Meanwhile, in the early 2010s, the company shifted its focus from “music enthusiasts” to what it calls “lean-back consumers”, effectively the kind of people who would once have turned the radio on in the morning and left it burbling in the background all day. The purpose of the playlists it designed to target them – “chill vibes”, “mellow morning”, “mood-booster” – was, and is, to provide unobtrusive background noise or, as Pelly suggests, a latter-day equivalent to muzak: nothing striking, unusual, out-of-the-ordinary, or indeed any of the things one might reasonably want music to be. The message that quickly filtered through to artists was that the more beige your sound, the more likely it was to find a place on a Spotify playlist and earn some cash. Hence the rise of a homogeneous genre dubbed “Spotifycore”, which you’ve doubtless heard even if the term seems unfamiliar. It’s a bit ambient, a bit electronic, a bit folky, a bit indie, a nonspecific wish-wash possessed only of a vague wistfulness, the sonic equivalent of a CBD gummy: music “for any place, for anyone”, as one producer put it, that ends up being “music for no place, for no one”.

Spotify encouraged it, developing an “optimisation tool” called Spotify4Artists that urged musicians to examine the data, see what is doing well and tailor their music to be more like that. Given how hard it is for musicians to make a living in the 21st century, you can understand the pressure on artists to join this particular race to the bottom. “To be sustainable,” says one indie record label executive dolefully, “you have to put out records that are going to get repeat listens in coffee shops.”

Enligt bokföringslagen ska räkenskapsinformation arkiveras (sparas) i sju års tid – och i den form den hade när den kom till företaget. Får exempelvis ett företag in material på papper ska det också arkiveras på papper och har det kommit in elektroniskt ska det arkiveras elektroniskt. Det går däremot inte att skanna in pappersfakturor och sedan slänga fakturorna när allt är inskannat. Man får inte heller skriva ut elektroniska fakturor och sedan bara arkivera dem på papper, de måste även arkiveras digitalt.

Väljer du att skanna in en pappersfaktura säger dock bokföringslagen att du bara behöver arkivera pappersfakturan (originalet) i tre år och den inskannade kopian i sju år.

One of the bad learnings you get from YC is that there’s a formula for success, and it looks like this: First you do some brainstorming. Then you come up with a good idea that can scale to a billion dollars (otherwise what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?) Then you work hard until you find “product-market-fit.” And then if the noises from investors indicate you won’t be getting a next round of funding, you start looking for a “pivot.”

This so-called formula is nonsense. First, good ideas rarely come to us from a brainstorming session. They come from wandering about with an open mind until we stumble on an opportunity worth pursuing. Most of your ideas will be bad ideas, because unfortunately you’re not a genius visionary. So the best way to find good ideas is to have many ideas, try them out, take what works, and throw away the rest. But this is not what YC wants you to do. YC wants you to pick an idea that has market pull (or the potential for it), and to then dig a hole in the same spot until you reach the boiling magma. Because what if you stop digging just before you strike gold? When you’re cheap and expendable, that’s not an optimal strategy for the YC fund. You must go all in. Diversification is for your YC overlords, not for you.

To hear the recording industry tell the story, copyright is the only thing protecting musicians from poverty and despair. Of course, that’s always been a myth. Copyright was designed to benefit the middlemen and gatekeepers, such as the record labels, over the artists themselves. That’s why the labels have a long history of never paying artists.

I spent some months following BTS and Blackpink and others, butchering my algorithmic recommendations in the process, and concluded that there are four key things all K-pop bands do to cultivate their fandoms. I’ll describe each below, along with examples of how founders and execs can modify these tactics to build passion for a product, brand, or mission. No dancing required.

The digital media industry wants to eat its cake and have it, too. Even as they tell you that you've just bought a "license" and therefore have no rights under copyright, they tell their workforce – the creative laborers who composed, arranged and performed the music – that you're buying your music, not licensing it.

That's because all the record deals from the prehistory of digital music have two different royalty rates: when a musician's work is sold, they get a low royalty rate (12%-22%). When that same work is licensed, they get a 50% royalty.

...

Now, a musician has managed to drag digital music into the realm of classical physics, ending its quantum indeterminacy. Electronica pioneer Four Tet has successfully wrung a settlement out of his label, Domino, who will now be forced to treat his digital recordings as licenses and pay a 50% royalty, rather than the 13.5% they'd insisted on.

The list below is updated continuously by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his team of experts, research fellows, and students at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute to reflect new announcements from companies in as close to real time as possible.

Also: sortable, searchable, filterable database interface.

I was under a common engineer misapprehension that BFE [Big Freaking Enterprise] sales requires playing golf, inviting clients to steak dinners, and having budgets beyond to reach of small businesses. This is not 100% true: you can hack the BFE procurement process to your advantage. Let's dig into how.

• Legally release your version of any song in 1--2 business days.
• You can talk to a real person who will handle everything for you.
• We clear 100% of the rights you need, guaranteed.
• You get proof of licensing in your email (PDF document).
• Each request is securely saved online in your account

...

• $13.59 per song plus royalties.

Sometimes I get asked "have you ever seen someone do XYZ to acquire customers?" Turns out, the highest vote of confidence I can give is, "No I haven't, and that's good -- that means there's a higher chance of it working. You should try it."