The Hype Cycle, Vol. 6

Kyle Maurer

Jul 5, 2024 — 2 min read

Three Things, My Thoughts.

Some topics from this week — with my own 🔥 (or 🥶) takes:

The Great Copyright Clash Continues

Music and AI continue to tussle over ownership. Meanwhile, the pace of the landscape shift continues to accelerate. Just in the past month: Universal Music Group and SoundLabs revealed an AI vocal plug-in for artists using their voices; there was Google’s DeepMind announcing a new tool for making video soundtracks, and ElevenLabs debuting a new text-to-audio app. Meantime, a flurry of lawsuits from labels have come flying. In the midst of this conflict, content-licensing providers are starting to organize — like the recently announced DPA. Their aim is to ensure an environment consisting of ethically sourced data.

My Take: a solution may look like, Jen, a new music AI model by Futureverse that is trained on licensed music catalogs. AI companies are going to have to license IP. IP companies can use the licensing to improve cash flow, particularly legacy media industries such as print and music.

Threads Is Still Growing

Remember last year when everyone said Threads was DOA after it couldn’t hockey-stick to a billion users in just a few weeks? Silly. Meta’s app has passed the 175MM user mark, continuing its steady rise. This isn’t the graph of a platform in danger.

My Take: When Meta turns on ads, watch out. This just might finally be Meta’s first home-grown winner, and Zuck may not be too far off with his estimation that Threads could be a billion-user platform. Leadership is clearly steering Threads to be a safer, more fun version of X, and they’ve got an ads engine that’s rivaled only by Google and Amazon.

Ice Cream Gets Candid

Rebel Creamery has embraced radical candor in their latest campaign, “Don’t Sugarcoat It.” The ice cream brand harnesses humor and well-scripted moments of relevance for their target audiences.

My Take: ads that make you laugh win wallet share. Humor is a universal truth — we all love to laugh. Combining salty humor with spot-on situational storytelling is a job well done.

Two Good Resources.

I found a couple of recent 📖🎧📺 I found to be particularly good:

Why We Sleep: this book will get your butt in bed every night for a solid seven-to-eight hours of shuteye. The science of sleep comes through like a clarion call as we burn the candle at both ends of society, constantly. It vaporizes the machismo “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” mantra to ash. TL;DR — you really do need sleep.

The Acolyte: I am enjoying it immensely. I am enjoying it immensely, in large part because it is not recycled versions of previous Star Wars movies and TV series. I don’t need to see a replay of things that once gave me joy (and still do) — I can make space for new things, too. (Side note — I see folks online complaining about the writing… umm, do you remember the dialogue in George Lucas’ original trilogy of movies? 😬😖)