Blogotariat

Why are musicians so keen to get played on the radio?

It can’t be because of the money.

In Australia they are paid at rates so low they come close to making streaming services look generous. By law, no radio station can be made to pay more than 1% of the station’s gross revenue for all of the music it plays, even if it is an all-music station. By the time the labels have had their cut, the artists get a lot less.

Large language models (LLMs) have overrun commercial markets, more like a tsunami than a normal technical wave of interest. The topic is everywhere –news stories, blogs, podcasts, startup investments, analyst reports, hackathons, and government announcements. A virtual frenzy surrounds it.

Australians are set to find out if we are on the edge of a so-called “official” recession.

Due out mid-Wednesday, the national accounts will either show spending, incomes and production continued to grow in the three months to December, or show they fell.

If they fell, it would be the first of the two strikes needed for what some people call an “official” recession. (Though surprisingly, there’s no such thing here in Australia, as I’ll explain later.)

Does it feel like you’re being charged more for all sorts of things these days, from groceries to banking?

The Defence Minister, Richard Marles, has announced an upgrade and expansion of the Australian Navy to give it an “enhanced lethality surface combatant fleet”.

Flanked by the Pat Conroy, the Minister for Defence Industry, Marles announced an additional $11 billion over the next decade. The money will be used to expand the Navy’s fleet of warships to 26 vessels, an increase of 15 craft.

Commitments to the construction of naval vessels in South Australia and Western Australia were reiterated, with ship workers being promised work for deacdes.

Jeremy Rockliff, the Liberal Premier of Tasmania, has announced that negotiations with two former Liberal MPs have broken down and he will call an early election tomorrow.

Rockliff said John Tucker and Lara Alexander had “failed to commit to a new, enduring agreement”, following their resignations from the Liberal Party in May, 2023. The former Liberals had concerns relating to the proposed Macquarie Point Stadium project. Their resignations sent the government into minority status in the House of Assembly.

The coalition will support the Albanese government’s tax cuts, the Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, confirmed today.

Flanked by the Shadow Treasurer, Angus Taylor, and the Shadow Finance Minister, Senator Jane Hume, Dutton said “the coalition is not going to stand in the way of people who are doing it tough”.

With repeated references to “the liar in The Lodge” and the government’s “egregious lie”, Dutton said the coalition would take “a significant tax policy” to the next election.

Watch the Dutton-Taylor-Hume press conference (35m)

The Chinese Australian writer Yang Hengjun has been sentenced to death by a court in China.

Yang Hengjun

Yang Hengjun, a pro-democracy activist, has been detained for the past five years. His death sentence will likely be commuted to life imprisonment after two years of “good behaviour”.

Wes Mountain/The Conversation, CC BY-ND

A panel of 31 leading economists assembled by The Conversation sees no cut in interest rates before the middle of this year, and only a slight cut by December, enough to trim just $55 per month off the cost of servicing a $600,000 variable-rate mortgage.