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.

Will people pay more?

Back in web3’s halcyon days, when the bull market buoyed builders and DAOs were proliferating like urban legends, even editorial had a sizable budget. Fast forward a couple years, though, and web3 writing gigs have largely evaporated, thrown on the “difficult to monetize” chopping block.

At the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC), EthDublin co-founder Caolán Walsh referenced journalism’s “difficulty to monetize,” suggesting in his talk, “Redefining Funding for Cultural and Creative Pursuits through Harm Reduction as a Public Good,” that it’s a great candidate for public goods funding.

Alas, the pile of pursuits relegated to public goods funding – a mishmash category of causes that our platform-centric Internet culture has made “difficult to monetize” – is growing all the time.

At this point, we risk equating “difficult to monetize” with non-essential, and non-essential things can disappear. A world without journalism is dangerous because it’s unseen. So while I would wholeheartedly endorse public goods funding for journalism (and many other crafts), society should also recognize its inherent value to our lives.

Perhaps there’s some insight we can borrow from an unlikely source: Spotify’s latest earnings report. Last year, the company raised its premium subscription price for the first time in their history. Today, thanks to premium users now paying eight percent more on average, Spotify just posted their most profitable quarter ever.  

Quashed are any concerns that subscribers might have blanched at the dollar rate hike. Thank God, it looks like people are willing to pay more for music. 

So how far can we push that willingness? Might this be indicative of consumer behavior that we can emulate for other essential pursuits – maybe even journalism? Could we, in time, take our money out of platforms altogether?

The Internet’s Original Sin

In 2012, journalist and culture theorist Cory Doctorow wrote an essay called “Music: The Internet’s Original Sin.” The title refers to Search Engine podcast host, Jesse Brown, who described music downloads as the “Internet’s original sin.”

That’s because, Doctorow writes, Napster et al were important for more than just making music available for free. Before peer-to-peer file sharing, 80 percent of music wasn’t available at all. “The record industry had always enjoyed both the savings from not having to warehouse and manage all those physical products, and the increased profits that arose from limiting choice,” Doctorow wrote.

And when it suddenly was available, people developed a thirst for abundance. Pandora's box transmuted into the ‘celestial jukebox,’ an infinity of music first prophesized in Paul Goldstein’s 1994 book Copyright’s Highway. Out of the heavens came the mighty platform, which wrapped the world’s content in said jukebox and put a bow on it.

Even in its nascent stages, Doctorow could see the forthcoming flood. “Curation is the watchword for the coming century,” he wrote in the same 2012 essay, “some process by which you are able to outsource some of the reviewing and ranking of all this material to communities, algorithms, or individuals.”

Journalists are curators of some truth. At our best, we winnow the infinity of life into something digestible and affecting. At times journalism is the only way to cast light on growing shadows.

Ulterior motives like politics and cash can muddy the truth, of course, but so too can the distance between reader and writer, discoverer and creator.  There’s power in that space, because curatorial clout can be leveraged to sway the masses. Take payola, a clandestine payment made to promote something – the most notorious example being record labels who paid radio DJs to play label songs.

Payola is still an issue today. Spotify’s controversial “Discovery Mode” – which offers artists better placement for even lower payout rates – is essentially platform payola. And given how opaque the platform’s machinations are – and that there are conflicts of interest to consider, like the major labels holding equity shares in the company – it’s nearly impossible to know if more traditional forms of payola are taking place (but they very likely are). 

In the 12 years since Doctorow’s essay, platforms have evolved from convenient intermediary to entrenched middleman, siphoning value from creators, curators and end users – a facile summation of the Doctorow-coined concept: “enshittification.”

Platforms commoditize creator labor to maintain user attention, which comes at the expense of direct relationship and journalistic “truth.” Insidiously, they have become our de facto curators, feeding us content in convenient, digestible – and even entertaining – morsels.

Who needs journalists anymore?

Indeed. The state of journalism, particularly outside major national publications, is undeniably grim. Local newspapers are hemorrhaging resources – many have shuttered entirely. Digital-first publications struggle to compete with the content churn and major platforms’ ad-supported business models. They, too, have become “difficult to monetize.”

In January, Pitchfork – one of the last balustrades of music journalism – was folded into GQ by their parent company, Conde Nast. When we devalue context, we also devalue those who make it for a living. “Where there's power and money, critics can have influence and get paid,” wrote Yancey Strickler through the lens of Pitchfork’s effective closure and the loss of myriad editorial gigs. “When the money and power dry up, the beat does too.” 

But it’s not like there’s less money in the collective coffers. Spotify’s doing great. The music ticketing platform DICE is exploring a sale “valuing it at hundreds of millions of dollars.” Queen, in the biggest artist catalog sale in history (by far), is selling its catalog to Sony for $1.27 billion.

If wealth was better distributed before, why can’t we redistribute it once again?

Hotel California

A good place to start is reappropriating the moment of discovery.

In Pitchfork’s heyday – already tapering off at the time Doctorow published his piece — music blogs played an integral role in music discovery. In rich context, people read about new music on Pitchfork et al and then bought the CD/mp3. 

Today, if you’re the rare rose that still reads music blogs, maybe you’re also buying music on Bandcamp (whose excellent editorial should also be mentioned). And if you’re reading this, that very well may be true. But most people are discovering songs from within Spotify and saving them to playlists within Spotify, which obviates the human curator and does virtually nothing for the artist.

Platforms preclude a seamless journey from discovery to fandom – they take significant cuts of creators' revenue, control audience data and often dictate how creators interact with their communities. They have co-opted the discovery process and bent it toward their own means. There’s never a need to leave the platform and that’s the point.

Spotify is “Hotel California” – you can check out any time you’d like, but you can’t ever fucking leave.

But maybe there’s some hope afloat. SoundCloud just announced a partnership with electronic music events platform, Resident Advisor (RA) – which has a robust editorial arm of its own.

"The integration of RA's events API with SoundCloud's platform opens up exciting possibilities for the electronic music community," said RA's COO, Simon Kempner. "By seamlessly connecting event information across platforms, we're empowering promoters, club owners, artists, DJs, labels and fans through increased visibility and engagement."

Devi Mahadevia, Sr. VP of Strategy & Growth at SoundCloud, added that "by integrating RA's events onto our platform, we're further enriching the music discovery journey for our listening community."

The move is the latest evidence – alongside things like fan-powered royalties and fan DMs – that SoundCloud may be a platform of a different breed.

“We’re not so interested in the zero-sum game that is defined by a fan-powered model, or a pro-rata model, or artist-centric model, whatever,” said SoundCloud’s CEO Eliah Seton. “This in the end is dividing the pie into thinner and thinner slices. We’re more interested in putting new pies on the table.” 

Spotify’s fruitful quarter proved that there is indeed untapped revenue out there. And the day is coming where people will realize the money they’re giving platforms would be better spent on new pies – whether that comes as direct revenue models and public goods funding or as the overdue realization that platform CEOs extracting billions of dollars from the creative economy is bad for culture (hopefully both).

At its best, the web3 community seems to have the will and wherewithal to change these incumbent systems, and we know the tech itself has the versatility to heal endangered creative ecosystems like journalism and music.

But if that’s to happen, web3 has to transcend the platform model. We need to build interoperable, platform-independent tools and re-invest in context and curation – and right now we’re not doing enough.

Coda

Recently I’ve had crypto PR folks tell me that Decential is the only web3-focused media org covering culture, because culture itself is “difficult to monetize.” Oh how far we’ve strayed.

But at the same time, it’s a testament to the care of people like my editor (and Decential co-founder) Matt Leising, who gives me the latitude to cover this broad nexus of culture and tech. Those people are out there, and that’s important.

Because if we know there are caretakers, and some emerging precedent for reconnecting context and art, and a demonstrable willingness to pay more, this is all just a coordination issue. We can figure that out.

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.