I like thinking about song collaborations as business partnerships— audience exchange deals that expose two artists’ fanbases to each other. Maybe for business purposes or maybe because their voices meld so beautifully, Billie Eilish and Rosalía are here with the collab you want to see in the world, a moody duet of bilingual harmonies about betrayal and redemption. Playing to the Eilish mood, crushing remorse is the top note, but she takes stylistic cues from Rosalía, too, including some truly frightening fingernails that feature in the video. Watch it and fulfill their managers’ dreams.
Do you love Facebook Stories? Instagram Reels? Then you’re in luck, because an FB-branded ripoff of Clubhouse is on its way. Just five days after Zuckerberg appeared on a panel on the OG Clubhouse, his colleagues announced that they’re making their own version to squash the billion-dollar baby that, if I’m not mistaken, everyone is already sort of over? One theory is that, far from trying to outrun the new kids, Facebook is intentionally planning for their product to fail so they can point to it in court when they deny holding an internet monopoly. Be that as it may, none of this information appears to have made its way to Jack Dorsey or Mark Cuban, both of whom are also working on Clubhouse clones. Join the club, boys.
To zero in on our buddy Jack for a minute, Twitter evidently feels so threatened by not only audio but newsletters that they just bought up some no-name Substack competitor so people can launch personal editorial products straight from the site. The thinking is this: writer starts newsletter, announces to their many fans on Twitter; Twitter followers follow the writer right off to Substack, where they form an intimate email relationship over words that exceed the 280-character limit; Substack monetizes that relationship while Twitter gets no richer. So a merger might actually be a good thing, but Substack rejected Twitter’s overtures since their self-esteem is higher than that. Instead, second-string darling Revue is enjoying a brief moment of limelight before Twitter inevitably loses interest and lets them fade. Remember what happened to Vine?
Forget Twitter, Clubhouse, even TikTok—MySpace is back, thanks to an 18-year-old in Germany who rebuilt it from scratch. Wise beyond his years, he says contemporary socials are just too much, so he’s spent his quar building SpaceHey.com to the delight of many a former emo kid. Will he maintain the site or will the last frontier again be ripped out from under the well-meaning internet humans? Or, hang on— will Clubhouse buy him out?
