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.

All I want for Christmas is a number one hit

For nearly three decades, Mariah Carey has been the queen of Christmas music. Her 1994 hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is one of the most successful digital singles of all-time – seasonal and otherwise – and continues to chart every year, holding the US record for longest gap between release date and going number one (25 years) – until now, that is.

This year, Brenda Lee’s classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” supplanted Carey atop the charts and broke her record, rising to number one 65 years after it was released. As she turned 79, Lee became the oldest person to go number one. If she had topped the charts when the track arrived in 1958 – her playful Georgian drawl belying her 13 years of age at the time – she would’ve also been the youngest.

So how did it happen? There was a new music video, for one, but a lot of Lee’s fresh momentum arrived when she created a TikTok account – a tactic she adopted while working alongside her label.

“I’m happy for everybody here that’s worked so hard to make this happen because in today’s world, everything moves so fast and furious. But I’m telling you this: My label has come to bat,” Lee told Billboard after learning her song went number one. “I like that God has given me that favor that I can stand aside and look and know that it wasn’t just me; that it’s a conglomerate of a lot of people that made the song what it is.”

Conglomerates of a lot of people

Throughout October, Water & Music and Music Tomorrow teamed up to co-host their inaugural Music Marketing Data Bootcamp. A litany of industry leaders gathered to curate eight nutrient-dense sessions on music data, filled with case studies and actionable frameworks that might guide folks through the terrifying gauntlet of the digital marketing lifecycle. 

Many of the folks in attendance were artists’ champions – that is, the unseen “conglomerate” whose job it is to do things like dethrone Mariah. TikTok, of course, is one of the most leaned-on platforms in the music industry – a tool that’s helped transition the recipe for success from being a talented musician to being good at TikTok.

“Sadly,” said guest speaker Luna Cohen-Solal, senior audience consultant at Atlantic Records, “I’m seeing it’s not the most talented who rise to the top, it’s the most ambitious, motivated and good at TikTok.”

Another guest speaker, Alec Ellin – co-founder and chief executive officer at the CRM Laylo – added: “On the social platform side, it’s 90 percent consistency and 10 percent talent.” 

Yikes. Motivation and hard work should absolutely be factors for success, but such a skewed scale is indicative of the outsized control TikTok-like social platforms have over fledgling careers.

The massive, one-size-fits-all social platform is clearly antithetical to Venkatesh Rao’s “cozy web,” which Maarten Walraven – one of the Academy’s co-leads – highlighted in his recap of the bootcamp. “Coziness might be characterized by some as an escapist retreat from reality,” he included, citing the author Ker Lee Yap, “but really it is a way of finding each other.”

The cozy contours of a vinyl record

‘Cozy’ connotes an entirely different type of Internet. As I write this Beat near our decorated tree, surrounded by people I love as A Charlie Brown Christmas spills forth from the record player, the cozy web feels particularly appealing. And amidst a “fast and furious” social landscape and a streaming-dominant listening market, vinyl’s recent resurgence feels like an indication of an interest in something cozier than TikTok.

In a recent edition of his newsletter Where Music’s Going, Rob Abelow posited that vinyl’s revival is categorically different from its erstwhile heights. In the days of yore, vinyl was the predominant format for music consumption. Charlie Brown and Brenda Lee could only be heard on wax – people bought records to listen to them. But today, obviously, there are many other ways to listen to music. So the rationale for buying records in 2023, Abelow said, is fandom.

And fans are buying. The vinyl market has grown an astounding 8400 percent over 17 years of consecutive growth, and it’s doubled in just the past two years. Amazingly, 50 percent of buyers don’t even own a record player! 

“It's about a deeper experience in the artist's world,” Abelow wrote. “People are looking for this – and they’re not getting it from streaming. It requires a complimentary, non-disposable format.”

Pariah Carey

Last Friday I played my first proper London gig. Invoking the wisdom of folks like Abelow, Walraven and the bootcamp’s sages, I handed out CDs (vinyl, alas, was too expensive) at the door, burned with my first single and stamped with a QR code that directs folks to my Bonfire page.

The approach wasn’t as robust as tailor-made, web3-powered systems by Avenged Sevenfold, or the “tangible digital experiences” Vérité has used with IYK, but it felt important to bridge the “phygital” divide, and to offer something that enabled listeners to take a deeper step into my music world.

As part of my coverage of the bootcamp, I'm writing a four-part series that references valuable lessons like these – and which platforms artists should try them on – and tests them on the open waters, using my own nascent musical journey as guinea pig.

Now, outside of this exercise, I don’t use TikTok. I barely touch Instagram. Admittedly, I’m not that great at Twitter either. As regular Beat readers can attest, I frequently advocate for more niche-based social platforms because the ones already mentioned in this paragraph are lousy community building tools.

But as Ben Folds said in clear, unfortunate truth: “Self promotion. If you don’t want anything to do with it, stay in your fucking basement.”

And as Lee’s label likely told her: you wanna top Mariah? You gotta play the game. And hey they did it, identifying the right platform – in this case, TikTok – to send Lee to the top. The record’s even back on vinyl, this time not because it’s the primary mode for music consumption – as it was when it was first released – but because it’s a “complimentary, non-disposable format” that brings people closer to the artist.

Coda

The four-part series I’m writing – half of which has now been published on Decential – is called Pariah Carey. Why? Because even though the musicians you’ve never heard of aren’t pariahs, they may as well be. Algorithms treat them as such. And did you know the word ‘pariah’ is actually derived from the Tamil word ‘parai,’ which means ‘a drum?’ The more you know.

But there’s also the wordplay, of course, and reference to the Christmas queen herself. Hopefully the series can help emerging artists stumble to the gilded path of Mariah – probably not with as many number ones, but at least a music life that can be meaningful and, perhaps, even sustainable.

Wishing you all a very happy holiday.

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.