Hearing Things is already off to a great start. Today’s feature by Andy Cush is about a guy named “Catbreath?” who games the voice assistants to make a few bucks, by naming his songs things like “Cozy Fall Playlist”, “True Crime Podcast,” or “Beatles Greatest Hits”.

I was expecting this to be another AI scam, but the guy seems like a normal dude. He makes all the songs himself, though they’re not exactly listenable:

I took the 7-inch record of “Cars” by Gary Numan and slowed down the drum beat and did a little guitar ditty over it. No one was listening to my stuff on Apple Music at the time. Every song had one or two plays. Then I noticed that that song had five hundred plays. So I typed in “Car Jams” on Apple Music, and that song came up before any algorithm-driven driving playlist or anything like that. At that point, I was like, Shit, I need to drop an album of songs with titles that someone might hypothetically try to look up.

It’s a fun article. Check out the full thing at Hearing Things.

Follow along

Want to keep up?

There are a few ways to do that: find out what works for you

Have something to share?

Something you wrote or made? Something you just think more people should see?

I’ll read it.