Business/music
You may have seen James Blake post about Tiktok and reels ruining attention spans and audience engagement recently. It seems a lot of people are talking about this and other adjacent issues if you want to think holistically. We have a particular hell to endure in the algorithm driven music landscape of 2024. There are some points I want to highlight in these conversations.
Tiktok has built a company off the back of the music industry. Just like most highly profitable music businesses they’re taking that money away from the musician. Although their streaming rate is much better than most streaming platforms there have been issues pointed out in James’ post about the lack of credits when sharing audio. Specifically this happened to their cover of Godspeed which didn’t make a cent in royalties and even omitted tags to the original sound source. The issue brought up here is that the benefit of having a viral song on Tiktok essentially means people only know roughly 30 seconds of the song and audience retention is almost non existent. Audiences are disengaged for most of the set until the song they know starts playing.
Is there any real loss from having our pop genres shift to shorter songs with thick and fast bursts of aural dopamine? Songs produced to be universally liked have always looked to trends to lure fans in and make them come back. So this isn’t any different. Arguing outside of that would be going into the high art low art trench where no one is happy.
One extremely poignant point was that this new model forces musicians into a life of admin, marketing through short form video, and overall spending a lot of time on running a business instead of making music. This may sound like a new problem but as long as there has been independent musicians there has been music admin. The alternative is hiring someone to help with this admin but having to use your time making money to pay the hired work. We don’t live in a world where musicians can focus on only making music. I’ve never met a musician early, mid, or late career who has only ever played and practiced making music. I know that’s a buzz kill but you can read Funemployed by Justin Heazlewood for suggestions on how to cope with this.
It’s extremely hard to have a lot of people listen to your music even if it’s written with 'pop’ tendencies in mind. Because of that it’s very hard to make money off of music if you want to make something that challenges people. The real emerging problem is the erosion of the methods we have for introducing people to music they don’t like.
Why do we care about people listening to music other than hit radio or their individual curated playlist? Because at some point we found a song which we had no idea could exist and broke our understanding of music. It made us feel alive and in awe of the world. Maybe… at least that’s what I experienced when I went into Rocking Horse records and picked a random CD from the second hand bin which ended up being Múm - Finally We Are No One. An album that made me fall in love with unexpected moments in music, timbre, blank space and made me who I am today.
One threat to this are modern gatekeepers. Algorithms made by companies who make their fortune from advertisers. That means music has to keep people coming back to a platform, and depending on the platform it has to appease advertisers. This idea comes from Adam Neely. Understanding that you’re listening to a playlist that’s supposed to keep you engaged is important. It means your taste won’t be challenged. A world where almost anyone can record and release music should be celebrated. Listening to adjacent artists doesn’t always allow for the wild card. Múm, James Blake, and critically your local artists. The algorithm is horrible at introducing you to local music.
So this is just a bunch of words to say the industry stinks because capitalism made us sell art and of course that will influence what is deemed ‘good’ and ‘bad’. But to me the only thing that matters in music is how it made you feel. To search for that is to use media sources which aren’t curated on what you previously listened to. It’s asking friends for suggestions, buying physical media in a local record store, going to shows and watching all the bands, listening to community radio, and watching films to an extent.
How do you convince yourself to keep making music that isn’t appealing to trends? Firstly, you need to find what makes you believe in your music and drill into it. Then you have to keep making it for yourself and try to find every happy moment along the way. Maybe employ the groundswell of artists centered platforms like Patreon and Discord, more on that here. There may never be a sold out amphitheater, full of thousands of people waiting for one song. There will be moments much more gratifying which will remind you why you love music and why you started playing music in the first place. To be human, to love.
