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.

Preset Conditions

I recently interviewed Sebastién Devaud – better known as the DJ and producer, Agoria. The French artist just wrapped up an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, the Parisian museum known for its extensive collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist works – as well as its recent foray into blockchain. 

Alongside teams of scientists and artists, Devaud contributed two pieces to the exhibit: Interpretation by Saccharomyces cerevisiae of The Painter's Studio by Gustave Courbet, which uses yeast to recreate the conditions of historic events during Courbet’s life, “revealing its living nature;” and {Σ LUMINA}, an interactive sculpture that allows visitors to use their breath to activate digital shadows and create unique, mintable collections of Orsay art. 

Both are examples of Devaud’s career-spanning mission to reconcile seeming oppositions, mitigating the sense of ‘the other’ – from biological to artificial, physical to digital, web2 to web3.

The first Agoria NFT was a seven-minute film called Phytocene. Created with sound designer Nicolas Becker (who won an Oscar for his work in the film Sound of Metal) and biophysicist Nicolas Desprat, Phytocene documents the growth and interactions of hemp microorganisms alongside “a vegetal musical texture to the rhythm of their growth.”

“This element of preset conditions that can generate unexpected outcomes is fascinating to say the least,” Devaud wrote in a Twitter thread. “And to me living beings by their essence and adaptive nature are the best example of Generative Art.”

Since we spoke, I’ve been thinking about how the preset conditions of our world affect our “adaptive nature” – especially for artists. Most of our major “music spaces” – across consumption and social – are owned by Big Tech: Apple (Apple Music), Google (YouTube), Amazon (Amazon Music, Twitch), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp), TikTok. They impose strictures tightly wound around their bottom line, and adaptation is always a financial decision.

One might be tempted to call Spotify a music company but it’s platform capitalism at its finest – complete with a CEO who bids $2 billion on Premier League football teams. 

So what would it look like to adjust our conditions – those that have been preset without artist permission? What seeds might we plant to embrace our adaptive nature and create something truly generative (and not just fiscally)?

Serving the Public Interest

In his First Floor newsletter, music writer Shawn Reynaldo highlighted a recent Instagram post where Spotify head honcho Daniel Ek compared music to professional sports, implying that “artists who aren’t earning adequate money simply aren’t good enough to be in the industry’s metaphorical big leagues.

“The man seems to legitimately think of Spotify as a force for good,” Renaldo wrote, “and his fellow CEOs all appear to feel the same about their own platforms, routinely touting their growth and popularity as signs that they are serving the public interest.”

Consumption does not equal public interest. But we can’t blame consumers for a failure to decry the system; what we once paid for one album we now pay for every album – that’s quite a deal. And with tech products – and that’s what Spotify is – consumers are accustomed to cost-benefit analysis. Our more benevolent tendencies toward art and patronage get subsumed by business rationale.

Functionally, then, the music industry is now an extension of the tech industry, Reynaldo says, and in that depressing reality, he suggests one last candidate for meaningful intervention: the government.

Over the past few years, there’s been some movement on that front. In 2021, the UK’s Digital, Media, Culture and Sport Committee launched an inquiry into the economics of music streaming, ultimately denouncing the prevailing tech-driven streaming ecosystem as “unsustainable.”

Elsewhere in Europe, in 2022, France became one of the first major market countries to write minimum streaming royalty rates into law. And just last week, the EU handed Apple a $1.8 billion fine for limiting competition from other music streaming services.

What appears like a win for music, though, was really just a win for Spotify. The ruling stems from a 2019 complaint from the Swedish company, which subsequently met with the European Commission 65 times over the course of the investigation.

“The EU has attempted to frame its ruling as a win for consumers,” Reynaldo writes, “stating that they weren’t previously being informed ‘about alternative, cheaper music services available outside of the Apple ecosystem.’”

“Cheaper” music services, though, aren’t going to help artists. It means less money going into the pot and therefore less money going to artists. And that $1.8 billion – a slap on the wrist for Apple, a nearly three trillion-dollar corporation – probably isn’t going to consumers either. Fines are placed in a general EU budget and not earmarked for any particular purpose.

So, at the end of the day, Reynaldo writes, “who stands to benefit the most from a slightly reduced price for a Spotify subscription? Spotify itself.”

These are those conditions at work.

Living Wage for Musicians

Across the pond, back in 2022, Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib proposed a resolution to “establish a new statutory royalty program,” declaring that it’s the government’s responsibility “to provide musicians…reasonable remuneration through a royalty payment earned on a per-stream basis.”

Tlaib’s office partnered with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), promoting the bill as an effort to raise awareness, educating “not only lawmakers but also just everyday streaming users about how when you listen to a song on Spotify and other platforms, the artist is being paid basically nothing.”

“The lack of transparency in streaming music services like Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube,” the press release read, “has created an environment dominated by private deals with powerful corporations, payola, predatory pricing, and other practices that would be illegal in traditional media.” 

The bill itself even declares that the streaming ecosystem “encourages collusion,” noting that the major record companies that license music to streaming services also hold significant stakes in the companies that operate them. 

Tlaib – the first Palestinian American woman to serve in Congress – has been in the news recently for encouraging Michiganders to vote uncommitted in the Democratic primary, a retort to Joe Biden’s miserable response to the genocide in Gaza. 

Last week, Tlaib’s name popped up again, this time to renew her push for her bill, formally introducing the Living Wage for Musicians Act – developed with UMAW and co-sponsored by New York Representative Jamaal Bowman (founder of the Congressional Hip Hop Task Force).

The bill would ensure artists earn a penny per stream (the average on Spotify sits around $0.003 per stream), levying companies’ non-subscription revenue and an increase to customer subscription fees to get it done. It also introduces a cap to any given track’s monthly royalties – a billionaire’s tax, if you will, aimed at mitigating a wealth gap where the top 1% of artists earn 90% of streaming revenue – and bolstering an artist “middle class” that’s been much discussed but never championed.

When Canada enacted its own Online Streaming Act last year, the middle class was also one of the focal points: “It is vital that we have policies that aim to build a strong middle-class of arts and culture workers, artists and entrepreneurs,” said Andrew Cash, President and CEO of Canadian Independent Music Association, “not the feast or famine industry it often is.” 

Limit to Your Love

In his piece, Reynaldo grounds his commentary in some recent wrath from the artist James Blake – who can certainly count himself amongst that top 1% of streaming earners. His fury serves as a good barometer for just how dire the situation is – as Reynaldo wrote, “If we’re now at a point where James Blake is part of that middle class, then things are far worse than most people realize.”

A lot of the response to Blake’s outcry was from web3 builders – people actively working on solutions they hope can disrupt incumbents and provide sustainable alternatives (and/or supplements to government intervention).

There were thoughts from Black Dave and Violetta Zironi, as well as folks from Catalog, Sonu Stream (fka Sona Stream), Fam and Formless. Notably, while Blake did engage with other comments, he didn’t touch the web3 mentions – though some others did:

As per usual, there’s persistent optimism from on-chain builders that web3 is our reimagined system – the conditions reset, and the corrective measure to all the bullshit and systemic disregard for artist woes. But alongside it: stigma and distrust.

Misgivings should go both ways, though. What has Spotify done for you, dear artist? And meanwhile TikTok, the de facto platform for artist discovery, just lost Universal Music Group’s catalog and may very well be banned in the US (a reminder that government intervention can very well be politically motivated).

It seems our choices, then, are to reconcile seeming opposition or – as on-chain builders are attempting to do – plant more fertile seeds.

Coda

While the Living Wage for Musicians Act has nation-wide implications, Congresswoman Tlaib grounds the bill in her love for the rich music culture of Detroit (where she was born): “Detroit is one of the music capitals of the world,” she says, “and our artists here have changed the music industry and our culture in so many incredible ways.”

It was Detroit that drew Sebastién Devaud to music, too. In the late 1980s, when Devaud was about 12, he discovered a love for house music emanating from the Motor City – a world away from his childhood home in the French countryside. Detroit’s scene and style have long guided his path and the Agoria sound.

One of my favorite Agoria tracks is “What if the Dead Dream,” which features the Colombian artist, Ela Minus. For it, Devaud developed an “infinite remix” format with ARCA and Jai Paul collaborators, Bronze. The idea was to create endless alternate versions of the song at the press of a button, reflecting his belief that the last second of a human life goes on forever, filled with infinite dreams.

“It's a constant evolution. It's a perpetual track. At [any given] moment, I say, okay, I think this is the best version I could present and display today,” he told me. “And then the piece keeps evolving without me.”

The concept reminded me of Brian Eno’s "generative music," an approach to composition he's been using for his ambient records since Discreet Music (1975). To create his generative systems, Eno feeds sounds through algorithms in software of his own design. As I wrote for Vice in 2017, the string of resultant music is endless and ever changing, subject to the software's infinite permutations. 

To make his record Reflection, for instance, the producer spent weeks listening to his output, examining its interplay with life in various situations and then adjusting it to his liking. "It's a lot like gardening," Eno wrote. "You plant the seeds and then you keep tending to them until you get a garden you like."

We can't adjust our systems as easily as Eno can adjust his, but we can still acknowledge that our preset conditions are a bit shit. Thankfully, we can keep tending them until we get something we like. We can be better gardeners.

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. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.