1. Spotify's blind spot goes platinum.

Valentin Hansen’s “Crisis (The Worthless Album)” might be the most valuable act of musical protest yet, by being literally worthless. The debut album features 30 tracks, each exactly 29 seconds long, staying just under the threshold needed for Spotify to count a stream or pay a cent. It’s musical malicious compliance at its best: even if every user streamed it forever, Hansen would still earn exactly $0.00.

After earning just €2,000 from 1.7 million streams of his most popular song, Hansen figured zero might actually be an upgrade. The project skewers the economics of streaming while launching into something bigger: a multi-season NFT rollout where fans gradually assume ownership. In a world where TikTok snippets dominate and attention spans shrink, Hansen’s 29-second “songs” might feel more like the future than a joke.

_{Thanks Dom Cooper for this curios find.}

2. Ice cold voice over.

Coors Light just dropped a frosty twist on radio ads, by recording them in actual ice baths. To push its cold-activated cans, the beer brand dunked voice actors into 42-degree plunge pools and had them shiver through the script, delivering their lines mid-chill for maximum brrr-and-believability.

It’s a clever way to turn a sonic medium into a sensory one, proof that when your brand promise is ice cold, your ads better be too. Proof that even the behind-the-scenes can become front-and-center content.

3. Seconds that took a year.

While ChatGPT users are turning selfies into Ghibli-style portraits with a single click, a documentary reveals that one four-second scene in Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises took over a year to animate. The moment, capturing the chaos of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, required meticulous attention to detail, down to how cloth-wrapped packages should be held in a crowd. When animator Akihiko Yamamori lamented that his year-long effort would appear on screen for just seconds, Miyazaki simply replied, “But it was worth it.”

That quiet exchange says everything about Studio Ghibli’s commitment to craft. Frozen may have taken the Oscar that year, but as the documentary 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki shows, awards were never the point. The irony is hard to miss: while millions share fleeting Ghibli-style selfies, somewhere in Japan, a team of animators is still spending months on seconds of work we’ll remember for decades. Some things, it seems, are still worth doing the slow way.