Audio Job Salaries, Amazon Music & Podcast Moves, and Wow I Forgot How Good Journaling Is

Friday, November 4, 2022

Nice fall colors - Washington D.C., Oct 28, 2022. Shot with iPhone 14 Pro.

Hello friends, hope you’re having a great week so far! The weather here in Fort Worth has been spectacular, alternating between cool and overcast, and cool and sunny. I’d like to stay in fall weather forever, please.

Just have a couple quick recommendations to share with you and then it’s off to the weekend! (Happy Friday.)

💰 1. From Ashley Carmen at Bloomberg: These Are the Salaries Warner, Amazon and Sony Offer For Audio Jobs 💰

Nice work from Ashley Carmen here. New York City’s pay transparency law means we now have visibility into more audio job salaries.

Also worth a read (if you missed it when it was posted back in 2021) is this tweet from Misha Euceph on rates and pay in podcasting.

Might be time ask for a raise. 💸💸💸

🎵 2. From Niley Patel at The Verge: Why Amazon VP Steve Boom just made the entire music catalog free with Prime 🎵

Starting today, one of the benefits for Amazon Prime members is that you now get access to the entire Amazon Music catalog, about 100 million songs, to play in shuffle mode. That service used to only contain 2 million songs. They’re also removing ads from a large selection of podcasts including the entire Wondery catalog if you’re a Prime member.

I love covering the music industry because it’s famously opaque. I wanted to ask Steve: what’s it like to negotiate with the record labels for a service like this? What can streaming services do to make artists more money? And where do podcasts fit into the overall strategy? Amazon and Spotify both spend a lot of money buying podcast studios. Is it paying off?

I’ve been a long time Prime subscriber, but I’ve never really been interested in using Amazon Music. I do like that new Peripheral show they have, though. I’m a sucker for sci-fi.

But how many people want to listen to music on shuffle mode? Wasn’t that Pandora’s thing? Apparently some of the Prime members are a little upset about losing the ability to actually choose what music they get to listen to. I get that.

Still, that article/podcast from the Verge is an interesting read/listen if you’re at all interested in the music or podcasting industry. Amazon may not have a lot of listener share at the moment, but they sure do have a lot of users, and providing ad-free podcasts to subscribers is a smart move, IMO.

📓 3. A Quick Plug for the Self Journal, and Journaling in General 📓

I’ve done a fair bit of journaling over the years, not always consistently. But I recently bought another Self Journal journal and made an effort to fill out a page everyday for the past 3 months (they’re meant to cover a 3 month period).

Learn from my mistake though, don’t buy one of the lighter colors. Go dark. Also there’s no affiliate links here, I’m not making money if you buy one, I just really like these things.

I was even inspired by the Nathan Drake character in the Uncharted 4 game (5 stars, that game) to start adding little bits of physical items (receipts, post-cards, ticket stubs, etc) into the journal on the days I acquired them. (I think this is called scrap booking.) Now I want to learn how to draw so I can put cute little sketches into the journal too.

I’ve been blown away by the results of this little journaling experiment. It’s like reconnecting with an old friend, except I’m reconnecting with myself. Amazing. Who could have guessed that you could get so much clarity and and benefit from a little bit of daily writing and taping some random scraps into a notebook?

An example page from August. I had a leftover 20 kroner bill (about $2) from my trip to Stockholm, so figured I’d might as well add it to the page. I love that I can flip back to any page and remember what I was doing that day.

Anyways, I just wanted to share this in case you’ve been feeling a bit disconnected from yourself or like you’re just being pulled through life by your routines and habits. Give one of those Self Journals a try. I realize they’re a bit pricey at $30 each, but I like how they’re structured. You could always just use a cheaper notebook, I’m sure they work just as well. Mental health for the win!

That’s all I have for now. Thanks for reading and I hope you have a good weekend!