Linked List: January 22, 2022

Saturday, 22 January 2022

Listen Notes 

My thanks to Listen Notes for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. As of January 2022, there are over 2,750,000 RSS-based podcasts and 123,000,000 episodes on the internet — way more podcasts than the ones you already know.

Basically, there’s a podcast for that. You can learn any topic by listening to podcasts. And it seems like every domain expert has already done some podcast interviews. Listen Notes is a search engine dedicated to podcasts. Search any topic or person at ListenNotes.com.

‘Seriously, I Could Have Done Lasso’ 

Very funny new commercial for Apple TV+: “Everyone but Jon Hamm”. But it’s funny because it’s true: there’s now quite a bit of original content on TV+, and Apple’s library continues to grow.

The knock against TV+ from the get-go is that its library was so small compared to rival services like Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, etc. “Who’s going to pay $5 a month for just a handful of shows and movies?” But Apple’s TV+ strategy is following the company’s traditional pattern of steady incremental improvement.

The Swiss site MacPrime has been counting TV+’s original content, and with the release of Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth last week, TV+ is up to 100 original movies and series, totaling over 500 hours. And they’re tracking at least 65 upcoming projects. (Safari does a remarkable job translating MacPrime’s site to English.)

Apple excels at these long run games. (See: Apple Pay.) The news media, as a general rule, has no attention span whatsoever.

‘The Sound of 007’ 

Justin Kroll, reporting last month for Deadline:

Following the success of a number of documentaries set in the music industry, Apple is now planning a doc that takes a deep dive into the music of one of the great movie franchises. Apple has announced The Sound of 007, a feature documentary about the remarkable history of six decades of James Bond music.

Brought to audiences by MGM, Eon Productions and Ventureland, the documentary will make its global debut on Apple TV+ in October to mark the 60th anniversary of the James Bond film series.

In case you missed it, back in November I linked to a delightful episode of the podcast Switched on Pop: “James Bond’s Spycraft Sound”. A documentary about the Bond franchise’s music is just what Dr. No ordered.