- The Beat
- Posts
- The Beat
Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly exploration of music, culture and the new Internet.
On the culture-tech byway, things move at breakneck speeds. From web3 to AI, copyright to collective ownership, art to psychedelics, The Beat is an exercise in association. We all contain multitudes, and within them, vast differences. But there is some connective, fundamental essence to be found.
The Beat is dedicated to that essence, and to the people who seek it; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.
“The culture of the music world sucks”
In 2018, I saw Nine Inch Nails play at Brooklyn’s legendary King’s Theater. That was a bucket list show for me – I’d long shrouded myself in the darkness of the Nine. And their influence persists. Fragile and The Downward Spiral both remain on steady rotation, the latter a frequent reference for my own forthcoming EP.
This weekend, Reznor and NIN running mate Atticus Ross won the Best Score Golden Globe for their work on Challengers. It’s their third such award, following scores for The Social Network and Soul – and the latest accolade in a history chock full of them.
Across their career, Nine Inch Nails have sold 20 million records and earned 13 Grammy nominations. Rolling Stone included the band amongst its 100 greatest artists of all time. Suffice to say the music industry has not been unkind to the Nine.
But that hasn’t blinded Reznor from its shortcomings. Here are his words in a recent interview with Indiewire:
“What we’re looking for [from film] is the collaborative experience with interesting people. We haven’t gotten that from the music world necessarily… You mentioned disillusionment with the music world? Yes. The culture of the music world sucks.
That’s another conversation, but what technology has done to disrupt the music business in terms of not only how people listen to music but the value they place on it is defeating. I’m not saying that as an old man yelling at clouds, but as a music lover who grew up where music was the main thing. Music [now] feels largely relegated to something that happens in the background or while you’re doing something else. That’s a long, bitter story.”
As a reader of the Beat and MUSIC x (this edition is getting published in both), I imagine you’re a music lover where music continues to be “the main thing.” You likely share Reznor’s frustrations and have your own long, bitter story.
Perhaps you’re actively engaged in building technology that vaults music back into the fore. Maybe you’re simply a superfan along for the ride. Whatever the case, we can relish in the fact that none of us want the culture of the music world to suck.
But how do we give that long, bitter story a happy ending…
Superfans
It’s no secret that superfans have been a focal point of builders these past couple years. They’re a would-be salve for the one-size fits all, music-as-wallpaper streaming paradigm that we generally agree sucks.
The promise behind superfans is hardly new. Countless startups have attempted to nail “fan engagement” – to manifest the logic behind Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans and Li Jin’s 100 true fans theories. All creators need to do is find their diehards and they’ll be set!
The issue, of course, is finding them – and doing it in a way that elides insidious platform mechanics. To do so, one must understand how and where to source, parse and process platform data.
About a year ago, I covered Water & Music’s sweeping eight-part Music Marketing Data Bootcamp, testing many of its lessons in my ongoing Pariah Carey series. I set targets, assessed various data tools, created a marketing plan, built a CRM (customer relationship manager), probed automation and discovery tools and learned about “gaming the algorithm.”
Pariah Carey is so named for the wordplay, of course, but also because, while musicians you’ve never heard of aren’t pariahs, they may as well be. Algorithms and platforms treat them as such. Don’t want to play the game? Then don’t expect to get any attention – or earn any streaming revenue.
“It still matters that music streaming platforms are driven by profit,” said Bootcamp speaker David Hesmondhalgh, a Professor of Media, Music and Culture, University of Leeds, “and may therefore have an incentive to keep pushing the work of the most popular artists – or at least not to take active measures to counter that tendency.”
The existence of the ‘game’ – where only the game creators know all the rules and they can change them when they no longer work in their favor – demonstrates the imperative and the challenge of identifying superfans. And with artists growing evermore tired of the game, a budding crop of superfan platforms are emerging to meet their demand.
Just before the holiday, Water & Music hosted a monthly webinar called, “The superfan fallacy: Three hard truths.”
“The music industry's obsession with superfans has reached a fever pitch,” reads the event’s teaser. “While everyone rushes to build the next fan platform or monetization strategy, we're overdue for an honest conversation about what's actually working – and what isn't.”
The three aforementioned hard truths are: “the celebrity superfan complex,” “the reality of data control” and “the platform paradox.”
I want to focus on the last one. In this segment, Hanna Kahlert, an Analyst at MIDIA Research, drew from “years of research on failed attempts and shifting artist and fan behaviors” to argue that “launching new fan platforms isn't the answer to critical fan engagement challenges.”
To unpack that rationale, I’d like to tap our old friend, the journalist and culture theorist Cory Doctorow, who coined the neologism enshittification. The word 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.”
Spotify – whose teased Superfan clubs are about as likely as CEO Daniel Ek understanding music culture – certainly falls within that scope. During the Bootcamp, it was staggering to me that so much energy is expended on “gaming” Spotify – to build tools that parse Spotify data, or fill in gaps for data it doesn’t, or optimize release timing, or predict the likelihood of a playlist feature; or, from an artist’s perspective, literally redesigning your creative practice to accommodate the algo and snag a spot on some mood-based playlist.
Plenty out there are ready for Spotify to arrive at the final point of Doctorow’s enshittification lifecycle (death), and thanks to Liz Pelly’s new book, the platform’s getting a whole new contingent of executioners.
The Mood Machine
The same year I saw Nine Inch Nails, I saw Pelly speak at, of all places, a New York comedy club. She played the proverbial halftime show, taking the stage between acts to present a powerpoint about her 2017 essay, “The Problem with Muzak.”
Published in The Baffler, the piece is rooted in a “techno-solutionism that’s unbearable because it insistently capitalizes on quick fixes for problems that didn’t exist to begin with,” she writes.
A representative of that dysfunction, she says, is Spotify. Pelly positions the tech behemoth as a modern day Muzak – the firm that developed, programmed and licensed music for retail environments throughout the 1900s. Similarly, she writes, Spotify uses leanback playlists to attract corporate sponsors – often with little regard for the artist or the sacred artist-fan relationship.
But even in 2017, the music world seemed ready to acquiesce to our corporate overlords.
“If you don’t bow down to Spotify, you might as well tell whoever runs the guillotine that’s above your neck to just let her rip,” Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier told Pelly for the piece. “These streaming services are literally the only option for a music career nowadays.”
Like Nine Inch Nails, Deerhoof – Pelly observes – holds “a unique position” because their career began well before streaming was normalized. They have the privilege of an established base, so – unlike artists forced to rely on Spotify games – they can risk the guillotine, and say things like, “The people I would blame the most are the greedy chauvinists in charge of companies like Spotify and [those] who own Google,” Saunier said.
Pelly ends the piece saying, “I want to believe that it’s not too late to beat the billionaires and the bots.” Alas, she writes, couching her hope, Spotify had just signed a 17-year lease for fourteen floors at Four World Trade Center…
Pelly’s new book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, hits stores this month. But she’s already published an excerpt in Harpers: “The Ghosts in the Machine – Spotify’s plot against musicians.”
The piece is damning, replete with Spotify fuckery. Spotify, Pelly learns, has been secretly filling its popular playlists with low-cost "ghost artist" tracks through its Perfect Fit Content (PFC) program, systematically replacing real musicians' work with anonymous stock music to reduce royalty payments and improve its profit margins.
It actively works against genuine fan-artist relationships – no one becomes a superfan of anonymous stock music:
“PFC was not the only way in which Spotify deliberately and covertly manipulated programming to favor content that improved its margins, but it was the most immediately galling. Nor was the problem simply a matter of ‘authenticity’ in music. It was a matter of survival for actual artists, of musicians having the ability to earn a living on one of the largest platforms for music. PFC was irrefutable proof that Spotify rigged its system against musicians who knew their worth.”
And Pelly’s book has not been consigned to the music tech media aisle. It’s been covered by Rolling Stone, by the Washington Post and by The Hollywood Reporter.
The New Yorker’s Hua Hsu dedicated five pages to Mood Machine, concluding with a sobering reflection of our Spotify-inflicted music world:
“Artists have always fretted about the pressure to conform, but the data-driven, music-as-content era feels different. ‘You are a Spotify employee at that point,’ Daniel Lopatin, who makes abstract electronic music as Oneohtrix Point Never, told Pelly. ‘If your art practice is so ingrained in the brutal reality that Spotify has outlined for all of us, then what is the music that you’re not making? What does the music you’re not making sound like?’ Listeners might wonder something similar. What does the music we’re not hearing sound like?”
Ted Gioia also penned a thoughtful essay on Pelly’s piece. He offers historical context, invoking the 1950s when the public learned about payola – i.e. that radio DJs were selecting music based on cash kickbacks instead of merit. Spotify has its own payola-like mechanics, but “nobody gives Spotify execs an envelope filled with cash,” Gioia writes. “But,” he adds, “this is better than payola.
He lists seven instances in the past year in which Ek has sold Spotify stock to the tune of eight- or nine-figure cashouts.
The Honest Broker
“Nobody in the history of music has made more money than the CEO of Spotify,” Gioia writes. “Taylor Swift doesn’t earn that much. Even after fifty years of concertizing, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger can’t match this kind of wealth.”
And let’s not forget that, in 2021, while 98.6 percent of Spotify artists were earning $36 per quarter, Ek bid $2 billion on a Premier League Football team.
The disparity is criminal. But much of the world sees Ek and Spotify as models of success. As a platform, Spotify is incentivized to guard trade secrets and engage in shady mechanics that bolster their bottom line, so it does. That’s the “platform paradox.”
Platforms have evolved from convenient intermediary to entrenched middleman, siphoning value from both artists and fans while their founders get rich. They commoditize creator labor to maintain user attention, which comes at the expense of direct relationship. Platform survival precludes the mechanisms required to foster equity and transparency – as well as any hope of identifying your superfans.
At scale, you get the enshittified reality depicted by Water & Music’s latest imperial ourobouros, which maps “the globalization and financialization of power in music and tech.”
Water & Music
So can we, as Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin implored, embrace a philosophy that “build[s] tools, not empires?” And is the broader media coverage of Pelly’s insights indicative of broader care?
I hope so, on both accounts, because empires make culture suck. If you need more galvanizing truth about what’s at stake, I’ll leave you with these harrowing words from Pelly’s book:
“It also raises worrying questions for all of us who listen to music. It puts forth an image of a future in which – as streaming services push music further into the background, and normalize anonymous, low-cost playlist filler – the relationship between listener and artist might be severed completely.”
Coda
In response to Pelly’s investigation, the artist hissquiet (aka Ash Farrand) announced a raffle. The winner gets a custom album cover design or physical/digital artwork; to enter, you have to unsubscribe from Spotify. It’s brilliant.
I discovered the gesture on a forum via Subvert, the cooperative and “collectively owned Bandcamp successor” founded by Austin Robey.
On the forum, members are chatting about Subvert’s business model, its tech stack and ideas that improve upon Bandcamp. And the participants are artists and music heads who care because they know they’re being heard. That’s how you build culture that doesn’t suck.
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.