I don't mean this in a derisive way, but was anyone else just a little disappointed by the Dune soundtrack? When I saw Hans Zimmer was working on it, I really expected him to get cut loose on this project. Instead we got pretty standard Hans Zimmer fare, some of which just sounded like him phoning it in. We're in the desert? Do the stereotypical Arabic singing sting! We're in a dark evil place? Cue the chanting (which wasn't anything interesting, either; just some people reading off the names of different Duniverse factions, nothing creative). Since Dune was (to me) always about this constant subversion of tropes, hearing Zimmer lean into these played-out sounds really sucked the air out of a movie I anticipated for a while, and a musician who I have great respect for. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic, though.

Like others in this thread, I naively assumed this was how Spotify already worked, and wondered why the payouts tended to be so low. Now it makes sense, and puts the numbers here (http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/) in context.

Realistically, it would be both hard to change structurally and a hard sell for major labels to give up what is effectively a subsidy of popular music by indie fans. Let’s take the author’s thought experiment to its logical extreme:

Imagine “Terry” listened to just one obscure band for the entire month of February. $7 of his $10 subscription fee is going to artists, but let’s say he’s also the only fan of that band on Spotify. So that band has effectively zero percent of Spotify’s plays for the month, meaning that the band gets effectively zero percent of Spotify’s monthly revenue.

Terry thinks $7 went to his favorite band, but it actually got divided up among February’s top 40, with only a fraction of a fraction of a cent going to the band!

Congrats to the team...I think my appetite for this has been whetted a little by the modern 2K Games remake...which, I know, is kind of heresy, but it really is a great example of how streamlining and simplifying an already decently-thought-out game (i.e. restricting soldiers to one special weapon and grenade, and base management to one base) can still be satisfying.

That said, in the remake, the AI is inexplicably "boxed" up. That is, the AI doesn't move until you stumble upon them...and so if you're patient and methodical, it's not terribly hard to win most fights, scratch-free. That ruined the tension that the original game had...The About page for Open-XCOM says the AI is improved...I'd love to see a writeup on what was changed.