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 Next Prince

“Chappell Roan is the most talented pop star since Prince.”

A close friend told me that over the holidays. I’d never even heard of Roan (a shame, in retrospect), and as a Minnesotan, I eyed this friend with skeptical pride.

He has a two-and-a-half year-old – my goddaughter – and Roan was all she wanted to listen to. And I must admit, after dancing around the living room with her for hours, “Pink Pony Club” blaring, I kinda bought in.

At this year’s Grammys, Roan took home the award for Best New Artist, and her acceptance speech won her my fandom:

Labels, big tech, governments – do you?

Path Dependencies

Metalabel co-founder Yancey Strickler amplified Roan’s speech in a recent blog post. “In a world of global corporations, artists and creative people are 1099 NPCs with limited power and agency of their own,” he wrote. “The path forward is one where creative people make new institutions of our own.”

The words echo Analivia Cordeiro’s conviction that artists and “cultural people” should build software because “the technical solutions will be more complete.” It’s Outlyr-e’s avant-garde ethos: “We must resist the idea that things simply have to be the way they are.” It’s Anna Lathrop’s notion of punk technologies – “responses, reactions, hacks, and workarounds of current mainstream technologies.” These are the ideas that should seep into our bones.

In a recent edition of MUSIC x, Maarten Walraven resurrected his 2023 take on “crypto music as punk technology” – “a way…that resists the way we’ve gotten used to thinking about music as a business,” he wrote. Walraven advocates for the builders thinking small scale – burrowing new paths for the bold and the beaten-down. “We definitely need to fight to position different alternatives,” he says. “Universal [Music Group (UMG)] won’t do the kind of creative R&D that the artists featured in Network Archives chased.”

Indeed. And it’s the latter – writes researcher Brodie Conley in the piece’s comments – that will get us out of the matrix: “The way to overcome the all-encompassing structural force of path dependency is to engage in small scale experiments that provide alternative ways of imagining, using and thinking about technologies.”

In music, that “all-encompassing structural force” is most crushing beneath the Spotify/UMG pedestal. “Spotify And UMG Rigged The Game a Long Time Ago” is the title of a new piece by Ari Herstrand, the musician and author who’s long sought to help new artists navigate the treacherous music industry. (For anyone considering that path, read his book How to Make It in the New Music Business – it’s a harrowing tale of realism.)

Spotify and Universal just agreed to a new multi-year licensing deal. One notable result of that union is that Spotify will pay a higher royalty rate to Universal’s Publishing Group. Through that lens, the rigged game comes into view:

That’s why they call Lucian Grainge – UMG boss and regular Beat rogue – the shark. But in public he paints a different picture. In his annual staff memo, he used doublespeak like “artist-centric,” “innovation” and “streaming 2.0” to cloak the truth that nobody benefits more from the status quo than him, his $150 million bonuses and the $50 billion leviathan he leads.

In that same memo, he notes that “UMG artists and songwriters brought home more Grammys than ever before in our history,” and “UMG broke the two biggest artists in the world last year in Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan.”

He claims Roan’s success, but not her words.

Over in DSP world, the other half of this courtship, Spotify – the purported face of Grainge’s “streaming 2.0” – reported its first-ever annual profit ($1.71 billion). And yet CEO Daniel Ek continues to purge his Spotify stock at a feverish pace. His most recent cash-out brings his one-year total to an astonishing $443 million.

Ek, too, spouts artist-friendly doublespeak as his company engages in predatory royalty-cutting tactics that we must surely credit, in part, for its fattened profit margins – e.g. low-cost, royalty-free music mood machines; and “bundling” premium subscriptions to pay songwriters a lower rate (the Swedish company just quashed a legal challenge to the latter from the Mechanical Licensing Collective).

Government interventions, too, have largely fallen short or gone stale in the acrid pools of bureaucracy. So, what’s to be done?

Offline is the New Luxury

Herstrand – like Walraven – advocates for small-scale and direct. “The only way to cut out the corporations and take matters into our own hands is to go direct to the fans.”

It’s back to the punks and their experiments. For her new record Eusexua, FKA Twigs dipped her toes into the blockchain (she’s done so before) via the budding ITM Studio. The new platform helped her sell 1,500 tickets to an event at New York’s Market Hotel. Reportedly, buyers’ metadata was stored on the data storage blockchain protocol, Arweave, which means that even if ITM folds, the data will persist.

In his piece, Herstrand lists some other services that, ostensibly, “cut out the corporations” – the first of which is Vault. I dissected Vault’s arrival last March. It’s a direct-to-fan platform where fans can subscribe to an artist to access their unreleased music and a private chat. It’s built by the creators of the music NFT platform Sound, and it’s in some level of partnership with James Blake.

Before the Vault release, Blake turned heads when he took to socials to express industry vitriol. In retrospect, though, it appears to have been a kind of pre-arranged marketing campaign for the pre-launch platform. Now he’s dropped another thinly veiled advertisement – this time for the platform indify.

As with the Vault promotion before it, Blake’s performative sentiments earned him some ire from the vanguard – and beyond just the choreography. Some noted that Blake’s “we’re all struggling” rhetoric sidesteps the fact that he’s part of the music pantheon. He’s got nine million monthly Spotify listeners. He collaborates with Kendrick Lamar and Travis Scott and SZA. What works for him won’t work for most.

Others questioned the real “innovation” behind it. When Vault was first announced, my favorite take came from Black Dave:

Now, it’s great that artists on Blake’s level are challenging the industry paradigm. And hopefully Chappell Roan’s comments invite more artists into this existential debate. But in a state of tech solutionism, every new shiny object is shipped as the savior that will relieve us from path dependency.

Some of these tools and platforms are well built and have well-intentioned teams, but for developing artists, it’s damn near impossible to muddle through an extractive regime with any of them. Those who have tried are often left jaded, because so far every shiny object has failed or exploited them.

Bottom line is artists need healthcare and living wages. It should come from labels. Government arts programs should have deeper coffers. But in the absence of those, tech needs to fill gaps – not with shiny objects, but with collective ownership and aligned incentives. It should reflect the intimacy of the culture that’s happening offline.

In “Offline is the New Luxury” – Black Dave’s latest Yards, a video series of his thoughts from his backyard – he reminds us that “the experience is king, not the sharing of the experience.”

The sharing is glossy and edited. The experience is tactile and human, blemishes and all. It’s the unseen experience that labels et al don’t want to look at. But it’s there that the dream takes root. It’s there that struggle happens. That’s where care is needed most, and that’s where joy is purest. No cosplay for the Gram – just people dancing together in their living room, unseen by all but one another, the memories seeped deep into their bones.

Coda

Earlier this week, Decential published my feature on Kane Mayfield. His new project Ides of March is a multi-artist, multidimensional experience that blends Bitcoin with hip hop, ancient Rome, the metaverse and a new on-chain sampler.

When Mayfield walked me through the experience, I couldn’t believe its depth and focus. “Our vision is to skip DSPs [digital service providers, like Spotify] entirely and focus 100 percent of our efforts on the Bitcoin native community,” he said.

This is one of those “small scale experiments that provide alternative ways of imagining.” And to all the other punk technologists who are, indeed, imagining, Mayfield shared these sage words:

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.