Applied Science #13: Read the Label
On the present and future of record labels.
Almost seven years ago, I got kidnapped by a rockstar.
A quiet morning: Sunny November Friday in Los Angeles, steaming French press of coffee accompanying some bit of writing I likely never finished. I’d turned 28 a week prior. I felt profoundly confused about my career. Was I a full time manager now? Should I go work at a management company? Was I a music publisher? Was I about to start a label? Was I helping make music for a virtual artist? Should I quit it all and just write? Did any of this define me as a person?
As my then-girlfriend, now-wife Jenny bounded out of the bedroom on her way to work, my brain tumbled in the existential rinse cycle. Every sip of coffee reminded me there is no amount of coffee that can fix a crisis of faith.
A text popped up on my iMessage a few minutes before 9am.
“Do you want to come to Japan?”
Tim Smith. One of the managers I’d been speaking with at length about my future. He’d gone off to Tokyo to spend time with one of his star clients, Skrillex.
“I’d love to. When?”
I was assuming some response like “next week” or even “next month.” Not:
“Right now. Today.”
Already on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I could hardly process the very obvious: I was about to have someone else pay for me to fly across the world to hang with Skrillex.
Suddenly I was on a text with Tim’s assistant at the time, the trusty Ben Slavich:
“Jon send me your DOB and if LAX is preferred. Also what is the absolute earliest you can fly. Full legal name as well”
I called Jenny.
“Hey babe…so I’m going to Japan.”
“You’re doing what?”
“Going to Japan. Today. It’s only going to be for 36 hours. I’m going to hang with Skrillex and his manager.”
“Uh…ok.”
“I wouldn’t go if I didn’t think it was important.”
I packed hastily. Black tee. Black jeans. One pair of sneakers (probably black). Pair of boxers. Pair of socks. Laptop and charger.
I landed to a new text from Tim.
“You’re staying till Wednesday.”
Two thoughts crossed my mind.
I’m not really sure how I’m going to explain this extension to my girlfriend. I already have no idea how to explain this trip.
I’m going to need another shirt.
On our first full day in Tokyo, we rolled to Nakano Broadway, a labyrinthine mall bursting from an overstimulated child’s dream. Glimmering, technicolor toy stores with densely packed, endless rows of figurines, posable heroes, statues, games, and vintage icons. Dusty book stores full of classic manga, outlandish hentai, and beautifully-bound graphic novels. Restaurants and stalls stocked with fast-food favorites. Galleries displaying various iterations of virtual superstar Hatsune Miku. And, as fate would have it, a small new-wave record shop that also sold merch. Flipping through a rack of black tees, my hand landed on one sporting a white Warp Records logo.
I’d loved Warp Records since I started my musical wandering on the internet as a teenager. That small globe and italicized text meant something, a mark of certain quality or discernment on the part of a team that had nurtured and distributed some of the most important electronic artists (and, at very least, some of my favorites): Aphex Twin. Flying Lotus. Boards of Canada. Prefuse 73. Squarepusher. TNGHT. A logo like that was also easy shorthand to someone like Skrillex that I was either a) knowledgeable b) a poser or c) an asshole who could also be either a or b.
I forked over $25. Now I had another day’s outfit with dual purpose, a flag to fly as much as something to wear.
For this edition of Applied Science, we turn our focus to record labels. What they have been, how that shaped what they are now, and what they may morph into. The current landscape doesn’t resemble the one that birthed boutiques like Warp and surely doesn’t look like the prehistoric conditions that spawned behemoths like Atlantic and Columbia. The wants and needs of artists and fans alike drive us to push for better answers to the record industry’s eternal existential question: how to get the music people make to those that want to consume it.
What does a record label do anyway?
Recently, Warner Music Group announced an aggressive plan to purchase independent label stalwart Believe Music. With this gesture, Warner CEO Robert Kyncl signaled the future for independent labels and the record business at large.
First, the most successful independent labels as such will largely cease to be, as big exit events continue to tempt even the staunchest moralists (I imagine Sony and UMG might eye Beggars Group after watching Warner descend on Believe). While many independent labels and their owners still proffer philosophical and aesthetic differences from their major counterparts, a minuscule number of artists and an even smaller number of fans even know these labels exist. It’s easy to envision the disappearance of the majority of these companies as they either merge for survival or sell over the next decade. I’ve already burned enough brain cells working through the term “independent,” a source of much consternation and debate in music press and on social media (and if you want to set your remaining gray matter ablaze, just type “Kanye West independent” into Twitter).
Second, labels writ large will move further away from what we have known as the frontline business (signing and developing new artists), trifurcating into catalog acquisitions (like the Believe purchase), artist services for stars, and distribution for the masses of aspiring and middle class artists. Recent layoffs and restructuring coupled with record revenues light the path: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment, three publicly traded companies, hurtle towards the label as creative asset management portfolio. The corporate goo that coalesced in the time after Napster punctured the industry’s sense of invulnerability will continue to grow grayer and less defined, a morass of once meaningful brands melted down for their most valuable ore.
In all this conversation and reconfiguration, we’ve lost partial sight of what a record label is: A label on a record.
Slapped on the inner circle of a vinyl record, labels identified the company that owned and distributed the record in hand. Labels signified quality in recorded music’s early days, when editorial gatekeepers were scarce, radio limited, and the notion of playlists a distant, algorithmic twinkle in a yet-to-be-born Daniel Ek’s eye. At a time, Motown, Stax, or Curtom logos spoke to specific brands of soul, Def Jam’s tone-arm morphing out of text promised cutting edge hip-hop, Columbia’s ocular insignia stood for urbane, tasteful collections from thoughtful singer songwriters and jazz greats, and so on. Of course, here I’m also talking about logos and packaging (two visual aspects further minimized by digital delivery methods), but if you lose the sleeve of a vinyl record, the sticker on the center of the plastic itself is your only marker of origin. (Gareth Murphy’s Cowboys & Indies provides one of the best accounts of the record industry’s birth, both from detailing the technology that spurred brand-building as a matter of early survival)
Labels have always served three primary functions:
Funding the creation of music
Distributing music
Promoting that music prior to and after distribution.
The methods have changed over the years, but every label intends to be an amplifier (and an incubator only secondarily, when and if that stocks it with product to successfully amplify). The fourth primary function—identifying mark—has faded as music evolves away from requiring the purchase of an object that plays (a record player, cd player, cassette player) and the object it plays (record, cd, cassette).
If you want to get a sense of how much the DSPs value labels, try searching a label’s name on Spotify or Apple Music. Most labels have their names relegated to the bottom of an album’s tracklist on the respective dominant DSPs, if they are present at all (some artists prefer to keep their affiliations secret for a time; some labels choose to remain silent partners; some labels still inexplicably have issues with proper metadata practice, leading to incomplete or misleading attribution). You cannot click on a label on either Spotify or Apple Music. There is no capacity for easily determining other releases from a company. If a feature doesn’t exist, it likely means one of two things: Either there isn’t enough user demand for it or executives and engineers have determined its absence isn’t enough of a nuisance to deter new users or drive existing users to switch to a competitor. With Universal Music Group and TikTok currently staring one another down in a hot war over royalty rates, we’ll be treated to a live look at how little an emergent tech behemoth (with its own AI music tools fast incoming) considers the worth of the current largest label group.
How are most labels currently structured?
(The following is intended as a loose guide to historical label structures, not gospel truth based on one label or another; for a comprehensive though slightly dated overview of major label structure that will give you a fuller sense, it’s worth reading Dr. Logan Westbrook’s 1981 text The Anatomy of A Record Company)
The prevailing label of the past and present is a highly centralized company, operating with a top down hierarchy in which chairmen/chairwomen steer teams of A&R’s, traditional marketers, digital marketers, publicists, sync-licensing specialists, radio promoters, visual creatives, lawyers, and accountants to (theoretically) shepherd the recording careers of artists, generate profits, and, in the case of the majors and some indies, gobble up as much market share as possible.
The A&R department lies at the heart of every label. We dove into the various romantic and realistic notions of what an A&R’s job entails in a previous Applied Science. The A&R department focuses on discovering and signing artists. A&R’s may also help facilitate the creation of an artist’s music. They may be tasked with such lofty notions as unearthing “career artists” and “nurturing talent.” All that nurturing doesn’t mean much if they’re not signing things that put black on the balance sheet.
To help A&R’s stay on the rails, the A&R administration team assembles and monitors recording budgets and contractual clearances for projects. A&R administrators are also the people who pay invoices for studio time, for producer and featured artist fees, for mixers, engineers, and instrumentalists. These much maligned humans are the arbiters (and sometimes only the messengers) of approved spending and cash outflows during the recording process. The administration team also often encompasses the royalty department, though at most major labels this is an entirely separate organ that sits at the corporate center of company and oversees the accountings and payouts of all the constituent labels (i.e. at Universal Music Group, there is a royalty department that oversees royalty accountings for Interscope, Def Jam, Republic, Capitol, etc., but those individual labels do not have departments whose sole purpose is to oversee royalty reporting and payment).
The business affairs team (i.e. the lawyers) largely guides the decisions of the A&R administration team, working with the finance department to determine what a label should spend on a given deal or artist once the deal is done. New deals typically demand sophisticated financial projections, based both on a prospective signing’s existing commerce (if possible) and on other areas of label spending. The business affairs team is also tasked with developing other profit centers and partnerships for a label.
While the A&R team may be the label’s heart, the marketing apparatus animates the body. Marketing encompasses any strategy that exposes consumers to an artist’s name, image, and, ultimately, music. Radio and TV remain key promotion methods, though digital platforms (from Spotify to TikTok) have dominated musical transmission over the past quarter century. Traditional editorial outposts (magazines and blogs, which feel like relics of a brief era) still hold meaning, but largely as items to be checked off a list of requisites for artistic prestige, rather than as command posts of public consciousness. Marketing governs so much of a label’s activity even as A&R sets the slate, forcing rapid reaction to constantly shifting means of communication, as well as an unending desire to control the uncontrollable.
Of course, and especially in the case of the majors, a whole unheralded work force of assistants, interns, security personnel, janitors, cooks, and all manner of other support staff makes possible the glamorous work of the person who signed the superstar and the one who secured the Spotify billboard in Times Square for that artist.
All majors and many indies also have human resources departments tasked with overseeing hiring, firing, and conflict resolution. They don’t differ meaningfully from what you might imagine at any other corporation.
This structure makes sense for the label when it runs as intended. A&R takes lead, the tip of the spear that brings in the music (with the guidance of business affairs on deals), helps the artist navigate the label system, and sets the tone for the marketing folks to understand and successfully promote the artist. A&R admin handles the business around the music, working hand-in-hand with an artist’s legal team to make sure the music meets legal minimums for release (a process that differs in different territories and also at different labels, as many play fast and loose with these legal minimums). Creative comes next, wrapping its arms around upcoming releases where needed. The promotional infrastructure sits alongside A&R, mostly taking cues as the music comes in (though marketers and sales reps will always have thoughts about what works best in the marketplace that might be at odds with a more artist-centric A&R team, or gel completely with a more agnostic, research-driven A&R team). The apparatus hums and whirs in the background of a campaign, pushing an artist to the eyes of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions, capitalizing on the zeitgeist whenever it arises. Labels exist in search of alchemy, hoping to toss out the right elements for a hit, then pour resources into that hit to make sure it grows as big as possible.
It is best to think of a modern record label as a fame machine than as some sort of consortium of great musical minds. They are marketing-driven sales businesses whose product happens to be music, but could just as soon be home entertainment equipment, movies, sneakers, video games, or soft drinks. For all this negativity, there are still many good people at major labels and many incredible independent labels/distributors doing hard, passionate work—Warp, Lucky Me, XL Recordings, Backwoodz Records, Empire, Secretly Canadian, Loma Vista, to name but a small, unrepresentative few.
For the artist looking to become a star, the major label system beckons and can certainly work as intended, but increased demands for transparency and accountability have tested an industry bristling with inefficiencies, inequities, and illogical processes.
How did labels get to be this way?
Like much of the entertainment business, technological changes accelerated a zero sum perspective on success. Labels shied away from mid-tier acts that generated consistent (though unexplosive) income and moderately expensive signings without what they perceived as big hit potential (in much the same way Hollywood tended away from moderately priced rom-com’s towards big budget superhero epics and inexpensive horror films—both of which could yield serious rewards). Pure profit imperative drives this decision making, a mentality held over from the early 2000s downturn that made an unsafe bet of anything outside beyond established hit acts, inexpensive developing acts, or artists already with traction.
One could divide the history of the record industry into three broad periods:
The Age of Identity (1877 - 1999)
Phonograph record labels are born, forging visible and audible identities in order to attract audiences. Independent labels and distributors pop up largely as regional players, while a handful of labels have the hits, reach, money, and distributive control to be considered “major.” Most labels offer distinctive product (or at least promise distinctive product in their aesthetic and marketing) in order to attract specific kinds of artists and the consumers that come with them. Hard product (vinyl, cassette tape, CD) is relatively inexpensive to produce and can be sold at high costs, given limited alternative methods for consumption. Numerous movements and technological shifts characterize this timespan, though they primarily comprise different media for owning music (vinyl, cassette, CD), with shifts in consumption (radio, music videos on television) remaining purely in the sphere of broadcast media. Analog creation and consumption defined it in ways that changed superficially rather than substantively, as they would in the subsequent era.
The Age of Consolidation (2000 - 2016)
Major labels consolidate into three largely undifferentiated masses (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group) as Napster and the proliferation of digital technologies puncture the record industry’s inflated ability to generate profit from sales. Major labels largely eschew aesthetic and philosophical distinction in the pursuit of mass market hits. Independent labels position themselves in contrast to the majors, providing defined perspective and musical alternatives (allowing plenty of independent artists to build big audiences). Digital technology forces companies of all sizes to reconsider how distribution works for artists at all scales, while also inspiring a rethinking of record deals to maximize and diversify label profits from different sources.. (This era makes me think of a quote from Shoshanna Zuboff: “Maps created empire…”)
The Age of Choice (2016 to present)
Streaming saves the record industry and opens up a sea of new possibilities for “independent” artists. Streaming also conflates ownership and broadcast of music in unprecedented ways, beginning the flattening of creation, distribution, and consumption that has accelerated in recent years. Major labels consolidate their marketing power, but independent labels, numerous new distributors, and label services companies provide a buffet of options for artists looking for control and transparency (or simply do not want to sign to a major label). Creation and distribution are each easier than ever, allowing artists to make art and distribute it with dizzying speed. Though debates about the fairness of streaming royalty rates persist, the streaming era rejuvenated a flagging business. Simultaneously, the resurgence of vinyl and the ebb and flow of NFTs points to an era of consumers who also view themselves as collectors. It is worth noting that this “age of choice” has been accompanied by rapid consolidation of power and record revenues by major labels, a paradoxical last days of Rome that seems to portend unpredictable shifts in industry profit centers and fame-making.
We’re in the primordial phases of this most recent age. As the most malleable, it may end up being the longest. It features considerable consolidation, but definitionally it can almost never be as consolidated as the industry in the two eras that preceded it. Labels have been forced to adapt to new realities:
The proliferation of information about exploitative practices.
Artists’ calls for transparency, control, and equity.
The rise of decentralization, a zeitgeist that speaks directly to those looking for an antidote to old ways.
The wide availability of inexpensive creator tools.
In response, majors have largely doubled down on their two power centers: funding and marketing. They’ve maintained their strength amplifiers at the expense of the hollowed, yet consistently stated function of artist development.
The label of the future, the future of the label
Staring out at the abyss of the next decade, I thought a bit about the futures emerging for labels, artists, and creators at large.
Future of Labels
As we’ve covered, a label’s primary historical functions have been funding musical creation (largely through A&R’s discovering and signing new talent), distributing music, and marketing that music.
In 2024, numerous circumstances have made the signing and development of new talent prohibitively risky and cost-inefficient (a few examples: many unsigned artists with leverage now ask for shorter term deals on better royalty splits, an effect of better education on the industry undercutting historic power asymmetries; labels signing artists with viral hits often can’t replicate the success of the song that drove the signing, pointing to a crisis of artist development in a system ill-designed for patience). The major label group of the future will likely focus on:
Catalog acquisition (or signing de-risked artists that already have significant cashflow and catalog)
Services (for stars)
Distribution (for the masses or for middle class artists, infrastructurally casting the widest net possible to trawl the surface of the earth for successful songs)
No matter the lip service labels pay to nurturing “true” artists, the label business model that persisted through the dawn of the digital era now proves too risky and expensive for publicly traded companies. Though major labels may cosmetically continue to house companies with notable brands (i.e. how RCA, Columbia, and Epic present as different companies under the Sony umbrella), UMG’s recent reorganization points to the arbitrariness of the distinction between individual labels waving a wider corporate banner. Put simply, the consolidated major label structure stopped making sense sometime between the birth of Spotify and the listing of WMG and UMG on the New York Stock Exchange.
Before UMG’s recent restructuring, a look at its holdings would reveal no fewer than eight “frontline” major labels, entities all competing for many of the same signings, touting versions of the same services, without any real differentiating philosophies or genre specialties. The idea of one label group owning many seemingly competitive major labels was born with an expiration date, particularly as aging catalog continues to prove more lucrative than newer signings.
UMG’s streamlining sketches the shape of the future: The individual label imprint as a vague creative agency, touting a menu of services for artists that rise to the level of need a major label can support.
The thinning won’t end here.
Catalog will be consolidated in a central department away from the grip of the front-facing labels, whose sole focus will be servicing the current generation of superstars and inexpensive emergent talent while marketers figure out what to do with all the monetizable copyrights older than 18 months (the growing category of “shadow catalog” Lucas Shaw succinctly outlined last year). With so much of catalog’s acquisition and promotional cost concentrated in the past, this centralized approach will allow labels to keep leaner teams of executives in their employ around catalog, further doubling down on new profit maximization strategies. More services that don’t bolster the specific strengths of frontline companies (like business affairs, administration, and perhaps even aspects of marketing) will be pushed fully into the corporate center, joining royalty administration and human resources as anonymous motors of massive machines.
Merck Mercuriadis’ publicly traded intellectual property vacuum Hipgnosis has seen its share of recent troubles, portending the uncertain state of the catalog market. Still, its formation proves visionary. All labels and publishers now search the private channels of lawyers, managers, and power brokers on the hunt for rights to acquire. Execs aim to bolster profits with proven assets. Hipgnosis started a wave that mirrored industry troubles, the number of superstars in their 30s and 40s suggesting the difficulty of breaking new global acts in the attention economy age (though it may be better understood as the era of the “distraction economy,” a concept outlined in Ted Gioia’s 2024 state of culture). In this light, major labels will drive their front-facing brands deeper into the service-for-stars business. Profits will likely remain concentrated in back catalog. Distribution of a high volume of songs and artists through companies like Sony’s Orchard (which acquired indie stalwart AWAL within the past three years) and Warner’s ADA will allow for a combination of market share expansion, profit, and exposure to emergent talent.
In 2021, I said the following in Applied Science #7:
“Hipgnosis (with its hoovering up of every catalog available and its acquisition of independent publisher Big Deal) gives a hint at what the future might be: An utterly unsentimental intellectual property megalith, an entity designed with the express purpose of acquisition, gaining enough critical mass to become a powerful lobbying body as well as a souped up library—an endless repository ready to find new media partners and products to help breathe life into all its owned properties, generating income anew from the hits of yesteryear and the forgotten tunes alike. Syncs, samples, boxsets, Broadway adaptations of whole catalogs, television series built from songs. All that’s missing is an accompanying life rights business and you could have a biopic factory churning out Oscar-nominated performances at a dizzying rate.
Or perhaps the future is just a fin-tech tool that also plays music—an idea that sounds like it was abandoned on the cutting room floor of Black Mirror or Ex Machina.”
On the topic of majors providing distribution to elbow for more market share and identifying emergent talent early, my second Applied Science explored some possibilities in 2019. I closed it with the following:
“Distribution plus services (marketing, radio promotion, press) is the music’s industry’s creeping present and impending future. Sony’s expansion of the Orchard, Warner Records’ quiet launch of Levels, and Universal’s boundless appetite for companies like Create and Empire tacitly acknowledge changing artist demands. It’s the core of what everyone at the Over Everything panel [Ed. Note: A panel I spoke on and mentioned earlier in the newsletter] wanted to know: How can I distribute my music independently and cut through the noise? There is no singular, sexy solution for cutting through the clutter. I’ll discuss many of my philosophies in upcoming newsletters, but the unsatisfying reality is that no one knows best. At root, you must create the art you want to create, tell the story you want to tell, and convert strangers into fans and evangelists day by day. It might take a decade, it might take a few months and some TikTok luck—either way, your understanding and control of your music’s distribution (where it lives and how it gets there) lies at the core of everything. It’s one of the only things you can directly influence; once your music is out, it’s a chemical exposed to the elements, warping and moving in ways that are hard to predict.”
We have arrived at the threshold of these futures. UMG, Warner, and Sony shave off pounds of flesh to pad stock prices while straining to answer existential questions.
Labels, freshly shorn, will abdicate much of the work of artist incubation and creative execution. What fills that space could comprise a book-length exploration. Suffice to say there will be much conversation about what it means to develop artists in the age of artificial intelligence and major labels chasing blockbuster after blockbuster. Thinking back to my fateful Warp t-shirt, the label as a harbinger of quality and a kind of community anchor (even, in some cases, a physical community center rooted in stores or studios) could gain strength as majors and mid-sized labels distributed by majors continue to shed perspective beyond commerce.
Future of Artists
As ever, asymmetries of power and the cold chaos of existence force artists to figure out the best path forward without reliable navigation tools. This moment calls to mind a Nina Simone quote reserved for a different purpose, yet no less relevant here:
“An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I'm concerned, it's their choice, but I CHOOSE to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when everyday is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved.”
While Simone spoke specifically of politics here, the quote feels as much a directive about social realities distilled in song as an awareness of the conditions that shape the creation, exploitation, and consumption of art (which are, of course, a matter of politics).
As we think about the future of labels, we can consider the types of artists that major labels will support.
In a streamlined corporate system designed to maximize market share and stock price, superstars like Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Harry Styles will continue to command services and resources tantamount to the scale of their blockbuster albums. Like film studios, labels will focus on the tentpole projects that drive outsized revenue. These releases subsidize the handful of inexpensive developmental acts that may become stars and the few non-commercial projects that garner critical acclaim or attract awards, lighthouses for future artist signings of the kind of home a major label could be. The “middle class” artist will find ill-fitting harbor in the major label system. The buffet of distribution and label services companies that exist within and without majors may prove better homes.
The artist that isn’t suited for a major label must be their own label. I considered this concept in broad strokes in last year’s missive on underground hip-hop economics. James Blake’s launch of Vault.fm noisily highlights the further need for artists with die hard fanbases to have access to tools that allow them to capture the value of their art as they see fit. While I grow weary of the constant relitigation of music’s monetary value, it is good to see more market signal for these kinds of tools (even though it would have been funnier and, perhaps, more effective if Blake just launched an OnlyFans account). Though direct-to-fan strategies will not make sense for every artist (as Water & Music details), it is important that creators at all scales have resources to cultivate dedicated fanbases and own their relationship with fans, rather than invisibly leasing the data to some third party.
On the heels of Blake’s Vault launch, famously DIY rapper Russ announced the launch of his own similar platform. One key difference: Vault is a service other artists can use, whereas Russ built something bespoke for himself. Each artist’s tool of choice emphasizes the widening rift between mass market aims and niche strategies that can develop real careers for artists unsuited for major label paradigm. This moment feels like a grand climate shift, water levels receding to reveal submerged landscapes hiding all the while. The super fan concept has been important from the time of fan clubs in the ‘60s and ‘70s, mythologized in the modern era by Kevin Kelly’s “1000 true fans” thesis. Luminate’s 2023 year-end report notes director to consumer sales jumped 27.8% from 2022 (with D2C vinyl even higher at 38%), while passive streaming growth stagnated (up 5.7% in 2023, after a 9.1% increase in 2022, and double digit percentage increases in each of the previous three years, per the RIAA). For a counterpoint to the froth around Blake’s Vault partnership and a skeptical addendum to Kelly’s silicon gospel, musician Tom Vek offers up an alternative path in a recent Guardian op-ed. Neither Vek’s vision nor the subscription model perfectly solves current problems, further evidence that a blanket approach to the music super fan won’t likely work.
(Ed. Note: The above is not theory for me. Last year, we launched PANIC.fm for my client TOBi, a bespoke web app developed with start-up Cool World. The goal: break out of the anonymous hegemony of Spotify, identify core fans, and provide them with a gamified experience around content that also didn’t force TOBi to be perennially on. So far, it’s worked as we’d hoped. In nine months, we’ve seen this idea function for an artist that does not have easily identified diehards in the way a Russ or James Blake does.)
Even with the rise of streaming as the primary mode of music consumption the world over, the last 20 years have reinforced the idea that dedicated fans will buy things (like vinyl and even NFTs), passive listeners will not. Some artists command both bases (Travis Scott, Tyler the Creator, Taylor Swift), some just one or the other. Spotify has supplanted radio (as has TikTok, in its own infinite way), even as terrestrial radio stubbornly holds on for dear life. Spotify works primarily for passive consumption, bread and butter of superstars in any preceding era. The classic radio model assumes, tautologically, that many people will like what many people already like. It relies on the notion that much of the audience will consume popular music almost incidentally, whether driven by an editorial playlist or an algorithm.
The super fan warrants an “if you build it, they will come” approach in a natively digital era. Artists wishing to capture these dedicated consumers will need to build on top of solid distribution funnels, understand their audiences, foster real community, and think of DSPs as amplifiers rather than primary pathways to sustained success.
And yet as the old models for making hits prove uncertain.
As superstars attempt different tactics to remain relevant.
As labels invest in sure things or cheap things if they invest in anything new.
As AI and other technologies challenge long-held beliefs about authorship and how to make money from creation.
The best ideas are perhaps the oldest:
Figure out who you are.
Make the music that feels truest to you (or at least feels like a challenge worth pursuing).
Build a community of likeminded creators in all disciplines.
Share your music with others in a way that feels natural.
Or make it for yourself and don’t worry about who finds it (if your concern is not to be a professional musician).
If you do want to be a celebrity artist, there’s always a path for that too. It’s just going to mean living your life in viral chunks, constantly edited to be shared for consumption and reconfiguration. (Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, but even cult icons like Lana Del Rey can’t escape the million-fingered grip of sped up/slowed down versions, user generated videos, and endless DJ remixes)
Future of Creation
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we have entered unprecedented territory for democratized creation.
Over the past 25 years, new technology has conflated creation, distribution, and consumption. An example: YouTube provides a mechanism where users upload (distribute) videos they make off platform or stream live on platform (create); other users watch those videos (consume). Platforms like TikTok and Twitch, games like Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite (crucial music consumption loci of the current and next generations), and audio tools like Splice and BandLab digitally fuse processes that once required different physical entities for creation, distribution, and consumption.
The future of creation is a multiplayer experience that fosters collaboration and the act of making music as a kind of consumption in themselves. User generated content has already become a primary axis for network building, as Spotify and Apple Music calcify into old style broadcast mechanisms.
The rise of BandLab proves particularly informative. A profile on BandLab CEO Kuok Meng Ru summarizes the company’s model:
“BandLab...doesn’t receive royalties from music made on its platform. Instead, the company makes money on artist services (which include distribution, livestreaming and BandLab Boost) that allow acts to turn their profiles or postings into ads on the platform to better reach the 50 million registered users BandLab has.”
BandLab launched in November 2015, only a few months after Apple Music launched (June 30, 2015) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) introduced a shared global release date, commonly known as New Music Fridays (July 10, 2015). BandLab’s promise of simplifying creation for any and all has attracted over 100 million users. It has already spawned one bonafide, new age hitmaker in Interscope’s D4VD. BandLab opened the floodgates for creator tools like Soundraw, BeatConnect, and WarpSound, to name but a few of the startups riding the consumer-creator revolution and artificial intelligence bloom to raise funds.
Artist and audience have never existed on a more fluid continuum, the wall between one and the other so diffuse as to only seem noticeable in the few true moments of celebrity throughout a calendar year. Now the belief that anyone can be a creator takes real root in the availability of tools for making whatever one can imagine. We live in a time when digital spaces allow makers to effortlessly share what they make with other makers, compete around their creations, collaborate remotely, and experience joy in the act of making without thinking primarily of monetization. While parasocial fandom and traditional broadcast have strengthened around master world builders like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, hundreds of millions of people now trade solely pressing play for entering the playground.
The above notion leads us, fatefully, to artificial intelligence. I have shared my hopes and fears about AI elsewhere. Musical AI is here, it is an existential threat to many, and, in the same breath, it is an exciting expanse that opens up new modes of creation and experience. The proliferation of tools forces not only a rethinking of traditional copyright, but a rethinking of the tools for tracking and monetizing creation. We already see these concerns born out in the myriad AI training lawsuits popping up in recent months, to say nothing of the often dubious lawsuits that already typified the litigious tactics of artist estates. Ethical training of large language models is a massive concern, as is the ethical exploitation of any creative output generated by tools like Suno, the recent hot name in music AI. What we must tackle next are frictionless systems for the use of music in the age of infinite remixing and sharing on social platforms and DSPs. You can’t blanket every illegal creation with takedowns. You have to build better systems.
The next era will reward synthesis, curation, and collaboration. Infinite access and dizzying choice will demand powerful associative thinking and taste for anyone hoping to navigate and stand out.
In the next Applied Science, I’m going to explore this notion of the human being as synthesizer further. As well, later this week my friend Alex Siber will explore the necessity of perpetuity deals used by record labels in a piece I’ve helped edit for Catalog’s Liner Notes blog. It fits in spirit with the many words spent above.
one of the best synthesizers out there. Thanks for this, Jon!
Brilliant insights. Thanks.