Trio #2: Spotify released in-app lyrics!, Entropy, and the best of Twitter.
Trio #1: Our nonlinear world, pigs, and self-compassion
Shoutout to Annie and Fikemi for helping to edit this Trio #2
#1 Spotify now has in-app lyrics
6 days ago, Spotify launched in-app lyrics. This is an exciting surprise going into the weekend and holiday season. Half of my excitement was because I can now learn Drake lyrics much faster. Catch me finally knowing the lyrics to “No Friends in the Industry”
The other half of my excitement was in anticipation of writing about this. A substantial number of Deep Dives readers are Spotify fanatics. (This is true at least because I diss Apple Music at every chance).
Since you’re sane, that is you have Spotify and will try out this feature, you should know that you will need to update the app to get the lyrics feature.
Those are screenshots of the mobile app. Spotify will offer in-app lyrics to users “globally across iOS and Android devices, desktop, gaming consoles,* and TV”! Yes that means both free and premium users can experience the lyrics feature on any device. I think this will be a fan’s favorite.
This is all thanks to Musixmatch which I want to learn more about. Musixmatch powers lyrics for Spotify most recently, but also Apple Music, Amazon music, Tidal, and even Instagram. Musixmatch functions similarly to Wikipedia: independent contributors, unclear financial incentives, clear but elaborate community reputation rewards, all to create a large database of music lyrics.
Given the volunteer nature of Musixmatch, it makes sense that not all of the 70 million tracks on Spotify will have lyrics. Here are the only three songs I love but did not find lyrics for (of course there are more)
Landed - Drake
Cucumber water - Biskwiq
Gbana - toro, boistory
Also, Spotify Wrapped 2021 will be out soon after you read this. If I see you in the next couple of weeks, I will ask you what your expected/actual song of the year is. But if you comment your song of the year now, then even just 1 other reader may discover and love your recommendation.
#2 How to address Entropy
Let’s extend the discussion on How to build good habits. One crucial reason why habits are so powerful is that they compound. But to benefit from compounding, you must be consistent. Before fast food becomes bad for you, you must go to Burger King often. Before your knowledge increases rapidly, you must read books often.
The challenge to consistency is entropy: a gradual decline into disorder. The best way to understand this is the seemingly empty phrase: “Life is tough”. I have faltered on pretty much all the habits I tried implementing since this summer. Some of my explanation is reasonable. I got busy with midterms. I also got sick, which is why this month will be back-loaded with Deep Dives posts.
I have even lost momentum for swimming. I wrote an entire article on building good habits, using swimming as my focal example. I even swam consistently for more than a few months. So does that mean all that advice is bs and we can’t change our behavior?
Absolutely not. The mistake is to think losing momentum is strange or unforgivable. Losing momentum is expected. Entropy is a natural phenomenon. It’s much easier to shuffle a deck of cards than to arrange one. In fact, any change to an ordered deck of cards will cause a decline into disorder.
When temperatures dropped in Philadelphia, walking to the pool felt more difficult. This threatened my swimming habit. As I headed into midterms, I had had to carve out a lot of time for studying instead of writing. This threatened my writing habit. When I fell sick, I couldn’t go to my usual study spots. This threatened my working habit.
Very basic changes can threaten your habits so you have to become Antifragile. In the book, Superthinking, Gabriel Weinberg, founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, explains that the opposite of fragile is not “robust”. Robust means ‘immune to change’. Weinberg rather references “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder” a book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
In other words, don’t be too focused on preventing entropy that makes you falter on your habits (robustness). Try to instead learn from your failures, so that you’re stronger because of (not in spite of) the disruption - Antifragile.
James Clear suggests asking the question: “What is the plan to get back on track when I fail?”
I could not swim because the action step of the Habit loop was hard: I don’t like swimming when it’s cold. So I’m going to work out on the Oculus Quest 2 headset through Beat Saber.
How will YOU get back on track when you fail?
#3 Follow me on Twitter! @TomiwaAkinyele
Justin is a great friend who convinced me to use Twitter more frequently (especially instead of Instagram). He’s a great friend for many reasons, but especially because I am now consuming a lot of intellectual content I want to be exposed to.
If you’re subscribed to Deep Dives, which you should, consider following me because I will be extending my article topics through tweets and Twitter threads. @TomiwaAkinyele
Here is one recent tweet:
Also, I think it is perfectly fine to jump around chapters in a book, or songs in an album. There’s too much content out there that we want to experience, so we have to ruthlessly choose the best way that content fits into our lives. Think about how we now watch movies on a ‘small’ screen from our beds rather than on a large screen in a dark room in movie theatres. Let users choose.
Here are my 5 favorite tweets from the past week:
check out more of my tweets @TomiwaAkinyele
Question
What do you need to stop doing?