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The Heat Is On: Reactions And Response To ‘The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t’

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Slate:

Musicians, writers, and other creative folk are still scratching their heads over the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The New Making It” — packaged online as “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” — looked at how the Internet economy, instead of destroying creative careers, had redrawn them in “complicated and unexpected ways.” The story’s author, Steven Johnson, is an engaging writer, and the piece is told largely through statistics, which most readers assume to be beyond criticism. So why are so many people who work in the world of culture wondering why the article seemed to describe a best-of-all-worlds planet very different from the one they live on?


The tone of the Slate article is a little off-putting for me though I understand where the author is coming from. I do agree the trope of musicians making more money on the road, thus compensating for lost recording revenue, is a bit of a wrong turn, and isn’t encouraging to us studio hermits or songwriters. That was a trap that Johnson fell into. But I feel there’s too much focus in these complaints on the traditional occupations – session players, record store clerks, and so on – without acknowledging the newly emerging opportunities. It is melancholy to see some of these professions fade (and I was a happy record store clerk for many years), but I accept this is what happens as society and technology evolves. Again, I feel we should be focusing on the prospects of autonomy and what it can do for creative people. This is the real story for me … the possibilities that are now available, when before we had to deal with labels, and distributors, and (yes) touring, and publicists. There’s now a freedom to opt out of any or all of those and still make a living.

Here’s another paragraph from the Slate article about a larger trend that I do agree is troublesome:

It’s worth looking at the world of culture as an environment: As rents in cities that have traditionally made creative life possible – especially collaborative creative life – jolts up by 10 percent or more a year, musicians, writers, actors, and others get forced out to make room for financiers and trustafarians. If I can extend the eco-system metaphor for a second: For most people working in film, music, television, or books, that is hardly sustainable. David Byrne has made this point about the one-percenting of American cities and its impact on culture quite eloquently; “The New Making It” does not even engage his argument indirectly.


The part about ‘collaborative creative life’ really hurts. Much of the music I listen to wouldn’t exist if not for the downtrodden arts community that inhabited New York City in the ’70s. This concern is a bit outside of Johnson’s original article, in my opinion, but is something that will have an impact on the quality, and regional meaningfulness, of American art moving forward.


Meanwhile, Bob Lefsetz weighs in:

Expect a flurry of naysayers to come out of the woodwork shortly. The Trichordist will freak out, all those agitating for a return to yesteryear. But the truth is we’re never going back, even if everything Steven Johnson says in this article is wrong. So why can’t we just accept it and move on, certainly the public has done this.



So stop complaining. You can make money in music, many are. Yes, the spoils are going to the 1%, but that’s true in all walks of our economy. Turns out there’s a limited number of top-notch execs and a limited number of top-notch musicians.



The public is happy. Instead of trying to get people to change their minds and go back to a past that you want, better to give them what they want, even better, give them MORE than what they want, new and different. That’s what turns people on, not when they’re corralled and ripped-off, but when they’re enticed.


And then Steven Johnson has posted his promised response to the criticisms from the Future Of Music Coalition.

Via The New York Times Magazine:

Interestingly, in all the responses to the article, no one so far has been able to suggest a data source that suggests that mean or median incomes for musicians have declined since 1999, adjusted for inflation. Everything that I have uncovered in many months of researching this article suggests that the story of music since 1999 is one of steady but small growth for musicians. Not some glorious renaissance, but certainly not a crisis.



As I wrote at the end of the article, I do not think this data should be used as a mindless defense of the status quo. For what it’s worth, I think musicians (and other creators) deserve to see an even bigger piece of the pie. I get that groups advocating on behalf of musicians may worry that a modestly optimistic story will make it harder for artists to negotiate better deals with their labels or new streaming services, or will encourage consumers to return to their old music-piracy ways because they read some article that said the musicians are doing just fine. But I think it’s just as important to point out that it has turned out to be a very exciting time to make music for a living, one filled with many new opportunities that didn’t exist 15 years ago. It’s important, for starters, because it contradicts a (false) theory that many smart people still hold about the state of the culture. But it’s also important for the music itself. I worry that there’s a whole generation of musicians out there who will be scared by all the doomsayers toward more conventional career paths, when there is so much evidence of opportunity all around us.

(Previously) and (Previously)

In a Land Before iTunes

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A review of Michael Denning’s new book Noise Uprising – which sounds fascinating – in New Republic:

Denning’s story starts in 1925, when engineers perfected the technique of electrical recording and the 78 RPM phonograph record supplanted sheet music as the basic unit of the music industry. A handful of Western record companies spent the next five years recording local music across the world. Some of the music they recorded—Indonesian kroncong, South African marabi, Shanghainese huangse yinyue—remains unfamiliar to most Americans. Others, like jazz and tango, have become ubiquitous. The quantity and diversity of recordings from this period reflect the record companies’ basic indifference to the music they put out: They were willing to record anything that might persuade local consumers they needed a record player.



The varieties of local music recorded during the phonograph boom were not quite “folk” music rooted in the rhythms of rural life. Instead Denning calls them “vernacular” music—music performed and listened to by the people, as opposed to the high tradition of “classical music,” guarded by a small, highly trained group of musicians and mostly performed in formal settings. Vernacular music, like vernacular languages—Spanish, Italian, etc—belongs to everyday life, whereas classical music is more like Latin, used by officials and in high art. And just as vernacular literature gained strength with the invention of the printing press, the rise of vernacular music began with the phonograph.


As the article points out, the fact that the publisher has supplied a follow-along Spotify playlist for the book creates a comment about the continuing evolution of these themes:

But accessing these songs as streaming data, rather than shellac 78s or expensive CD reissues, also suggests that the way we experience music is still being relentlessly transformed. Like the phonograph boom, the digital era combines elements of democratization with the persistence of large corporations and the commodity form. Perhaps more than any of its specific conclusions, Noise Uprising is valuable as a challenge to think through the audio politics of today.

8D Projects: Christy Love – Internal Waves (Get Up Recordings)

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8DPromo is presently working this 43rd release for NYC’s Get Up Recordings, the “Internal Waves” single from label co-proprietor Christy Love. Prime time house music elements abound in the original track, ready-made for an extended strobe light work-out. The remix by Londoners Severino & Hifi Sean lays down the swing and the funky 303, while MissB goes into more traditional territory, peppered with pleasingly spacious highlights.

The Discovery Dead End

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Cuepoint:

“Discovery” has certainly been the buzzword for the last few years, but the problem is that we still haven’t figured out the next steps after someone hears a song. I listen to music all day long but not much of it sticks with me, just because I get no direction from streaming platforms. I have to manually search for artists I like when I’m listening at home, and I have to actually remember to go back through a playlist and search for an artist if I hear something I like when I’m out. And I’m someone who cares about music more than most people.



There are a couple of possible remedies for this. One, streaming services could offer more links out to follow artists on other platforms. Spotify and Apple Music both have their own internal platforms, so I certainly understand why they want to keep people in the services — the problem is that both these internal platforms kinda stink.



In the end, just being “discovered” on a playlist doesn’t mean much to an artist. If services truly want to help artists monetize and build careers, the least they can do is direct listeners to other opportunities to follow, engage with, and support the artist. But artists also have a role to play, by making sure that their content is worth engaging with.


This harks back to an earlier post regarding the social Internet unwisely evolving into a series of closed ecosystems. The author’s points are valid, and keeping an artist’s fans within a closed network (and one that’s not that great, i.e. Apple’s ‘Connect’) doesn’t cultivate a positive experience for the user. An excited fan wants access to it all – the band’s social networks, websites, maybe even a Bandcamp link for purchasing the music (of course, I understand why Apple may not consider that last one). This not only helps the artists but I feel a richer, well-rounded fan experience will make users more enthusiastic about the streaming service they are using. This more than makes up for the trade-off of potentially sending users to an external site … they’ll certainly come back knowing that their requirements as music fanatics will be catered to.

Future Of Music Coalition Responds: The Data Journalism That Wasn’t

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Future Of Music Coalition:

Let us be clear: our problem with Johnson’s article isn’t that he fails to conform to some doom-and-gloom scenario for artists working today. Indeed, there are a lot of new opportunities for artists, and those opportunities are worth celebrating. Most frustrating to us is that Johnson reinforces a false binary between pro-technology optimistic futurism and anti-technology digital pessimism. And that simply doesn’t describe the state of the contemporary debate about art and the digital age.


Fair enough. And the Future Of Music Coalition fires off some worthy criticism of Steven Johnson’s numbers, which Johnson in turn has promised to respond to. It’s all very much worth reading.

I feel the true state lies somewhere in between. I know a few musicians who are doing quite well for themselves in the present climate, and I know a few who have dropped out of the business due to financial frustration. I’m hanging on, though it’s certainly a stressful arena to be making a living in. But I’m not convinced it’s all that different than it was a couple decades ago, in terms of some musicians benefiting and others struggling into disillusionment. Admittedly, one big change is that there are a lot fewer stable music industry jobs. And artists working within the traditional infrastructure are feeling the pain (which isn’t helped by labels adopting things like 360 deals). But I still think the emerging opportunities for creative people and independent companies, which the Coalition admits are “worth celebrating”, are the real story here, and it’s this shift towards autonomy that will define the future of music.

(previously)

The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t

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The New York Times Magazine:

Thanks to its legal troubles, Napster itself ended up being much less important as a business than as an omen, a preview of coming destructions. Its short, troubled life signaled a fundamental rearrangement in the way we discover, consume and (most importantly) pay for creative work. In the 15 years since, many artists and commentators have come to believe that (this) promised apocalypse is now upon us — that the digital economy, in which information not only wants to be free but for all practical purposes is free, ultimately means that ‘‘the diverse voices of the artists will disappear,’’ because musicians and writers and filmmakers can no longer make a living.



It seems logical to critics that we will end up in a world in which no one has an economic incentive to follow creative passions. The thrust of this argument is simple and bleak: that the digital economy creates a kind of structural impossibility that art will make money in the future. The world of professional creativity, the critics fear, will soon be swallowed by the profusion of amateurs, or the collapse of prices in an age of infinite and instant reproduction will cheapen art so that no one will be able to quit their day jobs to make it — or both.



(The artists’) financial fate turns out to be much harder to measure, but I endeavored to try. Taking 1999 as my starting point — the year both Napster and Google took off — I plumbed as many data sources as I could to answer this one question: How is today’s creative class faring compared with its predecessor a decade and a half ago? The answer isn’t simple, and the data provides ammunition for conflicting points of view. It turns out that (pessimists were) incontrovertibly correct on one point: Napster did pose a grave threat to the economic value that consumers placed on recorded music. And yet the creative apocalypse (we were) warned of has failed to arrive. Writers, performers, directors and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved. Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever.


This article is a must-read, and not just for its refreshingly optimistic tone about the economic changes in our creative culture. I had to hold back on quoting more from it above as almost every paragraph is fascinating. The author looks at not just the music industry but also the state of film and literature and determines what those in the trenches have suspected: things aren’t necessarily rosy for the legacy media companies, but are looking good for individual creators who know how to ride the landscape. Gee, it’s almost like someone out there has been purposefully controlling the narrative, pushing ‘doom and gloom’ stories for all artists who embrace this democratization through technology.

Also touched on in the article is how there are now so many more opportunities for musicians and content creators to make income on their work. Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ may not have fully realized, but indeed there are multiple avenues of artist income available now that didn’t exist even 15 years ago. On top of this, the crumbling of the traditional distribution model – which is the source of anxiety for all these big media companies – and the dramatically reduced costs for creating new media open up unlimited possibilities. It’s the punk rock dream come true.

Related, and also recommended, is this latest episode of the Mac Power Users podcast where the hosts chat with songwriter Jonathan Mann about how he makes a living by recording a song a day. Most of the podcast is a lot of technical talk, but the really interesting section starts around 1:08:00 where Mann gets into the business of what he does. Basically none of this would have been possible for him a couple years ago.

Update: The Future Of Music Coalition has some crticisms, and I have a few more thoughts.

8D Projects: Venntaur – Just Once (DeepWit Recordings)

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Danish label DeepWit Recordings is one of our favorite deep house labels – and we mean ‘deep house’ very much in the traditional, non-diluted sense – so it’s always a pleasure to work with them. This forthcoming release showcases two fine tracks by Finnish producer Venntaur, backed with remixes from Tokyo’s Datakestra and Jason Mitchell, who is the proprietor of another of our client labels, Australia’s Deep House Aficionado. Lush and melodic stuff here, complete with beefy rhythms and dreamy textures throughout. It’s our latest promotions project at 8DPromo.

How ‘Playola’ Is Infiltrating Streaming Services

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Billboard:

Like social media, playlists are viral in nature: A track’s streams will spike after it’s added to a popular playlist; listeners will add the song to their playlists; their friends will do the same. Getting a song onto a hot playlist almost ensures awareness will spread from one social network to another.

Multiple insiders allege that the major music groups have paid influential curators to populate their playlists with their clients’ music. Some third-party users are known to request money to include songs on their playlists. Pay for play “is definitely ­happening,” claims a major-label marketing executive, one of several who say that popular playlists can and have been bought.

According to a source, the price can range from $2,000 for a playlist with tens of thousands of fans to $10,000 for the more well-followed playlists. And these practices are not illegal, although it would be difficult to find an official policy in the fine print.

In a statement to Billboard, Spotify head of communications Jonathan Prince says its new terms of service, hitting the United States next week, prohibit selling accounts and playlists or “accepting any ­compensation, financial or otherwise, to influence … the content included on an account or playlist.” Yet policing, let alone enforcing, these terms could be difficult.


Everything old is new again, eh? But then how is aggressively promoting an artist to a playlist different than, say, promoting that artist – through bribery or otherwise – to a music blog? Playlists are sort of becoming ‘the new music blogs’ to streaming fans, so it makes sense. A blog (or a radio station in the ‘old days’) that relies on promoted or paid content gets noticeably watered down in its taste-making reputation, but that probably doesn’t matter to the mainstream targets here. Pay-for-play stinks, but as it is nearly-impossible to enforce (though not difficult to spot by savvy music fans) it’s probably going to be a permanent thorn in the side for these services. When it used to affect your local radio station you didn’t really have elsewhere to go … at least with playlists and blogs there are many other alternatives out there to turn to when the ones you are following start suspiciously including the same lackluster songs at the same time.