✘ What happens when music is no longer static?
And: An explosion of spaces for genAI music mavericks; Artists as APIs?; Found fandom families; How media is decentralizing in hopes of solving web2 problems
Hi all,
We have a newsletter takeover by Tristra Newyear Yeager for you today! I’m always excited when we can share this space with others, but especially so if it’s with people who I have so much respect for. Tristra is one of those people who is capable of going into the minutiae and specifics as well as taking a bird’s eye view and bring in some historical example that will make you re-evaluate what you’re doing and thinking now. Hope you’ll enjoy her article and links as much as me.
Love, Maarten
Right now, generative AI is The Big Thing. It’s going to change the world. It’s going to destroy humanity. It’s not that big a deal, just another tech helpmate; chill out. It’s a massive threat that should be paused or banned.
The conversation around generative AI in music, and by that I mean in both the creative community and the industry, is running through lots of open-ended improvisations on similar themes, all time tested, though we forgot the last time we had this conversation a few years ago. But something else, something far bigger, is happening to music, and generative AI is just a small part of it.
You see, kids aren’t listening to music.
They are making it, messing with it, adding it to something else they’ve made or messed with, or they’re experiencing it as part of a multi-sensory medium or experience. Music isn’t a broadcast or a set thing to them. It’s a meme you can mold and customize, deface or enhance.
Growing numbers of young social media users are spending more time creating content (including audio) than consuming it, and if the whispers I hear from mainstream business journalists are true, to cover social media now means covering music. Music trends from infinite chill beat streams to functional soundscapes to nightcore all point to aesthetics determined by wonderfully meddling kids, not obedient fans. And in an extension of remixes, turntablism, and old-school DJ culture, both hip hop fans and TikTok users are getting AI to make songs for them, by extending snippets into full-length tracks or by synthesizing covers by their favorite artists.
We’re approaching the advent of the eternal and infinite track, when a set piece of recorded music will no longer dominate listening and will spool out into endless variations and interactive opportunities. We’re staring down remix culture raised to the nth degree and powered by AI, when the original and derivative blend to such an extent as to be indistinguishable. Music is starting to flow, to wink at Csikszentmihalyi, not just stream or play.
This sounds familiar, of course. Didn’t Bowie himself posit that music would become a utility like water, back in the 2000s? But this is more than that: It’s not that recorded music is always on tap. It’s that music is never still, never set, never fixed. We’re about to see a shift to art as process, not static product.
The Western world has been obsessed with art as THING, to the neglect or detriment of hard-to-fix media like dance. This is partially practical; most artforms could only stick around as things. Huge technological leaps—the written word, the moveable type press, photography, recorded sound—came about in part to “thingify” art and cultural production. Another nice aspect: Things can be bought, sold, appraised, stolen, hoarded, displayed for clout.
Music was trickier than visual and literary art in this regard, and most music remained process. Elite music patronage proves the exception, though music was always a service not a product, to put it in modern terms. Because of this, it’s no coincidence that the aspects of music that can be most easily written down—melody, lyrics, basic rhythm—have been favored over other, equally important elements such as timbre in music criticism and aesthetic valuations in the West.
Recording technology turned music into a thing. It could be contained and conveyed on objects. It could be fixed. In the context of an unprecedented post-war economic boom during the mid-20th century, the market for said objects exploded, distorting our expectations and understanding for generations to come.
But objects are not music. The flow state is music’s first state, what our ancestors knew and benefited from. The reemergence of flow has wild, turbulent implications for existing structures, practices, and institutions that undergird music’s commercial side.
A streaming pile of… box fans?
Zigging back to generative AI and the present moment, there’s a pervasive feeling among some in the music business that AI tracks will make a bad problem worse. AI stands to further “dilute the pool” of viable music tracks, in a world where there is already “too much music,” whatever that means.
The crux of the problem is often laid out in terrifying, out-of-context statistics about 100,000 tracks released every day on streaming services and the massive pile of tracks with zero listens. This fear comes from the model music services are built on, the rev share/pro rata model. This model fixes the pie to be shared, and so yes, the more music, the worse for artists or creators or box fan enthusiast uploaders. Everything competes with everything else.
We’re dealing with a profound case of overcapacity, when we can manufacture more than we can sell, and that means market value plummets. It’s a battle royale that can only be won via marketing, not musical pleasure. Thus, the most resourced artists prevail, even if they don’t completely satisfy people’s longings or needs.
This model cannot, as it currently exists, embrace music’s new flow.
Artists in flow
Flow promises to do some interesting things. One thing it won’t do: replace all static track listening. But it will upend our ideas about artists, fans, and community.
First, if everyone wants to make music, there will be no artists as we currently understand them, as professionalized, siloed, monetized personas. The castle wall between creator and fan will fall.
The idea of artist as lone-wolf genius, tormented and gifted beyond the grasp of mere normies, will also fall. I don’t know about you, but I find this thought exciting. How many lives have been ruined by the rules of play set down by Byron and his publisher? By Beethoven worshipers and the like? We don’t need tortured geniuses anymore. We need guides, people who are skilled and have something to say via music. We need the beacons who inspire, the ark builders who help a community ferry their hopes, their inheritance into the future. We don’t need some narcissist starving in a garret or placed on a pedestal.
There is an active role, however, for creative control, curation, and other forms of direct and oblique encouragement. Artists won’t necessarily toss over some sounds for people to do whatever with. They may also imagine goals, give direction, and create call-and-response experiences with the people who want to make with them. Creative control is as important to many artists as ownership and earnings. We will want to exert control by creating reasonable rules for fans to play with.
The work of art in the age of blur
Music isn’t just flowing; it’s flowing into something bigger. We’re entering an era when one medium will no longer be firmly separate and distinct from another—and may seep determinedly into lived experience. This is the age of synesthesia, the age of evolving, but firm ties between the experiences of the senses, powerful new associations that will transform how we imagine the world—in beautiful ways. Like psychedelic medicines impact neuroplasticity, these experiences could unlock new connections in our minds, and the power of immersive tech could help them find a home in our bodies.
Everything will inform and distort, enrich and smear into everything else. This is more than the dreaded metaverse or NFTs or augmented/mixed reality or synthetic media; it’s all of this and more and so many things we haven’t stumbled into yet, which will prove more than the sum of its parts. Though there’s lots of scattered thinking and discussions across various scenes and industries, we’re more or less walking into this blindly and piecemeal. We’re building our futures on a murky present, the copy-paste of existing (arguably insufficient and inequitable) presents onto a digital plane. Our bodies and minds haven’t experienced something like this, though composers, film makers, utopia designers, outsider artists, architects, novelists, and other dreamers have fantasized about this kind of Gesamtkunstwerk for centuries.
This is neither good nor bad. It’s both a blessing and a peril. The business model remains to be determined. The kinds of things people want to do will require, for example, a new approach to licensing and new infrastructure to make licenses move at the speed of creation and desire. But we, as creatives and music lovers, need to think toward the flow of the future and find new ways. Can we provide truly meaningful experiences or merely endless distracting surfaces? Can we soothe and transform isolation, drawing more people into low-stakes, high-satisfaction musical flow and creativity? Or do we stay stuck in static, drowning in catalog, lost in the directionless urge toward commerce? I think we can make meaning in this blurred, evershifting moment.
LINKS
🦹♂️ Inside the Discord Where Thousands of Rogue Producers are Making AI Music (Chloe Xiang/Vice)
“The creators of AI music see their work as less of a way to make money or to steal artists’ fame, but to instead simply take their fan appreciation to the next level.”
✘ Fans want this. Some artists are cool with this. There are already several projects that boast they let fans stream AI music, including deepfakes. Will the industry find a compromise with all this, or will it condemn AI music to licensing purgatory, like remixes, DJ sets, and samples?
🎶 The Time is Now for Artists to Launch their Own APIs (Denisha Kuhlor)
“To stay competitive as an artist today, artists should consider creating a framework, an artist API, to license and leverage the most valuable part of their artist IP - their unique likeness. An artist API can systematically allow artists to capitalize on rapid shifts in technology (i.e AI) and consumer adoption while meeting fan demands more efficiently.”
✘ One of the more interesting reactions to Fake Drake. Artists may not have the will or desire to create APIs—but the point still stands: Artists need to have a plan for how to let dedicated fans loose on their work and persona, but with guardrails in place. (Hey, even Grimes walked back her all-in offer…)
👫🏽 What Fandom's "Found Families" Tell Us About Our Hunger for Community (Anne Helen Petersen/Aja Romano)
“Transformative fandom is…often engaging with media not simply to enjoy it but to critique it, subvert it, be mad at it, challenge it, or place it in conversation with other pieces of media. So for example, a more traditional fan might debate the meaning of the book they like on a forum or a subreddit, etc. But a transformative fan might go write fanfic of that book and then cross it over with another book… But transformative fans also tend to flock together in the same general online spaces, so their discussion and debate gets infused with that same spirit of transformative call and response.”
✘ The broadcast model of artist-to-fan communication feels stale compared to all the crazy ways fans have learned to mess with their favorite writing, images, sounds, and characters, engaging in intense worldbuilding. Online environments have accelerated this from the activities of an obsessed few to broader and broader swaths of fan-creators. And they are forming powerful bonds, a dynamic with big implications for music makers.
🕸 Decentralized Media is Breaking Barriers in a Web2 World (Cam Romano / CoinDesk)
“Decentralized media has become a prominent point of conversation among Web2 and Web3-native journalists alike. While covering cryptocurrency news is one thing, using Web3 tools to expand journalistic practices is another.
Some builders in the space feel that media distribution has become too focused on numbers, traffic and ad sales instead of creating content for its audience. Rather than publishing to generate revenue, what if the content was created with readers in mind, publications were co-governed by its audience and the nature of the media industry became more collaborative?”
✘ Web3 is adding new energy to the long-standing concept of service journalism, with interesting experiments and projects popping up. In the current atmosphere of digital media maelstrom (Buzzfeed News’ demise being the biggie in the US), what could this approach yield for communities interested in very specific topics or styles of reporting or analysis?
MUSIC
Qawwali music (devotional Sufi songs with roots in Mughal court poetry) has evolved and continues to evolve to fit the times, and this secular qawwali anthem, “Tobah,” gets into how love can really suck sometimes. It’s both soaring and complex and a real banger, with some added groove that reminds me of Tamashek rock a la Tinariwen. This track is part of a really amazing series of music by working-class musicians from Lahore, Pakistan called Rivayat, put together by Mekaal Hasan, a founder of South Asian prog rock.