Ben Samples

I’ve seen some fire fits in China but I’ve never seen a jacket this hard in my life

genuinely how the FUCK did Boys Noize even come up with this . in 2007 mind you

i sidechained the cpu usage to the kick. the beat is stuttering because i sidechained cpu usage to the kick

The first criminal case of streaming fraud where a North Carolina musician who used AI to make songs, then streamed them billions of times himself making $8 million

Remember when Ridley Scott for some reason directed The Martian which was this uncharacteristically hopeful, crowd pleasing sci fi flick & then followed it up with another sci fi movie about how god hates us & is dead & how we’re trapped in an endless cycle of creation & death

Your brain peaked musically somewhere around age 16. Everything since then has been a dopamine echo. Between the ages of 12 and 22, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, the same circuit that processes cocaine and sex, fires at levels in response to sound that it will never reach again for the rest of your life. A 2011 McGill study used PET scans and fMRI simultaneously and found that music triggers dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal. The caudate nucleus lights up during anticipation of the good part. The nucleus accumbens lights up when it hits. Your brain is treating a guitar riff with the same reward architecture it uses for food-seeking and pair bonding. During adolescence, that response is dramatically amplified. Pubertal hormones are flooding the system. The prefrontal cortex is still wiring itself. Memories formed during this window get encoded with a density of emotional tagging that nothing in your 30s or 40s can replicate. Researchers at the University of Leeds identified this as the “reminiscence bump”: the period when your sense of self is forming, and the music playing during that formation becomes structurally integrated into your identity. A 2025 longitudinal study from the University of Gothenburg analyzed 40,000 users’ streaming data across 15 years. Younger listeners explored broadly across genres. Older listeners collapsed into increasingly narrow loops, almost entirely anchored to music from their teens and early twenties. Your brain stopped losing interest in new music years ago. It’s running a cost-benefit analysis. Familiar songs deliver guaranteed dopamine with zero processing cost. New songs require pattern recognition, expectation-building, and repeated exposure before the reward circuit kicks in. Past 25, most people stop paying that tax. The one variable that predicts whether someone keeps exploring: the personality trait “openness to experience.” Score high, you keep seeking. Score average, you default to the familiar forever. The fix, if you want one: deliberate exposure. Three listens minimum before your auditory cortex builds enough predictive models to generate a reward response. One passive listen on a playlist will never get there. Your brain needs repetition to find the pattern, and it needs the pattern to release dopamine.

AI targets musicians who are lazy, constantly failing at making music, and resentful towards human musicians with talent. Just look at their advertising.

French electronic band Daft Punk releases its second album, Discovery.