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.

Enshittification

Enshittification is a neologism coined by journalist and culture theorist Cory Doctorow. It first appeared in his 2022 blog post, “Social Quitting,” and he expanded upon the idea in a subsequent 2023 post – which was later published in Wired – called “The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok.”

“Here is how platforms die,” Doctorow wrote, introducing enshittification’s natural lifecycle. “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

A couple weeks ago on Twitter, Metalabel’s Austin Robey posed the question: “What’s the opposite of enshittification, for web platforms?”

As I’ve ruminated on that question, the shit continues to boileth over, leaving us all wondering: what’s that ‘opposite’ that can actually make these platforms die?

Inconvenient Gut Flora

TikTok was the focal point of Doctorow’s essay. “For all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy,” he wrote, “[TikTok] is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora.”

He cited TikTok’s manipulative “heating” techniques, which are platform manipulations used to convert those ‘gut flora’ into monetizable “true believers.” It’s one of myriad pay-to-play tricks used by technocrats, where we’re compelled into exchanging “real money for fake money.” Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue campaign is clear example – a verification ploy that promises amplified visibility in the algorithm for cold hard cash.

Amazon and Facebook have similar ruses, Doctorow notes, while also taking aim at crypto: “Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with ‘fiat’ currency in exchange for it.”

In the case of crypto, he compares “crypto tollbooths” to ransomware, but it’s not the only place we’re held hostage. ‘Too big to fail’ companies “lock us in” until we can no longer afford the high switching costs. In other words, we exchange real money for attention on these extractive garbage heaps because it’s too much work to find, agree upon and commit to another home.

And that proof’s in the pudding. Take alternative social platforms like Lens or Farcaster, which flout the enshittification blueprint by building atop decentralized protocols but continue to have miniscule activity compared to the enshittified behemoths.

These are trillion-dollar-sized planets and I’ve wondered more than once if it’s actually possible to escape their tremendous gravity.

ShitTok

Two formidable foes challenged TikTok’s magnitude this week: Universal Music Group (UMG) and the US government. The social network’s parent company ByteDance is suing the latter over the “unconstitutional” ‘divest or ban law,’ a saga worth its own doctoral thesis. For the sake of brevity, we’ll focus here on the former.

In January, UMG effectively removed its content from TikTok by refusing to renew their license under current terms. TikTok expressed disappointment, citing UMG’s “greed” and “self-serving actions,” while the the label hid behind its standard lip service: “TikTok’s tactics are obvious: use its platform power to hurt vulnerable artists and try to intimidate us into conceding to a bad deal that undervalues music and shortchanges artists and songwriters as well as their fans,” UMG said in an open letter. “We will never do that.”

Won’t they, though? “TikTok’s tactics” are standard strategies from the enshittification playbook, but might UMG have been using the same book, more insidiously?

“[Universal] can wait until the time is right, let a platform grow and be fully dependent, and then hit the red button, pull content,” Dan Fowler tweeted at the time. “Where does this go? A load of uninformed column inches over the coming weeks, then silence for a bit, then a new deal will be in place.”

Bad Music

Late last week that new deal emerged. The two companies put out a joint statement that’s heavy on rhetoric and light on details. In a memo to staff, UMG head Lucian Grainge said “greater compensation” for creators is coming via investment in “artist-centric” tools like “Add to Music App,” enhanced data and analytics and integrated ticketing capabilities – as well as increased attribution and provenance mechanisms to help track value across the ecosystem.

It sounds great. And time will tell how these new rules actually manifest, but rest assured they will buoy label artists – and UMG’s bottom line – and give little consideration to emerging artists or independents.

The updated agreement also tackles AI unease. Grainge said that ”TikTok has now addressed the primary concern we expressed in our open letter that AI generated content would ‘massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists.’”  

A few weeks ago, in the face of powerful new generative music platforms like Udio, the Beat focused on this precise nightmare scenario. And indeed, according to Doctorow’s enshittification game plan, TikTok is at the phase where “once [users and suppliers are] locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.”

So if we’re plugged in Matrix-style and TikTok is just siphoning surplus to said shareholders, what’s stopping them from doubling down on their shittiness and just replacing human music with non-royalty bearing compositions generated by AI? Is that how platforms die, or is that how they survive?

And what of the music that disappears along the way?

“No stupid literature, art or music lasts,” wrote literary critic George Steiner in his 1986 book, Real Presences. Ted Gioia cites Steiner in a recent piece called “All Bad Music Will Eventually Disappear.”

Gioia discusses how his responsibility as a music critic takes him into haystacks of mediocrity, and though that single shiny needle is worth the slog, it’s still a slog. (Remember, there are about 100,000 songs uploaded to streaming services every day.)

Surely, AI-generated music would be amongst the “bad” music (for now), but what if it becomes all we can find? What about the casual fans that don’t have Gioia’s patience or interest in the slog? What if the platforms we use have no incentive to invest in human-generated art and we gradually care less until we’re subsumed by mediocre shit and can’t even remember the good stuff?

Again, time will tell, but Grainge seems assured by TikTok’s commitments that at least UMG’s artists are now better protected. But who’s watching over the rest of us?

Power Imbalance

The day before UMG announced its renewed TikTok partnership, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) let its own licensing deal with TikTok expire. NMPA President and CEO David Israelite told Music Business Worldwide (MBW) that NMPA is “not engaging in an extension of its deal.”

“Music is essential to TikTok,” he continued. “As we have said, we are not engaging in an extension of our deal. We are hopeful that the platform comes to the table with music publishers and compensates songwriters properly – their service depends on it.”

Are artist champions now getting wise to the shit? Feeling sufficiently empowered to jet off beyond the event horizons of that tremendous shit gravity?

In a profile for MBW, esteemed artist manager Michele Harrison just asserted that “the TikTok era is over.” “I would change the fact that the industry is run by these massive corporations,” she said, mentioning TikTok and Grainge by name. “It seems like the power balance is off.” 

“I do think that’s changing though,” she continued. “We’ve seen this over time: the big corporations get super huge, layoffs happen and then a bunch of really smart, talented people go out and create new opportunities for themselves. Then you see a rebirth of energy. We’re at that place right now.”

We need that energy, because even in Steiner’s pre-streaming pre-AI era, Gioia notes, the “bad” music took care of itself, but it took caretakers to ensure artists persisted beyond the sands of time. “We don’t need to destroy the bad stuff, because there’s some kind of quasi-evolutionary process at work that will eliminate it anyway,” Gioia writes, “but goodness is more fragile, and needs our support.”

Coda

In response to Robey’s tweet, my friend Glenn Poppe – whose Catalog project has been highlighted in the Beat before – suggested that the opposite of enshittification might be called “rewilding.”

He cited an essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon in Noēma, which depicts the Internet's transformation from diverse ecosystem to controlled plantation. This week, Doctorow published a new piece titled “The disenshittified internet starts with loyal ‘user agents,’” in which he quotes the same Noēma essay.

I’ll leave you with some sage words from that piece by Farrell and Berjon, as well as a reminder to celebrate goodness with care, and to feed your wild gut flora until our inconvenience becomes more than the enshittified platforms can handle.

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.