café snake - complainte de la playlist dropshippée

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

On explore le monde des plateformes de streaming musicale, leurs roles et leurs impact sur le monde de la musique. On discute aussi le nouvel essor dunationalisme consumériste et la piège du dropshipping.Kanye crashout, Jack Schlossberg, Onija au Pakistan +++Patreon: patreon.com/cafesnakeMusique:Nettspend - Growing UpRaccoon - Passenger PrinceRaccoon- PerrasLa SQ débarque sur TikTokLa Presse, Daphné B.https://www.lapresse.ca/societe/chroniques/2025-02-09/la-sq-debarque-sur-tiktok.php Quebec Schools Turn to AI to “Analyze Risks” to StudentsThe Rover, Isaac Peltzhttps://therover.ca/quebec-schools-turn-to-ai-to-analyze-risks-to-students/ Se croire meilleur ou moins bon qu’on ne l’est a-t-il un impact sur la réussite de l’élève?Réseau d’information pour la réussite éducative (RIRE)https://rire.ctreq.qc.ca/se-croire-meilleur-ou-moins-bon/ Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect PlaylistLiz Pellyhttps://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Mood-Machine/Liz-Pelly/9781668083505 Swedish composer becomes Spotify’s most-famous musician you’ve never heard ofMiranda Bryant, The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/19/swedish-composer-johan-rohr-becomes-spotifys-most-famous-musician-youve-never-heard-of The great Spotify swindle, with Liz PellyThe Culture Journalisthttps://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/spotify-liz-pelly-book Ghost in the machineLiz Pelly, Harpershttps://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/[Superlecture]: Nobody Listens to Music Anymore (Marek)Marek Poliks , Disintegratorhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/superlecture-nobody-listens-to-music-anymore-marek/id1716416573?i=1000682156197 Philosophy and Vibes with Robin JamesSound Expertise Season 3:7 –https://soundexpertise.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/sound_expertise_season_3_7_philosophy_and_vibes_with_robin_james-1.pdf HypernormalizationAdam Curtishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to72IJzQT5k&t=3s

Hello, I'm Daphne. I forgot I was watching a North American movie about a bear. I was really frustrated. I don't watch that movie. It's coffee snake. Hello, I'm Daphne. I forgot I was watching a North American movie about a bear. I was really frustrated.

I don't watch that movie. It's coffee snake. Hello, I'm Daphne. I forgot I was watching a North American movie about a bear. I was really frustrated. I don't watch that movie. It's coffee snake. Hello, I'm Daphne.

I forgot I was watching a North American movie about a bear. I was really frustrated. I don't watch that movie. It's coffee snake. Hello, I'm Daphne. I forgot I was watching a North American movie about a bear. I was really frustrated. I don't watch that movie. It's coffee snake. Hello, I'm Daphne. I forgot I was watching a North American movie about a bear. Hello everyone! Hello everyone!

Welcome to Café Snake! Café Snake number 29. Thank you to everyone who listens, who subscribes, who shares. At the beginning of the episode, I tell you, it takes 6 seconds, but you're 5 stars on Spotify and Apple Podcast, it really helps a lot. Thank you again for listening. Thank you to everyone, yeah. What are you going to talk about today Daphné?

Today I'm going to answer a request from one of our bosses, Tony Timmine, who asked us a few days ago to talk about Spotify, ghost artists, AI playlists, and what it does to the industry and to our ears. And you, Amouner, what are you going to talk about? I called my segment,

Produits du Québec. It's a segment that will talk about the rise in the last few weeks I've been thinking about my segment, Produits du Québec. Point de regard à ça. It's a segment that will talk about the rise in the last few weeks of a certain kind of economic or commercial nationalism that encourages people to consume locally. But through that, I want to get a little more interested in the phenomenon of dropshipping which is really prevalent on the internet. So that's it. Place to the DG News. Hey boy, do you have some focacets? Or DG News? Do do do! Hey, BoBoy! You got some f**kings?

I'm talking about the Doc! and the clock, do you have a girlfriend? If it doesn't come from the source, it's copy, see that your wife, you associate me with your girlfriend Fuck Estanis, I'm in the team of the village, I'm not ready to bet you owe the idiot of the village I'm asking the government for 100k in my pocket so I can do real estate 100k do real estate. 100K for real estate. 100K for real estate. There's an instrumentalization of culture to give a nice image, but in fact artists are dying right now. And to win the Quebecois,

they put a ring on their finger, eat pudding, they're gonna wear a tux and sing Céline Dion, and we're gonna say respect to Quebecois like the others. One year, we still need higher expectations compared to the future prime ministers. I'm not really happy about having to do this, but we have to talk about Kanye, Crash Out, Kanye West. For a few days now.

Since my son is a big Kanye fan. Since his appearance with his wife Bianca Sansoury at the Grammys, which made the controversy, we covered it in the last episode of Café Snake, he has really increased the level of spread of ideas on Twitter. Before, he posted a little more on Instagram. He was banned from Twitter since his last escaped Nazi. But now he's back on Twitter. Posted, you know, it was almost comparable to a teenager, in fact, who decides to say all the things as outrageous as possible. So it's okay. Yeah, it makes me think of a trend on TikTok. What's the trend?

When there are users who locked their kids in the bathroom they told them that when they close the door they can say all the words almost all the big words, not beautiful. You see the kids who are filmed on the phone

saying like poop and who knows. Because it's not the first time, but you know, when he shared the fact that it was a Nazi who liked Adolf Hitler, it's not the first time he does that, but when he did that in 2022, in 2023, he had still surprisingly succeeded in coming back, he had broadcast an apology message to the Jewish community. People know his history of false manic, who was diagnosed as bipolar. Now he himself says that he received another autism diagnosis. We don't really know his mental condition.

But when he had sent this apology, he had published it in Hebrew on Twitter. He had managed to reintegrate as some circles had been closed to him since we saw him on the set' set with Nick Fuentes imitating Netanyahu with a net. I really felt like I was in the range of a big baby who could come and give birth to a baby and a big baby who is having fun saying everything he shouldn't have the right to say. So sexist, grossophobe, Nazi, capacitous stuff. And it goes a little into this kind of contrary vibe that we talked about. There's an editor of Café Snake, Kevin Lambert, who offers us the French translation of Contriste to say Contrarienne. So we should adopt it.

A rent contriste de bébé Lala. And I could translate it into a poem I've already written. What is it? Gaga Gougou. A good poem. What is it? It's Gaga Gougou, a poet talks to me as if I was a... What is the poem?

Gaga Gougou, a poet talks to me as if I was a dog. That's it. I've been getting notifications for Kanye's tweets for 10 years. So it was like an infernal whirlpool. The more it went, so it was like a kind of infernal whirlwind. The more it went on, it was during the night, he didn't sleep. Then you see when he took breaks to sleep, he came back as soon as he woke up. He started interacting with big memes accounts. And when we say contrarian, it's really that idea.

I have the right to say what I want. It's like a kind of free speech posture. So I can say that I'm a Nazi, I have the right to... I can say the R-word. We talked about it in the previous episode, but I think we cut it in the editing. And now he's doubting it, he says it and he still says it. It's really very very counter-ist... but counter-ist baby-lala in the sense that all you want is to attract attention. And how do you attract attention? By opposing something to a certain norm. And he didn't even need to do that.

I think the Grammys thing attracted enough momentum for his new album. That's why I feel like there are a lot of people like you who, in the face of this recent offensive tweet or even disgusting actions from his part, who try to explain, rationalize her behavior, to find a way to excuse her. And I think I saw you in that situation in the last few days.

He should have a real awareness. I saw a tweet from Azaria Banks who was talking about that, about that situation. I really don't necessarily agree with her, but I admit that she was she was interested in me. She said that for someone who targets himself as a genius, a genius in the Western conception that we have geniuses, someone who leaves the streets beaten, who innovates, someone who is different from the norm, who distinguishes himself from the rest of the world, there was nothing new in his insults, in fact, and it's probably

the most normative things that are. I'm not exactly saying what she said, I can read the translation. I would like Ekaeni to know how much the Jews' jokes are lame, not specifically because of the intention of being offensive, to offend, but the biggest offense is to know how much Hitler's jokes are horribly stale and clichéd. This confirms how much he is not cultivated and has not studied. It attacks his culture. And why all the problems with the Jews are derived from the theory of stupid conspiracy. I can find a million more innovative, nuanced and more offensive things to say about anyone and anything

because my jokes are damn smart. Now that's a bad translation. No, but it's a huge truth about her too. That's a bad translation. But it's a ego trip too. Yeah, all the time. But I found that interesting. She ended up saying, it's tired, easy, please stop showing

how much of an impostor you are. We all start to doubt your validity at a deeper level. I thought there was something real in what she said, in the sense that there is something hyper-normative in what she puts on stage. And maybe the right attitude in there is not to go out and be offended or to kill the soul of the rage bait, and just ignore it as much as possible, not to talk about it.

That's not what we're doing right now, but just like, if it would happen again, let's say, not to even make articles on the subject because a baby screaming, it wants attention, so what we could do, it would be not to give it attention. You know, there are so many tweets that there is also this idea, it's a bit of the Trump strategy, and to put so much content influence that you can't even, like, all the repertoire, and you know, make tweets in the second, more offensive to each other, more... It's like a deluge strategy. It's like a deluge.

Exactly. I don't know if you told us that he probably hired boots to retweet and comment on his tweets. No, I don't think he hired them one who committed. I think people programmed bots. Okay, but in short, the commitment that these bots or these humans generate, makes it so that even if you're not enough Kanye and you're on X, I literally saw him appear constantly in my algorithmic thread. And there is still Elon who took the merit of having put Kanye on Twitter and not have deleted it, because he didn't block it or ban it, because the last time Kanye was in a kind of episode of Rhyme,

Kanye had published a Swatistica and he said enough about it, he had cut his account. But now, he's getting involved in the fact that it's funny that Kanye does that. Well, the only danger with that is that we finally banalize these acts of speech. And I think that's what's happening right now. As we say, the Overton window has really, really widened in recent months. So what can you say in the media? Next DG News? We're going to talk, we're going to come back to Jack Schlossberg, who we talked about in the previous episode,

which was available exclusively on our Patreon. So who is he? Just a recap. He's the grandson of the former US President John F. Kennedy. A counterist hope, so contrary to the Democrats. And this week he disappeared from social media. So he erased all his accounts and Instagram. Because he was on the rise in popularity. He has more and more content since the elections, and then he suddenly deleted everything.

Well, that's it, we talked about it in the last episode, it's a baby hippo, early thirties, directly from the Kennedy family, very active on social networks since 2024, since the election campaign. Then he adopted a bit of the right-wing Contravene playbook, he is a bit provocative, counter-current in his speech, more controversial, more clueless, prone to inciting reactions, in the rage bait type. But in the case of Jack Schlossberg, he was really a social democrat. through I think. And conservatives are good at playing with that without getting in trouble. And I don't know that we've come up with our own style of being funny and taking risks.

And people talk a lot about how we lost Democrats lost young men in this election. And I think a huge part of that is like not because we focus on the wrong policies, but because we seem so risk averse and we seem so cautious. And I don't think that in general, young men find that as attractive as a more risk on, kind of, say whatever you want attitude. that it's the new face of the Democrats, it's our gendered or millennial Democrat hope. And in the last few weeks, he was really taken by his uncle Robert Kennedy, who was in the vote to become the Secretary of Health in the United States.

And he also made a lot of content about U. Schovans, who is the wife of G. DeVance. He tried to seduce her. He even published a kind of poll or a survey on X where he said, true or false, where Chavance is really sexier than Jackie O'Kennedy, his grandmother. So that didn't really go well with some Democrats. There's a fandom, but there are people on Reddit who criticize, especially Democrats, who say, wow, he's bird-a-line giving orange men, so it looks like his speech is similar to Trump's, in the end. But I think that's his schtick. That's what differentiates him from other

democratic speeches. Well, that's it. And to come back to Ash Charlemagne de Gaude, who is a radio host who is one of the most popular in the United States. He, in his book, last year, which was published,

there's a chapter called The Language of Politics is Dead. Trump killed it. I think it's still the next politicians who will rise to the presidency will have to adopt the language of Donald Trump. I don't think we'll come back to a decorum that was classy and full of retinue and impudence. Respectability. Exactly. Because the moment one person decides that it doesn't work and that's not what they're going to do,

and that person is immensely rewarded by the voters, well, it's like you can't go back. That's right. I read a forum that was dedicated to him. And someone said, well, you know, respectability is dead and buried, we won't go back. It ended up saying, the change that's coming ain't gonna be polite. Exactly.

So it's like there was really a change of tone. But anyway, that's it, he disappeared. After posting a message of a bit of a critical excuse, he said, I'm sorry to everyone I hurt, I was wrong. He posted it on X and then he said I'm deleting all my social media forever. It's been fun. Thanks anyways everyone. So there's not much to say in the sense that I don't know if it's a real start

or if it's a stunt, but I wanted to come back to his case because I talked about it. And that my current feed on TikTok is full of melodramatic posts of women for the most part, who are crying their hearts out. Because you're part of the fandom, I know you're not. I came across a missing ship yesterday. So there's a whole narrative that's built around her disappearance. I think she was in the electoral cycle. I think it's good that she disappears and that she appears in the elections that have just passed. In case she comes back, it will be more interesting.

Everyone's talking about this woman who's gone viral after she flew from New York to Pakistan to marry a 19-year-old lover. I don't live here, I'm chilling. Her name is Onayja Andrew Robinson. What happened, Munir? I didn't have any on my film, but I saw the videos you sent me. It's crazy how people live in bubbles sometimes. But what I think I understand is that she wanted to go to Pakistan to meet a 19 year old man. And then she got four tickets where the guy rejected her. And then she asked for compensation from the Pakistani authorities. Ok, I'll explain.

It's an American woman who went to Pakistan to get married, but it's not clear if she would have married him online before coming or not. But she married a 19-year-old man she met online. What is said in the media is that while she was talking to this guy online, she used a filter that made her go for a white and blonde woman, whereas she was actually a black woman for about thirty years. So when she went to Pakistan, the family of her quote-unquote husband would not have accepted that she stayed in the family.

She would have locked Onidja outside their house and the whole family would have left, would have fled. Onidja just camped in front of the house for days until she caught the attention of Pakistani media. And then she literally became a sort of star in Pakistan. She held multiple press conferences. You see her on TikTok, she's surrounded by a lot of people, and she speaks English, but you ask yourself, do people really understand? She has an interpreter who accompanies her, there's like a micro troll in front of her face, and she says, I wouldn't speak unless I'm given a territory, like a land, 2000 dollars a week minimum. She declares to the journalist that she intends to rebuild the country, so Pakistan. 100K for real estate. 100K for real estate. We are moving to Dubai very soon.

We're going to have our baby in Dubai. How do you feel now Onija? I feel great Shabana. Do you want to go back to your country? It's private but no, I do not. I'm from Pakistan now. I'm Shabana. These videos that started trending in Pakistan, they went viral internationally.

We feel that she may have a mental health problem. In the end, we realized, according to her son, who would have said that she is a woman from New York, she is my mother and she suffers from bipolar disorder, that she was probably going through an episode. But people in Pakistan really treated her with a lot of care, humanity, dignity. They extended her visa, in particular. They found a way to return to the United States. They gave her medical care, food, support, clothes. She really went to Queen, surrounded by friends.

And it also highlights, I don inhumanity of the American system. Yes, and the fact that she can't marry her young pretender because she wasn't white. There's a lot of racism in this culture too. In terms of someone who suffers from a mental health episode, Yes, there is a social tissue. There is really compassion, there is a social tissue. You see people federing around her, bringing her all the help they can give her so that she finally goes back to her country safe and sound, but also the head, oh, you know, worthy.

Finally, it has become almost a media exercise for... To make good money in Pakistan. Yes, it's good place for Pakistan, exactly. It also makes us reconsider the vision we have of our own health system. I'm not necessarily talking about Quebec, but let's say the United States was still on the map and in the conversations around the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. We see how much it's possible to treat someone like that who has mental health problems with humanity. She also developed a fandom.

It's a great tribute. I used the English word for it, but it's channeling the spirit of Onidja. Yeah, so I would like to say that I'm launching a Bitcoin under Onidja's LLC. But it will be run under Nigel Ahmed. Yes, so... It's written in the Trend Report that this meme, which has become viral, is also representative of a trope, that of being American and projecting that when you are American, the world belongs to you, no matter where you are, whether you are in the United States, Canada or Pakistan. So there is a kind of soft imperialism that is rooted in culture and which allows these Americans to consider themselves

a bit like beings that would not be citizens of the world, but perhaps more like masters of the world. The government of Quebec has decided to use IA with children in primary schools. Parents are unable to refuse. Another Didy News. Quebec schools would turn to artificial intelligence to analyze the risks of each student. We don't specify what risk. It's an article that appeared in The Rover and that was written by Isaac Peltz. Quebec school turned to AI to analyze risk to students. Because risk in English is like... And even in French, it's often insurance language.

Exactly. Obviously, it poses a certain problem because the risk, the risks are not defined. We don't really know what we're talking about, but I think that's also one of the nerves of the problem. We use the AI to process personal data on children, such as sex, age, disability, language, parents' education, absence, etc. Then we analyze these data to establish the future risks that these children represent. But risks, I think that when we talk about risks, we could say, let's say, this person risks having problems in math, or this person risks being rejected, for example. There are risks of school rejection.

It's important to mention that it's a program that we can't opt out of. There are no options to not participate. It's automatically imposed. And there, we say that this program, supposedly, would aim to improve the programs to reduce risks. So there are already programs related to that in the This program, supposedly, would aim to improve the risk reduction programs, so there are already programs in the Quebec education system. And what does it mean to entrust this task to technology and not to humans? Because, I wonder, after that, wouldn't it be to cut costs, to enter a process of rationalization instead of hiring intervenors, orthopedagogues. We will entrust tasks that humans were doing

before to machines. In the article, it is specified that the government has committed to investing $100 million over 5 years in artificial intelligence and $13 million in this particular project, which wasn't necessarily discussed in the public space. At least, the journalist says he never heard of it, and even did some research to see if it had been announced elsewhere and that he didn't find any occurrence. At the same time, investing these millions of dollars in the IAEA also reduces the government's $200 million budget for education. According to my analysis, and this is not from the article, I think it can have negative impacts.

But that's it. Again, we're surfing a little bit on the unknown, in the sense of what are these risks, these famous risks. Are we talking about difficulties in of learning, of school school human intervenents. For example, what can impact your success in class when you're a child? It could be the fact that you have access to food that you can eat when you're hungry. So parents who have time to follow in their duties versus those who don't have time. Or even sexual abuse. If you're in a situation where you're sexually abused by a close friend or someone you know, it's for sure that it's going to impact your school results. So I think that for that, it takes a human contact and a bit of a digital analysis. Because if I meet you and I talk to you and I find out that you might have problems with your attention and all that,

and finally by talking to you and getting in touch with you, I understand that there's anger under the rock and that you might be living a situation of abuse or violence, but I'm going to be able to really give you the resources to help you, but if it's just a machine that analyzes numbers, I'm not sure we'll come to the same conclusion. I went to look for data, especially on the Observatory of the Family Realities of Quebec, and they say that the lack of support, school retards,

failures, which are all ingredients in the recipe for school dropout. But often, it doesn't happen in one stroke of the head, it's the end of a long process. We explain above all that it is the poorest children who have 34% more risk of finding themselves in a situation of school vulnerability. And even once in high school, children from poor families are three times more likely to experience learning difficulties and behavioral disorders. So, does this IALA system that analyzes or predicts risks want to flag all poor students as potential risk-detecting? And what impact can it have on the future of someone who is at risk of being considered in the first place, based on these data, as someone who is at risk of

falling behind. Because I did a training to teach in the school school committee of Montreal, the unqualified teacher program. And I didn't finish it because I was too busy and I had other opportunities that were offered to me, let's say. But when I did my training, there is one thing that I really kept. When you believe in skills and the potential of a student, it's the secret to bringing that student to success. You have to believe in his potential. It's the central motivational resource that will have a direct impact on the success of students. And then we say, for example, also on the Quebec Educational Success Network, that when we underestimate skills, for example, when we are going to flag you right away

because you are poor, like someone who is at risk of being rejected, well, almost unanimously, scientific studies say that it can have deleterious effects on you. Ok, and otherwise, there's an article that came out in the press today called The Tick Tock SQ-Debate. I wrote it. Excellent article. So we'll put it in the notes if you want my point of view on the police presence of Quebec on TikTok from now on. So Daphne, your segment. Yeah, so as I was saying earlier, I responded to a request from one of our bosses

who asked us to talk about Spotify and ghost artists, etc. and how it impacted our ears, our taste, our relationship to music. And I called my segment, consequently, Ghost Music. And basically, I'm not a, Consecration, Ghost Music. What is your favorite book? I'm not a specialist on the subject, but I decided to gather some ideas I read and heard about the subject. Especially the one by the music journalist Liz Perry, who covered the issue in a book she just published. It was released last January. It seems like it's very good, I haven't read it, but I'm interested in buying it in audio format. It's called Mood Machine, The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist.

She did an interview with the Culture Journalist podcast called Great Spotify's Window, which I will put in the show notes. But I also read an article that is quite stale that I recommend if you're interested in Liz Perry herself, which was published in the latest issue of Harper's magazine called The Ghost in the Machine. In her work, the American journalist Liz Pelly explains how there is a whole secret program that has been set up by Spotify to fill certain playlists or populate certain ultra- popular playlists of songs created by fake authors,

or what we call ghost artists. It's a strategy to reduce the contribution of income that artists have to pay. These ghost music pieces often appear in playlists that are linked to moodss like jazz, chill, peaceful piano, the kind of music we listen to in the background. Like when you're going to play in a restaurant or a sandwich.

Exactly, that's it. And for example, this is an article I took in The Guardian, which was published in 2024, but at one point we realized that a Stockholm musician named Johan Rohr was one of the most listened to people on Spotify. He was originally from more than 650 different artists, so he hid under the persona of 650 artists. His songs had been listened to more than 15 billion times, which made him the most listened Swedish artist at the time.

And if all his works were under the same name and not 650 pseudonyms, he would probably be one of the top 100 most listened artists. A large part of his success is linked to his presence in more than 100 playlist of instrumental music on Spotify, lists that Spotify manages and builds itself. You know, we were talking about background sound or background music, well, Lispeli calls it leanback music. So music is essentially a kind of background music, as I say, a mood, and that it doesn't require active listening. And in fact, Spotify had done a kind of survey years ago and realized that active listening only represented a very small proportion of global listening on the platform. We used more streaming, Spotify, as background music.

So from there, the idea of all these Playlists, of Vibes. From that moment, Spotify has optimized all its business model, its architecture for background music. They will favor songs that are more playlist-friendly, so that play well in the background, and that allow fairly fluid transitions from one song to another. So you don't even realize how much music you're listening to. Yeah, and there's even a name for this program, of some sort of optimization, and also trying to integrate music, songs, that they have commissioned,

manufactured by phantom artists, and it's called the Perfect Fit Content, so the PFC program. It's also said that in 2023, there were hundreds of playlists created by Spotify that were monitored by the team responsible for Perfect Fit Content. Playlists like Ambient Relaxation, Deep Focus, I often listen to Deep Focus when I try to focus, I'm in a period of stress. Detox, cocktail jazz, deep sleep, bossa nova dinner, that's not the kind of music. It created a phenomenon that some people like Alice Pelly call the playlistification of music. And that obviously brings multiple multiple consequences. There's a lot to say about that, but I can't make a long segment because we're stuck in time.

Lispeli will talk about a decontextualization of music. In the image of the concept of context collapse, do you know what that is? It's like the rise of short film content. No, it's the fact that when we started to have social media like Facebook, the day after tomorrow when we published on the platform, it's like we were addressing both to his friends, to his family, to his colleagues, to his bosses. You had the presence of several audiences but in one and the same context. So it's like she was making a parallel with that and she's saying, ah, there's a form of decontextualization because the role of pop music in culture is particular and the role

of background music too. And experimental music is filling another role. And there's a collapse of the context in the sense that in the playlist, all these objectives, specific to each musical style, it's like if they were placed in the same context. She also speaks that one of the potential risks of this idea of passive listening with the playlist is the fact that it disconnects us or it disconnects the one who listens to the artist's music. There is really a disconnect. There's a lot more to say, but I just want to mention other voices I listened to.

There's another podcast called Nobody listens to music anymore, which I will obviously put in the notes. It's a podcast by Marek Pollix, a researcher, it says, award-winning researcher in the philosophy of technology. So he's doing the philosophy of technology. And he's giving a kind of lecture, a conference that he already gave at Columbia University on the future of music. And I'm not going to tell you everything because it's sometimes complex and I don't think I understood everything necessarily.

And it's been two times that I've listened to it. Yeah, and I listened to it and it's really interesting, it's worth listening to. Yeah, really, listened to it and it's really interesting. It's worth listening to. Yeah, I really recommend it. And it can even be confronting. There's a kind of a polemicist opinion at the end, I would say. Because he thinks that the art of streaming, which relies on algorithms,

he doesn't necessarily see it as catastrophic. He thinks it's an opportunity for artists to rethink and reinvent what music means. So it's still provocative. And there's also algorithmic control, but also the control of labels. The biggest rap playlists are completely controlled by the biggest music labels.

And in Quebec, even the rap club playlist is completely controversial. Because there are a lot of artists who have been snubbed for a long time, and who have been integrated just once integrated once they joined a label. But she lost all her cultural significance, this playlist she had at the end of 2010. There was a good time, the communication, the message that this little ass was sending was meritocratic. It was like, hey, we get rid of those who... Every piece of music, the gatekeepers. And we offer you a model that is like, if your music hits,

well, it's going to be put in playlists, and then you're going to hit more people, it's going to be exponential. So it's this idea of meritocracy, you know? But yes, the major labels still have their word to say, and they still control that. And this model ends up favoring the same big players. And I think that in the case of the playlist Rap Caviar, which is the biggest rap playlist in

the United States, I think it belongs to one of the biggest labels. Oh yeah. But the idea is that there are a lot of parts of the Spotify company, which is a Swedish company, that's it, that belong to labels. Exactly. He tells us, this famous philosopher, that today music is... We can't consider it as a cultural product, but as a cost. It's depressing to see that, but he tells us that music is not something we sell today. There are almost no vehicles to sell and buy music. Now we have streaming, or for for example buying goods to go see

your favorite artist. The vinyl is back in popularity. They talk about the secondary market, collectibles, there are the vinyl, yes, but overall it's less something that we buy. The Spotify model is really like a owner, alord and we pay our rent. We come back to the form of a kind of capitalism, of techno-feudalism. We pay our rent and then he says, do we pay to necessarily have access to a music library? He says no, we pay to have access to their algorithms as we are in the playlisting of music. They continue by saying, you know, finally Spotify is on the edge of whether you listen to music or not. In fact, Spotify would rather you listen to as little music as possible.

Because for Spotify, the fact that you listen to a song, it represents a cost. They have to pay dividends or rights. I don't know if I can explain it, but how the funding of artists works on Spotify. We already explained it in another video that made Snake. But I think it's like $500 million per month, which is divided between all artists in terms of their proportions of streams on Spotify. It's one of the big critics of Kanye, compared to Spotify,

to come back to Kanye, who thinks it's slavery. Finally, music for Spotify, the company Spotify, is literally a cost and not the product that is sold. It's actually an existential cost. It's the biggest cost they're running. It comes back to the figure of the musician who says today, a musician doesn't necessarily sell music, in fact he sells something else. When he is an artist or any type of artist, you eventually start to create content. How to generate money,

often it's through marketing gigs. It's like music was something you paid to do, a bit like me, I pay to write my books. And then, if my books hit, I'll be able to do conferences or whatever, and I'll be paid. He says, if music meets a certain success, we'll pay these artists, these musicians, to do ads.

For example, I keep seeing a ad for tampons on my feed made by Claudia Bouvet. So there he says, being a creative is often about selling, not music, but the experience of being a musician, not really selling music. He tells us that the feed or the playlist is the medium. And he has this idea that music doesn't necessarily fit in, as it could have been the case before, in an identity creation that is very solid, robust. Like my father, who spent his adolescence listening to Clash, Sex Pistols,

and who built an imaginary that is still present today of someone who was against the current, who was punk. And it really shaped him. There's something more evanescent in the music we listen to and its relationship with our identity. Well, yes, we consume things that make us relate to our identity, let's say, but that music is more like a costume that we're going to put to amplify a mood, a state that is more vanishing in the end. I don't know, for just... Like, let's say in rap, the new wave of artists

who are associated with the Opium music label of Playboy and Cardi, it's not just the music. It's an aesthetic, it's an aura, it's an enchantment. The young people who are Opium kids, you recognize them in the street. And it comes with a philosophy and a way to see the world. And it for teenagers. It's a kind of tension that rap takes towards rock, which is more aggressive. It's called raindrop.

So it's not just a mood. I'm just saying what he says, but I think it's not necessarily true globally, but if we're in the paradigm of the playlist, yes, it is. I'm going to listen to the Girl Power playlist, and because I'm listening to Girl Power right now, but will it build my identity in a solid way? Listening to Katy Perry. I'm going to remember, you know,

the Girl Power playlist is starting to shape me. No, not really. My relationship with music is mostly emotional, in the sense that, let's say, there are albums that I listen to, and I remember when I listened to them a lot. So it always attached a lot of memories to the music for me. I think a lot of people know how to relate to music. Me too, but these are tunes that I like on TikTok, on which I listen to it over and over again for a month. And it will characterize that month of my life. But will the artist see it in person?

No, that's it. Will I invest myself in the lore, in the culture, in the ideology that this person represents? Not at all. That's what I mean. It's really more evanescent. It's like, Hey, you know what? This month, I like to wear black. And in another month, I'm going to decide that I want to be Old Money. So it can make you think of the vibes. And just to finish, I don't want to do this for too long, but I read the transcript of a podcast that was made with Robyn James, who is another

philosopher-philosopher. It was called Philosophies and Vibes by Robyn James. She's a researcher who develops a philosophical approach to understanding pop music and culture. And then she still developed a thought on vibes. And when I was talking about you know, of vanishing mood, I think we can say vibes. Is that your vibes? My vibes are alive.

Hoping not to fall sick. Vibes. So basically, she says that if we look at internet users, today we still use the word vibes a lot, even in Quebec. And according to her, today we use the word vibe a lot, even in Quebec. And vibe, according to them, points to an orientation, a trajectory, so you're going where or a profile. When we say that a person is chill, has a chill vibe, it means that his relationship,

his orientation towards other things, like, I don't know... It's not a political view or... And chill. We can either say that or we can also attribute a profile to that person. And when we talk about profile, we don't talk about identity, she talks about profile a little bit like in the police universe, when we make a profile of someone, a psychological profile. And what we do when we do that is that we take a set of points of data in relation

to that person that we're going to put together to reflect on the trajectory of that person. c'est qu'on prend un ensemble de points de données par rapport à cette personne-là qu'on va mettre ensemble pour réfléchir à la trajectoire de cette personne. Quand le FBI est sur les trousse de mounir, il va établir, bon, qui est cette personne, mère de Laval? On va collecter des informations, puis on va essayer d'établir non seulement ton état d'esprit, mais aussi ta trajectoire, parce que nous on veut savoir c'est où ton We're going to try to establish not only your state of mind, but also your trajectory. Because we want to know where your next crime is, where you're going to commit it. Because we're going to wait for you. At Daphne's. We're going to catch you.

That's the boss mode. We're going to catch you. Ok? So, Robin James continues by saying, if we look at Spotify, for example, users are a bit like that, we understand them. In the idea of profile, profiling, we will collect all kinds of data on them like little pieces of bread, and then we will create a profile, who is the Munir Kadouri listener, to know what we will trust to listen to next, what will be your listening trajectory? And then, what she says is that all this kind of language that we developed around

vibes that contaminated the discourse, but also our way of thinking about cultural phenomena, it became popular on the internet in the early 2020s, partly because it's as if it was popularizing the perception practices that algorithms already have on us. So algorithms perceive us in terms of vibes, profiles like that. Profiles with a trajectory. As if we, in some way, had learned to think in this way. We interacted with Spotify, Luffy, TikTok, all that, so that they understand our vibe.

And basically, everything became aesthetic. We learned to interact with algorithms so that they could perceive us in the way we wanted to be perceived. So it's logical that we start using the word, the term vibe, to describe ourselves, because that's kind of how we're perceived. There's like a's a feedback loop. Instead of talking about personality, we're going to use another reference frame.

We're going to say, well, that's her vibe. I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month.

And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to be in the U.S. for a month. And I'm going to rise in the economic nationalism in Canadian and Quebec society. We call it the boycott of American companies, following two main things. It's the end of the Amazon operations in Quebec, for clearly union reasons. And the threats of annexation and tariffs from Donald Trump towards Canada.

I think it can be compared to what happened during the pandemic, where we were really calling a lot to consume local. We were talking a lot about self-sufficiency. The blue basket. The creation of the blue basket. A virtual espouse that should have the goal of aggregating Quebec products on the same platform to encourage people to consume local. The blue basket is often described as a fiasco for several. It's only after a few years of existence that it closed in February 2024.

The blue basket was not the Amazon that we were told about. It cost the government of Quebec 22 million dollars plus private investments from Desjardins and FTQ. Also as a result, Radio-Canada reported in April 2023 that out of 100,000 products of the blue basket, only 600 were certified as Quebec. There are really different certifications to identify a product from Quebec. It was designed in Quebec, manufactured, manufactured and produced in Quebec. So that's three scales. The first one is really designed in Quebec.

It means it was designed and imagined in Quebec, but not necessarily assembled in Quebec. You were designed in Quebec. That's crazy. Manufactured in Quebec is another scale. And the product in Quebec is a du Québec was designed in Quebec, it was sourced in Quebec at 85% and the last significant assembly or manufacture was made in Quebec.

These three are the most common. It's under the jurisdiction of the OBNL Product du Québec. It's really not too expensive to have the certification and it depends on your business number. The blue basket, I think it was a good idea in itself. It was poorly executed. All this rise in the discourse on local conservation also makes me think a lot about dropshipping. I don't know why. Dropshipping consists of selling products without having them in inventory to then order them from a supplier who will send them directly to the customer.

Dropshipping is extremely present on social networks. Yeah especially on TikTok. Exactly. It comes in several forms. You you'll see TikToks or videos that will put in the frame of LooFo products, for example, it's almost Valentine's Day. Me on my feed, there will be a lot of gift products that you could give to your girlfriend. But it's especially, you know, dropshipping itself, that's it, it's especially when you come across lives, so it's live sales on TikTok, and people, it's often Quebecers who will have all kinds of products, and they will show you soap, and people, it's often Quebecers, who will have all kinds of products. And they will show you soap, and then they will talk about this soap,

and that soap, but it's not them who are crazy. No, not at all. No. But often, it's going to be with soap and TikTok too, it's going to be part of MLM. That's another thing, we're going to do a full episode on that. But often when it's good products, it's not even going to be dropshipping, it's going to be really people who be people named multi-level marketing.

You see TikToks with kitsch music and a Minecraft video below. A video of a mechanical pressure machine crushing a tennis ball. It's the kind of video I see on TikTok. These are facades. They don't necessarily have a representative. They'll have accounts for products that just pump content

and hope to have a viral video. It's going to be a weird hair dryer with headphones. It's going to be a product that's a bit uncanny. A product that you didn't think you needed. Like a kind of accessory to stand your head up and hold pistachios. Oh yeah yeah. It's going to be shit red. A baby in a peanut.

Yeah, like... Otherwise it's going to have more interesting forms for me. For example, I receive periodically emails from sketch sketchy emails asking me to promote stuff on Instagram It's going to be wireless headphones, wireless speakers, all kinds of wireless stuff. They're like, put a link and you'll get a percentage of the sale They don't even offer cash and I don't have a big Instagram So we're going to receive that kind of stuff less often than an Instagram with presence I think the most popular in Quebec in Zeitgeist was the

ABDO machine that Elisabeth Rio promoted so much on Instagram in the 2010s. Have you ever seen that? No, but it's a thing that pilates. Yeah, it's a little plastic thing that you put on your six pack to have ABDO. I remember back in the days in the early 2000s, there were things that you could scratch on your body, that gave you electric shocks and that stimulated your muscles.

That's a bit of the deal, but it's fucking cheaper. You know, she did that, she stopped, but again, no mention that the product is on a selling site like AliExpress for a fraction of the price. Because it will often be that, people who will create front-line sites to sell products or promotion campaigns, the same product will be found on their basic supplier for extremely less or even a fraction of the price. I think this wave of dropshipping is really

going down, especially in Quebec, because the communities of these influencers have understood and they have become more critical. They will organize themselves on Reddit to denounce this kind of thing. In parallel to that, for example, you have applications like Tmew and Sheen that are up. And that give you have apps like Tmoo and Sheen that are on the rise. And that give you direct access to these products. Where you can see, for example, a post on TikTok that promotes something. The product is $25, you can see on Tmoo, it's $4.99. Now comes the most misleading part, which is a bit related to our desire to consume products from Quebec.

I think that's why I had the link in my head. Because I often see that come back as a discussion on social media. It's often that... And I'm not going to name a company, but there are several. Often, influencers will say that they are starting a business. And that they are starting a Quebec company. It's going to be jewelry, bags, decorative accessories, soap, as you said.

And they will brand themselves as a Quebec company. But if you do a little bit of research again, you will see exactly the same product on AliExpress. And they will use the language very clearly of we are a Quebec company, but we don't make Quebec products. And I think that's important, like in the language, when you see these kinds of campaigns on the internet, that a company will say that we are a Quebec company, it really means nothing about the origin of the products.

It's a Quebec company, but the products come from China. The most controversial case at the time, that I've observed in the history of the influence of the Quebec, I think I called it the entrepreneur of influence, is in 2019 the case of the company Blaze Swimwear, which belonged to the influencer Maud Poulin, who really made the controversy when a YouTuber, who I think I called, I searched, but I didn't know her name, her name was Justine, she made a video on YouTube,

it was a hit, made a video to expose that all his products came from AliExpress and he sold identical bathing shirts to what he had on AliExpress. He always put himself on stage to show how difficult it was to get started in business and that he made his shirts in Quebec and that he had to encourage Quebec companies. And finally, it was completely exposed and that was at the beginning of my YouTube. So I remember one of the first episode of Fêtes d'Iver, it was before there were guests. It was just me covering the blaze swimwear controversy.

It was because of this girl who made a video. It was really early 2019, 5 years ago. To expose that... Now it's 6 years ago, because it was in the spring of 2019. So it's gonna be 6 years, it's crazy. Getting old. It was a big deal. Because she also competed at AUCA swimwear.

It was a bit lonely in the lane competing at AuCustomWare. It was a bit lonely in the lane. Elizabeth Rue wasn't really into chicken. There were shades, drama, but all of that around dropshipping. Just to talk about the recent story of that, like in Quebec, there's another YouTuber who made a video called Here Charlie. She made a video called the influential dropshipping. But since she deleted all of her videos and all of her channel's channel, we can't really have access to what she had archived. But I remember watching this video on YouTube and that she had really documented

all the moments when she had dropshipping. Not all, but a lot of moments when she had dropshipping in Quebec. Another thing that makes dropshipping easier nowadays is an e-commerce platform, one of the biggest in the world, called Shopify. Shopify is a kind of a hand-held platform that will let you build a transactional website and benefit from technical support, support in all ways. It's really intuitive to use to put online a virtual store. And I find that interesting because it's a Canadian company.

It's really not expensive to build a sign. But we thought we could build one for Capricorn. To sell our Capricorn cap because there is an editor on an editor who made as a Christmas gift You said we could make one for CaféSneak. To sell our coffee caps. There's an editor on an editor who made a coffee cap for Christmas as a gift. There's only one that exists. Shopify is one of the Canadian tech fleurons. We don't have a lot of it.

We have it in terms of video games, graphic design, artificial intelligence, aeronautics, but really tech, consumer product for applications, or whatever, there aren't many. I think all the time, no matter how big the biggest mobile phone company in the world could be, with Research in Motion, but they flopped the BlackBerry, they couldn't compete against the iPhone. It would have been incredible, I think. I had a BlackBerry, I don't know if you had one. No, I didn't have a smart phone. You never had a BlackBerry? No, but I remember that people who had Blackberrys were easy. But for me it was when Blackberrys were popular.

It was like my father's old cell phone. I think my mother and my grandmother had Blackberrys. That's a subject for another episode, the Rise and Fall of Research in Motion. Now they make cloud info, they make information support. They're no longer in the product... Design? Yeah, in the products. Interesting, Shopify is still politically registered in Canada

in the same ideological movements that we can observe in Silicon Valley. CEO Toby Looked criticized federal government measures to suspend TVS for two months, which he deserved a huge tweet from Pierre Poiliev. It was a few weeks ago. To tell him that it's entrepreneurs like that that we needed in Quebec, in Canada, that it wasn't normal that we didn't have our own Silicon Valley, and that Canada was lucky enough to have a company like Shopify, and that if we made the wrong choices politically,

we were going to force them to leave. He's really very active on Twitter, the president of Shopify. In the media of heritage here, when he had this long exchange with Poiliev, and he called it the bruligarchie, so it's they called it the bruligarchie. Yeah, bruligarchie. That's the term that comes back. It's written in there. The almost wild closing of Amazon in Quebec for trade reasons,

barely hidden, brings us back to our consumption habits and gives us a sense of control over the current situation. But I think that if we want to have an effect on it, we have to be aware of what you're not buying. Because something like products from Quebec or an influencer is like, no I'm a Quebec entrepreneur. It's true that it has some drawbacks for Quebec, even if you buy a dropshipping product from someone. But it's because there's a kind of, in my case, why wouldn't I buy dropshipping products when it appears? You're being fooled, there's a fraud. I think one of the easiest ways to know is when you see the photos of the products. Often if you do a reverse image search on Google, you can do it by right clicking on a photo on Google or by putting it in Google.

It's written reverse image. We're like the bill here. There's also an environmental cost to that. Because if it's dropshipping, it means it's going to travel a lot. That's it. And it's going to have big shipping delays. And it's going to lot. That's right. And it will have big shipping delays. And it will happen. It's often cheap. And I think we need to encourage the entrepreneurs here to invest in websites that have their own online sales system.

But in a place like Amazon, I listened to the president of OB&N, Product of Quebec, who said that on Amazon, there is a section of Product of Quebec that works with Amazon. So there are a lot of entrepreneurs from Quebec who are still on Amazon. They see their sales go down because people boycott, but it also affects our companies. Thank you, my niece. I would like to add something about that.

It would potentially lead to a decrease in the United US because of all these taxes on the goods coming from China that would maybe even quadruple some prices or whatever because it's like... A small war, a surcharge. So I read in the media, I forget because I read a lot of media, but this week there were some journalists who predicted or speculated that it might be the end of Tmoo or even China in the United States. These applications that are known to make cheap, fast fashion, cheap merchandise, well the prices were really, really important to get to know each other. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like, to follow, but I think it comes back to our In-N-Out of 2025. It's just all the byproducts of Trump and everything that changes in society. Yeah. On that, we keep monitoring everything. To think, to read, to look at things.

Exactly. And there's so much, as we said last week, but it's so much that we feel that there is still a is a current trend that is getting more and more accelerated and we don't cover everything because we can't do everything. No. There are a lot of things we could talk about. Exactly. But everything in its time. It's almost the 30th episode of Café Sneak.

It's really nice for everyone who listens. A big thank you to everyone. Do we have announcements to make? No, but we might do a special episode. Ok, so we don't have any cultural recommendations necessarily for this week, but Mounir had this idea. We're going to be talking about our patrons, Skaffy Snakers Snakers, on Patreon. But we would like to go back to the concept of hyperreality, hyperrealism, at the end of the day, through the introduction of a documentary that Moun and Munir watched during our second date.

It's iconic, it's a documentary by an English documentary writer. Adam Curtis, it's Hypernormalization, which was released in 2016. Yeah, and it's available for free on YouTube. We'll share it in the notes and we'll edit it on... That's right, because I ordered a book from a French publishing house called La Boite de Pandora, Pandora's Box, which has interviews with Adam Curtis and detailed analyses of his films. So we thought if we told you to listen to it, we'd do a breakdown of it and explore the concepts that intersect with the things we've studied in Café Sneak. For subscribers and non-subscribers, it's a cultural suggestion anyway. It's essential.

We put that in our notes. Hypernormalization. And if you have a date at Saint-Valentin, why not take an example of us? It's in the wall, as fuck. Look at that. And on that, we'll see you next week. Wait, I'm going to shout out. Shout out to Daphne, she gave a brilliant conference to Meghille, the other one in residence. Everyone was there, there were lots of coffee snick auditors. And there was a coffee snick auditor who couldn't come in, who couldn't find the door.

And what can I say, she loves coffee snick, so shout out to Gabrielle who is probably listening. We apologize. Yeah, the door wasn't closed. A thousand apologies. So on that note, have a good week. The music is Azlo, A-Z-L-O. Kisses! music is as low as it is