Hi there,

Ever wished they’d ask Wes Anderson to make a Star Wars movie? Yeah, us neither. But an AI did – watch the trailer here. (Yes, it's fake. No, he's not really making a Star Wars movie.)

In this Open Letter:

• Sounds like AI: The future of music, tech and Canadian synth-pop.

• Taxidermied drones, SAPS bugs & having a worse weekend than Elon.

• Get off my lawn: Our geriatric presidents & the trouble with young ones.

• Last mile as a service: Opportunity where the Post Office falls short

TRENDING NOW

The Future of Music

Working with the Bots

Recently singer Drake lost his mind when several so-called AI music artists used his voice to create brand new tracks called 'Winters Cold', 'Not a Game.' and most notably “Heart on My Sleeve”. The track went viral, amassing millions of streams in a day before it was removed by Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, and YouTube.

The music industry has not seen a threat of this magnitude since Napster, and Universal Music Group (Drake’s label) even called for AI music to be banned.

Exactly how that would be possible without banning AI altogether, is not clear.

Why The Big Moves to Block It?

Spotify, for example, pays $0.00437 per play, which means $5 if all of you listen to our podcast. Not shooting the lights out (yet). But Drake is a legend with a record 50 billion streams on Spotify. In 2021, he was the most-streamed artist with 8.6 billion on-demand streams, netting him a cool $37 million. Now we’re talking.

But it’s not that simple. His style, voice and persona are all carefully managed to maintain a supply and demand to ensure ongoing income. What happens when people can use it to create all kinds of music using his voice? We could get an oversupply and before you know it, no one is listening to Drake anymore and what’s worse, the money made on these songs will never reach him. Yikes.

Perhaps Acceptance is a Better Approach

Canadian musician Grimes is taking an acceptance stance to AI. Instead of protesting, condemning or pushing for legislation, Grimes is creating a new platform that lets you deliberately use the synth-pop star’s voice to create your own AI tracks and even publish them with a perfectly legal 50/50 royalty earnings split.

Grimes’ solution lets you upload a recording of your own voice, or record it directly, via the new platform elf.tech. (Still in beta for all you early adopters!) And it’ll generate the same song but in Grimes’ voice. Grimes gets half the money, for none of the work… smart.

What do you think? Should musos fight AI or work with it?

IN SHORT

🤫 Watch what you “said”? Parliament this week green-lighted SAPS to intercept your phone calls and communications. Or at least to buy the tech for it. But it’s too late to watch your mouth because they already bought the equipment back in 2019 and have been doing it ‘illegally’ for almost 4 years now.

💰 Still rocking cash? Well, soon you’ll be able to get your hands on SA’s new-look notes and coins.

🌎 Flat earthers look away: A Wikimedia dev did us all a favour by making the obvious doubly so, using pretty simple and elegant logic. That’s right, it’s 10 everyday ways you can prove the earth is totally round.

📰 Pay-per-view: Twitter is introducing a new feature that lets publishers charge a fee to read a single article as opposed to subscribing. A move Musk calls a win-win even as media outlets are looking for Twitter alternatives – speaking of which…

😈 A thread from hell: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s new decentralised Twitter rival, Blue Sky Social, launched to beta users and started making headlines instantly. From users insisting on calling posts “skeets” (look it up, we can’t post about stuff like that here) to having to ban users for “coordinated harassment” to bot-driven bugs resulting in what’s now called the “hell thread”.

🦜 On the wing: A group of researchers are building drones from taxidermied birds. Yes, you read that right – watch the video. What started as an attempt to create more nature-friendly drones presented a unique question: How exactly do birds fly? The result is hours of hard work and, you know, dead birds, flying again.

­WATCH THIS SPACE

There’s been a lot of talk over in the USA about President Biden’s age. After announcing he is running for President again. If elected, he would break his own record of being the oldest president in the USA to take the oath.

But just how old too old?

Too old and it might feel as familiar as riding a bike, too young and you might have a bit of a party animal on your hands.

Here are the world’s oldest, youngest (and a few notable ones in between) Heads of State.

🇨🇲 Cameroon - Paul Biya - 90 years old and the oldest sitting president

🇳🇦 Namibia - Hage Geingob - 81 years old

🇺🇸 USA - Joe Biden - 80 years old

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe - Emmerson Mnangagwa - 80 years old

🇿🇦 South Africa - Cyril Ramaphosa - 70 years old

🇨🇳 China - Xi Jinping - 69 years old

🇫🇷 France - Emmanuel Macron - 45 years old

🇬🇧 UK - Rishi Sunak - 42 years old

Why does this matter? Younger presidents like Macron are often more pro-technology and pro-startups. Although President Ramaphosa (at age 70) is still younger than his US, Namibian and Cameroonian counterparts, with South African elections coming up in 2024, here are some younger alternatives:

• FF+ - Pieter Groenewald - 67 years old

• ActionSA - Herman Mashaba - 63 years old

• IFP - Velenkosini Hlabisa - 58 years old

• DA - John Steenhuisen - 47 years old

• EFF - Julius Malema - 42 years old

• BOSA - Mmusi Maimane - 42 years old

Whoever leads the country come 2024, we sure hope they take the Startup Act seriously.

THE THREAD

In Tuesday’s Open Letter, we covered the opportunity in getting the SA Post office back on track. Bobby and Renier dive into this a bit deeper in this week’s edition of How Would You Build It? If Spotify is your jam, catch it here.

Want to jump to the good stuff? Here you go

• 00:40 What's happened to the post office

• 03:55 How Post Offices are branching out from just mail

• 05:05 DHL playbook

• 06:29 The Age of Post Bank

• 07:51 Plugging in E-Commerce

• 11:17 Where are the logistic opportunities

• 14:56 What about other logistic industries like construction

• 16:02 Unit economics in logistics

• 17:04 Last Mile as a Service

• 20:07 Pasella; Servicing the townships

• 22:30 Delivering medicine

• 24:19 Tech OR Processes?

• 26:20 How can this expand to Africa?

Like our podcast? Consider subscribing and getting notified when new episodes drop.

DID YOU LIKE THIS WEEK’S OPEN LETTER?

It’s our mission to add value, entertain, to delight. Did we miss the mark this week? Hit a link below and give us some feedback….please.

TELL YOUR FRIENDS

Rewarding you for sharing The Open Letter! Get your unique sharing link and rake in those referrals. For now Takealot vouchers, soon much more (and any referrals you get now will count towards future rewards!)

Please note: To prevent that friend from signing all his mates up without their knowledge, we need those referred to double opt-in. That means after signing up, also click the email to follow. So be sure to follow up with your mates to do that - we know it’s annoying, but the platform works that way, sorry!

This Open Letter is brought to you by Renier Kriel, Jason Mill and Elvorne Palmer.

Join us on Linkedin for juicy memes and more content.

Did we miss something? Hit reply and tell us what trends you’d like us to explore next.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.