✘ Friction in the sea of sameness

And: Don't fall into the anti-AI hype; AGI is here (and I feel fine); UGC content 🤝 record label; New nature; Tools for ideal collaborations

The future is a dystopia filled with crap music being forced down your ears as you willingly consume it. Or is it? The platform economy has been forging a homogenous playing field for years now. All AI really does is exacerbate it. There’s sameness all around us. Nothing new here. I remember going to festivals as a teenager and already thinking how happy we all were being so different together. 50,000 people on a field all being different than some perceived norm in the safety of the sameness of alternative culture. But I loved it, because those 50k people were definitely less than the 15 million people of the Netherlands at the time so we felt special. We always have choices, and choices come with - or perhaps from is better - friction.

Anti-friction fallacy

This slop-filled dystopia is a choice. Engaging with it is a choice, too. Everywhere, people are withdrawing into dark forests. Yancey Strickler still aptly discusses this, nowadays in the context of how small, hidden groups can gather safely and alone on the Internet. This is as much about how we operate the Web as it is about how we commune as people. Any theory of community will tell you that it is just as important to put up barriers to entry as it is to welcome people in. To make a community feel valuable there needs to be some friction involved. The ‘openness’ of the platform economy mostly centred around an open-to-advertising funnel.

On the major platforms a lack of friction is touted as a good thing, even though it’s all geared to more time-spent-on-platform. As Dr. Kate Stone explains in our podcast published last week, friction is a route to meaningful creation and creativity more generally. We need it to create the space necessary for the act of creation. From platforms to generative AI, tech has become about erasing friction and making things feel easy and to provide fast results. But as Ana Andjelic recently wrote, friction is an advantage. What’s more, she writes that “friction is ineffecient by definition.” Friction, in other words, goes against the current tech-driven drive towards an ever more efficient life. The Web, and tech, can provide this friction just as much as moving away from it can.

Source: Wellcome Collection

Either / Or

Does this feel like a duality? Perhaps. If so, let’s ask the philosopher Kierkegaard, who wrote a book about just this topic:

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.”

For me, Kierkegaard calls to his reader to act with persistence and with clarity of reason. If you’re going to do something, be aware that that is what you’re doing. What’s more, whatever choice you make you will regret it. Why? Because the thing you didn’t do will seem so appealing in its potential.

That is what friction is, a choice. You can either do or not do. When we move that towards music we see a musician who has the choice to pursue reach through major platforms or intimacy through limited releases. We see a listener with the choice to passively consume a playlist or radio show or to actively search for music that resonates and reach out to the artist. I’m not here to argue one avenue is better than the other, but there is definitely more friction in the second option.

In a world of Fast Moving Music Goods, trends fall over each other and achieve ever less impact along the way. To create something meaningful requires friction. Through that friction the trends stop falling and a little island appears in the sea of sameness. Does it matter how many people this impacts? No.

The curiosity lever

How to build for this? The answer is probably not tech-focused. Instead, we are better off thinking about different models and more experiments. This is about curiosity and learning. The music industry might feel boring, it might feel like it’s at a dead end, or it might feel like everything is great. All of these restrict the way we understand music. All of these feel like there’s no more friction. If instead we decide - we choose - to be curious and to learn we can find new elements that allow us to figure out how things got to be as they are and how we can make them better.

One example where tech isn’t a solution is a platform like Subvert. It’s basically Bandcamp, allowing people to put up their music for others to buy directly from them. The big difference? It’s a cooperative. The big disruption here isn’t around a specific application of technology, but about the ownership model. Can we create different systems of governance and success by changing the dominant model of ownership in the platform economy?

Another example is Cantilever. Now that it’s also available in the US and Europe, it’s a good time to explore if you’re interested in an actually curation-driven platform. Cantilever takes a leaf out of the playbook of video-streaming services that host a limited amount of films or series in high-rotation. Curiosity is a main driver, because you have limited choice leading you - the listener - to choose something you don’t know yet much more easily.

When, however, do you dig deeper into fandom as a listener. Subvert helps its owners connect through values and curiosity. For now, there’s a limited amount of artists on the platform, but that will change. With Cantilever, there’s an interview to support the choice of curation and links to buy the music. There’s still a lot of different types of fans. As much as the industry more generally likes to make buckets. A good example comes through Sound of Fractures, who’s currently speaking openly about the struggles around choosing where to communicate for his next project. How do you connect people who prefer Instagram with people who don’t use it? Is everyone comfortable sharing their phone numbers through WhatsApp? The answer, of course, is to pick a lane and stick with it. The question behind it, though, is significant: how do fans want to engage and how to cater to that?

Friction is inefficient

Coming back to that point Ana Andjelic made: friction is inefficient. That’s the feature, not the bug. That doesn’t mean you need to generate scarcity where perhaps there is none. It does mean that you need to embrace the human aspect of music. People create music in different ways. Artists want to share about their music in different ways. People listen to music in different ways. Fans want to share about their favourite music and engage with their favourite artsists in different ways. Instead of trying to find a middle ground where most people are okay, we should focus more on creating high-friction environments where perhaps less people find their way but more energy gets channeled into beautiful experiences. Swimming out of the sea of sameness is like swimming out of a riptide. First, you let yourself be led into deeper waters and this feels counterintuitive, but it’s actually the best way out.

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LINKS

🍂 Don't fall into the anti-AI hype (antirez)

“Yes, maybe you think that you worked so hard to learn coding, and now machines are doing it for you. But what was the fire inside you, when you coded till night to see your project working? It was building. And now you can build more and better, if you find your way to use AI effectively. The fun is still there, untouched.”

✘ One of things I find so interesting about the GenAI debates is how it shows that coding is just as creative an act as making music. They’re both acts of creation and both have the potential to change under the influence of GenAI. How that works for you is up to you. There’s agency here.

🙂 AGI is here (and I feel fine) (Robin Sloan)

“If it were only critics of the industry resisting the declaration, it wouldn’t be surprising. Acknowledging AGI might feel to them like conceding defeat; it might simply … rankle; but I think the critics should indeed acknowledge it, & in a moment I’ll explain my logic.”

✘ I love this argument and use it a lot. If you look at previous definitions of AGI from, say, 20 years ago we’re here. This is the moment of AGI. But, of course, we need more investment so we move the goalposts. Or, where we are is underwhelming, so we move the goalposts.

Also, this experiment of a time-bound pop-up newsletter from Robin is very cool!

🤝 What does UGC content and a record label have in common? (Charlotte Caleb)

“One of the problems with the music media landscape is that artists are often siloed to their own social media platforms, there’s often no platform for people to actually get to know them beyond their own channels until they break into the mainstream.”

✘ This, for me, resonates with my article above. We need to relentlessly diversify how music works. Charlotte has a lot of good advice and take-aways here for just that!

🏞️ New nature (Venkatesh Rao)

“Most technologies are like guns. They tend to get aggregated and captured by those who already have a lot. Technology, in other words, generally exhibits preferential attachment to power.”

✘ I’m still thinking about this, but there’s good logic behind this argument. Venkatesh advocates for distributed ownership and governance layers to protect technologies from ‘simply’ falling into the hands of the already powerful.

🪟 Windows of Tolerance: Tools for Ideal Collaborations in an Unideal (Art) World (Paola Jalili & Katie Lenanton)

“[This] is a compilation of exercises, checklists, workflows, prompts for conversation, and practical tips that Feminist Culture House has developed over the years while curating exhibitions, making publications, and developing workshops and other learning experiences. The publication invites readers to become attuned to the social, cultural, and political implications of the working methods they put into practice, and to implement intersectional feminist working methodologies when collaborating with others.”

✘ The kind of publication everyone, and I mean everyone, should read and take to heart. It’s full of little things as well as bigger things we can all do to evaluate how we all work. And then, of course, what we can do to improve on the conditions those existing workflows have set.

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MUSIC

My record of the year for 2026 may already have been released. Two of my favourite artists, Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick, collaborate to weave together an album full of magic. Listen to this in mornings, evenings, or when you’re out for a walk. The combination of harp, vocals, and electronics is stunning.