AA

Wall Street has spent $20.4 billion buying your favorite old songs since 2019. BlackRock, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR. They own the music you grew up on, and Spotify is built to keep playing it. Sony paid over $1 billion for Queen's song collection in 2024. Biggest single-artist deal ever. Warner Music and Bain Capital (a major investment firm) put up $1.2 billion in mid-2025 to buy more old song rights. Concord packaged 1.3 million song rights (Beatles, Beyonce, Pink Floyd, Rihanna) into investment products, like bonds, and raised $1.76 billion. Pophouse raised $1.3 billion for the rights to KISS, Cyndi Lauper, and Avicii. When you spend that kind of money on old songs, you need returns. Spotify delivers. Your $12.99 monthly subscription goes into one big pot with everyone else's. That pot gets split based on which songs got the most plays. A play of "Bohemian Rhapsody" pays the same rate as a play from someone who dropped their first song yesterday. The top 1% of artists collect over 90% of all plays. The money flows to whoever owns the biggest song collections. That's Wall Street now. The system that picks what plays next makes this worse. Spotify retooled it in 2024 and 2025 to favor songs you already know over songs you haven't heard. Autoplay, AI DJ, and Radio loop you back to familiar tracks instead of showing you new artists. Familiar music keeps people on the app longer, which means more ad money and fewer cancellations. New music is a financial risk the system won't take. In April 2024, Spotify stopped paying royalties on any song with fewer than 1,000 plays in a year. That wiped out about 175 million songs, roughly 87% of everything on the platform. Disc Makers CEO Tony van Veen estimated the lost royalties at $47 million for 2024. That money got rerouted to the biggest hits, owned by major labels and the investment firms behind them. An AI company called Suno now cranks out 7 million songs every day, enough to recreate Spotify's entire library every two weeks. Deezer, another streaming service, says 28-39% of daily uploads are now AI-generated. A new human artist isn't just competing with Taylor Swift. They're buried under millions of machine-made tracks. In 2014, older music (anything over 18 months old) accounted for 35.8% of what Americans listened to. By 2024, it hit 73.3%, per Luminate, the firm that tracks this stuff. Fleetwood Mac didn't suddenly get better. Investment firms bought the catalog, the algorithm feeds you what's familiar, the platform stopped paying small artists, and AI is flooding the pipe. Every piece of this machine has a financial reason to play you something old.

@nitinmeshram Let’s start with the basics: 1. Manusmriti is generally accepted to be dated between ~200 BCE & 200 CE 2. Islam emerged in 7th century CE 3. Islamic Sharia developed gradually after that, crystallising over 8th - 10th centuries CE. So your premise is entirely flawed.

I am researching how Hindu law, including Manusmriti, was inspired by and influenced by Islamic Sharia law. I would greatly appreciate hearing your viewpoints. Please feel free to share your opinion via email.

@subhash_kak @viprabuddhi Contrast this with Borobudur, where visitors were required to wear special upanat sandals to climb the temple, movement was controlled, and the temple was treated first as a Buddhist site, and next as a monument.

@viprabuddhi Prambanan is an incredibly beautiful temple. Speaking from personal experience.

The Prambanan temple complex is an exquisite masterpiece of Hindu Javanese architecture. It was reconsecrated in 2022 and Indian govt is helping in renovation of the 500+ temple complex. Indonesian govt is now wooing Indian Hindus for tourism. C: Hindu Channel

@subhash_kak @viprabuddhi I visited Prambanan a week ago. My first observation was that, unlike Borobudur, it was not treated as a place of worship, or temple, but rather as a tourist site. Visitors were walking inside the inner sanctum with shoes on, flashing torchlight on the stone idols of deities

@froglover2003 what was that?

@froglover2003 masi love is public service. but I hear you. truce ✌🏽😘

@froglover2003 keep playing white, I’ll keep playing masi who comments ‘bittu, khana khaya?’ on every post 🫶

@froglover2003 I’m practising emotional unavailability to understand the divine masculine

@froglover2003 So Erykah Badu is the new Gen-Z hoe magnet? We were playing that on Sony Discmans before y’all discovered streaming, my boy 😭💀

@sandeepnailwal vote for $MATIC

Thought Experiment: Time and again, I keep hearing from folks in the Polygon trading community that MATIC was a far stronger and more familiar ticker — it had history, recognition, and stuck in people’s minds. So here’s an honest question: should we ask exchanges to revert just the ticker back to MATIC? My stance so far has been: it’s too much churn. We migrated to POL, let’s stick to it — enough people know it now, specially on CT. But the counter-argument I keep getting is: “the guy in the Philippines running a sari-sari store, or an Uber driver in Dubai, knew MATIC… and now he has no idea where it went.” And that, projects shouldn’t be making decisions based on what CT thinks — it represents <5% of total crypto trading population. I’m genuinely curious what the broader community thinks, because this feedback keeps coming up. No guarantees that exchanges would even agree to a revert — but who knows, it might be a trivial update on their end.

@ricis_angel Can you share the recipe, please? Thanks

I made 3 different fermentation water kefir probiotics drink. 1. Bee pollen ginger , 2 strawberry 🍓 Turkey tail mushrooms, shiitake chaga and birch polypore 3. Tangerine 🍊 maple water.

@KutnitiFNDTN So why are Indian journalists doing this? What’s the agenda- ideology, foreign funding, or just the market for anti-India narratives abroad?

🇵🇰 Pakistan has found a clever trick: Use 🇮🇳 Indian journalists in 🇬🇧 Reuters to make its propaganda look credible. 🌍 That’s how anti-India narratives becomes global But, who are the Indians giving their name to validate Pakistan abroad?

So long as you’re choosing a side, you’re not choosing peace. @vijayraju000 @AdamMGrant @DrGaborMate

We felt strong tremors right up in Kathmandu as well. My last night in Nepal from Gokyo / Chola Pass / EBC trek, before I head back home. Praying for the people and families affected 🙏

Congrats, @anantnath!

As my motto goes “open to trying most things in life at least once!”, good to know “openness”= willingness to engage w/ new ideas & experiences, strongly correlates w/ intelligence. Successful folks see possibilities that others miss coz of an “open mind” bit.ly/402fLdo

@atShruti I know, it’s been so long! Was thinking of our dinner in my hood with @ehchkay :) any plans of visiting India soon?

@BlingCat come visit! it’s been a while!

I have a different SF story to share today. Last night at 1:30 AM, our garage was broken into. The cops banged on my door, made sure we were safe, asked questions about our safety, and then actually found someone in our garage. A neighbor had reported a break in and the police acted swiftly. There are a lot of stories out there about SF crime, but this one makes me even more proud of our city. The @SFPD are doing a great job keeping us safe. Thank you neighbors for caring for the community and taking action.

An eye for an eye, Makes the whole world blind. 💔

Translation: economic history of role of working women over centuries, shedding light on nuances such as surprising role of birth control pills, to pressing issue of gender pay gaps. “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity” - have to agree!!