The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Uninvention

The thought of ‘uninvention’ has been percolating in my brain since the New Yorker’s 2016 essay series called Uninvent This. High heels and mirrors were two of the candidates, with both authors referencing their object’s inimical effects on vanity, and the unhealthy social norms they set that still permeate our society.

I was reminded again recently in a conversation with a friend who expressed wishes that we could simply uninvent AI – erase it from the earth. Alas, we’ve opened Pandora's box, and it will have an outsized effect on the world at large. Music, of course, isn’t going unspared.

Music distributor TuneCore just conducted an AI survey of 1,558 independent artists. Of them, 77% are concerned about being replaced by AI-generated music, 61% are worried about plagiarism, 58% are bothered about correct attribution of AI’s creative inputs and 46% are anxious about the fair distribution of recorded-music revenues.

Is the fretting well-founded? Depends who you ask, but new offerings from the tech overlords aren’t cause for optimism. Meta just launched AudioCraft, pitched as a “generative AI for audio made simple and available to all,” proffering these visions:

“Imagine a professional musician being able to explore new compositions without having to play a single note on an instrument. Or an indie game developer populating virtual worlds with realistic sound effects and ambient noise on a shoestring budget. Or a small business owner adding a soundtrack to their latest Instagram post with ease.”

And in the unwritten subtext, imagine not having to deal with paying artists and songwriters for original soundtracks or sync deals. But hey at least you don’t have to play your instrument anymore…

DJs and trillionaires

Spotify, for its part, just announced it’s going global with its AI DJ feature that was first released in the US, Canada, Ireland and the UK. “We’re seeing users tune in even more, with fans spending nearly one-third of their listening time with DJ,” the expansion announcement said. Music Ally’s Stuart Dredge framed the news as “more evidence of the blurring boundaries between streaming and radio on Spotify, and more grist to the mill of campaigners in countries like the UK who are arguing for radio-style ‘equitable remuneration’ to be applied to ‘push’ streams from DSPs.” Triggering that radio-style remuneration could have financial repercussions that slim-margined Spotify might struggle to afford.

Meanwhile, Spotify’s Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek just sold $100M in Spotify stock – only a year after he personally purchased $50M to ostensibly evidence his belief that “[Spotify’s] best days are ahead.” Are they though? Amidst the uncertainty, is Ek hedging his own personal bets? Time will tell.

Apparently Spotify is now also part of Universal Music Group’s artist-centric research, an initiative I’ve mentioned before whose goal is to move beyond pro rata – a payout model where artists are paid based on the overall percentage of streams they garnered from all listeners – and toward a model that prevents fraud, makes artists more money and brings artists closer to their fans.

I’ll never pass up the opportunity to remind everyone that Universal boss Lucian Grange’s lip service for better payout models comes while he sorts out a $100 million bonus for himself. My uninvention friend, who has some exposure to these “artist-centric” conversations, basically summarized them as an open call for solutions that gets Universal the most money possible. Not surprising.

That same friend and I discussed how small Spotify’s market cap (today about $26 billion) is compared to big tech – which includes the company’s primary competitors, like Apple, who can situate their streaming offering as a tiny little loss leader amidst their nearly three trillion-dollar market cap. Apple is about to launch its own music discovery service called Discovery Station, based on recent listening habits, and with this resource gap, it’s hard to envisage a long term future for Spotify.

In some circles of industry soothsayers, there are even whispers of an inevitable acquisition somewhere down the line – despite Spotify just introducing its first-ever subscription hike that will increase their revenue (in the US alone) between $247 million and $533 million annually. Those are big numbers, but they’ve got nothin’ on the trillionaires.

Systems of care

The three major labels, on the other hand, just generated a billion dollars more in the first half of 2023 than they did last year, demonstrating that their model works (for them). Platforms come and go, but the majors live on. Is that the definition of a successful business, then? Resilience through periods of disruption and innovation, at whatever the costs?

When the costs are 0.4 percent of artists making a living off their streaming revenue, it’s hard to call it success, and easier to invoke Steve Albini’s seminal 1993 treatise in which he compared the music industry to a shit-filled trench whose crooked contract math – which he breaks down in detail – demonstrates “just how fucked [artists] are.” Maybe we should acknowledge that a paradigm that pays its executives $100M bonuses is actually keeping a lot of other people from succeeding.

We can’t uninvent any of the things that got us here, but it’s a worthy thought experiment for exploring how we can reinvent the music industry. Uninventing $100 million bonuses is a good place to start, but what if we dig deeper, rummaging through the mechanics that uphold this paradigm — centralization, lack of transparency, diminished ownership, the concept of copyright itself.

What if we imagined something like socialized copyright, and acknowledge that we and AI aren’t so different? We both are what we eat, and what we regurgitate is some pentimento of something that already exists. Why should we get to own our ideas when they originated elsewhere?

Coda

A new paper in Nature outlines the methodology for rewiring cancer cells to self-destruct – let’s call it uninventing cancer from the body. I know little about neuroscience but for the curious reader, it’s one of those things that you come across and your jaw drops a little. It speaks to the capability of human minds. Read: minds. As in plural — there are 15 people credited in the paper, working toward the eradication of cancer, which is something pretty much the whole world round can agree is a pretty decent cause.

Can’t we also agree that music should be protected by systems of care? Why can’t we rally around its safekeeping in similar ways, so that we don’t have to talk about mega-rich assholes and trillion-dollar tech companies in the same sentence as music.

In the spirit of uninvention, here’s a remix of a cover of a Sun Ra track from the 1984 record, Nuclear War (h/t Brodie Conley), featuring Joel Tarman and the Kronos Quartet.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. Thanks for being here.