Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
CEO Of Music AI Company: Making Music The Traditional Way Sucks
“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get...
Warning: Hollywood Screen Music Production Is Endangered
Los Angeles is facing a loss of artists, producers and executives ranging from sound to visual effects. Musicians, and the players behind them, are a...
Is Netflix Deliberately Dumbing Down TV For The Internet Generation?
Is it inherently bad to cater to people who may prefer their viewing on the more casual side? Is it snobbery to believe that...
Classical Music’s Identity Crisis: Political Music Under Biden
Classical music has long been wandering in the desert of its own identity crisis, and 2016 was an unexpected checkpoint. Overnight, it seemed that...
Data’s In: What And How We Read Last Year
About 63 percent of us read at least one book last year, an improvement from the 54 percent we saw in 2023.Other sources don’t...
Study: LLM AI’s Aren’t Very Good At History Yet
“The main takeaway from this study is that LLMs, while impressive, still lack the depth of understanding required for advanced history. They’re great for...
Is The TikTok Battle A Chance To Reimagine How The Internet Works?
Broadly, Project Liberty is part of the movement toward a decentralized social Internet, where no single network controls users’ data and users can instead...
On Social Media, Disasters Are Now Merely Consumable Content
Like every major platform in 2025, X has become more like TikTok, prioritizing recommended content from accounts from people users follow. You can still follow people on X,...
Small Study: Readers Don’t Seem To Care If Writing Was Created By AI
"Throughout the study, writers expressed concerns about audiences' reactions to their use of AI assistance for their writing," the authors note. However, the survey...
Criticize Artists For Promoting After the LA Fires? I Don’t Think So!
“The Oscars are a big show that will be seen by millions of people and will bring national attention to Los Angeles. That can...
How De-Gendering Language Works
“She’s an actor” simply phases out “actress” and sends it on its way, along with Studebakers, Koogle peanut butter and Red Skelton. It creates...
How We Listened In 2024: Increase To Almost 5 Trillion Streams
The global music industry hit 4.8 trillion streams in 2024, a new single-year record, Luminate’s 2024 Year-End Report found. That’s up 14% from 2023, which held the previous record....
The Death Of DEI
For a large swath of the country, the idea of DEI has become a catchall insult. DEI is part bogeyman, part always-there scapegoat for some combination...
The TikTok Ban — End Of An Internet Era
TikTok’s rapidly approaching deadline represents the end of an era in online life and a strange moment for many—even those who don’t consider themselves...
The Art Of Amazon Reviews
He embraced all the stylistic quirks, choppy sentence fragments and run-ons, either darting from point to point like a distracted squirrel or leaning heavily...
How/Why Netflix Changed How We Watch
Guilds like the WGA and the Screen Actors Guild under-estimated just how quickly Netflix would take over the industry. Suddenly, most of the work...
Sesame Street Is Homeless After 55 Years
These shows didn’t just pioneer ways to teach children their letters and numbers. They created a set of tenets rooted in love – the...
Bay Area Arts Organizations In Funding Crisis
Similarly in San Francisco, hundreds of music and theater organizations (the latter in major decline recently) are struggling to survive despite the well-established fact...
Critics Have Always Hated/Loved/Worried-About Newspapers. Let’s Understand The History
The abolition of most forms of censorship, declining paper costs, railway expansion and universal primary education triggered a newspaper boom that saw total daily...
Barnes & Noble’s Great Resurgence
The bookseller expects to open over 60 new bookstores in 2025, including five this month. - Geekwire
Criticism Is So Much More Than Being Critical
Criticism can oppose; it can also cajole, provoke, consider, inform, and suggest. More than being punitive or dismissive, public criticism can provide an opportunity...
Artists Tried Influencing The Election With Billboards. Did They Sway Anyone?
How do you evaluate something as subjective and mercurial as billboard art? - The New York Times
Drake Sues His Record Label For Promoting “Defamatory” Recording
Drake’s lawsuit claims that Universal Music Group ‘chose corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists’ by allegedly promoting Kendrick Lamar’s song...
Criticisms Of Spotify? The Don’t Hold Up
What a lot of these criticisms seem to miss is the crucial element: that we can still choose what we listen to. No one...
Christie’s Picks A New Leader
Bonnie Brennan, a 51-year-old Michigan native, succeeds Guillaume Cerutti, a 58-year-old Frenchman who is stepping down after an eight-year run. Cerutti plans to continue as...
