✘ Societal value, artist empowerment, inclusion, equity - Remixing our industry

And: Clubbing x Science; Hallucination as imagination in LLMs; Tencent's superfan clues; Viral songs aren't good; Create acquires Monstercat

The music industry's grassroots - the independent artists, small venues, and community-driven initiatives that form its cultural foundation - are in an existential crisis. Venues struggle to cover basic operating costs, even when hosting talented emerging acts, while artists need to overcome formidable barriers to build something approximating sustainable careers.

Amid these the grim realities there’s a range of innovative, community-driven solutions. These aim to sustain and empower this vital part of the music ecosystem. Think of community ownership of venues and calls for policy reforms that better recognize the societal value of grassroots music. There’s a path forward, all we need to do is take action and start remixing.

On venues

Grassroots music venues, those ones you probably say you want in your life but don’t go to often enough, struggle. They struggle because they see rising costs of operation, a decrease in bar revenues - gotta love those Gen Z kids drinking less - and just a general fight for attention in a crowded market. Tackling rising costs is difficult in an economy driven by inflation, tariffs, and other macro-level shifts that grassroots level organizers definitely can’t impact. This leads to difficult decisions, as Hannah White from Sound Lounge said recently:

“We are talking about the fact that as a venue now, when we're getting music applications coming in from artists who are making brilliant music and we love it and it's really interesting and it's exciting and it's just great. But we know they've got no audience. We cannot afford to be paying for staff to run a bar. And we can't afford to turn the lights on, pay the rent for that evening. To have no one coming in when whatever little ticket money's going to the artist, we're trying to cover the engineer fee. It's a lot of infrastructure.”

These venues feel a responsibility to programme the kinds of acts who don’t have a following yet, but then can’t make their business work when they do and nobody shows up to the gig. This is a fundamental problem for music right now. It impacts everything from the early stage support artists need to the broader infrastructure of live music.

One solution for the rising costs issue is to switch from a free-market rent model to owning and operating venues. This, of course, is impossible for grassroots venue operators who already struggle to make ends meet and keep the lights on. Music Venue Trust came up with a solution - Music Venue Properties. They raised a crowdfund and have since bought 5 venues around the UK - the latest being Le Pub in Newport. This is how it works:

“Music Venue Properties was conceived and set up by Music Venue Trust to deal with that very issue. We have created a Charitable Community Benefit Society to remove venues from commercial ownership, purchasing buildings and renting them back to their current operators. Utilising a friendly lease, we aim to reduce rents, make contributions to insurance/repairs and offer rent breaks in the face of adverse conditions.”

In other words, MVP reshapes the role of the owner. Instead of being a purely profit-driven landlord, they see the societal, and economic, value of a grassroots music venue. The partnership and rent then reflect this work. This leads to venue operators being able to plan long-term, work on sustainability and accessibility, and focus on building and maintaining community.

On artists

There really is only one way to make sure that you, as an artist, don’t disappear into the endless scroll or disappear into the background of a label roster. That is to focus intently and intentionally on human-centred approaches. This starts with a realistic look at what determines success. Take Isobel Anderson, of Girls Twiddling Knobs, who speaks about:

“And if you are not breaking even, and you are at a loss, but you're still making some kind of income and you're making a difference. You're still doing effing well, and I think that's really important for us to remember, or just hear on an individual and collective basis. Because it's so easy to be judging ourselves by arbitrary inflating kind of measures that maybe aren't attainable. It is not to say you shouldn't be earning well for what you do, but it's just say you're doing really well if you're breaking even.”

This is the current climate for the vast majority of grassroots artists. And it’s important to hear from peers on how to navigate that negative worldview that’s so easy to find yourself with.

Stepping beyond that, it’s about acting in those human-centred ways. This means that we need to throw DIY out the window. As I wrote before, we need to focus more on DIWO, do it with others. In that piece, I wrote about the power of collectives and project-based work. How each of those projects can be something to monetize. But, we should also look at the societal and cultural impact of the projects - there’s a lot more that just a monetary impact here. When we do that, important new avenues for music open up. Dan Fowler wrote about it well in this piece about funding for projects in crypto music.

“Public Goods matter because they shift the design space. Without this, we move quickly from a period of experimentation and exploration into continuous optimisation of the status quo. In gaming terms, we go from “progress” to “parsing”.”

What this approach does is to allow for a situation that has a more long-term focus on development - of talent, of organizers, and of collectives.

Actors and stakeholders

The path forward is not simple. We need people like Music Venue Trust to build lines of communication towards politics and policymakers. We need the people who are passionate enough to set up a venue or build out a festival. We need punk technologists who aim to build new models of creativity of remuneration. We need community builders and gardeners. Olivia Laing is one of these gardeners music people can learn from. Here she is in her Garden Manifesto:

“The capitalist model of time is perpetual growth and abundance, and the garden refuses that. Its model is a cycle of death and re-birth.”

Here’s what we can learn if we aim to remix the music industry from the ground up. Accept that most business models must die in the face of grassroots organization. That’s exactly the scene where re-birth happens.

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This piece finds its inspiration in a roundtable and panel discussion held last week at the Royal Society of the Arts in London. The full panel discussion is here:

More to follow from this in the future, both here in this newsletter and elsewhere.

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LINKS

♣️ Clubbing's appeal is struggling, but could science revive it? (Kikelomo Oludemi)

“I'm sometimes hesitant to admit I'm a DJ because of the judgement that comes with it, both good and bad. At its core, DJing is about facilitating positive connection through sound. Being able to point to scientific evidence that proves the material benefits my skills can bring to society not only makes me feel incredibly proud of what I do, but turns club culture's survival into a mainstream issue—one that everyone should care about.”

✘ There’s a whole world of collaboration that opens up when we start to consider how science and club culture - or music much more broadly - can be seen as a kind of creative research and development for tech, society, and culture.

😶‍🌫️ Purposefully Induced Psychosis (PIP): Embracing Hallucination as Imagination in Large Language Models (Kris Pilcher, Esen K. Tütüncü)

“Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely regarded as errors—outputs that deviate from factual accuracy. However, in creative or exploratory contexts, these “mistakes” may represent unexpected avenues for innovation.”

✘ To be creative with LLMs, and with machine learning and generative AI more broadly, we need to take our understanding of it outside of a binary cognitive model. As happens with psychosis, we can see hallucinations as both starting points and bridges between different layers of understanding and perception.

🀀 Looking east for music superfan clues (Jimmy Stone)

“When it comes to adoption timelines, TME’s experience suggests that meaningful superfan tier adoption will likely take several years to play out. Even with a lot of exclusive features available for Super VIP users, TME’s superfan tier launched two years ago but still remains below the 20% - 30% paid subscriber goal shared by some industry executives and analysts. With Western streaming services operating in a more competitive environment, I have a hard time seeing how they will outperform TME’s timeline. Simply put, the 20%+ goal seems potentially plausible, but it’s probably going to take longer than executives are going to want.”

✘ This isn’t about a category of fans, but about how to better monetize existing fandoms. Tencent is definitely better at this than Western DSPs. It’s important to understand that these tiers suggested in this piece aren’t geared to ‘superfans’ per se, just to people who care to express their fandom in different ways. The number one issue, however, is monetization - how to get more money from a rather passive listening audience on DSPs?

🦠 “Just because a song is viral doesn’t mean it’s good” and that’s a real problem for artists (Laura Fisher)

“This is not to say that there are not great songs that have gone viral. But when artists feel compelled to reverse-engineer their music rather than lead creatively, we face a dangerous tipping point. The pressure feels tangible, and the consequences could be culturally devastating.”

✘ I like that Laura also puts some responsibility with listeners to solve for the problem she posits here. Consider what you’re giving your attention to is as much a question as what an artist wants to create for what purpose.

👹 Create Music Group acquires again, swooping for indie electronic label Monstercat (Mandy Dalugdug)

“As part of the deal, Create said it has committed to investing an additional $50 million over the next two years in artist development, advances, and platform support across Monstercat’s roster, “to accelerate both new signings and long-term career growth”. Financial terms beyond the $50 million investment commitment weren’t disclosed.”

✘ Create is building an interesting sort of vertical integration of music companies. I mean vertical in the sense of buying up strategically to make sure that they can reach all modes of distribution for music. It might well be a very clever play, if they make sure that they don’t either collapse in on themselves or get into too much of a synergy-frenzy.

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MUSIC

So much great music coming out at the moment. I’ve been captivated by this record by Eli Keszler, called Eli Keszler. The music feels fragmentary yet cohesive. It’s got a cinematic quality - I dare you not to think of David Lynch as you listen to the opening track - but transports you in an organic way into yourself as well. It’s this tension that I think makes the songs, and the record as a whole, so powerful.