✘ Can music even be ethical?

And: The slow streaming movement; Is streaming music's final form?; India's DSP market today; 9 steps to building super fans; Are the 80s back?

Let me bring together two unlikely companions. First, Mike Patton, vocalist extraordinaire:

“Do we realize that we are eating our young? It seems the passion that moves us is accompanied by an incredible urge to squash it. It is as quick as a fucking reflex - a conditioned response.”

Second, Ayatollah Khomeini:

“Music is no different than opium. Music affects the human mind in a way that makes people think of nothing but music and sensual matters. Music is … a treason to our youth.”

Patton is talking about how artists are falling into a trap of convenience. Forgetting to share in their creations as they chase perfection. Or, forgetting to care about their creations as they chase, in his words, “a quick fuck in the bathroom.”

Khomeini is talking about the impact music can having on or mental health and wellbeing. We know music has a profound impact here, but if you’re like me you’ll tend to focus on the positive effects of music on the brain, soul, and body. There is, however, a very different angle and Khomeini is a good example of that.

Taking these two approaches to music at face value they seem to not align. And yet, they open up how difficult it is to talk about music as ethics. It’s not for lack of trying - discussions around music and ethics go back as far as Plato and Aristotle. In fact, Khomeini uses some of the words that Aristotle also used to discuss music in his Nicomachean Ethics. More recently, there’s a lot of discussions around music and ethics, specifically when it comes to generative AI, large music models, and training data. In all this, is it possible for music to be ethical? Can we think about this at face value? Or, do we always need to bring in techno-social and economic developments?

Listening in time and space

There’s a strong argument that we can’t actually grasp music. Even though we can record music, this doesn’t capture the music itself. That only sits in the soundwaves as they hit our ear drums and we and the music meet each other in that moment - before it vanishes again. In these moments of contacts, music is ethical in the sense of an ethics that Marcel Cobussen and Nanette Nielsen describe as:

“Listening produces music as a ‘subjective objectivity’. Or … both the listening subject and the heard object or event at once affect and are affected by each other.”

This is an ethics of engagement, one where meaning derives from the contact of two ‘bodies’ in the broadest sense of that term. It’s also where I think music can indeed be ethical. In the personal moments of affect between a listener and the soundwaves in form. That’s where ethics sit without any moral or sensual bridges.

Politics, hear it

Any other form of music as ethics requires drawing in the much broader political constitutions. Those techno-social and economic features that determine how we listen. This is where the vast differences between a Mike Patton and Ayatollah Khomeini get played out. It’s also where the differences between Italo Disco and the Second Vienna School get played out. All those varieties of interpretation and meaning are not in the music. Hence, the music isn’t the vehicle of ethics but merely a conduit - something that a particular ethical approach gets pushed through. Of course, a great example of this happening is when OpenAI says that copyrighted work as training data is fair use, but that people can’t use their logo in similar ways.

Politics tries to be solid, but, as I recently argued, there’s more value to operating in the gray zone. Music is a teacher here. It is both structure and affect. Its structure adheres to rules. Its affect creates an experience of unstable articulation. In-between those two elements lies music’s power as a teacher and is another place where it becomes ethics. It can help us to understand the gray zone of our current political moment better than anything else.

Affective listening

We are affected by what we hear. Similarly, what we hear is affected by us. Recognising this takes us into a place where there are no solid objects, no hard and fast rules. A lot of Western music has a history of constraint and structure. Think of our classical music heritage, but also the recent desire to objectify all music into specific microgenres. This doesn’t take into account vast swathes of musicking, which we find all over the world and all throughout human history. There is an aleatory element here that composers like John Cage tested against the Western classical heritage. With the advent of various technologies we’ve also come up against all kinds of random sounds turned into musical elements.

A great example is the marginal sounds of equipment, especially electronic. These have played an important role in many genres of music from the second half of the 20th Century onwards.

I can’t help but reference David Byrne’s excellent piece on Blip Hop here.

More recently, as Declan McGlynn wrote - already nearly two years ago:

“Where some might (rightly) laugh at AI’s failings when it comes to sample-accurate, lossless reproduction of studio-quality music, I see this period as a creative opportunity. If early digital samplers could have been perfect, they would have been. But by falling short, they introduced their own kind of beauty that has become a sought-after sound.”

And so AI-generated music has its own glitches which could become sounds that will define genres. The moment this happens, though, is the moment of affect. This is where music becomes ethical because it’s where the listener generates the sonic object as music.

Music is ethical when it wanders

Throughout this piece, I’ve tried to make the point that talking about ethics and music is hard. What’s more, when talking about ethics and music something very specific happens. I automatically end up in the gray zone. As soon as I think seriously about this, I find that my focus shifts to that moment of affect. Where the music generates my self, and I generate the auditory object I engage with. This may seem quite philosophical, but there’s firm ground here. Acknowledging this moment and its transitoriness allows us to consider not just music’s affect but our own. I already mentioned Marcel Cobussen here. In another of his books he writes:

“He who deals with spirituality, music, and their mutual relation should be a wanderer, repeatedly deviating from the normal, ordinary, lawful course, way, or path. He is not only a heretic who transgresses but also a subversive who breaks the (power of the ) law, who strays from the correct path, the right direction, the rule of rectitude, the norm … Such wandering is erring.”

We should all be wanderers. When we treat music affectively, we understand it outside of its productized nature. Every technological development - pianola, radio, CD, synthesizer, MP3, AI, etc. - pushed music into its next phase of monetization. At the same time, it also allowed us to listen differently, to hear new sounds. If we explore that, we wander and we understand we can, no we must, err.

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LINKS

🦥 The slow streaming movement: counteracting Spotify & co's economic impact on artists (Bas Grasmayer)

“The main question I want to answer here is: as someone who streams, what can you do better? What new habits can you develop? How can you counteract the forces of the economic underpinnings of the music streaming system?”

✘ Love this piece - and it mentions ethics too! - by Bas. Thinking about the intentionality of streaming helps to refocus our listening behaviours. It’s also a great way to take agency in a world where you - a single listener - can barely make an economic impact. Yet, you can make an intentional impact on yourself.

⏭️ Is streaming music's final form? And if not, what's next? (Tatiana Cirisano)

“Usually, the emergence of a new format is preceded by slowing revenue growth for the prior one. This is happening with streaming right now, and it is driving a focus on new growth opportunities for the format, including those aforementioned tiers. At the same time, though, new forms of being an artist and a listener are evolving entirely outside of streaming’s borders.”

✘ I read this while I was thinking of the piece I wrote above and I resonated with this point Tati makes here. It’s not just new formats, it’s new forms of being that arise when a technology spurs music along into a new realm of production and distribution.

🇮🇳 Shut-downs, watching vs. listening, and future growth – India’s DSP market today (Amit Gurbaxani)

“In the interim, Spotify gradually edged out the other incumbents by replicating some of their strategies such as selling mini subscription plans, accepting country-specific modes of payments such as UPI, and focusing on regional Indian language music – and combining this with huge marketing and advertising spends. It also spotlighted India’s independent music scene, a segment given less prominence by its film music-focused domestic rivals. This was all on top of its superior algorithm-based listening recommendations.”

✘ India is a massive country and I’m sure it will determine a lot of global popular culture in a few years - I know I’ve been saying this for a few years now. This piece by Amit is a great overview of how the streaming market has developed with local versus international players. Similarly, the focus on monetizing the Indian streaming audience will prove decisive in creating new forms of monetization globally.

👷‍♀️ 9 steps to building music super fans (Ariel Hyatt)

“We moved our offices from New York City to The Samples’ hometown, Boulder. CO. This put us in direct community with the band, who stopped by the offices when they were off the road and hung out with us socially. This move also put us in a community with many of the core super fans, promoters, venues, managers, and team who were spreading the gospel of The Samples from the band’s home base. It was not unusual to drive around town and hear The Samples blasting from car windows, frat houses, bars and restaurants. It was an exciting reminder of our mission and it was highly motivating (and fun).”

✘ Ariel coming in hard with how super fans are nothing new and the rules for nurturing them have been the same for many, many years. All-round excellent advice here. Whenever I get stuck on any marketing-related questions, I turn to Ariel’s writing.

📠 Are the 80s back? Power vs. Freedom (Daisy Alioto)

“The 80s were more than a turning point in the industrial economy. They were the beginning of the ascent of total power enjoyers over total freedom enjoyers. These people don’t want freedom to do what they want to do—they want the power to tell you who you can marry, which genocides you can protest, and how you plan your family. And if you push back, they want to see you suffer more than they want happiness for themselves. After all, they are miserable. And they look like shit!”

✘ I have another article idea about repetition and recurring cycles in culture. It centres around the notion that Jeff Mills put forward: how culture moves in 30 year cycles. In that line of thinking, the 1980s can’t be back, because it’s 40 years ago. And yet, it definitely feels as if they are in many ways.

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MUSIC

Music is energy. The guitar of Oren Ambarchi and the drums of Eric Thielemans show how it feels when musicians allow music to simply be energy. Often, there’s a meditative serenity to these two musical pieces. However, there are thrusts of texture, rhythm, and melody which refocus the listener in this journey. Kind Regards is a beautiful next step in the coming together of these two musicians. I hope they will keep exploring their sonic interactions on many more records.