When Substack expanded the newsletter service to incorporate video, content creators gained access to the Wild Wild West of streaming. Reminiscent of the leap into media that extended blogging to podcasting, producers of all stripes can now write a post, upload a video, start a discussion, and all behind or in front of the newsletter paywall. Substack makes its money on a cut of subscriptions, where stars migrating from mainstream media make enough to fund its basic publishing services to the long tail. It’s similar to Spotify’s move into podcasting with its acquisition of Anchor. The podcasting tool offers anybody the ability to produce and distribute audio shows for free, in return for a cut of advertising and sponsorship dollars.
Bringing video to the party may dramatically alter the newsletter, much as Spotify’s podcasting strategy has metastasized into the Joe Rogen controversy pitting the two sides of Spotify’s business against each other. Podcasting and Rogen’s exclusive deal with the music streaming service has pushed major artists to remove access to their music, but the economics so far are on Rogen’s side. Meanwhile, streaming music has reached the point where it’s the only way musicians can earn a living in the pandemic-constrained loss of touring revenue. Just not enough of a living for any but the Taylor Swifts of the business, forcing artists to sell future access to their catalogs and recordings to keep the lights on.
Streaming has an enormously disruptive impact on the movie and television industry, with Netflix now being challenged for the dominant share of the subscription business it pioneered. Production budgets of the well-heeled competitors are rising rapidly — Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and a surprising surge by the company once known as Viacom/CBS, its streaming service Paramount+, and now Paramount Global. The engine for this rise is writer/showrunner/director Taylor Sheridan; he’s parlayed the modern Western Yellowstone into a series of spinoffs, prequels, and other streaming successes. It’s the creator economy origin story, where people like Shonda Rhimes and other studio titans sign massive deals in the streaming ecosystem. Sheridan has stopped everything but writing as he tries to fend off the huge demand for more and more product coming from Paramount. It’s a classic Hollywood story but it speaks to the impact that may be coming to the newsletter and its newly expanding paywall.
No matter what you think about newsletters, or NFTs, or live audio, or whatever is the metaverse, what really matters are the reasons for these tools. It is reminiscent of the emergence of Web Services, aka the Cloud. Before that, the major vendors held sway over the production and marketing of software. Programs came in boxes, on floppy disks and then CDs. The last CD I remember booting was the bundled Microsoft Windows 95 operating system that came with a new thousand dollar computer. Then Office 97, and then the Internet took over.
Today the landscape is dominated by mobile and apps, but how do we think of these powerful machines and digital abstractions? A few weeks ago, we bought a laser printer and set it up to speak over Apple’s AirPrint. It was spectacularly simple, so simple that it scared the hell out of our dogs when the machine suddenly came to life to service a job from an iPhone, an iPad, or a Mac somewhere on the network. So I printed a wonderful newsletter about the Beatles’ Get Back film. Over the past weeks since the documentary appeared on Disney+, we’d all dissected the 8 hours of material from the end of the group’s arc, culminating in a classic live performance of the film’s material on the roof of Apple headquarters on Savile Row in London.
The intersection of this long-suppressed narrative of the band’s struggle to move on from the structure of the four to marriage, remarriage, and whatever needed to come next — mirrored the same questions we’re asking today as the technology world tries to grow up. The tyranny of success plays out on every digital street corner. Social media, which once felt like the promise of tomorrow, swelters in the backwater of lies and misinformation. Along the road to a better tomorrow, we feel stuck in the pandemic of dashed dreams, shattering of families, and the inexorable stasis of unanticipated pivots from simpler roots.
As a child of the media, the forced reordering of life as we knew it put untoward pressure on the reporters and editors of the electronic press. Stuck in their own meltdown of print distribution, the economics of sharing the news unfit to print has tilted the output of these networks toward repetition, pandering to partisan tactics, and a general malaise engendered by power as the validator of what’s left of basic human values. Even the groups I tend to favor, liberal, arts-fueled, and collaborative in theory, are all the more difficult to endure in their own unfair and unbalanced extremes. I end up longing for at least a little of the other side’s perspective, if only to reward the idea of listening as a part of hearing some more nuanced and possibly better way forward.
Meanwhile, the seductive tools of digital production broadcast a message at odds with the conflicted straitjacket of the news media, the politics of crypto and Web3, and the rest of it we essay in our work-from-everywhere world. Instead, the blank page — the crisp efficiency of Cloud tools and bootstrapped ideas — recalls and even encourages a more personal voice mixed with the desire to connect with peers and progressive partners in what should be important. More and more, I see the writing become a hybrid of these personal narratives and a measured criteria for impact on the safety and durability of our lives. This is not about the old guard or the new creators. It’s a broader recalibration of both the strides technology has taken and the dangers of that success.
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