Many comments here are very insightful and discuss phenomena like high music diversity, music proliferation and easy of producing music, and automated recommendations.

One thing that has been occupying me is that curation is still harder than I'd like when using streaming tools like Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal. Pandora had good roots with its music genome project, and have built on that. (I can't use it without a VPN since they discontinued supporting the country I mostly live in). It's probably a function of how I consume my music today - no longer desk-bound at work, but on the go, so iPhone (and Apple Watch) are primary tools. Being able to select/skip/preview/tune what I'm listening to is nowhere near as powerful as I'd like. I've written library curation tools in the past, these always expected me to spend significant dedicated time in front of a screen (e.g. a similar tool like the cool looking https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer, I think).

This has strong parallels to how older people consumed music - either totally passive curation (radio), or very deliberate, like finding music in record stores, at a friend's place. Also replay involves selecting records/CDs in your own bookshelf. Today's ephemeral digital libraries are much lower effort, are huge and curation/selection tools are not easy enough to use, so I tend to fall back onto old favourites or recommendation engines that usually don't satisfy me.

A solution might be a much more configurable curation assistant that is also super easy to use (and, in my case) very accessible on a mobile device with 0-1 clicks (because I'm busy doing other things). Music discovery tools that don't allow in-situ music playing is thus also a no-go.

It wouldn't be super hard to build an interactive tool, but as always, making a super intuitive and useable UX experience is the hardest part. Most streaming tools are giant swiss-army knives for listening use-cases.

I like physical controls for everything else, but please make displays for e.g. CarPlay touch screens.

He also invested in OpenAI until he had a falling out about who would be in charge of the company. He recently founded X.AI, which is supposedly also building generative AI.

Everyone sees danger, but many, including Musk, are forging ahead.

From TFA: "says Blankenburg, “the data show very clearly that the means used to obtain these profits cannot be reduced to the use of productive technologies.” Other mechanisms, such as lobbying or mergers and acquisitions, the authors find, have played a significant role in enhancing the market power of dominant companies. “You can show quite clearly how surplus profits increase with mergers and acquisitions, or how changes in regulation that favor control over intellectual property rights for large corporations have a pretty-instant impact on the profit performance of those companies,"

That's the sum total of the rent seeking argument. There is nothing in there demonstrating use of IP to extract rent (which, arguably isn't even rent seeking behaviour, but for the sake of argument may be granted here). My intuition is that profit extraction due to IP for the very large companies is most obvious in pharmaceuticals, but that's just my guess?

There are a few interesting points in this article, but it's weakly written.