✘ Trust and other things that won't change
And: Emerging artists between venture and social capital; Holly Herndon is revolutionary; Music rights should be a global economy; Coding a playful web; Floppy Rock
This newsletter focuses on music and tech through innovation and future-gazing. It speaks to what artists, the people on their teams, the builders of tools and experiences can do to make an impact on improving our industry. But today, let’s talk about what will remain throughout all of that - human connections and the trust that they need to come to fruition and exist.
For the artists
Here’s the thing that will never change: every time someone tells you how your music impacted their lives, you’ll remember why you do what you do. Here’s another thing: when two people meet and they realise they both like your music, they will instantly connect. Music supersedes everything else that could be an obstruction to that connection - politics, economics, all of that. Every single one of those connections can lead to a shared trust of each other. This is built up over time, with every interaction helping grow both parties toward it. Once that trust is there, it means there’s space for feedback, but most importantly both parties feel seen.
What to do?
Set up a private channel with maximum 7 people. Everyone will feel more visible, more seen and it allows you to cultivate a totally different culture then a broadcast channel or a large group chat. It should also allow for the cultivation of vertical connections between the group members. There doesn’t have to be a goal or purpose beyond the trust exercise here. After a while - perhaps weeks or a few months - you could ask what the others in the group would like to do to help spread word of a release or crowdfund, etc.
For the artist team, in the broadest sense of the term
Here’s the thing that will never change: the connection between you, the artist/band, and other people on the team. The connections you build up along the way while on tour, creating merch, doing taxes, etc. will all be there for you. All of the information needed to do all of these jobs moves incredibly fast. You can wake up with a conversation on one side of the world and go to bed during a conversation at the other side of the world. Somewhere along the way, all of this feels like it needs to be done right now. However, the trust you establish between everyone on the team and others you work with, requires a different speed - it only moves at the speed at which humans work. Any technology that says it will help you with this dehumanizes the relationship you’re trying to build.
What to do?
Having written that last sentence, I realize this might sound counterintuitive, but there’s tech out there that works to help you share and organize information. I’m not talking about stuff like Google and SEO, or ChatGPT and five-point business or marketing plans. Instead, I’m talking about any kind of project management tools. The thing to take into account here? That it requires constant communication to make sure those tools work. So don’t use them to help solve that communication part, instead allow to help you share and organize information and determine the structure in which to do that together. Basically, use tools only to support routines established between humans.
For the builders
Here’s the thing that won’t change: your product won’t scale beyond the speed at which the humans using it can form their connective tissue. What’s more, you shouldn’t even want to. A lot of us reading this newsletter will have our own little corners of the internet that we love, and trust. Like the artists, embrace your creative side - especially when you’re a coder - and build with a small group of people who you want to build for. Trust in innovation is low according to the Edelman Trust Barometer so riding on the idea that you’re making a better world isn’t enough. Instead of focusing on the idea first, work on it with those who you want to use it, and get feedback on your attempts at making the idea a reality.
What to do?
Don’t build the product and look for the market, but turn it around. Step into the market, talk to artists first and get them on board to help you build what they need. Think more along the lines of Umberto Eco’s Open Work than platformization and walled gardens. For Eco, the open work is open because it is susceptible to multiple interpretations from audiences:
“A solution is seen as desirable and is actually anticipated, but it must come from the collective enterprise of the audience.” (p.11)
LINKS
🧵 Diversified portfolios: Placing emerging artists at the intersection of venture and social capital (Mayuyuka Kaunda)
“The fusion of the worlds of culture and investment could open new avenues for financial growth, creating a symbiotic relationship between artistic expression and entrepreneurial success. The question that arises then is: why haven't we witnessed a surge of artist-entrepreneurs, especially in emerging markets?”
✘ A great piece that goes deep on the ways artists can leverage their music and artistry to delve into ventures beyond recording and performing.
🚼 Holly Herndon’s revolutionary AI music (Robert Barry)
“Sounds and compositional ideas flowed back and forth between human and machine, getting stranger and stranger at each step of the process. The end results are utterly beguiling, like medieval plainsong beamed down from another planet, with the lines between organic and digital blurred to the point of total indistinction.”
✘ A wonderful overview of Holly’s and Mat’s journey from 2013 to now. Their focus remains firmly artist-led and, resonating with what I write above, they work through problems by doing rather than through ideas.
🗺️ Music rights is not a global economy. We need to change that (Shain Shapiro)
“One of the challenges is not how valuable music copyright is or can be, but how it is managed around the world. The systems in place to administer copyrights and pay royalties vary wildly across borders and jurisdictions. There are no standard practices and in many countries in the world, including some of the world’s most populous, there are no frameworks. Music, at its most foundational level, is not an economy in many places, because there is no infrastructure to support it. Music that is listened to but not paid for remains endemic. Unclaimed royalties add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. And even where robust systems exist to track music copyrights, value is questioned.”
✘ Shain references Hipgnosis Song Fund in this piece, and what’s so striking about the recent activities of that company is how it’s current catalogue sales don’t match their earlier rhetoric around building up value. Of course, Hipgnosis cannot singlehandedly change the structures on which the music industry has been built, but there’s equally little evidence that they tried to live up to their early statements.
🛝 Coding a more creative and playful web (Kes Inkersole)
“Code isn’t destined to be serious. It isn’t just a binary blur of 0s and 1s. Code can be playful and imaginative, as much about fun as function. While we can code to solve practical problems, adding a layer of interactivity to designs can provide unexpected, exciting and innovate results.”
✘ This is isn’t just for the builders in my piece above, it’s for everyone to understand that code isn’t just cold, it can be alive and playful.
💾 Flop rock: inside the underground floppy disk music scene (Alexis Ong)
“For decades, the floppy has been a quiet mainstay in DIY-driven media, especially in lobit subculture, which celebrates low-bitrate music as a form of art and practicality. The added fact that floppies aren’t made for long-term storage also forces their users to confront the transience of art and information in the face of time and decay.”
✘ While we think about future formats for music releases, let’s also remember old formats and how they can still challenge what song or composition can be.
MUSIC
An album that resonates on my levels. There’s themes of identity and and genre which keep swirling around. Bring that together with songs that sound sometimes big and sometimes small and there’s a blissful arrangement of sonic architecture. I’ve been anticipating Sheherazaad’s Qasr since the first single release last October and listening to it is a gripping experience.