✘ Overcompensating with originality

And: Two-tier music streaming market; DJs' 1% reality; Indies rule; Radical sonic futures; Tropical technologist

Mimesis is the representation or reflection of what we experience in the world around us expressed through art. At least, that’s what the Greeks thought. Plato, Aristotle, they wrote about Mimesis. It never went far and made a big comeback with Adorno and Walter Benjamin. It became language-based mostly. The way we express the world through names, words, expressions, but also pictures and music. As the sociologist Jürgen Habermas put it: “naming is a kind of translation of the nameless into the language of humans.” Two things happen here: 1) naming means sounding; 2) naming means language. There’s formal structures to this, as there is to music. It’s these formal structures that we look to when we discuss originality.

My Sweet Lord, He’s So Fine

It’s one of these plagiarism cases that’s always mentioned when we talk about musical influences and how they work. George Harrison’s first solo record, He’s So Fine, ended up resembling the Chiffrons’ My Sweet Lord. As the case is often discussed, I won’t go into too much detail, but here’s the gist.

My Sweet Lord starts with a specific musical phrasing that can be heard back in the beginning of He’s So Fine. In court, there were many expert witnesses and those standing for Harrison mentioned how the songs were very different. This wasn’t however based on the specific musical phrasings, but on issues such as different words being used or the number of syllables involved. All of these arguments were pushed aside because the essential musical part matched.

This is how we understand music - through its notes, phrasings, melodies, etc. These we can capture in motifs that allows us to compare them. Now, this is also how we analyse music when we look at machine learning and generative AI. It’s this part of the music that’s the core input - the notes. We add a lot of attribution tags and retrofit genre, mood, activity and whatnot to it. And here we have a simplified version of how generative AI for music works. What this doesn’t capture, however, is the reception, the feeling of the listener, and the sense of authenticity.

Degrees of overlap

If we let go of the idea of originality, there’s still plenty to protect through copyright and to monetize. But it also opens up the notion of mimesis. These are not opposites; there’s no duality here. Going back to Habermas: mimesis is “the as-yet-uninterrupted connection of the human orgamsm with surrounding nature … [as] expressive movements are systematically linked with the qualities of the environment that evoke them.” Here’s what we miss when we focus too hard on originality: we create based on our interaction with the world around us.

There are only degrees of overlap here. The world is as much human as it is cat, sunflower, or frog. Seeing (and hearing) these overlaps forces us to move away from technodeterminism and Cartesian dualism. We’re forced into the mushy center. The author Haruki Murakami describes it well in his book Novelist as a Vocation:

“Originality is hard to define in words, but it is possible to describe and reproduce the emotional state it evokes. I try to attain that emotional state each time I sit down to write my novels. That’s because it feels so wonderfully invigorating. It’s as if a new and different day is being born from the day that is today. If possible, I would like my readers to savor that same emotion when they read my books. I want to open a window in their souls and let the fresh air in.”

Murakami doesn’t try to be original, but he tries to find an emotional state that comes through, something he feels - we can call this authentic. A breeze into the soul is what he offers. This is also what music does. It helps us process, grieve, enjoy, celebrate, and much more. Each time we feel music do something inside us we feel that connection that comes with it. It’s an authentic feeling, but not an original one.

The right to monetize

There was a moment where Web3 presented the opportunity to redefine who had the right to monetize music. In an interplay between artist and collectors, a market dawned which brought a focus on the value of music that didn’t exist before. This unfortunately became a short blip in both crypto and music history. But something lingers there, especially now that all music is also training data. This, also, isn’t new. The artist and writer Christina Rosalie wrote about an emergent mindset in 2014:

“Authenticity is derived not from the uniqueness of your idea, but from the personal iterative process of creating meaning that takes place between you and your audience when you show up and share. Your ideas might not be unique, but the meaning made through conversation, collaboration, and interplay, is.”

This is a vibe that still lingers in some of the, let’s call them post-Web3, communities I still hang out in. It’s the people, the interplay, the degrees of overlap. It’s also still about who gets the right to monetize. While most Web3 platforms for music either stopped, pivoted, or switched to basically be memecoin-based, there’s a broader questin that lingers. In the current struggles around generative AI, this question on who has the right to monetize is stronger than ever. In Web3 is was about the individual artist, with GenAI it’s about whether the pendulum will swing at a higher macro scale.

Instead of getting swept up in those large discussions, just briefly, imagine letting go of originality. Focus on those degrees of overlap and the human emergent interplays. There, we find other monetization opportunities. Nothing new or radical, just the kind of things that crowdfunding, subscriptions, patronage, merch, etc. already focus on. We can take confidence that the structures to take advantage of these monetization opportunities already exist. The right to monetize doesn’t stem from originality, it emerges through creative convergence.

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LINKS

2️⃣ Combating the emergence of a two-tier music streaming market (Dan Fowler & Kat Bassett)

“Market dynamics are predominantly dictated through the licensing deals between the majors and DSPs, particularly led by the market leader UMG, which produces changes to the market being imposed on all other parties. This often leads to unintended consequences that are disproportionate and could be avoided by addressing consolidation and ensuring open communication and industry negotiations ahead of new precedents being established, as well as ensuring respect for labels’ freedom to choose collective representation solutions such as Merlin.”

✘ A great piece of research with some actual solutions to implement. We can’t ask for much more. It’s also a great companion-read to Bas’ piece from last week about metered streaming. Something will change in the streaming economics as we’ve known them throughout the next few years. We can both consolidate and create new opportunities.

1️⃣ The 1% reality: What the numbers tell us about DJ economics (Rufy Ghazi)

“The math is simple — if barriers to entry drop while opportunities remain more or less unchanged, competition intensifies. Democratisation in an oversaturated market doesn’t create opportunity; it alters the limited nature that gave expertise its value.”

✘ The kind of stuff we don’t talk enough about. More and more people have access to creating and playing music. There isn’t more and more opportunities to monetize this. A solution, as Rufy writes, is to throw your own parties and promote yourself. But in our attention economy that is still a limited play.

🐁 Nothing will stand in the way of independents (Bruno Guez)

“The key is technology. Few indies are motivated by a fervent interest in the back-office function required to run a label. Their strength is they are motivated by a passion for the music. Now, technology allows them effectively to outsource the processes required to take their music to market and monetise it – not just distribution, but marketing, royalties, the whole kit and the caboodle.”

✘ Not too dissimilar to Rufy’s argument about DJs, it’s also become much easier to set up a label and start distributing music in the digital music ecosystem. The issue that Bruno highlights is that of monetization - the right to monetize question I also ask in my piece above. Tech can definitely play a role in increasing monetization opportunities, it just needs to be implemented thoroughly and comprehensively.

📣 Radical sonic futures (Debashis Sinha)

“And through that listening, that reaching, we come to a deeper understanding of what it means to inhabit the world around us, now, in this present moment. That we seek a path to engage with our world as it is, not as something outside ourselves, but through being a part of it, in it.”

✘ This resonates with what I’ve been writing a lot about recently - music can help us understand the world beyond simple black/white dichotomies. I love this short contemplation of what this term, radical sonic futures, could mean.

🌴 Tropical technologist (Chia Amisola)

“Third world technologies present alternative imaginaries for environmental computing that reject utopian visions of control. A tropical technologist embraces intermittency, seasonality, and scale, acting as a steward of land and machine. Living between extremes of dry and wet, blackouts and fragmentation shutter our attempts to control the weather—we merely adapt, memorize, survive. Ecologies are read as cybernetic systems; all environmental instability merely responds to human attempts to reign over it.”

✘ Read this and reconsider how you see the role of technology in your life. Most of your reading this will live in rich countries in the Global West. There are many other experiences out there. And, like Chia writes here, there’s other histories - such as cybernetics - that better suit what’s going on through these experiences. Moreover, we can learn a lot from this in the West.

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MUSIC

Lyra Pramuk’s new record, Hymnal, is out. I’ve listened to it so many times already, it’s utterly captivating. Lyra is a remarkable artist and she’s really showing her range on this album. The artistry fits into the lineage of Meredith Monk, Diamanda Galás, and Andrea Parker. It will envelop you.