✘ Community, scene, meme & lasting cultural impact
And: How artists run ads on TikTok; Turning brain scans into music; WT$ is streaming economics; Pudding on female-written hit songs (or lack thereof); SoundExchange sues SiriusXM (again)
Somewhere along the way, we always learn that we can’t do it alone. There’s no genius without a network, and more and more this network has become something public. As we moved our lives into digital spaces and places, what we call Web2 gave us a strong public network. It allowed us to create connections beyond what we were used to before. What we often forget when we talk about Web2, and it’s current debilitating state, is that the technologies affected how we created our spaces and made them places of meaningful interaction. This, of course, got kicked to the side by extractive practices around advertising and profit.
More recently, we seem to be pulling back into little pockets of the Internet. Gated chat groups, or private Discords allow us to create place with people who share values with us which allow for meaningful discourse to take place. We can curate these places. There is, however, a tension between those closed-off place-making activities and the public networks. If only 11, 34 or 67 people are part of the discourse, is it even public? How does such a network find its way into a wider public discourse. How can we create lasting impact, especially on a cultural level?
Consumption = production
In his The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that consumption is a kind of creative process as the consumer puts their own ideas, thoughts, motions, spaces, etc. into the product they consume. This argument does two things. First, it individualizes consumption and provides a lens through which we can talk to others who share similar methods of consumption of particular products, especially when it comes to cultural artifacts. This is a strong feature of music which allows people to bond over songs having put the same type of emotions into them. Similarly, the counterculture of certain genres and bands and musicians gives listeners and fans a way to express to each other that they share these consumption practices. If I wear my Aphex Twin t-shirt and someone recognizes it, this tells me a lot about how that person sits in the world at large. Second, de Certeau’s argument helps shape the way we can analyse the exceeding abundance of information that we can consume. Endless timelines and feeds make sure that the individualized perspective disappears. Even the spaces of dark forests can give this notion - think about too many chat groups and notifications on Telegram or 114 Discord servers and their notifications.
That said, de Certeau also argues that subcultures often tend to find ways to make their culture function within the dominant culture. In the music industry, right now, the dominant culture is that of the major labels and festivals and DSPs and short-form video apps. Between them, they determine the mainstream and to even propose to go a different route means that most people will not understand the narrative. And yet, by functioning against a dominant culture, any subculture always also support the metanarrative of that culture. The only way out of that is to zoom in and look at the consumer as a practitioner within the production of music and its meaning. In other words, back to the individual level, back to the level of private pockets of the Internet.
The meme
When the consumer, the listener, the fan gets a voice through their consumption and so become a part of the product it becomes easier for them to repeat the narrative around it. As Tristra Newyear Yaeger recently put in here in this newsletter, the flow state is the original state for music. It is, then, actually perfectly suited for an evolving meme, continuously shifting meaning as it travels along the narrative from one person to the next. At the start of this year I spoke about how 2023 should be the year where we forget about scale. I urged you all to look for a squad and work with focus. In a way, the communal retreats into our own little digital pockets perhaps represent that. My question now is about how to spread out from there in a thoughtful manner that doesn’t require an embrace of extractive media.
One answer is to find that focus and build your meme around that. Not in the sense of funny pictures, but in the original sense of symbols and behaviours being imitated across people and communities and cultures. We can build and shape those symbols, those narratives, and tell the accompanying stories. When the meme travels, all you can hope is that it retains the values you imbued it with.
And perhaps that’s the answer. Communities require presence to sustain. From its culture a scene can come up through the connections forged. Symbols gain values and memes are born. Once these start travelling, that’s the way to bring the culture out into the broader world. One story at a time, not with the purpose of growth, but with the specific purpose of telling that story. Not a straight path, but a rambling, careening track picking up only those who also look for a companion.
The above piece also finds inspiration from Wild Awake, an experiment in scene building I’ve been a part of. We are preparing for the next part of that journey, and if you’d like to learn more and support the meme, so to speak, please think about collecting the Zine we created, or reach out to me directly.
LINKS
👀 See how other artists run their ads on TikTok (Carlo Kiksen)
“Ad transparency Libraries, like TikTok’s Commercial Content Library, allow artists to research every advertisement placed on the platform and look under the hood of other music or artist campaigns on TikTok. It may provide artists with fresh ideas and inspiration for their campaigns. It also helps to recognise trends in what creatives and ideas large brands use for their paid ads on TikTok.”
✘ This is a great bit of insight from Carlo, because especially in the social ads game it’s better to steal well than try to come up with solutions on your own.
🧠 Researchers find that AI can turn brain scans into music (Rachel Roberts)
“Over 500 tracks across 10 musical genres were played to the volunteers while they were inside the scanner, and their brain activity created images that were captured and fed into Google’s AI music generator, Music LM. The software was conditioned on the brain patterns and responses from the individuals, and results found that the music created from the test subjects’ brain waves were similar to the stimuli they were played.”
✘ Our brains are vastly more interesting than we currently grasp. This experiment shows that again. Get the full paper from Google and Osaka University researchers here.
🔀 WT$ Is Streaming Economics (Michael Pelczynski)
“Unlike traditional, physical and digital download eras, streaming payouts are calculated based on ebb and flow economics (aka constantly fluctuating factors). That is why the debate is complex, often misconstrued and should not be measured by a static one-dimensional indicator such as – 'what is the industry/platform/market per play rate?'”
✘ This needed to be told and needs to be shared widely.
👩🎤 This is how rare it is for a hit song to be credited to an all-women songwriting team (Chris Dalla Riva)
“Women singing the songs that they wrote might seem like a trifling detail, but it actually suggests something more vital: you cannot talk about the history of music without talking about men actively limiting the musical activities that women were allowed to participate in, sometimes via physical or sexual violence.”
✘ Just let this whole wonderfully designed research sink in for a moment … Then, think about what you can do to fix it. Are you in a position to get more female songwriters to work and to get men to sing the songs they write?
⚖️ SiriusXM Sued by SoundExchange Over $150 Million Royalty Underpayment Claim (Jem Aswad)
“The new lawsuit, filed Wednesday with the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, maintains that SiriusXM improperly manipulated the federal regulations to create an artificially low calculation of “revenue” on which it pays creator royalties. It claims that SiriusXM “accomplished this by ascribing excessive and unjustified value to the webcasting component of its bundled packages and then removing that value from the satellite radio royalty pool.””
✘ It’s not the first time SoundExchange has sued SiriusXM and the last time they got their settlement. This time, though, I personally think it’s more important that the focus in the lawsuit is on the allocation of revenues specifically, which could mean that over the course of the court proceedings we’ll learn a lot more about how exactly SiriusXM measures ‘webcasting’ plays versus ‘satellite’ plays. The full wording of the suit is here, only for the nerds, of course.
MUSIC
I’ve been really enjoying Noname’s new record Sundial. Everything about it falls into place, from the music to the lyrics and her delivery to the collaborations.