comes to Chinese individuals returning to China from the US, this isn't exactly traditional brain drain, and it's also something China has actively, sometimes aggressively, been pursuing the past decade or so.
> and I see little reason why that would change in the near future
Really? There have been 2 months of reasons accumulating by now. One of which being that the government is made of fascists who make nazi salutes and oligarchs.
Imagine 30 years ago if someone said the country of Wittgenstein would not have a large language model of its own, let alone the EU.
It is insane.
Many people just talk nonsense on this topic with China vs the US. Anyone who hasn't read America Against America by Wang Huning basically has no idea what they are talking about on this subject. Of course, total ignorance on a topic has never been something to slow down the opinion of a westerner.
I'm a little confused by this post. Obviously it's easier to maintain a plain VM than managed services. That's why people are paying a lot more money to the cloud providers for managed services, so they don't have to do it themselves. What you're saying is that this is essentially a pointless endeavor? I don't think this statement is entirely uncontroversial, since managed services are the main reason for many companies to migrate to cloud.
Using managed services is not a pointless endeavor – they can save you a lot of time (and therefore money).
Unless you need to switch providers, at which point it may take more time to adjust for differences in how those managed services operate.
Managed services are absolutely not the main reason for moving to the cloud. Companies do it for the flexibility that comes with renting the real estate/energy/hardware instead of owning it.
Heh, until you need to rollback a specific table in postgres using their backup solution. IIRC, this is possible in AWS -- or at least, I'm 99% sure you can at least download the backup. In Azure? All you can do is restore the entire database, and you cannot download it.
I would love for you to briefly describe how and where this can be done. I wasted a significant amount of time searching for this exact capability for Azure SQL Database and only ran into dead-ends.
For Azure SQL Database, you can restore any database backup to a new database, and export any existing database to bacpac format on a storage account [0]. The storage account file can be downloaded. You can also do the latter without using through the portal, using sqlpackage.exe on your local machine (same restriction applies: sqlpackage must connect to a live database, so if you want to download/view an Azure backup you must first perform a backup restore).
Not sure how to do the same for Azure Postgresql databases, but looks like standard pg_dump and pg_restore are supported.
Yes! The longer response is that the closer you stick to standards the easier of a time you will have. VMs are a standard with cloud-init and image formats, etc.
i.e. in 2025 managed Kubernetes is not _that_ different between providers
I mean, if it was solely about renting machines, we’d all just use DigitalOcean, or EC2 on AWS.
People use things like RDS and EKS/GKE to avoid all the administrative overhead that comes with running these things in prod. The database or its underlying hardware has a problem at 1am? It’s Amazon engineers getting paged, not you (hopefully… assuming the fault hasnt materialised to operational impact yet)
I've never seen a managed IaaS that saved time. It is marketed as something that can free you from hiring ops people, but you will absolutely need to hire some supplier relations people to deal with it. (And contract optimizers, and internal PR to deal with the fallout.)
It's different for fully featured SaaS. It's a matter of the abstracted complexity vs. interface complexity ratio that is so common for everything you do in software.
It's easier for the provider to maintain a VM provision. It's supposed to be easier for the customer to maintain managed services, but that's often debatable.
Global connect (the company that owns and operates most data cables in the Baltic sea) is running tests with tamper detecting cables. They say they will be able to detect a whale at a distance of 80 kilometers. I assume the whale is just used as an example to demonstrate its sensitivity, since whales haven't been implicated in any of the previous cable breaks.
The whales already signed an international treaty on this, and it's really unlikely they are going to violate their treaty obligations by destroying fiber optic cables.
Also, you know, whales not having sharp teeth and the ability to chew small breaks into cables that look remarkably like intentionally dragging boat anchors across them and all that.
I hope researchers get access to some of that data. Would be cool if an unintended side effect of this work ends up benefiting marine wildlife research.
I might be mistaken but I believe the final day has only one puzzle, but the 50th star (a.k.a., the second star of December 25th) is given for having solved everything else. I don't think any puzzles are "locked".
>Though secretly, it was to give hope to the students who were defeated by the education system and told “You can’t study Computer Science, because you didn’t know Carbon has a radioactive isotope.”
Forgive me if I'm being elitist here, but this seems like a strange example of outrageous admission requirements. I would have thought knowing about radiocarbon dating (which I'm assuming this is a reference to) is common knowledge (I believe it's in the standard curriculum for grades 7-9 in my country), so it doesn't seem like a completely unreasonable test question. If this is an example that the author uses from his or her own experience, it seems stranger still.
>Every evening, my brother and I would sit in front of an oil lamp and study, mostly maths and science.
It reads to me like this was on the exam for getting into the CS program in particular, though. Which makes it sound like IIT has dealt with the very large number of students who want to study CS by trying to limit it to the overall academically strongest students?
I am Brazilian and people from US and Europe are completely clueless about the level of competition at the end of high school in those kind of countries (Brazil, China, India). He is talking about college entrance exams.
"vestibular" in Brazil, "gaokao" in China, the JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) in India. Those are the keys to upper middle class and they are guarded jealously. In my case to get in CS at a top university in Brazil there were 30 students applying for each spot in the Major in that year.
It is often used as a measurement "X per spot" for different majors to say how hard it is to get in. Some majors like Medicine can reach 200/spot. And trust me since most people have to pay to get those tests the less prepared students don't even bother because they know they won't pass. A lot of people also go for an easier-to-get-in major than the one they want hoping they can do an internal transfer after getting in (people apply for Pharmacy major in order to transfer to Medicine for example). Pretty much all majors at the top universities have at least 5 per spot, even the useless ones (which won't get you a job either).
It is grueling, it is not uncommon to see people crying in the hallways after the exams and occasionally suicides directly linked to the exams. There is such a glut of graduates and such a lack of jobs that unless you go to one of the top schools you won't get a good job or you will have to endure years at bad jobs to get experience before moving on to a good job.
Oh yeah, also student loans? Forget it, you have to pay for yourself, so hope you live close to the uni or daddy can cover your living costs. At least in Brazil (and I believe in China and India as well?) tuition is free at the top unis.
Second one is a Brazilian uni and there are more in it.
The thing is, in those countries your uni name is everything. Imagine that if you want to have a career you need to go to harvard, otherwise good luck.
> sound like IIT has dealt with the very large number of students who want to study CS by trying to limit it to the overall academically strongest students?
I interpreted it as knowing the basics of nuclear physics in order to do a CS Bachelor's degree, which is what the entrance exam for these colleges ask.
Like lancebeet, I learned there are radioactive isotopes of carbon as part of learning about carbon dating while in high school.
I think there's a big step from that knowledge to say that means I know the basics of nuclear physics. If anything, it's a better test for the basics of archaeological dating.
Or, as I learned recently, the 12C/13C/14C ratios are used to help determine the source for the increase in atmospheric CO2, since fossil fuels have essentially no 14C. (TIL it's the "Suess effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suess_effect ). So it can also be a test for how well one understands the evidence behind the causes for global warming (while also making carbon dating trickier - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1504467112 ).
I also know that nuclear power plants split the uranium atom to generate power, as do atomic bombs. I also know that radioactive materials are used in smoke detectors and as power sources for some space probes, that bananas are radioactive, and that radon is a radioactive gas that can build up in houses and cause cancer.
That still doesn't mean I know the basics of nuclear physics, which starts with how the nucleus contains protons and neutrons, and is incredibly tiny compared to the nominal size of the atom.
I'm Indian. We also learned that Carbon dating was a thing somewhere between Middle School and High School. I also believe that the reference to isotopes was hyperbolic and that he actually wanted to talk about the fact that we teach the basics of Nuclear fission, fusion and radioactive decay in high school. [1]
In hindsight, it's funny that we use radioactive decay as one of the filters for an entrance exam for University. [2]
Knowing about carbon dating is a proxy for general knowledge or nerdiness, but any proxy that becomes a measure, stops being a good proxy.
The only way physics helps with computer science, is by being a convenient source of coding challenges.
In this regard, it's like treating programming languages as "languages" and only allowing people to study them if they can also master French or Spanish.
Also:
Common knowledge is much, much less STEM-y than most commentators I've seen, seem to think.
Back 24 years ago, the final mandatory exams I had at school (UK GCSE), one of the questions in the higher level biology exam was asking me to… count ~ten dots within a rectangle and none of the dots outside.
Most people have no motivation to care what carbon dating is, or that it involves radioisotopes, even if they're smart, hence (though I think things have improved since then) The Two Cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Instead of STEM, culture: Soap operas, Harry Potter, Pokemon, ball games, etc. — I have no idea what the "offside rule" is, as despite having heard people explain it, I have no motivation to care and therefore don't remember it.
It's interesting how bad the democrats seem to be at the game of winning elections. They continuously seem to pick bad candidates and poor strategies resulting in them losing the election when they seem to have had the general conditions for winning. This time, the elephant in the room is of course the late ousting of Joe Biden, but there were similar issues that (in hindsight at least) were obvious in the Clinton 2016 campaign. This pattern can be seen in other countries as well, where it's clear that one group knows how to play the game while other groups don't, but it's surprising to me that a massive organization like the democratic party wouldn't have streamlined this process.
It would be interesting to hear from someone more familiar with the inner workings of the democratic party why this is. I.e., if it's a cultural issue in the party, if it's economical, or if my view on this is completely off.
"interesting how bad the democrats seem to be at the game of winning elections"
Since 1992, haven't democrats had power for over 20 years as opposed to GOP's 12 ?
Yea, but the game's changed. The Republican Party has figured out how to rally millions behind charismatic candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if we were in for a couple more years of Republican leadership.
I wouldn't say charismatic, but he's solid. I think people mistake charismatic for blunt. Trump is more blunt than he is charismatic. That makes him appear like less of an NPC compared to other politicians, and people actually like that.
Trump literally said "you won't have to vote again".
And if the Project 2025 plan works as they planned it, that's the truth. America will become a single party state and that won't change without a civil war.
They will stack the courts and every appointable position with pro-Trump (not Republican) people who will make sure every election goes their way in the future.
Charismatic or populist? Same thing in effect, but the latter has a bit more weight / context to politics.
Also if they're having their way, they will break the current system; Trump has said people would never need to vote again if he wins, and Project 2025 aims to give much more power to the president (autocracy): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Given what democrats stand for, you don't even have to be charismatic to push them into a corner.
Any candidate who will shout anti trans anti illegal immigrantion talking points will always carry the day
You specifically chose a range of dates to make this as dramatic as possible. Could easily say GOP has 24 to 20 since 1980, or 16 to 12 since 2000, or 8 to 4 since 2016.
My view since 2016 has been that winning elections in the US is about telling a good story. Whether you're trueful or not doesn't really matter as long as people believe it.
Trump's story is pretty ridiculous, there's no way that his plans on how to fix the economy or the border or the whole department of efficiency thing work anywhere close to as well as he says. Regardless, his demographic believes it.
Kamala's story was a lot weaker, involved a ton of hard truths and concessions about things that people in her base care about such as Gaza. Additionally her story on the border was mostly the same thing as Trump's. If you like the border story, why not go for the guy pushing it harder?
Obama had a pretty good story in 2008 (the whole hope thing). Dems need to get back to that.
It would have been pretty silly for Harris to campaign on a Hope and Change™ platform, since that would imply she is doing a very poor job as incumbent.
I don't think "have had the general conditions for winning" is at all accurate this time around. It was clear ahead of time, and much ink was spilled on it, but it's even more clear in hindsight that this cycle was always going to be a giant uphill battle. Incumbent parties all over the world have been and are having the same issue. We're all still going through a hangover from the pandemic.
The Democrats are somewhat hampered by their focus on facts and rationality ("play fair") rather than spouting bullshit, conspiracy theories, and whatever bigotry is currently hot ("win at all costs").
Unironically yes. You have to meet the median voter where they're at, even if you find some of their positions dumb or bigoted. That's why Obama spent the 2008 election cycle pretending to be opposed to gay marriage.
The party has evolved an idea that you can do away with those kind of dirty political shenanigans, and construct a rational fact-based proof that will leave voters no choice but to support you, and I think that pretty clearly doesn't work.
It is some sort of tribalism. Believers can't see it. E.g. we gotta remember that people were gaslighting eachother into pretending Biden is not what could charitably be described as about to be senile.
Refusing to see one self as part of the problem, fundamentally.
They planned poorly with their candidacy; Biden and Harris were the obvious candidates being president and vice-president, respectively, but Biden was too old and they couldn't find a different candidate that wasn't as well known as Harris quick enough.
That said, the Republicans would have the same problem if Trump dropped out or if that bullet didn't miss.
Also by the fact that their unwillingness to turn on their capital sponsors, who don't really care whose in power and whose needs are ostensibly better met by republicans (so long as republicans don't start a trade war...)
Dems will continue to make the mistake of coasting deeper into the right wing, picking up 0 voters in doing so (why would I vote for a "tough on immigration" candidate when I can vote for the one who gleefully promises to deport all the browns?), meanwhile disenfranchising any left wing voters left in the USA and creating no new left wing voter bloc by presenting a coherent alternative to the reactionaries.
The same mistake is being made by neo liberal parties across the world.
>why would I vote for a "tough on immigration" candidate when I can vote for the one who gleefully promises to deport all the browns?
I'm always surprised by how bipolar US politics is. There's no place for nuance or third options, it's always one or second extreme. In this case, to answer your question, maybe you want to limit an influx of new people into your country (for ideological, or economical, or whatever reasons) but don't want a full on ethnic cleansing. That's OK, people don't have to only hold extreme opinions.
> In this case, to answer your question, maybe you want to limit an influx of new people into your country (for ideological, or economical, or whatever reasons) but don't want a full on ethnic cleansing.
As this election shows, then, you would vote for Trump, who is "better on immigration." You would tell yourself, as many Trump supporters demonstrate in interviews, that "he wouldn't actually do that."
If you're looking for a quote of him saying that word for word, no. But it is not an unreasonable interpretation of the things he has said he wants to do. Especially when he's used language saying immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" and makes up lies about immigrants eating pets.
It sounds to me that this is crass exaggeration and one of the many reasons why there is such a big divide between supporters of both factions. The whole exaggerated narrative and associations to nazism is definitely off putting.
You don't see any similarity between immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" (from Trump) and "Look at the ravages from which our people are suffering daily as a result of being contaminated with Jewish blood" (from James Murphy's English translation of Mein Kampf?
I understand you think people are exaggerating. You probably roll your eyes when people say Trump is a fascist, I imagine?
Can I ask - let's say before 2028 the democrat party gets tea partied and gets a genuine fascist candidate. What would that candidate say? What would their policies be? Can you do the same thought experiment for the Republican party? Or do you, unfairly, believe it's simply impossible for one, or the other, party to become genuinely fascistic? Perhaps you even believe fascism was permanently defeated when Mussolini was hanged? I would admire such an optimistic view!
Just in case you're genuinely curious why people say these things, it's not like we're all just making it up. Trump's rhetoric simply, to one who studies history, sounds very similar to Hitler's. It doesn't mean he's as bad as Hitler, it just means he talks like Hitler talked.
As for hitlerian policy, there is simply no way to deport the millions he has promised to deport that doesn't involve roundups, trains, and concentration camps. It's a physical impossibility to achieve otherwise. Do you disagree? Will he not follow through on his campaign promise to deport every undocumented immigrant?
I see you're unwilling to engage with the topic, though I try to in good faith. This makes me sad and frustrated. The key thing about British and American political discourse seems to be a disengagement from political education and reality. The reactionaries are actually "moderates," the guy speaking eerily similar to passages of mein Kampf is not hitlerian, center-right are actually communists, etc.
Yes, that is the point. I am u willing to engage with the lunatics that call Trump a fascist. You are either stomping your feet like a child, or you do not understand what words mean.
Don’t be a clown and then come to me about “good faith”.
Of the two of us which is more obviously unserious about our positions? Which is more able to speak clearly about them?
If you can't comprehend political analysis, why pretend to understand it? Just say you like the guy and if that makes you a fascist then you like fascism. It seems like you have a vague notion of what facism means and that it's bad - but the same people that you're calling a clown, a child, a lunatic, are the people that define words like "fascism" and imply it's bad. Why listen to us in one case and not the other?
That's what Trump's circle wants, though. They want to deport 25M immigrants. Generously, the number of people here illegally is only half that. They don't care if people here legally get caught up in it and deported as well.
Deporting even a couple million people will require mass raids, round-ups, and the construction of concentration camps. It is physically impossible to deport that many people quickly or quietly or efficiently.
They're afraid of losing the white majority, plain and simple. The sad thing is so many non-white people don't see this and voted for him.
Who's calling Trump a fascist? For one, John Kelly, the right-wing Marine General, Trump's former chief of staff.
"Project 2025" may be unhinged, but in what sense is it a conspiracy theory? It's right out in the open and produced by one of the most prominent conservative think tanks.
The Republican party is also flipping seats in the Senate and the House, yet you seem focused on Harris. It's not that people are voting for other Democratic candidates, the country is simply becoming more conservative as people leaning on left are simply not voting.
The Dems exist to give you an illusion of choice. This has gone down exactly as planned, or why do you think rich donors play both sides? Do you really think the Dems are this naive and keep messing up without it being on purpose?
The opinion makers know if it wasn't this close there'd be visible backlash.
My impression is that the current-day Dem's are, in "actions speak louder than words" terms, simply not all that interested in winning elections. Stuff like not bothering to do even the most basic of opposition research on George Santos ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos ). Not carefully checking that Biden's marbles were all still there 12+ months before the election. Their slow and half-hearted (at best) response to the RealPage ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPage ) rent-jacking scandal. Etc., etc.
There is the LGBT. Specially the T part. The right thing is to do is support their rights, and it is very hard not to do the right thing when you know what the right thing is. However, the republicans have weaponized it against the democrats. They call them radical left and they campaign saying things like the want to convert your sons in girls and other awful things. It is an imposible choice because it can cost you the election.
I think it is because people who think or say "what about me?" hear "what about me?" from others as if it's support of their own view, when really their core issues could be totally different. "Yeah, what about us?"
As opposed to "we need to help everyone, especially highly victimized groups". And then people infight over which groups require more attention vs everyone else.
Right, and economics as a field is difficult to understand for most people.
Presidents can't in reality take all that much credit or blame for the economy. A lot of it is out of their hands, and many economic shifts take longer than a presidential term to play out. But of course presidents will try, and succeed, because most people don't understand this.
On top of that, the GOP complains about how much money Biden "printed" during the pandemic, but Trump did his fair share of that in the first year of it as well. They just make dishonest arguments.
What I always find interesting is how Democrats insist their failure is due to a lack of sound strategy. That is of course a strategy in and of itself to NEVER admit that it might be a refutation of their policies or (gasp) their values. Telling yourself you just lost because you didn't "play the game" is a cope. It serves its purpose though, as it allows ardent followers to avoid actual self reflection.
Is this really a "degradation" in popular taste, or is it a change in the demographics that dominate the demand side? While there's apparently been some studies on the demographics of Swifties, it's much more difficult to produce the same for Bob Dylan 50 years ago. My impression though is that the initial core demographics (driving the fame) of Bob Dylan's music were young adults of both sexes, while the initial demographics of Taylor Swift's music were teenagers, overwhelmingly female. The demographics have different interests, with the interests preferred by Dylan's demographics being considered deeper and more intellectual by the cultural zeitgeist. It makes sense that target demographics of popular music would have been older back in the day, since buying records required some sort of record player, which was a significant investment. Today, there's practically no investment to listen to music via a streaming service.
Mostly agreed, but imo Taylor Swift’s music trajectory is kinda similar to Beatles.
Swift’s fanbase has been mostly teenage girls, who now grew up, and now her concerts are filled with women in their 20s and 30s, as well as plenty of guys (though still a minority).
Beatle’s fanbase at the time of their rise to fame? Also predominantly teenage girls. Take a look at the photos from any of their concerts in the prime age. And then there are those infamous photos with crowds (that were almost entirely teenage girls) pretty much hysterically crying in the audience upon seeing their idols.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It is probably a controversial take, but if anything, I would consider Taylor Swift’s core audience these days being way less “culty” and less homogeneous than that of the early Beatles (despite, indeed, being one of the most “culty” fanbases of the present times). And I am saying this as someone who is as far from a Swift fan as one can be. I only know a few of her top songs, and they are pretty catchy/fun, but I simply don’t have much interest in it overall. Can’t deny that she is doing a great job all around though.
Calling it now: a few decades down the road, Taylor Swift will exist in the cultural zeitgeist in a similar way to how Beatles are revered many decades after their breakup in the present times (assuming she stays on her current trajectory).
> Calling it now: a few decades down the road, Taylor Swift will exist in the cultural zeitgeist in a similar way to how Beatles are revered many decades after their breakup in the present times (assuming she stays on her current trajectory).
The Beatles, after getting early popularity with teenage girls via stuff like "She Loves you", "I wanna hold your hand" etc., moved on to more ambitious music for adults. Meanwhile, we're still waiting for Taylor Swift's equivalent of the White Album...
I think you're right. I'd add that it's sound to invest in a younger demographic when there are more young people, more customers, who are more impressionable, for a longer term return. With companies trying to get the most from their investment, I'd expect this strategy to drive the market towards less complex, and less interesting media.
