✘ The Illusion of an idea - a scaled-down music industry
- Music innovation learning curve - Teens make friends with AI chatbots - Game music turned entertainment into art - Changing landscape of Hip Hop fans & events - Berlin's love affair with music tech
There’s a dearth of valuable ideas right now. Just look at the apps on your phone - they all look the same, work the same, and make you act the same. Popular music is also a great reflection of this. So much of it sounds the same. Go on social media and every TikTok, Reel, Short, etc. looks and sounds the same. Everything seems to follow a template, which is the supposedly grand idea that everything works to scale. Every space we occupy, at least online, seems to push us to think about scale. There’s little pockets everywhere, of course, where scale isn’t even on the playing field. These are our dark forests and cozy webs. But how can we push a whole industry built to scale down from their mediocrity of ideas to this illusion of an idea - a scaled down music industry consisting of many divergent and multiple initiatives where those at the top don’t own the whole thing.
Music isn’t content
It starts with a simple notion, a quiet idea. Music isn’t content. We listen to it mostly as content nowadays, rarely listening with any form of intent. Those music projects, those songs, those artists, they all share something. When we perceive them, consume them, as content we miss it, but all music is, is an invitation to explore. When you listen to music, really listen to music, you can explore yourself, the world around you, or the inner worlds of the artists who made the song. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han put it in his book Vita Contemplativa:
“When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible.”
While music is great for background listening and to give colour to events like a dinner or a waiting line, there’s more to the craft of songs. They’re always a hello and a farewell wrapped up in a single, brief, moment. Their invitation takes you across time - past, present, and future. Stopping to think about that and experience that is one of the beautiful effects of music.
The algorithm takes time away
Music can be functional. And even functional music can have soul. When we start to think about functional music, the concept changes. It’s less about that invitation, and more about what happens acoustically. The reason for this is that functional music takes away the experiential effect. Moreover, there’s little to no cultural value attached by listeners to functional music. The media scholar Jonathan Sterne has taken this a step further to discuss how functional music and its acoustic properties organise space in commercial settings.
Most of our current everyday online experiences are mediated by algorithms. With them, the separation between music and listener has invaded much further than simply the malls that Sterne wrote about. As media critic Kyle Chayka wrote in his book Filterworld: “algorithms are limiting the future to the past.” Where music is an open invitation to experience time across past, present, and future, the way we mostly experience music goes against that. Time is taken away from us, as listeners. Chayka talks about how everything mediated through algorithms simply gets rehashed from past expressions and past popularity. This severely limits our creative expression and leads to the mediocrity of ideas we are currently all faced with.
Music has no purpose
Music has no purpose, it merely brings together people’s dreams, fragilities, licentiousness and weirdness. It can bring masses of people together through that. As much as those in the underground find each other, so do the Swifties and The ARMY. Scale, here, doesn’t stop the human capacity of bonding through music and the exchange of identity. And yet music functions like everything else in liberal capitalism - the winner takes all. For music to fulfil what it does best, there’s no business, moral, or ethical argument for one musician to make exponentially more than another.
There’s a fix here, as well. Consider how Spotify and others will demonetize tracks with less than 1000 plays. In the same vein, let’s put a cap on earning above a certain number of streams. Perhaps 100 million? 10 million? Anything above that doesn’t count and this will definitely shrink the division between top and middle. It’s up for discussion, but if equitable remuneration is discussed, this kind of cap should be on the table as well.
It’s one part of the cog in the machine that will bring down the dominance of the top in the music industry. On top of that, we need new music economies. Beyond that, we - as consumers - need to dig in, listen, and accept that invitation to explore. Let’s scale it all down and accept niche as a metric of success.
LINKS
🪝 The learning curve of innovation in music (Mathilde Neu)
“Staying current with the latest trends and technologies is essential. They’re transforming the industry, and here’s why embracing music evolution is so important.”
✘ Mathilde summarizes really well why and how we can stay on top of all the changes in our music ecosystem. What’s your hook?
🤖 The teens making friends with AI chatbots (Jessical Lucas)
“Aaron is one of millions of young people, many of whom are teenagers, who make up the bulk of Character.AI’s user base. More than a million of them gather regularly online on platforms like Reddit to discuss their interactions with the chatbots, where competitions over who has racked up the most screen time are just as popular as posts about hating reality, finding it easier to speak to bots than to speak to real people, and even preferring chatbots over other human beings. Some users say they’ve logged 12 hours a day on Character.AI, and posts about addiction to the platform are common.”
✘ It’s time to make that chatbot for your fans to interact with. But more seriously, one of the key learnings from this piece is how it showcases the way young people more generally have used the internet in its various forms to vent or explore themselves.
🎮 High scores: How game music turned entertainment into art (Paul Verhoeven)
“This is why Untitled Goose Game is so fantastic: because the music does exactly what Bear said. It puts you inside the Goose’s head. The Goose, and the score, are pure, unadulterated chaos. Terrorising a small British village as a goose — source of French culinary staple, goose liver pate — whilst French composer Debussy plays? Pure anarchy.”
✘ This article is heavy on the interviews with lots of great insights from the musicians and composers involved. They go deep on the way that music and gaming interacts to bring up both.
🖼️ Decline or evolution? The changing landscape of Hip Hop fans & events (Christine Osazuwa)
“Having the ability to select multiple genres really allows us to see the way Hip Hop is regarded. If event organisers needed to select a singular genre, it's entirely possible that a more drastic decline in Hip Hop events would have occurred, but with the option to select multiple genres, we’re able to see how the culture of events has evolved. Hip Hop has essentially been the dominant and de facto default genre for Black music events in the UK for well over a decade. As other genres grow in popularity, they're considered additive to Hip Hop rather than a replacement for Hip Hop.”
✘ There’s a lot of talk about this topic so it’s great that Christine looked at the actual data around events and the people attending them. The conclusion is, of course, not extreme, but measured.
💘 From Kraftwerk to AI – Berlin’s love affair with music technology is stronger than ever (Clovis McEvoy)
“In Portrait XO’s opinion, however, it’s the open and accepting culture that permeates the city: “There’s a space here for whatever you want to do. Experimental avant-garde performances, exhibitions, talks, workshops, refined contemporary art — it’s a city that has an audience for anything and everything.” Tradition and an engaged public are surely part of it, but another key aspect is the country’s uncompromising commitment to the arts and its accessible artist visa program.”
✘ Kraftwerk was, of course, from Düsseldorf, but the insight into what people are doing in this city and what laid the groundwork for them to do so is great.
MUSIC
Here’s some music that asks for your contemplative attention. The wonderful ganavya released some new music, which is actually an old song, and it beautifully lays our her voice with some gorgeous minimalist arrangement. Sit back, listen, and do as the title of the song says: draw something beautiful.