Welcome back to The Catalog. Here's what’s worth learning, exploring, or watching this week, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.

CONTENTS

1. New Arrivals (Streaming Services Add AI Labels, Sunlight as a Service, Dolly's Family Asks for Books, Get Paid to Tie Your Shoes, Biggest IPO in History Might Be Weeks Away)

2. The Feature (Colour Revolt Is Back)

3. Observations (A Secret Deal in My Own Backyard, Norcross Expedition photos)

NEW ARRIVALS

01 · Streaming Music Services Add AI Labels

Apple Music will now require labels and artists to tag new tracks when AI helped create them. An Apple executive estimated earlier this year that 1/3 of all song submissions were entirely AI-generated. I think Apple deserves credit for burying those songs with proprietary detection tech, prioritizing human curation over algorithmic discovery. Today on Apple Music, entirely AI-generated songs account for less than 0.5% of listening time.

Spotify moved first this month, when it introduced an "AI Persona" badge that flags public artist identities as AI-generated when they don't represent a real person, and by default excludes those songs from editorial and algorithmic recommendations (unless listeners choose to follow the AI artist directly). Creators can now self-disclose AI presence through Spotify for Artists. Billboard followed suit a week after Apple with its own pledge to flag AI-generated songs on its charts and in editorial coverage.

It's going to be difficult to draw a hard line for this kind of AI filter. Is a song "AI-generated" because the vocal is fully synthetic, or does an AI-compressed vocal count? What if one section of a live drum track includes an AI-generated hi-hat? I like the idea of AI transparency flags, but I’m unsure about the threshold for upstream usage.

02 · Sunlight as a Service

A bright new startup called Reflect Orbital is selling on-demand sunlight. Their gigantic orbital mirrors, aimed by satellite, reflect sunlight onto a specific patch of ground on Earth for a fee. Their new mirror, Eärendil-1, measures roughly 60 × 60 ft, and won FCC approval last month to test lighting up a 3-square-mile patch of ground at night.

In its justification for granting the Reflect Orbital test flight license, the FCC said optical astronomy and light pollution fall outside its authority, and approved the launch, while there is currently no other U.S. government agency that is responsible for granting licenses to satellite companies.

03 · Dolly's Family Asks for Books

Dolly Parton, an absolute icon in country music and entertainment, died on Tuesday at 80. I spent time onsite at Cracker Barrel’s HQ with their marketing and digital team during one of their active campaigns with Dolly. In lieu of flowers, Dolly’s estate is asking for donations to her children's literacy initiative instead. The Imagination Library is a nonprofit she founded in 1995 that mails a free book every month to enrolled children from birth to age five. The program has sent out more than 330 million books to date.

Donate here to the Imagination Library

04 · Get Paid to Tie Your Shoes for AI

Frontier AI labs are hungry for new data, and LLM training has consumed nearly every book on the internet, but still lacks real-world experience. So companies are now paying ordinary people to record everyday tasks to resell to AI as training data. Waffle Video will pay you $25 an hour for footage of everyday chores like tying shoelaces or loading a dishwasher, though you have to request access through a creator waitlist first. The math is interesting downstream: Waffle's payment terms show creators get a revenue share if their video gets relicensed (e.g., your video sells to a company next year for $100, you get $30).

This reminds me of a secret shopper service from the 1990s, except instead of reporting back on a retail store, you're sharing footage of your own kitchen.

05 · The Biggest IPO in History Might Be Weeks Away

Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate passed $65 billion at the end of July, up from $47 billion in May and roughly 7x what it was at the end of last year. Anthropic, widely known for its AI product Claude, is expected to file for an IPO as soon as October, at a valuation that could exceed $2 trillion, which would make it the largest public offering in history.

The scale these new frontier AI companies are operating at right now is hard to wrap your mind around. For comparison, here's how Anthropic’s valuation stacks up against the largest historical IPOs on the US stock market:

THE FEATURE

Colour Revolt Is Back on Tour

This weekend, I watched Colour Revolt play their first hometown show in over a decade back home in Jackson, Mississippi at Duling Hall. The bluesy southern alternative rock band has been dormant for more than a decade, and they sounded better than ever.

I wasn't missing this show. Colour Revolt, back on stage in their hometown of Jackson, Mississippi.

Colour Revolt was part of some of my first tours across the Southeast, back when Manchester Orchestra shared stages and van rides and the exhaustion of figuring out how to function as a touring band. They were an enormous influence on me, not in an abstract sense of old songs I like, but I honed my craft shoulder to shoulder, night after night, on our first few southeastern tours. Their latest lineup, after all these years, sounded as good as ever.

Beyond a stellar performance, I was impressed by all the people who travelled in to see the show. I saw old friends from Dallas, and got to hang out with former bandmates that also made the trip from Atlanta. I saw familiar faces from NYC and Nashville, and there was a guy standing behind me in the merch line that had flown in from Philadelphia.

I could have waited for their next Atlanta show. I figured they’d be on tour again soon, but I wanted to see them back in their hometown first, in Mississippi, before touring smooths out the resurgent energy with something more polished.

The last time I drove hours to see a reuniting band was in 2011, when Dismemberment Plan reunited for a run of shows at the 9:30 Club in Washington DC after seven years apart. I drove from Atlanta to see them, because Emergency & I and Change are two of my favorite records, and because I understood then that a hometown reunion is special.

There’s something about a band coming back after years of silence. It’s not exactly nostalgia. Seeing a favorite band reunite after all that time functions less like a concert and more like a checkpoint, an involuntary one, where you measure the distance between who you were the last time you heard those songs live and who you are now (same kind of room, different atmosphere), surrounded by a couple hundred people singing along.

I filmed them playing “A New Family”, one of my favorite songs. If you're within driving distance the next time they play near you, go check it out.

OBSERVATIONS

Datacenter Deal in My Backyard

Late last summer on Jekyll Island, I sat at a hotel cocktail bar next to people from the Georgia Chapter APWA's annual meeting when someone mentioned a big water and power buildout somewhere between Savannah and Bryan County. I've since learned about how OpenAI's $20 billion data center deal in Effingham County got approved, and I wonder if it was the same project.

A $500 million water project approved that March, officially for Hyundai's Metaplant, was permitted for 23 million gallons a day against a 12 million gallon need, and Effingham's county manager said other entities could tap the supply if needed. “Project Camellia” requires 24 million gallons a day.

The OpenAI deal moved through Georgia Power starting that October, county officials under NDA until April, and a vote called on three business days' notice instead of the required seven, posted nowhere public. OpenAI raised its standard community grant from $20 million to $80 million, a generous rounding error, for the Georgia community days before the vote.

Norcross Expedition

I took the photos for this story on the Georgia Trust's Norcross Expedition, a self-guided tour through more than 20 historic homes and sites in my hometown of Norcross. It drew 500 visitors and I got to see the interior of historic homes I walk by all the time.

ABOUT THE CATALOG

These days everything is moving at hyperspeed. We're creating and producing more content, with less certainty, than at any point we can remember. AI is fundamentally reshaping how work gets done, how content is produced, and how we communicate with each other, faster than we can keep up with.

As an experience strategist I read a lot, and I continually run across things that are useful or worth thinking about. In a fast moving environment, the hardest part can be deciding what deserves your attention.

In this newsletter, I aim to capture what I've found each week that's worth learning, exploring, or watching, so you can start with a shortlist instead of sifting through noise.

Learn more about why I started writing this newsletter in Issue 000.

See you next week,

Jonathan