✘ The recorded music fallacy - remixing at speed
And: Unlocking Spotify Algorithms; Framing the future of the Internet; Memory Machines; Social is the new streaming
Before recorded music is a very long history of humans and music, especially musicking. Actually, it was only musicking until we came up with notation. Those notes on paper were the first instance of music fixed in place and time. Before that moment, no music ever sounded the same way twice. It was also immediately a power play. The music that found its way into those notes was Catholic. The Church benefited from knowing exactly how the music sounded whether it was in a church in Germany or Italy. Everyone literally had to sing from the same hymn sheet. The fixation on coordinating music across space and time only exacerbated with recorded music. When Edison, and other inventors, in the late-Nineteenth Century started recording their voices this eventually led to more ubiquitous sharing of music.
In the past few decades, it seems that the history of music started with those early experiments by Edison and others. In other words, the history of music is merely the history of recorded music. This is, of course, a fallacy. It doesn’t just exclude the long history of musicking, it also creates a power dynamic where the listener and the musician are in separate realms. With the rise of first creator tools and then AI, a shift is happening that forces us to acknowledge the long history of musicking again. Music is no longer static, and social media and emerging tech point towards a future that is about play and deeply human experiences. Recorded music is really only a blip in the history of music, it’s time we acknowledge that and open up to a shift towards more musicking again.
Remix
When Kaitlyn Davies reflected on remix albums back in 2021, she asked:
“when does remixing become repackaging? When does community building become social climbing? In ruminating on answers to these questions I find myself, as I often do when thinking about the function of music as talisman of both financial and cultural capital, arriving at the conclusion that a one-size-fits-all consideration is not going to provide sufficient space to explore and be critical of the platformed music ecosystem.”
And this is what we need to realise: the platform rules the music ecosystem. There’s the major DSPs, the major labels, and the major artists. All of them are platforms in their own right. Everything that involves a remix has long been out of their scope, the money generated elsewhere. Now, with the shift towards community and the recent rediscovery of the ‘superfan’, the remix will come into play for the platforms again.
Remixing has become second nature to most very-online-people. Everyone who makes a TikTok, a Short, a Snap, etc. works to remix. Even if they just fix some music over their video, a remix - a repurposing of the meaning of music through video - takes place. More directly, we see tools like Endlesss, music making becomes collaborative as a default setting. Another example is Bandlab, where the social element allows for a feedback loop that other DAW-style tools don’t offer. The list goes on, and with the rise of AI-driven tools, different aspects come into play as well.
Speed
Let’s take a step back into history again. Back when we moved in tribes we played together, creating music with our voices, with stones, and other early instruments such as the bone flute.
We can only guess how long people had to search for rocks with certain frequencies 7000 years ago, nowadays we have everything at our fingertips. Think about tools like AudioStack, which helps us create audio ads. What it does, is that it provides options to choose from - and it does so much quicker than any human can create a single of those options. This isn’t just about speed, this is like time collapsing on itself.
We can remix, but the remix already exists before we have thought of what it can be. Declan McGlynn called on us last year to remember the beauty of mistakes. His point was that the risks around AI model collapse also present a new opportunity for unique sounds to emerge. Let’s bring that together with the element of speed. On the one hand, we have Large Music Models which allow us to generate music from text prompts in seconds. Think about it, it takes seconds to create a piece of music one minute long. We already have an abundance of music, but now music exceeds time. This isn’t model collapse, this is temporal collapse. On the other hand, though, we have opportunities for quirks, strange new sounds to emerge which are unique to this new technological expression of music. The speed with which music can now be generated allows the remix to become the first instance of a sonic expression.
Make it work
The new era for music is definitely more about play and remixing and sensing than putting on a record. The question is, how can we make this work? Specifically, how can this be monetized and how can we make sure that this monetization that disappear into platforms? Remixers require freedom and every new Large Music Model provides more freedom just as it speeds up creation into temporal collapse. The value lies in the doing, and it lies in the sharing, the community. This value gets captured in direct relations between us as we all turn into listener/creators.
LINKS
🔓 Unlocking Spotify algorithms: Proven strategies from 2 years of boosting artist visibility on streaming platforms (Julie Knibbe)
“When algorithms try to understand what listeners enjoy, they pay close attention to their listening habits. It means that if you're an artist looking to get noticed, it's beneficial for your music to be played alongside other artists who share a similar fan base. By doing so, algorithms start to recognize patterns and connect your music with the right audience, making it more likely for new listeners who enjoy similar artists to discover your tracks.”
✘ I encourage every artist to look into this, and can highly recommend reaching out to Julie if you’re keen to learn more.
🖾 Framing the future of the Internet (Packy McCormick)
“More likely, it will create something new and different and potentially more powerful: a social protocol on top of which anyone can build products that take payments, purchases, mints, predictions, and all of the other primitives that developers develop for granted. This isn’t about “onboarding the next billion users to crypto.” It’s about using blockchain networks to do things that billions of people want to do, better.”
✘ There’s a lot of interesting things happening around crypto and blockchains at the moment and Packy highlights how starting really small can help.
🗄️ Memory machines (Jessica Traynor)
“Rather than creating something permanent and inviolable, we’ve made our memories more contingent than ever upon a fantasy of technological stability that, given the constant churn of history, seems inevitably fleeting.”
✘ This isn’t about music, but it’s such an important piece to read. It focuses on the impact of data centres on a locale. And, it shows how we change the way we treat archiving and history through these data centred. Truly a must-read.
🕳️ Social is the new streaming… but the cracks are already showing (Hanna Kahlert)
“In short: social is disrupting music in the same way streaming once did. The only difference is that the disruption is happening faster now. Whereas it took a decade for the second-order impacts of streaming to show, the pivot to entertainment-first social media is already beginning to show cracks. Revenue pressures are higher from stakeholders, and the models just are not there yet: TikTok has trialled a subscription in some markets, but has not launched it. Snapchat’s Snapchat+ subscription is an early-release app experience upgrade and at a very low price point (£3.99). Facebook’s own subscription in EU markets is likely linked to privacy regulations, rather than remuneration.”
✘ This piece is great, and makes me want to write about the problems and opportunities around ad revenues for music - maybe next week!
MUSIC
Jlin is one of those artists who carry mystique around them and who can sonically manifest that same mystique in their music. It’s not something that a lot of artists can do, or maintain. The fact that on their new record we see collabs with Bjork as well as Philip Glass make me incredibly excited. This is a future of music I’m ready for.
Thanks for the reminder about the new Jlin! (and for the thoughtful historical musings)