A New Zealand supermarket created Savey Meal-bot, an AI-powered meal-planning app, and its recipes haven’t all been winners. Savey’s picks include: “aromatic water mix” (actually a lethal chlorine gas), ant poison and glue sandwiches, “bleach-infused rice surprise,” and “methanol bliss,” a turpentine-flavored French toast. Delicious.
In today’s email:
Internet Archive: Why the web’s nonprofit library is being sued again.
Watch: Are people actually making money with GPT side hustles?
Pop-Tarts + Crocs: We only have ourselves to blame for this mashup.
Around the Web: A very cute robot turtle, secret recipe secrets, a chill puzzle game, and more.
👇 Listen: Why we’re seeing more and more odd brand pairings.
The Big Idea
Music labels vs. the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is being sued again, this time by music publishers.
2023-08-15T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Ryla
Did you know shellac is a resin secreted by lac insects? I didn’t — nor did I know that in the early 20th century, 78 rpm records were made out of shellac.
The sound quality isn’t great — hisses, pops, cracks — and the records themselves are brittle.
But they’re at the center of a lawsuit pitting music publishers including Universal Music Group Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment, and Capitol Records against the Internet Archive, perReuters.
The Great 78 Project…
… is a collection of 400k+ such records. IA uses George Blood LP, a Philadelphia-based digital archiving company, to digitize the recordings, then uploads them to its website, perAtlas Obscura.
Many recordings have already been restored or remastered on other media formats, but the project asserts:
Digitization allows people to do research without harming the physical records
The collection provides a reference to lesser-known music
But it’s not the unknowns…
… to which the lawsuit — which names IA, its founder Brewster Kahle, and George Blood — objects.
It objects to 2,749 copyrighted recordings from the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington that it alleges IA has digitized, uploaded, and distributed without permission, resulting in ~$412m (or $150k per song) in damages from copyright infringement. It also argues:
Making the recordings freely available exceeds the purposes of preservation and research
These songs are available to stream or download elsewhere and “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed”
This isn’t IA’s first rodeo
IA sees itself as a nonprofit library that makes culture and knowledge freely available to anyone with internet access; this often pits it against corporations that want to make money off said culture.
Case in point: IA’s ongoing litigation with book publishers over its attempt to distribute free ebooks, sans waitlist, amid the pandemic.
Free access vs. copyright law is likely to be an ongoing factor in these cases, but also in the numerous AI claims popping up in which copyright holders allege AI used their work to train.
Not fun fact: In 2008, the fire on Universal Studios Hollywood’s backlot did destroy a collection of UMG-owned, one-of-a-kind masters.
TRENDING
Drone vs. shark: Due to an uptick in shark sightings and attacks, New York officials are now using drones to spot the predators at beaches. Each drone costs ~$6k+, but are cheaper than police helicopters and could be used in search and rescue operations or to drop life preservers.
SNIPPETS
Today in AI: The New York Timesupdated its terms of service to forbid AI from training on its content — though it does have a $100m deal with Google to collaborate on various tools.
PayPal named Intuit exec Alex Chriss as its new CEO. He’ll replace retiring CEO Dan Schulman, who’s held the position since 2015, on Sept. 27. Shares bumped ~2% on the news.
America shotguns on Dunkin’: The coffee chain is releasing spiked iced coffees and teas. The former contain ~30 mg of caffeine and 6% alcohol, so old-school Four Lokos they are not.
Inside, please: Restaurants report a drop in outdoor dining — a pandemic staple — due to scorching temps and wildfire smoke. It is not, as one Chicago patron told The Wall Street Journal, “the vibe.”
There is such thing as a free lunch: Thanks to a 4% tax on residents who earn $1m+ per year, all Massachusetts public school students now get free breakfast and lunch. The new tax will generate $1B of the state’s record $56.2B fiscal budget for 2024.
TikTok’s new beta program to pay its creators has wowed with its first payouts. Many report a few thousand dollars per month, but one influencer duo with 3.5m followers toldInsider they made $87k+ in July.
Getting cured: A New Hampshire woman is seeking $50k in damages from Eataly after fracturing her ankle at the food hall chain’s Boston location. She allegedly slipped on a fallen prosciutto slice.
Grow on the ‘gram with this beautiful Instagram for business kit. Use the strategy guide, algorithm tips, and 20+ post/story templates to elevate your brand.
FROM THE BLOG
You know the saying: content is king. We have new data on how startups can unlock growth through smarter SEO strategies.
VIDEO
How not to grow a newsletter using ChatGPT
People online claim they’re making money using ChatGPT to launch side hustles — but we’ll believe it when we see it.
To better understand these GPT hustles, we teamed up with Caya, CEO of cloud-based presentation software startup Slidebean, to create a daily newsletter written by ChatGPT.
We gave this nostalgia-themed product one month to turn a profit. Now we’re three weeks into the experiment.
So, how are things looking?
Open rates of our chatbot-penned newsletter have tailed off, as people find the content too repetitive.
Subscriber acquisition has slowed.
We haven’t added a single buck to our name… yet.
Can GPT hustles actually work? Perhaps, but this one’s only got one week left to make the grade, and it ain’t looking good.
Learn what’s working — and not working — from Caya in the latest “Hustles Debunked” episode.
We may have removed the reader feedback footer on our emails… but some of us indeed used to read every message y’all sent our way.
Common complaints included:
More profitable knowledge!
More timely opportunities!
More industry trends!
Or else… 🔪
Please. We’ve got families. Bills. Dreams. Take Trends TLDR, our shiny new dispatch for anyone into startups, side hustles, and growth talk with gumption.
Join 500k+ people in snacking on a weekly slate of superfood for entrepreneurs.
A Pop-Tarts and Crocs partnership exists because we’re all total suckers
“Finally, you can put Pop-Tarts on Crocs and Crocs on Pop-Tarts,” says an actual press release we couldn’t look away from.
2023-08-15T00:00:00Z
Ben Berkley
It seems no day can pass without two brands creating some weird love child of a product. The latest:
Frank’s RedHot and Sabra teamed up on hummus — which, OK, we can see that one.
Skittles and French’s gave us a mustard-flavored skittle — still not forgiving them for that one.
And now: Pop-Tarts and Crocs present Croc-Tarts, “an ingenious pairing of flavor and footwear.” Sure.
What gives?
Partnerships are nothing new — it’s been a common marketing strategy for decades — but today’s blistering rate of them can be attributed to two things, perAd Age:
The economy is weird: A majority of marketers reported a decrease in spending in this year’s CMO Survey. Naturally, though economic uncertainty tightened their budgets, the pressure to attract attention only increased.
Enter mashups: a cheap way to make noise, as fools like us, seeking new things to write about every day, hand out earned media like candy (non-mustard flavored, preferably).
It simply works: It’s not just us falling for it — consumers are also simple beings who crave novelty.
Ad Age illustrates the power of the collab via e.l.f. Cosmetics: Its 2022 Dunkin’ collab drove a 52% lift in social impressions, and its partnership with retailer American Eagle scored 5.8m TikTok views.
Another key: Scarcity
These “limited-edition” mashups mostly play off the Supreme playbook, trying to finesse the supply-and-demand hype just right.
In March, Nike and Tiffany launched special-issue Air Force 1s with a Tiffany blue swoosh, and the small supply of $400 shoes instantly sold out.
Pop-Tarts and Crocs — the poor man’s Tiffany and Nike? — will play the same game: just four drops, with 60 Croc-Tarts kits released in each one.
May the odds be in your flavor.
AROUND THE WEB
🎥 On this day: In 1979, the film Apocalypse Now, inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, debuted in US theaters. While Conrad’s novella is set in the Congo, the film is set in Vietnam.
🐢 That’s interesting: A tiny (and adorable) robot turtle could help guide baby sea turtles to the sea.
🎂 Haha: Secret family recipes are often not original, but plagiarized from cookbooks or mayo jars.
🧠 Cure boredom: Move the tiles to complete the phrase or picture.
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