Although Netflix received 24 nominations (the most of any studio) at this year’s Oscars, its films only ended up winning two awards.
Laura Dern was named Best Actress in a Supporting Role for playing Nora, a flashy divorce attorney in “Marriage Story” — the only award that “Marriage Story” won from its six nominations.
And “The Irishman” came up empty-handed despite being nominated in 10 categories. Both films were nominated for Best Director and Best Picture, awards that ultimately went to the night’s big winner “Parasite.”
Netflix’s only other Oscar for the evening was for “American Factory,” which won the award for Best Documentary Feature. The film was the first to emerge from Barack and Michelle Obama’s production deal with Netflix. (Despite rumors to the contrary, the Obamas were not on-hand to accept the award.)
Last year, Netflix’s “Roma” won the awards for cinematography, foreign language film and director. There was some speculation that it might have beaten “Green Book” for Best Picture if it had been released by a traditional studio, but it had other disadvantages. For one thing, a foreign language film had never won the big award — until tonight, when “Parasite” emerged victorious.
And perhaps this would have been “Parasite”‘s year regardless; it certainly deserved all the awards. Still, “The Irishman” seemed like Netflix’s biggest swing yet. It was made for a reported budget of $160 million, directed by the legendary Martin Scorsese and brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro back together on-screen. Maybe next year.
“Miss Americana,” a new Netflix documentary about Taylor Swift, is worth watching — if you go in with the right expectations.
At least, that’s according to two out of three hosts of the Original Content podcast. Darrell was the holdout; he didn’t hate the movie or think it was poorly made, but he’s much more skeptical about celebrity culture in general and argues that everyone would be better off ignoring celebrities altogether.
Your other hosts don’t go quite that far. Instead, we admit to a guarded admiration for Swift and her music, and we enjoyed “Miss Americana” as a window into Swift’s world. Not a completely transparent window — despite being directed by Lana Wilson, the film feels like it was guided by Swift’s perspective, focusing on her chosen themes of tabloid persecution and political awakening — but a revealing one nevertheless.
What comes across clearly is the utter insanity of the musician’s life, lived under intense (and often unfair) media scrutiny.
The film also demonstrates the extraordinary talent, ambition and luck that Swift must have needed to get where she is. And it boasts a few glimpses into her songwriting and recording process, and into what appears to have been an agonizing decision to endorse Democrat Phil Bredesen’s ultimately unsuccessful run for one of Tennessee’s Senate seats in 2018.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
When Ubisoft first approached “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” stars Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day about creating a new show set in the video game industry, McElhenney said they weren’t interested — at least, not initially.
“Anything that we had ever seen in the past, from a movie or television show perspective, the industry was always presented in such a negative light,” he told me. “It was the butt of the joke. The characters themselves were derided, and it was very specific to geek culture … We just had no interest in that.”
And yet McElhenney, Day and “It’s Always Sunny” writer Megan Ganz ended up creating “Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet,” which premieres on Apple TV+ this weekend. McElhenney explained that a visit to the Montreal offices of Ubisoft — publisher of “Assassin’s Creed”, “Prince of Persia” and other major game franchises — changed his mind.
“Once we went to Montreal and met all of the devs that worked at Ubisoft, that all work in communion to make these games, [we realized] how many different, disparate personalities there really were and how much they were all all united by their love of games,” he said.
So McElhenney decided that “this just seemed like a really interesting and new place to set those kinds of stories.” And just as he assumes most “Sunny” viewers aren’t tuning in to learn the fate of Paddy’s Pub (the Philadelphia bar run by the show’s main characters), “The approach we took was, the general audience is not going to care about the success or failure of a video game, they’re going to care about the interpersonal dynamics of the characters themselves.”
Ganz also said she didn’t know much about video game development when McElhenney first approached her about collaborating on the show, but she started to see parallels between that world and a TV writers’ room.
“Except that instead of everyone being a writer, they all have very specialized jobs that they care about, like just the writing or just the design or just the money that’s being made,” she said. “And I thought, well, that’s really fun because that presents something that’s even more complex than your typical writers’ room — you have all these sort of Greek gods that all control their very specific part of the world.”
Of course, “Mythic Quest” had a writers’ room of its own, which Ganz said was divided evenly between people with deep knowledge of the industry (like Ashly Burch, who’s done extensive voiceover work on games like “Team Fortress 2” and “Fortnite,” and who also plays a game tester on the show), and those like Ganz herself, “who maybe played casually when they were younger” but ultimately didn’t know much about that world.
“We did that because ultimately, if you come up with a script or a joke that satisfies both of those people, then you’re going to satisfy as much of the audience as you possibly can,” she said.
The goal, she added, was not “pandering to the video game community,” but rather “to be authentic and not make fun of them, but also be authentic in terms of talking about some of the toxicity that happens in the video game space, the gender dynamics that are at play.”
It wasn’t just a learning process for the writers. F. Murray Abraham (who won an Oscar for playing Salieri in “Amadeus”) plays an eccentric science fiction writer who works on the game, and he told me that when it came to video games, “I had no idea. I knew something, I was aware of it, but not the size of it, the success of it, the reach of it, my God.”
All the “Mythic Quest” writers and actors I spoke to said that their approach has evolved significantly from the original pilot script. For example, there’s McElhenney’s character Ian Grimm, the creative director of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that gives the show its name.
“In the first draft of the script, we made Ian a little bit more of just a straight buffoon,” McElhenney said. “We read through it and we realized it just felt false. It was missing something, that if we didn’t want this to feel like a live action cartoon — like ‘Sunny’ often does, which is by design — and we wanted these people to feel real and authentic, that we needed to believe that he really should have that position.”
The question, then was how to make him competent, but in a funny way. They went with a pilot episode where Ian and lead engineer Poppy (played by Charlotte Nicdao) end up in a passionate debate about the properties of the game’s brand new shovel. While that debate will probably seem silly to most viewers, McElhenney said it also conveys “that thing that so many people in the creative arts have, or don’t have — the ability to see the most minor detail, the reason why something is going to work, or why it might not work.”
Throughout that process, the writers also tapped Ubisoft for advice. Jason Altman, Ubisoft’s head of film and television, is an executive producer on the show, and he recalled bringing in different team members to help the writers understand everything that goes into the development process.
In addition, Ubisoft Red Storm (the studio behind the Tom Clancy game franchise) pitched in by building the game segments that we actually see on the show.
“What they created were actually small gameplay sandboxes that we could bring to set, and the actors could sit and play with them and it would actually inform their performances,” Altman said.
He acknowledged that there were challenges, like helping the “Mythic Quest” writers realize that the developers needed time to do their work — but ultimately, he said the Red Storm team had “a great time” creating something that gave the show “a real sense of authenticity.”
Ganz and McElhenney also had plenty of praise for the developers, particularly for their openness to adding silly comedic elements like ridiculous gouts of blood. McElhenney pointed to one episode that required them to create “a really believable Sieg Heil Nazi salute.”
“There’s no way they’re going to go for that, it’s going to take a follow-up phone call,” he recalled thinking. “And they were like, ‘Okay great.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what do you mean, okay great?’ They said, ‘No, we do Nazis all the time’ — and we put this in the show — ‘because Nazis make the best villains, everybody hates Nazis.”
I was also curious about why the show focuses on the development of an ongoing MMORPG, rather than launching a new game. Altman had an answer for me: “I think it represents what’s happening within the game industry. You don’t just launch a game and forget it, the development team lives with it, you’ve got live services and live events. It’s the way games are operated right now.”
Plus, he said it reflects another aspect of development, the fact that teams “don’t just spend six months together, they spend years together, and the success that they create together binds them together.”
David Hornsby — who, like McElhenney, is both a writer, executive producer and actor on the show — told me that the writers’ understanding of show’s distribution also evolved, since Apple TV+ hadn’t launched (or even been officially announced) when “Mythic Quest” first got picked up.
“We weren’t sure if it wasn’t going to be binge-able from the start, we heard incrementally,” Hornsby said. “Apple is good at keeping secrets.”
Ultimately, they did find out that all nine episodes would drop at once, which Hornsby said led them to structure the season “like a movie — we know where we are going to be in the middle of the season, the story arcs for each of our characters.”
I also brought up Apple TV+ with McElhenney, who said the team had offers from a number of studios.
“It was scary,” he said. “And I remember we were discussing it, we were like, do we go with a known quantity? Or do we jump into the waters of mystery, because even though it’s the biggest company in the world, you don’t know if it’s going to work.”
So why choose Apple? “We just felt like, if you’re gonna bet on somebody, why not bet on a trillion dollars? They seem to have the resources and something figured out.”
TVs this year will ship with a new feature called “filmmaker mode,” but unlike the last dozen things the display industry has tried to foist on consumers, this one actually matters. It doesn’t magically turn your living room into a movie theater, but it’s an important step in that direction.
This new setting arose out of concerns among filmmakers (hence the name) that users were getting a sub-par viewing experience of the media that creators had so painstakingly composed.
The average TV these days is actually quite a quality piece of kit compared to a few years back. But few ever leave their default settings. This was beginning to be a problem, explained LG’s director of special projects, Neil Robinson, who helped define the filmmaker mode specification and execute it on the company’s displays.
“When people take TVs out of the box, they play with the settings for maybe five minutes, if you’re lucky,” he said. “So filmmakers wanted a way to drive awareness that you should have the settings configured in this particular way.”
In the past they’ve taken to social media and other platforms to mention this sort of thing, but it’s hard to say how effective a call to action is, even when it’s Tom Cruise and Chris McQuarrie begging you:
I’m taking a quick break from filming to tell you the best way to watch Mission: Impossible Fallout (or any movie you love) at home. pic.twitter.com/oW2eTm1IUA
While very few people really need to tweak the gamma or adjust individual color levels, there are a couple settings that are absolutely crucial for a film or show to look the way it’s intended. The most important are ones that fit under the general term “motion processing.”
These settings have a variety of fancy-sounding names, like “game mode,” “motion smoothing,” “truemotion,” and such like, and they are on by default on many TVs. What they do differs from model to model, but it amounts to taking content at, say, 24 frames per second, and converting it to content at, say, 120 frames per second.
Generally this means inventing the images that come between the 24 actual frames — so if a person’s hand is at point A in one frame of a movie and point C in the next, motion processing will create a point B to go in between — or B, X, Y, Z, and dozens more if necessary.
This is bad for several reasons:
First, it produces a smoothness of motion that lies somewhere between real life and film, giving an uncanny look to motion-processed imagery that people often say reminds them of bad daytime TV shot on video — which is why people call it the “soap opera effect.”
Second, some of these algorithms are better than others, and some media is more compatible than the rest (sports broadcasts, for instance). While at best they produce the soap opera effect, at worst they can produce weird visual artifacts that can distract even the least sensitive viewer.
And third, it’s an aesthetic affront to the creators of the content, who usually crafted it very deliberately, choosing this shot, this frame rate, this shutter speed, this take, this movement, and so on with purpose and a careful eye. It’s one thing if your TV has the colors a little too warm or the shadows overbright — quite another to create new frames entirely with dubious effect.
So filmmakers, and in particular cinematographers, whose work crafting the look of the movie is most affected by these settings, began petitioning TV companies to either turn motion processing off by default or create some kind of easily accessible method for users to disable it themselves.
Ironically, the option already existed on some displays. “Many manufacturers already had something like this,” said Robinson. But with different names, different locations within the settings, and different exact effects, no user could really be sure what these various modes actually did. LG’s was “Technicolor Expert Mode.” Does that sound like something the average consumer would be inclined to turn on? I like messing with settings, and I’d probably keep away from it.
So the movement was more about standardization than reinvention. With a single name, icon, and prominent placement instead of being buried in a sub-menu somewhere, this is something people may actually see and use.
Not that there was no back-and-forth on the specification itself. For one thing, filmmaker mode also lowers the peak brightness of the TV to a relatively dark 100 nits — at a time when high brightness, daylight visibility, and contrast ratio are specs manufacturers want to show off.
The reason for this is, very simply, to make people turn off the lights.
There’s very little anyone in the production of a movie can do to control your living room setup or how you actually watch the film. But restricting your TV to certain levels of brightness does have the effect of making people want to dim the lights and sit right in front. Do you want to watch movies in broad daylight, with the shadows pumped up so bright they look grey? Feel free, but don’t imagine that’s what the creators consider ideal conditions.
Photo: Chris Ryan / Getty Images
“As long as you view in a room that’s not overly bright, I’d say you’re getting very close to what the filmmakers saw in grading,” said Robinson. Filmmaker mode’s color controls are a rather loose, he noted, but you’ll get the correct aspect ratio, white balance, no motion processing, and generally no weird surprises from not delving deep enough in the settings.
The full list of changes can be summarized as follows:
Maintain source frame rate and aspect ratio (no stretched or sped up imagery)
Motion processing off (no smoothing)
Peak brightness reduced (keeps shadows dark — this may change with HDR content)
Sharpening and noise reduction off (standard items with dubious benefit)
Other “image enhancements” off (non-standard items with dubious benefit)
White point at D65/6500K (prevents colors from looking too warm or cool)
All this, however, relies on people being aware of the mode and choosing to switch to it. Exactly how that will work depends on several factors. The ideal option is probably a filmmaker mode button right on the clicker, which is at least theoretically the plan.
The alternative is a content specification — as opposed to a display one — that allows TVs to automatically enter filmmaker mode when a piece of media requests it to. But this requires content providers to take advantage of the APIs that make the automatic switching possible, so don’t count on it.
And of course this has its own difficulties, including privacy concerns — do you really want your shows to tell your devices what to do and when? So a middle road where the TV prompts the user to “Show this content in filmmaker mode? Yes/No” and automatic fallback to the previous settings afterwards might be the best option.
There are other improvements that can be pursued to make home viewing more like the theater, but as Robinson pointed out, there are simply fundamental differences between LCD and OLED displays and the projectors used in theaters — and even then there are major differences between projectors. But that’s a whole other story.
At the very least, the mode as planned represents a wedge that content purists (it has a whiff of derogation but they may embrace the term) can widen over time. Getting the average user to turn off motion processing is the first and perhaps most important step — everything after that is incremental improvement.
So which TVs will have filmmaker mode? It’s unclear. LG, Vizio, and Panasonic have all committed to bringing models out with the feature, and it’s even possible it could be added to older models with a software update (but don’t count on it). Sony is a holdout for now. No one is sure exactly which models will have filmmaker mode available, so just cast an eye over the spec list of you’re thinking of getting and, if you’ll take my advice, don’t buy a TV without it.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch that it has internally prototyped an Instagram Partner Program that would let creators earn money by showing advertisements along with their videos. By giving creators a sustainable and hands-off way to generate earnings from IGTV, those creators might be inspired to bring more and higher-quality content to the service.
Carta has created an investing vehicle called Carta Ventures. The well-funded unicorn hopes to foster an ecosystem around its core products and services.
When Fair laid off 40% of its staff in October, CEO Scott Painter promised it wasn’t shuttering its leasing services to on-demand fleets. But just one week later, Painter was removed as CEO and replaced in the interim by Adam Hieber, a CFA from Fair investor SoftBank.
Since they started leveraging the technology, tech companies have received numerous accusations regarding the unethical use of artificial intelligence. Gramener’s Ganes Kesari says that to address the issue, fixing the model is not enough. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel is recommending that Boeing’s software testing processes undergo a review, following the discovery of another problem with the on-board system that was in operation during the CST-100 Starliner uncrewed Space Station docking test launch in December.
This morning, at an event in Chicago, Motorola introduced two new entries into the G line: the Moto G Power and Moto G Stylus, which will run $300 and $250, respectively.
A startup called Our.News is working to make its users smarter consumers of the news.
In other words, it’s confronting some big, seemingly intractable problems. For one thing, there’s a tremendous amount of disinformation online — as Our.News founder and CEO Richard Zack put it, “Unfortunately, you have thousands of people all over the world who intentionally make it hard for people to know what’s true.”
All of this adds up to an environment where no one is quite sure what to believe, or they simply accept the stories that reinforce their existing beliefs.
“You can’t fight misinformation by telling people what’s true, because they don’t believe it,” Zack said. His solution? Something that he described as a “nutrition label for news”: “It doesn’t tell you it’s good or bad, it doesn’t say buy it or don’t buy it, it leaves the buying decision in the hands of the consumers.”
In some ways, the approach is similar to NewsGuard, which rates online news sources. In fact, Zack said, “We really support NewsGuard and what they’re doing.” Still, he suggested that evaluating publishers isn’t enough, which is why Our.News provides labels for individual articles — he compared it to “trying to choose between Lucky Charms and Cheerios,” where it’s not to know that both cereals are manufactured by General Mills.
To put it another way, you don’t want to just accept what a publisher tells you. Even the best publisher can make mistakes, so you also want to understand what claims they’re making, what their sources are and whether those claims have been vetted by independent fact checkers.
An Our.News label is accessible through Firefox and Chrome browser extensions, as well as an iOS app. The label includes publisher descriptions from Freedom Forum, along with bias ratings from AllSides; information about an article’s sources, author and editor; fact-checking information from sources like Politifact, Snopes and FactCheck.org; labels like “clickbait” or “satire”; and user ratings and reviews.
Zack said Our.News has created around 600,000 labels to date, generating about 5,000 new ones every day. Of course, there’s still a good chance that the article you’re reading won’t have a label, but if that’s the case, Our.News might still be able to show you publisher information, and users can also click a button to add the article into the system.
“We’ve intentionally combined objective facts [about the article] with subjective views,” Zack added. “We think that’s the solution … If you go purely subjective, then it’s just a popularity contest. If it’s just objective, then who’s the determiner of truth? We’re mixing the two together, condensing it all into the nutrition label, so news consumers can more quickly make their own decision.”
He also acknowledged that different users will treat the labels in different ways. Some, for example, may still not trust the fact-checkers, but even then, Zack argued that there’s still value in giving them a way to provide feedback to publishers in a way that’s more structured than a regular comments section.
He also noted that user ratings will be weighted based on their interaction with the label — if you skip the publisher information, skip the sources and skip the fact-checking, then your rating won’t be worth as much someone else who carefully considered all of that information.
In addition to its current, consumer-focused distribution, Our.News just launched a way for publishers and other businesses to incorporate its labels. Zack said this could be used by “news publishers, content aggregators, social networks, anywhere that’s displaying articles.” (This is also how he plans to make money.)
The hope is that Our.News partners can use these labels to make readers more comfortable trusting their content, and to collect feedback from those readers. There will be some degree of customization available, but Zack emphasized that publishers won’t be able to change the actual content of the labels.
Instagram may finally let IGTV video makers earn money 18 months after launching the longer-form content hub. Instagram confirms to TechCrunch that it has internally prototyped an Instagram Partner Program that would let creators earn money by showing advertisements along with their videos. By giving creators a sustainable and hands-off way to generate earnings from IGTV, they might be inspired to bring more and higher quality content to the destination.
The program could potentially work similarly to Facebook Watch, where video producers earn a 55% cut of revenue from “Ad Breaks” inserted into the middle of their content. There’s no word on what the revenue split would be for IGTV, but since Facebook tends to run all its ads across all its apps via the same buying interfaces, it might stick with the 55% approach that lets its say creators get the majority of cash earned.
Previously, Instagram only worked with a limited set of celebrities, paying “to offset small production costs” for IGTV content Bloomberg reported, but not offering a way to earn a profit. That left creators to look to sponsored content or product placement to generate cash, or to try to push their followers to platforms like YouTube where they could earn a reliable cut of ads.
A lack of monetization may have contributed to the absence of great content on IGTV. Many of the videos on the Popular page are low-grade rips of YouTube content or TV, or are clickbaity teasers. That in turn has led to mediocre view counts, only 7 million of Instagram’s billion-plus users downloading the standalone IGTV app, and Instagram dropping the homescreen button for opening IGTV. That’s all disappointing considering TIkTok is blowing up on the back of more purposeful, storyboarded mobile video entertainment.
But today, reverse engineering master and perennial TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong tipped us off to the IGTV monetization prototype she dug out of the code of Instagram’s Android app. She tells TechCrunch she first saw signs of the program a week and ago and was then able to generate screenshots of the unreleased feature. It shows an “Instagram Partner Program” with “Monetization Tools”. This seems to be different from the old “Partner Program” for business tool developers.
Users who are deemed “Eligible” according to criteria we don’t have info about could choose to “Monetize Your IGTV Videos”. The screen explains that “You can earn money by runing short ads on your IGTV videos. When you monetize on IGTV, you agree to follow the Partner Program Monetization Policies.”
It’s not clear IGTV’s monetization policies would be different, but on Facebook, they require that users:
Follow all its normal Community Standards about decency
Share authentic content without misinformation, false news, clickbait, or sensationalism
Share original content they made themselves
Avoid restricted content categories including debated social issues, tragedy or conflict, objectionable activity, sexual or suggestive activity, strong language, explicit content, misleading medical information, and politics and government
Instagram confirmed to TechCrunch the authenticity of the prototype it’s been working on and provided the following statement “We continue to explore ways to help creators monetize with IGTV. We don’t have more details to share now, but we will as they develop further.” Given the company is confirming this as a prototype rather than a feature being beta tested, there are no public mentions, and that there’s no Instagram Help Center information published about it, Instagram might not be testing the program externally yet.
Creator monetization has been a slow-going evolution on many of the major social networks. While YouTube was early to the space with ads, it as well as Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat are now testing an array of ways for influencers to earn money. Those include ads splits, subscriptions to exclusive content, tipping, connections to brands for sponsorship, merchandise sales, and more.
Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier and Nico Grant reported this week that Instagram brought in $20 billion in revenue during 2019. It gets to keep that revenue since it currently doesn’t split any with creators. That contrasts with YouTube, which says it took in $15.1 billion in 2019 revenue this week in the first time it’s revealed the stat, though it has to pay out a substantial portion to creators. With Instagram now running ads in feed, Explore, and Stories, only IGTV and Direct remain as major surfaces lacking ads.
Social apps are wising up that if they want to keep their creators from straying to competitors and bringing fans with them, they need to offer ways for people to turn their passion for creating content into a profession. IGTV spent a year and a half trying to get video makers to volunteer for free, and the result wasn’t entertaining enough. Now Instagram seems ready to share the proceeds if they can bring in viewers together.
Netflix announced this week that it has started to stream titles in AV1 on Android in what could significantly help the two-year-old media codec gain wider adoption.
The world’s biggest streaming giant said on Wednesday that by switching from Google’s VP9 — which it previously used on Android — to AV1, its compression efficiency has gone up by 20%.
At the moment, only “select titles” are available to stream in AV1 for subscribers “who wish to reduce their cellular data usage by enabling the ‘Save Data’ feature,” the American firm said.
Netflix hasn’t shared much about the benefit AV1 will provide to customers, but the new media codec’s acceptance nonetheless sends a message by itself.
Tech giants, including Google, have spent years developing and improving media codecs as consumption of data skyrocketed and low-cost devices began to sell like hotcakes. But they just can’t seem to settle on one media codec and universally support it.
Think of Safari and YouTube, for instance. You can’t stream YouTube videos in 4K resolution on Safari, because Apple’s browser does not support Google’s VP9. And Google does not support HEVC for 4K videos on YouTube.
AV1 is supposed to be the savior media codec that gets universal support. It’s royalty-free and it works atop of open-source dav1d decoder that has been built by VideoLAN, best known for its widely popular media player VLC and FFmpeg communities. It is sponsored by the Alliance for Open Media.
Who are the members of Alliance for Open Media? Nearly all the big guys: Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Nvidia, ARM, Facebook, Microsoft, Mozilla, Samsung and Tencent, among others.
But that’s not to say there aren’t roadblocks in the adoption of AV1. Compared to HEVC — the format that AV1 is supposed to replace in popularity — encoding in AV1 was noticeably slower a year ago, as per some benchmark tests.
Adoption of AV1 by various browsers, according to analytics firm StatCounter. Safari is yet to support it.
Netflix’s announcement suggests that things have improved. The streaming giant said its goal is to support AV1 on all of its platforms. “In the spirit of making AV1 widely available, we are sponsoring an open-source effort to optimize 10-bit performance further and make these gains available to all,” it said in a blog post.
Snafu Records is bringing a new approach to finding musical talent — founder and CEO Ankit Desai described the Los Angeles-headquartered startup as “the first full-service, AI-enabled record label.”
It’s a world that Desai knows well, having spent the past five years working on digital and streaming strategy at Capitol Records and Universal Music Group. He argued that there’s still a vast pool of musical talent that the record labels are ill-equipped to tap into.
“If there’s some girl in Indonesia whose music the world is dying to hear, they’re never going to get the chance,” he said. “The bridge to connect her to the world doesn’t exist today. The music business is entrenched in a very old way of working, finding artists through word-of-mouth.”
There are other companies like Chartmetric creating software to help the labels scout artists, but Desai said, “I used to be the one buying the sevice. What always ended up happening was that we were trying to put 21st century technology into a 20th century machine.”
The machine, in other words, is the record label itself. So he decided to create a label of his own — Snafu Records, which is officially launching today.
The startup is also announcing that it has raised $2.9 million in seed funding led by TrueSight Ventures, with participation from Day One Ventures, ABBA’s Agnetha Fältskog, Spotify’s John Bonten, William Morris’ Samanta Hegedus Stewart, Soundboks founder Jesper Theil Thomsen, Headstart.io founder Nicholas Shekerdemian and others.
The Snafu approach, Desai said, uses technology “to essentially turn everyone listening to music into a talent scout on our behalf.”
The company’s algorithms are supposedly looking at around 150,000 tracks from unsigned artists each week on services like YouTube, Instagram and SoundCloud, and evaluating them based on listener engagement, listener sentiment and the music itself — Desai said the sweet spot is to be 70 or 75% similar to the songs on Spotify’s top 200 list, so that the music sounds like what’s already popular, while also doing just enough to “break the mold.”
This analysis is then translated into a score, which Snafu uses to go “from this firehose of music, distill it down to 15 or 20 per week, and then the human [team] gets involved.”
The goal is to sign musicians as Snafu artists, who then get access the company’s industry expertise (including advice from the label’s head of creative Carl Falk, who’s written songs for Madonna, One Direction and Nicki Minaj) and marketing support in exchange for a share of streaming revenue. Desai added that Snafu will share more of the revenue with artists and lock them in for shorter periods of time than a standard record contract.
Asked whether streaming (as opposed to touring or merchandising) will provide enough money for Snafu to build a big business, Desai said, “Economics-wise, streaming sometimes does get a bad rap sometimes. It’s a bit misunderstood — there’s still just as many artists making really, really good numbers through streaming, it’s just a different kind of artist.”
And while Snafu is only officially launching today, it’s already signed 16 artists, including the Little Rock-based duo Joan and the jazz musician Mishcatt, whose song “Fade Away” has been streamed 5 million times in the five weeks since it was released.
“There’s a major opportunity for Ankit and the Snafu team to build a new innovative and enduring music label at the intersection of technology and deep industry expertise,” said Hampus Monthan Nordenskjöld, Founding Partner at TrueSight Ventures, in a statement. “The music industry is going through a tectonic shift and we’re extremely excited to work with Snafu as they redefine what it means to be a music label in the 21st century.”
Reddit, a site that refers to itself as the “front page of the internet” is today announcing a new deal that will see its posts and conversations extend beyond the web page. The company is partnering with Tagboard, which will for the first time allow broadcast networks the ability to easily display Reddit’s content on TV. That includes Reddit’s unique content, like AMA (Ask Me Anything) recaps and photoshop battles, as well as popular posts and comments that make the news, and more.
The site, now visited by 430 million people monthly, is often home to breaking news and interesting stories, but hadn’t yet offered a way for this content to be easily sourced and shared with broadcasters. Tagboard’s solutions allow clients to search across social media, curate content, then use its tools to help design and produce their stories.
In addition, Tagboard brings to the table its relationships with broadcasters including the NFL Network and U.S. local TV broadcaster TEGNA, which has 62 stations in 51 markets, reaching 39% of all TV households nationwide. Both have already put Reddit content to use on their networks.
The new partnership is Reddit’s first-ever effort with regard to sourcing content for broadcasters — something Reddit hopes will help raise its brand profile as well as encourage newsrooms to consider looking to Reddit, and not just large social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to find content to enhance their stories.
“Reddit is home to more than 100,000 active communities and a plethora of amazing content and we are thrilled to partner with them as broadcasters are committing more time to sourcing perspectives from online communities to enhance their stories,” said Nathan Peterson, Chief Revenue Officer at Tagboard, in a statement. “As the premier distributor of Reddit content to broadcast brands, Tagboard is playing an important role ensuring that Reddit content is disseminated more easily to news, sports, and entertainment brands across the globe,” he added.
Starting today, Tagboard partners can access Reddit content in formats and packages designed for on-air viewing. Through the partnership, Reddit’s content has the potential to reach over 250 global broadcasters across news, sports TV, and entertainment, the company says.
“In our ongoing transformation of local news, we are constantly seeking out the stories that matter most to our audience,” noted Adam Ostrow, TEGNA’s Chief Digital Officer, about the partnership. “Our partnership with Reddit and Tagboard lets our 49 local newsrooms stay attuned to the hyperlocal issues being discussed in their communities, and gives us the ability to develop news content that reflects the most topical online conversations and insights being shared by redditors.”
Reddit, a Condé Nast majority-owned site, raised a massive $300 million round from Tencent last year, with the goal of chasing more ad dollars. And what better way to get advertisers to better understand Reddit’s role in breaking and contributing to news and storytelling than sticking Reddit posts up on the TV’s big screen?
Plus, Reddit needs a way to combat its reputation as a home to some of the darker corners of the internet, where it has hosted forums catering to misogyny, racism and violent threats, and worse.
This isn’t the first time Reddit has tried to better highlight the news-gathering aspects of its website. The company in 2018 launched a news tab right on its home page, after earlier attempts to create a standalone news site of its own back in 2015.
“Our partnership with Tagboard enables Reddit’s unique content to be credited and distributed by television networks around the world for on-air storytelling purposes,” said Alexandra Riccomini, Reddit’s Senior Director of Business Development & Media Partnerships. “We anticipate this partnership will empower broadcasters to share Reddit content regularly while also showcasing Reddit’s power of community and belonging.”
