Linked List: June 16, 2016

Thursday, 16 June 2016

Billboard Interview With Apple Music’s Brain Trust: Iovine, Reznor, Cue, and Kondrk ★

Interesting interview:

Billboard: Record labels and publishers are also concerned with the decline in download sales. Will we see a streaming-only future and when?

Cue: There’s no end date, and as a matter of fact, they should all be surprised and thankful to the results that they’re seeing because our music iTunes business is doing very well. Downloads weren’t growing, and certainly are not going to grow again, but it’s not declining anywhere near as fast as any of them predicted or thought it would. There are a lot of people who download music and are happy with it and they’re not moving towards subscriptions. We talked about subscriptions bringing a lot of new customers in, people who have never bought music. And if you look at Apple’s music revenue on a quarterly basis, because of subscriptions and because of sales, it’s now higher; it’s actually growing, which is great for the labels.

Trent Reznor: It feels as though we’ve turned a corner in terms of the adoption of streaming. I think it’s inevitable that downloads will diminish, much like CDs. But I’ve started buying vinyl — probably out of nostalgia, but also there’s something about a physical thing that has meaning to me as an artist. I think coexistence can take place.

Samsung to Buy Joyent ★

Jonathan Cheng, reporting for the WSJ:

Samsung’s acquisition of San Francisco-based Joyent signals the South Korean technology giant’s burgeoning interest in “big data,” part of a broader effort to use powerful remote computers to bolster its data analysis and the computing capabilities of its devices.

Samsung said in a statement it will integrate Joyent into its mobile division, though the 11-year-old company will retain both the Joyent name and its top management, and operate at an arm’s length from its new parent company.

Long-time readers will remember that I was a very early employee at Joyent when it was founded in 2005. I left in 2006 to write Daring Fireball full-time. Kind of funny to think that in some alternate universe I’m now a Samsung employee.