✘ Fast Moving Music Goods, or the nothing that supports the something
And: Streaming fraud; Gaming and music digest; The future of music and media; Engineering virtual worlds; Erasing digital history; Techno-pessimist manifesto
Enter the world of fast-moving-music-goods. With the explosion of creator tools and generative AI, it’s become quick and cheap to produce and distribute music. This leads to millions of projects in the works through apps like Bandlab and countless attempts at text-to-music through models like MusicLM. We already see where this leads to in terms of how many songs simply go unheard. According to Luminate data in 2023 that number stood at 45.6 million songs.
It’s a fact of life that music will be made, it’s human nature. What we do with, however, is a choice.
Recency bias
Fast-moving-music-goods haven’t just come through increased access to cheap and quick production and distribution. It’s also due to our increasingly online lives, which a relative few social media platforms dominate. All of these apps suffer from a strong recency bias. The latest comes to the top, even timelines generated based on preferences and likes tend to favour more recent content. Since these social media are the main communication and marketing channels for artists and their teams and labels it’s necessary to play the game or adding continuous content. All of these apps are created to spend as much time on them as possible. Music is a great trigger to keep scrolling and keep clicking, but only if it happens on the platform’s terms.
Humans suffer from recency bias as well. We tend to favour what happened yesterday over what happened last year. In many industries, and music is a strong example, this means there’s a strong lack of institutional knowledge. We see this at the macro level, for example, when it comes to music industry investments. There’s always a shiny new toy (hello blockchain, hello AI) which takes the stage over constructive developments. Similarly, old concepts become new again without talking about their history (hello superfans).
We are all broadcasters
We all try to broadcast ourselves into existence. But, as I wrote back in October: “We’re all creators, but we’re not all broadcasters. The difference is in the intention.” If you use the tools of the creator economy and try to find audiences that way, you play the game in a skewed power law. Li Jin, who championed the idea of a creator middle class for a few years, now says that this hasn’t yet been possible to achieve, her reason:
“So to just say that the Creator Economy middle class can't exist seems rather fatalistic, because it's very much an output of the way that discovery platforms have been designed. Discovery platforms, I should say, sit upstream of the Creator Economy, because they determine who sees what, what content we consume, what we're even exposed to, what we like – so when we're talking about the distribution of creator success, it very much flows from the decisions that these platforms make.”
Here, we see Li Jin become less of a techno determinist. Culture becomes more important. But, we also have to remember that it’s us who shape our tools before they shape us. Sure, we can blame the algorithm, but we made the algorithm. Too often, the people who are most affected by a technology don’t get to influence how it’s shaped. This is what excites me about new tech like NFTs, which exist in a time of development where artists can shape them. Similarly, with AI and the voice we enter an opportunity for singers to be there and influence how their instrument gets monetized from now on.
On silence
If you have ever heard of John Cage, you know there’s no such thing as silence. In his Lecture on Something he talks about the music of Morton Feldman and the possibility of nothing:
“If you let it it supports itself. You don’t have to .
Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.”
Let’s take this to heart. And let’s also remember that whatever happens, we still want to engage with other humans. No algorithm will stop that. Cage’s 4’33”, specifically, shows us that every intermittent moment is full of sound - no instruments needed. Our online social lives are the same. In between all the posts, there’s a lot of wonderful silence - filled with experiences, not all of them beautiful. What if we start to document those? Those in-between moments, the nothing that supports all that something we see and hear. The technologies are there to do so, and shaping them is still in the hands of those first movers.
LINKS
⚖️ Fraud, the Eternal Frontier (Michael Pelczynski)
“We need a well-resourced, information, and data-sharing collective hub similar to those established in other industries decades ago. This hub must be built from active relationships within the music industry and function as an 'outside entity' to its members.”
✘ I have been waiting for this piece. Fraud is such an underreported element within our music streaming economy. Read this, and share it widely.
🎮 K-Pop Kart Racing, Virtual Concerts and Fortnite's Musical Future (Mat Ombler)
“I suspect we’ll see a lot more from Meta in the virtual concert space in 2024, especially as artists wise up to the idea of having Meta film their live sets and replay them as VR experiences through Horizon Worlds for $$$.”
✘ If you are into the intersection of gaming and music, this new newsletter by Mat Ombler should be assigned to your inbox.
🔮 Anticipating the future of music and media: What lies ahead in 2024? (Meg Adams)
“So, what are the big headlines? Unsurprisingly, AI is predicted to dominate the narrative across music and media in 2024 and beyond, presenting both exciting opportunities and daunting challenges in what promises to be a transformational year for entertainment.”
✘ An excellent overview of predictions for this year, with the underlying question of where will the money be made. Meg looks at a broad array here, including how major SVOD players will start to add more tiers - will music follow suit?
👩🏿🔬 Video games and engineering virtual worlds (Anna-Sofia Lesiv)
“Computer games are still a new medium. They’ve only been around since the 1960s, and yet they’ve already had a transformative impact and become the largest source of global entertainment, eclipsing even music and film. Games have also become among one of the most powerful expressive mediums because of the number of variables they can manipulate with respect to player experience: everything from how players experience time, space, images, sounds, and more is at the discretion of the game designer.”
✘ Music people love to compare the music industry and the gaming industry. But there’s really no comparison. IP is monetized in totally different ways, engagement differs, and the creation is also in sharp contrast. And yet, there’s a lot to learn. First, to understand how the gaming industry works, this piece by Anna-Sofia is a great starting point.
📜 A techno-pessimist manifesto (Curtis Yarvin)
“The implicit premise of techno-optimism is that technology drives civilization. To fix any and all of the problems of society, just get out of the way of technology. Across history, do we find this premise to be true? Usually, since intact civilizations rarely forget how to do useful things, technology advances monotonically within any civilization. Unfortunately, this implies that most civilizations fall at the height of their technical skill. This is a statistical illusion, but it should still make us think.”
✘ The Andreessen article on techno-optimism really got a lot of creative juices flowing. I’m a big fan of this counter article by Curtis.
🗃️ How social media’s fading archives are erasing our digital history (Joan Westenberg)
“And that’s the larger concern, of course. To lose an entire platform is to lose huge swathes of our digital culture and shared memories. But for many creators, it’s not just the cultural missing pieces that are concerning; it’s the work itself, calling back from another time in their lives and their careers, work that they might not have maintained in their archives in a pre-cloud storage world where computers still had CD drives.”
✘ I love how Joan puts into words how I feel about this issue. The problem of centralized platforms having access and control of all our digital work and memories is laid bare every time they die. Joan encourages us to rethink responsibilities and worth. Let’s do just that.
MUSIC
Let’s kick off this first MUSIC x of the year with a stonewall classic by Marlena Shaw.