Tag Archives: #music industry

State of the Music Industry…

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Depending on your perspective, the music industry is in fine health. 2023 saw a record year for sales (physical, digital and streaming), and touring artists are generating more income from ticket sales and merchandising than the GDPs of many countries. Even vinyl records, CDs and cassettes are achieving better sales than in recent years!

On the other hand, only a small number of musicians are making huge bucks from touring; while smaller venues are closing down, meaning fewer opportunities for artists to perform.

And despite the growth in streaming, relatively few musicians are minting it from these subscription-based services, that typically pay very little in royalties to the vast majority of artists. (In fact, some content can be zero-rated unless it achieves a minimum number of plays.)

Aside from the impact of streaming services, there are two other related challenges that exercise the music industry: the growing use of Artificial Intelligence, and the need for musicians to be recognised and compensated more fairly for their work and their Intellectual Property.

With AI, a key issue is whether the software developers are being sufficiently transparent about the content sources used to train their models, and whether the authors and rights owners are being fairly recompensed in return for the use of their IP. Then there are questions of artistic “creativity”, authorial ownership, authenticity, fakes and passing-off when we are presented with AI-generated music. Generative music software has been around for some time, and anyone with a smart phone or laptop can access millions of tools and samples to compose, assemble and record their own music – and many people do just that, given the thousands of new songs that are being uploaded every day. Now, with the likes of Suno, it’s possible to “create” a 2-minute song (complete with lyrics) from just a short text prompt. Rolling Stone magazine recently did just that, and the result was both astonishing and dispiriting.

I played around with Suno myself (using the free version), and the brief prompt I submitted returned these two tracks, called “Midnight Shadows”:

Version 1

Version 2

The output is OK, not terrible, but displays very little in the way of compositional depth, melodic development, or harmonic structure. Both tracks sound as if a set of ready-made loops and samples had simply been cobbled together in the same key and tempo, and left to run for 2 minutes. Suno also generated two quite different compositions with lyrics, voiced by a male and a female singer/bot respectively. The lyrics were nonsensical attempts to verbally riff on the text prompt. The vocals sounded both disembodied (synthetic, auto-tuned and one-dimensional), and also exactly the sort of vocal stylings favoured by so many contemporary pop singers, and featured on karaoke talent shows like The Voice and Idol. As for Suno’s attempt to remix the tracks at my further prompting, the less said the better.

While content attribution can be addressed through IP rights and commercial licensing, the issue of “likeness” is harder to enforce. Artists can usually protect their image (and merchandising) against passing off, but can they protect the tone and timbre of their voice? A new law in Tennessee attempts to do just that, by protecting a singer’s a vocal likeness from unauthorised use. (I’m curious to know if this protection is going to be extended to Jimmy Page’s guitar sound and playing style, or an electronic musician’s computer processing and programming techniques?)

I follow a number of industry commentators who, very broadly speaking, represent the positive (Rob Abelow), negative (Damon Krukowski) and neutral (Shawn Reynaldo) stances on streaming, AI and musicians’ livelihood. For every positive opportunity that new technology presents, there is an equal (and sometimes greater) threat or challenge that musicians face. I was particularly struck by Shawn Reynaldo’s recent article on Rolling Stone’s Suno piece, entitled “A Music Industry That Doesn’t Sell Music”. The dystopian vision he presents is millions of consumers spending $10 a month to access music AI tools, so they can “create” and upload their content to streaming services, in the hope of covering their subscription fees….. Sounds ghastly, if you ask me.

Add to the mix the demise of music publications (for which AI and streaming are also to blame…), and it’s easy to see how the landscape for discovering, exploring and engaging with music has become highly concentrated via streaming platforms and their recommender engines (plus marketing budgets spent on behalf of major artists). In the 1970s and 1980s, I would hear about new music from the radio (John Peel), TV (OGWT, The Tube, Revolver, So It Goes, Something Else), the print weeklies (NME, Sounds, Melody Maker), as well as word of mouth from friends, and by going to see live music and turning up early enough to watch the support acts. Now, most of my music information comes from the few remaining print magazines such as Mojo and Uncut (which largely focus on legacy acts), The Wire (but probably too esoteric for its own good), and Electronic Sound (mainly because that’s the genre that most interests me); plus Bandcamp, BBC Radio 6’s “Freak Zone”, Twitter, and newsletters from artists, labels and retailers. The overall consequence of streaming and up/downloading is that there is too much music to listen to (but how much of it is worth the effort?), and multiple invitations to “follow”, “like”, “subscribe” and “sign up” for direct content (but again, how much of it is worth the effort?). For better or worse, the music media at least provided an editorial filter to help address quality vs quantity (even if much of it ended up being quite tribal).

In the past, the music industry operated as a network of vertically integrated businesses: they sourced the musical talent, they managed the recording, manufacturing and distribution of the content (including the hardware on which to play it), and they ran publishing and licensing divisions. When done well, this meant careful curation, the exercise of quality control, and a willingness to invest in nurturing new artists for several albums and for the duration of their career. But at times, record companies have self-sabotaged, by engaging in format wars (e.g., over CD, DCC and MiniDisc standards), by denying the existence of on-line and streaming platforms (until Apple and Spotify came along), and by becoming so bloated that by the mid-1980s, the major labels had to merge and consolidate to survive – largely because they almost abandoned the sustainable development of new talent. They also ignored their lucrative back catalogues, until specialist and independent labels and curators showed them how to do it properly. Now, they risk overloading the reissue market, because they lack proper curation and quality control.

The music industry really only does three things:

1) A&R (sourcing and developing new talent)

2) Marketing (promotion, media and public relations)

3) Distribution & Licensing (commercialisation).

Now, #1 and #2 have largely been outsourced to social media platforms (and inevitably, to AI and recommender algorithms), and #3 is going to be outsourced to web3 (micro-payments for streaming subscriptions, distribution of NFTs, and licensing via smart contracts). Whether we like it or not, and taking their lead from Apple and Spotify, the music businesses of the future will increasingly resemble tech companies. The problem is, tech rarely understands content from the perspective of aesthetics – so expect to hear increasingly bland AI-generated music from avatars and bots that only exist in the metaverse.

Meanwhile, I go to as many live gigs as I can justify, and brace my wallet for the next edition of Record Store Day later this month…

Next week: Reclaim The Night

 

 

 

Music streaming is so passé…

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Streaming services have changed the way we listen to music, and not just in the way the content is delivered (primarily via mobile devices), or the sheer number of songs available for our listening pleasure (whole catalogues at our fingertips).

These streaming platforms (which have been with us for more then 15 years) have also led to some more negative consequences: the deconstruction of albums into individual tracks (thereby undermining artists’ intention to present their work as a whole, rather than its component parts); shifting the relationship we have with our music collections from “ownership” to “renting”; paying paltry levels of streaming fees compared to royalties on physical sales and downloads; pushing suggested content via opaque algorithms and “recommender engines” rather than allowing listener self-discovery; squashing music into highly compressed audio formats, thus impairing the listening quality; and reducing album cover art work and design into tiny thumbnail images that don’t do justice to the original. (If you can’t appreciate the significance and importance of album art work, this forthcoming documentary may change your mind.)

Of course, streaming is not the only way to consume music – we still have vinyl, CDs and even cassettes in current production. (And let’s not forget radio!) Although optimistic numbers about the vinyl revival of recent years have to be put in the context of the streaming behemoths, there is no doubt that this antique format still has an important role to play, for new releases, the box-set and reissue industry, and the second-hand market.

For myself, I’ve largely given up on Spotify and Apple Music: with the former, I don’t think there is enough transparency on streaming fees (especially those paid to independent artists and for self-released recordings) or how more popular artists and their labels can pay to manipulate the algorithms, plus the “recommendations” are often out of kilter with my listening preferences; with the latter, geo-blocking often means music I am looking for is not available in Australia. (As I am writing, Spotify is playing a track which has been given the wrong title, proving that their curation and editorial quality is not perfect.)

Streaming can also be said to be responsible for a type of content narrowcasting – the more often a song is streamed (especially one that has been sponsored or heavily promoted by a record label) the more often it will appear in suggested playlists. Some recent analysis by Rob Abelow suggests that fewer than 10% of songs on the Spotify billion stream club were released before 2000. This may have something to do with listener demographics (e.g., digital natives), but it also suggests that songs only available as streams (i.e., no download or physical release), or songs heavily marketed by labels wanting to promote particular content to a specific audience, will come to dominate these platforms.

Further evidence of how streaming is skewed towards major artists is a recent post by Damon Krukowski, showing how independent musicians like him are being “encouraged” to be more like megstars such as Ed Sheeran. Never mind the quality of the music, just think about the “pre-saves” and “countdown pages” (tools which are not yet available to every artist on Spotify?).

I’ve been using both Bandcamp and Soundcloud for more than 10 years, to release my own music and to discover new content. I began with Soundcloud, but soon lost my enthusiasm because they kept changing their business model, and they enabled more popular artists to dominate the platform with “premium” services and pay-to-play fees that favour artists and labels with bigger marketing budgets. Whereas Bandcamp appears to be doing a better job of maintaining a more level playing field in regard to artist access, and a more natural way for fans to connect with artists they already know, and to discover new music they may be interested in.

But all of this simply means that streaming has possibly peaked, at least as an emerging format. The industry is facing a number of challenges. Quite apart from ongoing disputes about royalty payments and album integrity, streaming is going to be disrupted by new technologies and business models, thanks to blockchain, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens. These startups are going to improve how artists are remunerated for their work, create better engagement between creators and their audiences, and provide for more transparent content discovery and recommendations. Elsewhere, the European Union is considering ways to preserve cultural diversity, promote economic sustainability within the music industry, remove the harmful effects of payola, make better use of content metadata for things like copyright, creativity and attribution, and provide clear labeling on content that has been created using tools like AI.

Just for the record, I’m not a huge fan of content quotas (a possible outcome from the EU proposals), but I would prefer to see better ways to discover new music, via broadcast and online media, which are not dependent on regimented Top 40 playlists, the restrictive formats of ubiquitous TV talent shows, or record label marketing budgets. Australia’s Radio National used to have a great platform for new and alternative music, called Sound Quality, but that came off air nearly 10 years ago, with nothing to replace it. Elsewhere, I tune into BBC Radio 6 Music’s Freak Zone – not all of it is new music, but there is more variety in each 2 hour programme than a week’s listening on most other radio stations.

Next week: More Cold War Nostalgia

 

Musical Idolatry

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As a rebooted version of “Australian Idol” appears on network television, I can’t decide whether programs like this are a result of the current state of the music industry OR are they the cause of the industry’s malaise…?

I’ll admit upfront that I know I’m not the target demographic for these shows (Idol, Voice, Talent…), so I’m not even going to comment on the quality of the musical content or the presentation format.

Before we had recorded music or broadcast radio, the industry relied upon song writers selling sheet music, in the hope their compositions would get performed in theatres and concert halls – and audiences would want to buy copies of the songs to perform at home.

Then, radio largely killed the music hall, and with the advent of the 7″ vinyl record, together they eventually displaced the reliance on sheet music sales. From the early 1960s onwards, we also saw more artists writing, performing and recording their own material, which transformed both music publishing and the record industry itself.

Although record labels still exist as a means to identify, develop and commercialise new talent, only three of the so-called major labels have survived – a process of industry consolidation and M&A activity that began in earnest in the 1980s – ironically, a period now regarded as a “Golden Age” of pop music.

A key legacy of the punk movement of the 1970s was a network of independent music labels, distributors, publishers and retailers – along with a strong DIY ethic of self-released records and independent fanzines, thanks to lower production costs and easier access to manufacturing and distribution.

Now, there is more new music being released than is humanly possible to listen to. It is relatively quick and simple to produce and release your own music – record on a home laptop (even a tablet or smart phone will do), upload the finished mp3 files to user-accessible platforms such as Bandcamp and SoundCloud, and promote yourself on social media. However, without significant marketing dollars to buy an audience, those hoping to become an overnight viral sensation may be disappointed. And even if you do manage to get traction on one of the global streaming platforms, the income from digital plays is a fraction of what artists used to earn from physical sales.

So that’s how the major labels (and some of the larger independents) still manage to dominate the industry: they have the budget to spend on developing new talent, and they have money for marketing campaigns (and possibly to influence those streaming algorithms). Plus, they have access to a huge back catalogue that they can carry on repackaging at a fraction of the original production costs.

It’s also true, however, that the shorter shelf-life of many newer artists means that labels don’t have such an appetite for long-term development plans, where they are willing to nurture a new talent for several years, before expecting a return on their initial investment. Just as with fast fashion, the pop music industry has become hooked on a fast turnover of product, because they know only a fraction of new releases will ever become a hit, and they have to keep feeding the beast with new content.

Which brings me back to programs like Idol. First, it’s one way for the music industry to fast-track their next success. Second, it literally is a popularity contest – the industry gets an idea of what the public likes, so they can pre-determine part of their release schedule. Third, hosting these contests on commercial TV means advertising dollars and sponsorship deals can help defray their A&R and marketing costs (or, at least help them to prioritise where to spend their money).

But let’s not pretend that these singing shows are nothing more than televised karaoke. Performers don’t get to play their own songs, or even play any instruments (as far as I can tell). The program content relies on cover versions – usually songs that are well-known, and therefore already road-tested on the audience. Plus, by choosing to perform a particular song, a contestant may hope to win by association or identification with the successful artist who originally recorded it. But contestants are not free to choose whatever song they like – my understanding is there are only 1,000 (popular) songs to choose from, just like karaoke.

In pretending to discover new talent, in part, the industry is simply hoping to re-release songs in their back catalogue, albeit with a new face on the record. Through the restrictive format of these programs, the industry is not discovering new musicians or finding new song writers and composers, and it’s certainly not forging any new direction in music, because of the reliance upon an existing formula, and dependence on a very specific (and somewhat narrow) strand of pop music.

Next week: Eat The Rich?

 

Digital Perfectionism?

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In stark contrast to my last blog on AI and digital humans, I’ve just been reading Damon Krukowski‘s book, “The New Analog – Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World”, published in 2017. It’s an essential text for anyone interested in the impact of sound compression, noise filtering, loudness and streaming on the music industry (and much more besides).

The are two main theses the author explores:

1. The paradoxical corollary to Moore’s Law on the rate of increase in computing power is Murphy’s Moore’s Law: that in striving for improved performance and perfectionism in all things digital, equally we risk amplifying the limitations inherent in analog technology. in short, the more something improves, the more it must also get worse. (See also my previous blogs on the problem of digital decay, and the beauty of decay music.)

2. In the realm of digital music and other platforms (especially social media), stripping out the noise (to leave only the signal) results in an impoverished listening, cultural and social experience; flatter sound, less dynamics, narrower tonal variation, limited nuance, an absence of context. In the case of streaming music, we lose the physical connection with the original artwork, accompanying sleeve notes, creative credits and even the original year of publication.

Thinking about #1 above, imagine this principle applied to #AI: would the pursuit of “digital perfectionism” mean we lose a large part of what makes analogue homo sapiens more “human”? Would we end up compressing/removing “noise” such as doubt, uncertainty, curiosity, irony, idiosyncrasies, cognitive diversity, quirkiness, humour etc.?

As for #2, like the author, I’m not a total Luddite when it comes to digital music, but I totally understand his frustration (philosophical, phonic and financial) when discussing the way CDs exploit “loudness” (in the technical sense), how .mp3 files compress more data into less space (resulting in a deterioration in overall quality), and the way streaming platforms have eroded artists’ traditional commercial return on their creativity.

The book also discusses the role of social media platforms in extracting value from the content that users contribute, reducing it to homogenised data lakes, selling it to the highest bidder, and compressing all our personal observations, relationships and original ideas (the things that make us nuanced human beings) into a sterilsed drip-feed of “curated” content.

In the narrative on music production, and how “loudness” took hold in the mid-1990s, Krukowski takes specific aim at the dreaded sub-woofer. These speakers now pervade every concert, home entertainment system, desk-top computer and car stereo. They even bring a distorted physical presence into our listening experience:

“Nosebleeds at festivals, trance states at dance clubs, intimidation by car audio…. When everything is louder than everything else, sounds lose context and thus meaning – even the meaning of loud.”

The main issue I have with digital music is that we as listeners have very little control over how we hear it – apart from adjusting the volume. So again, any nuance or variation has been ironed out, right to the point of consumption – we can’t even adjust the stereo balance. I recall that my boom box in the 1980s had separate volume controls for each speaker, and a built-in graphic equalizer. To paraphrase Joy Division, “We’ve Lost Control”.

Next week: I CAN live without my radio…