AA

| entrepreneur | human-ist | art+design | nature worshipper | kakigori lover | @Wharton alumnus

[AA @BlingCat]

@bryan_johnson @_katetolo Men get health baseline in 2 weeks. Women need 3 months. That gap IS the problem. Finally someone’s funding the answer 👀 @bryan_johnson First time in modern history, $2M/yr & full medical team to understand ONE woman’s body in full. Not as footnote to male biology 👏 @_katetolo

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Wall Street has spent $20.4 billion buying your favorite old songs since 2019. BlackRock, Blackstone, Apollo, KKR. They own the music you grew up on, and Spotify is built to keep playing it.

Sony paid over $1 billion for Queen's song collection in 2024. Biggest single-artist deal ever. Warner Music and Bain Capital (a major investment firm) put up $1.2 billion in mid-2025 to buy more old song rights. Concord packaged 1.3 million song rights (Beatles, Beyonce, Pink Floyd, Rihanna) into investment products, like bonds, and raised $1.76 billion. Pophouse raised $1.3 billion for the rights to KISS, Cyndi Lauper, and Avicii.

When you spend that kind of money on old songs, you need returns. Spotify delivers.

Your $12.99 monthly subscription goes into one big pot with everyone else's. That pot gets split based on which songs got the most plays. A play of "Bohemian Rhapsody" pays the same rate as a play from someone who dropped their first song yesterday. The top 1% of artists collect over 90% of all plays. The money flows to whoever owns the biggest song collections. That's Wall Street now.

The system that picks what plays next makes this worse. Spotify retooled it in 2024 and 2025 to favor songs you already know over songs you haven't heard. Autoplay, AI DJ, and Radio loop you back to familiar tracks instead of showing you new artists. Familiar music keeps people on the app longer, which means more ad money and fewer cancellations. New music is a financial risk the system won't take.

In April 2024, Spotify stopped paying royalties on any song with fewer than 1,000 plays in a year. That wiped out about 175 million songs, roughly 87% of everything on the platform. Disc Makers CEO Tony van Veen estimated the lost royalties at $47 million for 2024. That money got rerouted to the biggest hits, owned by major labels and the investment firms behind them.

An AI company called Suno now cranks out 7 million songs every day, enough to recreate Spotify's entire library every two weeks. Deezer, another streaming service, says 28-39% of daily uploads are now AI-generated. A new human artist isn't just competing with Taylor Swift. They're buried under millions of machine-made tracks.

In 2014, older music (anything over 18 months old) accounted for 35.8% of what Americans listened to. By 2024, it hit 73.3%, per Luminate, the firm that tracks this stuff. Fleetwood Mac didn't suddenly get better. Investment firms bought the catalog, the algorithm feeds you what's familiar, the platform stopped paying small artists, and AI is flooding the pipe. Every piece of this machine has a financial reason to play you something old.

[AA @BlingCat]

@nitinmeshram Let’s start with the basics: 1. Manusmriti is generally accepted to be dated between ~200 BCE & 200 CE 2. Islam emerged in 7th century CE 3. Islamic Sharia developed gradually after that, crystallising over 8th - 10th centuries CE. So your premise is entirely flawed.

[AA @BlingCat]

@subhash_kak @viprabuddhi Contrast this with Borobudur, where visitors were required to wear special upanat sandals to climb the temple, movement was controlled, and the temple was treated first as a Buddhist site, and next as a monument.

[AA @BlingCat]

@subhash_kak @viprabuddhi I visited Prambanan a week ago. My first observation was that, unlike Borobudur, it was not treated as a place of worship, or temple, but rather as a tourist site. Visitors were walking inside the inner sanctum with shoes on, flashing torchlight on the stone idols of deities

[AA @BlingCat]

@froglover2003 masi love is public service. but I hear you. truce ✌🏽😘

[AA @BlingCat]

@froglover2003 keep playing white, I’ll keep playing masi who comments ‘bittu, khana khaya?’ on every post 🫶

[AA @BlingCat]

@froglover2003 I’m practising emotional unavailability to understand the divine masculine

[AA @BlingCat]

@froglover2003 So Erykah Badu is the new Gen-Z hoe magnet? We were playing that on Sony Discmans before y’all discovered streaming, my boy 😭����

[AA @BlingCat]

@sandeepnailwal vote for $MATIC

[AA @BlingCat]

@ricis_angel Can you share the recipe, please? Thanks

[AA @BlingCat]

@KutnitiFNDTN So why are Indian journalists doing this? What’s the agenda- ideology, foreign funding, or just the market for anti-India narratives abroad?

[AA @BlingCat]

So long as you’re choosing a side, you’re not choosing peace. @vijayraju000 @AdamMGrant @DrGaborMate

[AA @BlingCat]

We felt strong tremors right up in Kathmandu as well. My last night in Nepal from Gokyo / Chola Pass / EBC trek, before I head back home. Praying for the people and families affected 🙏

[Nepal Earthquake @NepalEarthquake]

Hope the survivors are rescued on time.

Scores reported dead as 6.4M #NepalQuake jolts Jajarkot https://t.co/EGgbsG9sfJ via @kathmandupost

[AA @BlingCat]

Congrats, @anantnath!

[Editors Guild of India @IndEditorsGuild]

EGI elects new Office Bearers at the AGM for FY 2022-23 held on Oct 28.

President: Anant Nath, Editor of the Caravan

General Secretary: Ruben Banerjee, former Editor-in-Chief of Outlook

Treasurer: K Ve Prasad, former Senior Associate Editor of the Tribune

[AA @BlingCat]

As my motto goes “open to trying most things in life at least once!”, good to know “openness”= willingness to engage w/ new ideas & experiences, strongly correlates w/ intelligence. Successful folks see possibilities that others miss coz of an “open mind” https://t.co/Ykbz11eXY9

[AA @BlingCat]

@atShruti I know, it’s been so long! Was thinking of our dinner in my hood with @ehchkay :) any plans of visiting India soon?

[AA @BlingCat]

An eye for an eye,
Makes the whole world blind.
💔

[AA @BlingCat]

Translation: economic history of role of working women over centuries, shedding light on nuances such as surprising role of birth control pills, to pressing issue of gender pay gaps. “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity” - have to agree!!

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Claudia Goldin “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes.”

#NobelPrize