Category Archives: Culture

Music, music everywhere…. and none of it very memorable

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This past weekend I experienced a couple of musical events that were poles apart, but which also underlined how so much contemporary music is totally forgettable, due to both ubiquity and overabundance.

The first event was the Independent Music Exchange held in Melbourne. Here, a collection of small independent labels, distributors and retailers came together to promote their current catalogues. Most of the music was on vinyl, but there were also CDs and lots of cassettes. (Melbourne is allegedly the vinyl capital of the world…) Releases on sale included new product, plus swathes of back catalogue and archival reissues – some of which have only become well-known long after their initial release, or are only available again thanks to these independent companies because the original labels (often one of the big global players) have chosen not to keep them in print. I can’t pretend to have been very familiar with many of the items on display; but it was nevertheless gratifying to see the range and diversity, and to know that there is an audience for these types of music (judging by the number of punters attending the event), which is largely overlooked by broadcast radio and major streaming platforms.

The second event was an evening of Karaoke with friends, which largely featured music from the 80s and 90s (reflecting the age group), but which also included a reasonable selection of more recent tracks. I have to admit that any of the latter that I did recognise were songs I have heard as background music in public places, rather than as a conscious decision to listen to them. I’m also woefully ignorant of most of the artists behind these latest songs, and if they have reached my consciousness it’s probably as a result of a news story or social media campaign. Admittedly, I’m probably not the target audience for most of this newer music, so my ignorance can be forgiven!

The latest IFPI annual report reveals that nearly 70% of global music revenue comes from streaming platforms, around 17% from physical sales (of which vinyl is increasingly taking a bigger share), and just 3% from downloads and other digital formats. The remaining 10% is derived from performance rights and associated syndication licensing.

If streaming platforms have done one thing well, it is to help create an over abundance of “new” music. This is because they have reduced the costs of distribution, and in many cases, this new music is being self-released and directly uploaded by the artists themselves, rather than via record labels or music publishers. This applies to both the big brands like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube and Pandora, as well as the smaller players like Bandcamp and SoundCloud. However, easier and cheaper distribution has not reduced the costs of marketing and promotion; and thanks to certain algorithms, a lot of new music is being created just to get “discovered” via streaming and social media, based on listeners’ habits and/or preferences. There is also a debate about whether AI-generated music, artists or promotion should be allowed to co-exist on these streaming platforms; and if so, should they come with associated disclosures so listeners can choose to block AI-content? In some ways, it’s rather like the Enhanced Games competing with the Olympics, or consumers preferring to exclude GMO crops from the food chain – the boundaries are blurred, and once the content is in the system, everything else becomes tainted or infected.

I recently read a blog by an independent recording artist and curator who was bemoaning the current state of the music industry – specifically, the noise and hype around so much current music – the main conclusion being that thanks to the algorithms and the repetition, it was dulling his appetite to engage with new music. I can certainly empathise with this perspective – often, the announcement of this or that new album or a “sneak peak” (i.e., co-ordinated leak) of a carefully stage-managed artist collaboration is more significant than the music itself. It feels like the amount of promotion thrown at a song or a music video is in inverse proportion to the quality of the release.

The ubiquity of highly homogenised popular music is down to three main factors:

  1. The tech (streaming, AI, algorithms)
  2. Record labels (guilty of pushing “fast fashion”-type music)
  3. TV talent shows (Eurovision, X-factor, The Voice, Pop Idol) that push a very narrow agenda, and are guilty of form over substance

BUT at the end of the day, I can’t help also thinking that the public gets what the public wants (to quote Paul Weller): “You are what you listen to”. So choosing to engage with this type of content only perpetuates its creation and existence – and “helped” by this ubiquity and overabundance, most of this new music is ultimately disposable and totally forgettable.

Next week: My night with the Sex Pistols

The cost of AI

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A variant on Moore’s law is the observation that the financial capital required to launch a new business decreases exponentially as technology gets cheaper.

Pre-internet, and using a notional geometric scale for the purposes of illustration, you might have needed $5m to found and build a new venture. The World Wide Web probably reduced that to $500k, while cloud computing brought it down to $50k. With the expansion of SaaS and API solutions, that cost might have been $5k to get going. Now, vibe coding and $500 of AI prompts can probably launch a new website, build a back end database, implement an e-commerce solution and deploy agentic AI bots to go and find your first customers.

This is a great outcome if measured by a lower barrier to market entry. It also enables founders to “fail fast, fail cheap”, and incentivises innovation by financially de-risking the process.

But even though the cost of AI tools is extraordinarily cheap in terms of the computing and processing power they deliver, there is a huge cost to our rapid adoption of AI that needs to be accounted for.

First, we are seeing corporate lay-offs among tech firms and parts of the service industry that no longer need as many human bodies and minds to operate at scale. So there is a human, economic and societal cost of increased un(der)employment.

Second, traditional skills and expertise are being hugely reduced in perceived value – why pay a graphic artist to design an image when I can use dall-e for free?

Third, as more and more creative tasks are being outsourced or delegated to AI (“create a short story about an F1 race in the style of Ernest Hemingway”) we risk losing our own innate creativity (that comes with experimentation, curiosity, play and reflection). This in turn devalues the creative process itself (thanks to cheaper, AI-enabled production).

Fourth, AI (and the Large Language Models on which it is trained) has no great respect for intellectual property. It doesn’t recognise boundaries between copyright material, content that is subject to creative commons, content that is in the public domain, and content which is publicly available. Again, if copyright owners and original content creators are not recognised or compensated for their work, why would anyone aspire to creating anything original?

Finally, there is the cost of resources (energy, water, rare earth metals) needed to maintain huge AI processing plants and data centres. (But at least this demand is accelerating the development of renewable energy.)

A few years ago, I posted a blog about the importance of the human factor, in the face of technological progress brought by automation and AI. I still remain cautiously optimistic that AI will bring huge benefits, despite the rampant growth of AI in the three years since I wrote that piece. But we are currently in an awkward and comfortable transition phase. If more jobs are lost to AI, and if human-led output is increasingly devalued, perhaps we will need to revisit the debate about Universal Basic Income and other policies to facilitate this transition.

Next week: Music, music everywhere…. and none of it very memorable 

Cultural References

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Most days I like to try and solve a cryptic crossword. It’s a hobby I picked up from my dad, when I was in my early teens. He probably regretted introducing me to this particular pastime, as we used to compete for the newspaper…

I think I have persisted with this hobby because I have an innate interest in word-play, and solving puzzles helps to maintain my cognitive agility.

Apart from having a large vocabulary and an understanding of the rudiments of solving different types of cryptic clues, it also helps to have wide general knowledge. In my own case, this is underpinned by having received a “classic education” – that blend of critical thinking, an inquisitive approach to learning, and a mix of the liberal arts, formal science and a hint of classics.

Cryptic clues frequently involve specific and oblique references to weights and measures, chess, bridge, languages, history, geography, the arts, literature, politics, current affairs, religion, sport, law, technology, entertainment and the sciences. Puzzle setters also rely on lexical techniques such as abbreviations, palindromes, homophones, anagrams, synonyms, antonyms and phonetics to construct their clues.

Many times, I find I just “know” the answer because some word association triggers mental recall. Often, though, clues are solved by a process of deduction and logic to parse the cryptic component to align with the factual meaning or definition.

I am increasingly challenged by references to current popular culture. Sometimes, I can deduct the reference to the name of a chart-topping singer or title of a Hollywood movie franchise – and not from hearing the music or watching the film.

It does make me think about what defines “general knowledge” – the stuff you should know without having to use a search engine? The public canon obviously shifts and evolves over time, but increasingly our individual knowledge is becoming fragmented, siloed and insular – not helped by algorithms designed to serve up more of the same or push us deeper into very narrow bands of information. Obviously, tastes and currency change with the times, but what constitutes a core foundation of personal wisdom and understanding to help us navigate the world?

This thought struck me recently during a family games night. One of the teenage participants was given a particularly difficult film title in a round of charades: “Dog Day Afternoon”. I was certain our young contestant had never seen (let alone heard of) this controversial 1975 movie (but which even now, seems highly topical). Yet, our plucky player rose to the challenge, and acted out a very literal interpretation, which made it relatively easy for the rest of the team to solve. It was great to see the process of deduction based on limited information!

So, maybe as long as we keep teaching basic general knowledge plus strong problem-solving skills, we’ll be OK?

 

 

Regulating Social Media….

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The term “mainstream media” (or MSM) is generally used as a derogatory term to describe traditional news services (print, broadcast, on-line), especially by anyone who thinks that MSM does not reflect what’s “really going on” in politics, society and the wider arena of current affairs. Depending on which conspiracy theories or political agenda you follow, if MSM doesn’t agree with or express your viewpoint, it’s become very easy to dismiss the Fourth Estate as an instrument of the (deep) State, or merely serving the interests of an oligarchy of wealthy media owners and press barons. This dialectic is sometimes described as the Fifth Estate – those bloggers, podcasters, citizen journalists and marginalized voices that seek to pursue their version(s) of the truth via new content platforms.

Although the tradition of the counter-culture as represented by this Fifth Estate has a very long history, its growth has been accelerated and amplified thanks to new digital technologies in general, and social media brands in particular. The problem is, not only is social media challenging (and ignoring) many of the rules and conventions that underpin the social contract between the public and the traditional media outlets, our governments and regulators cannot keep up with the pace of technology.

In the late 1980s, when I studied sub-editing and basic journalism at night school, the ethos of The Five Ws of Journalism were still taught as the essentials of any credible news outlet or publication. This was also a time when the media was going through significant changes, from new content technology to cross-border ownership, from multi-channel narrow-casting to 24-hour rolling news formats – yet the principles of source verification, fact-checking, libel laws and the right to reply were generally still seen as crucial to instilling public trust and confidence in the media (alongside a healthy dose of scepticism to not believe everything that we read in the paper!).

Now, with social media grabbing more of our attention, and with large, global and engaged audiences on their platforms, who are getting more of their news from these channels, the term “MSM” could easily apply to social media itself. Hence the term “legacy media” has emerged to describe traditional news services.

Whether it’s Facebook wanting to be the “world’s newspaper” or X positioning itself as the global “public square”, it’s clear that these new media barons are in many ways no different to the aging media moguls they seek to displace. Newspapers don’t make money from their cover price or even subscriptions – most revenue comes from advertising and the “rivers of gold” it represents. Now, those advertising dollars are on-line, and tied to our social media accounts and the proliferation of posts, “likes” and “shares” (as well as our personal data).

So how should we think about regulating social media, if the old rules no longer apply?

First, the policy, regulatory and industry framework to oversee social media needs to be simplified and streamlined. In Australia alone, based on a cursory internet search, I identified more than a dozen entities (government, agency, association) that have some form of oversight of social media. Apart from being highly inefficient, surely it doesn’t have to be this complicated? (And complexity and ambiguity can embolden those who seek to flout convention.)

Second, if a social media platform wants to be taken seriously as a trusted news source, and if it aspire to be recognsied as a publication of record, it has to adopt some fundamental principles such as The Five W’s. It’s all very well saying that these platforms are anti-censorship, and pro-free speech, but those rights come with a heap of legal and social responsibilities. To argue that these platforms are merely conduits for public opinion (rather then being content publishers) undermines agency theory. Given that I am not entitled to a social media account (I don’t think it’s yet risen to being a fundamental human right?), and that I don’t own my account (often, not even the content I post), social media companies act as our agents. They give us permission to use their services, and they ultimately control what we post on their digital real estate. They also use algorithms to manipulate what is served up in our feeds. Social media should therefore be held accountable for content that it enables to be disseminated; take more responsibility for any libel, lies or dis/misinformation issued on its platform; and risk prosecution for any content that promotes, encourages or incites violence, insurrection and public disorder.

Third, the fact that much of the content on social media is user-generated should not absolve these platforms from having to provide a formal right of reply, as well as adhering to a recognised and independent dispute resolution service. This will enable alleged victims of on-line bullying, harassment, personal abuse and outright lies to seek redress, without having to embark on expensive legal proceedings. (Of course, if social media companies maintained fact checking and other verification tools, they should be able to mitigate, if not eradicate, the need to invoke these mechanisms in the first place.)

Finally, any reputable social media company should be willing to sign up to minimum standards of practice in respect of content originated or disseminated on its platform, as well as observing existing regulation around personal data, data protection, cyber-security, privacy, intellectual property rights and general consumer protections. At the very least, social media has to prove itself a credible alternative to the legacy media it seeks to displace, otherwise they are not the solution, just another part of the problem.