I joined because I wanted to figure out how it worked and luckily I have been able to mostly resist the addictiveness of it by manipulating search on YouTube to find the content deeply buried on that platform.
As a label runner myself. it quickly becomes apparent that TikTok is gamified, and it really only cares about promoted content, and everyone is at the mercy of the 5 seconds of fame rule. Even people who do go viral get exhausted by the content consumption factor of the platform, but the truth is that TikTok is just the most recent and updated iteration of the social media model that really does not work for new music discovery.
Listeners, the people that actually buy music are too used to playlist culture now, no one goes searching for music because of the sheer tediousness of the process, and when any music, even total drivel is played repetitively to people, it simply ends up selling.
These platforms are a distraction from our lack of choice and individualism, and it also highlights a time when being a successful independent entrepreneur is totally under threat because not only can you be let down by the illusion that success is possible on these platforms, you can also waste lots of money on ads that don't work for much other than generating bot stats, and years of fruitless promotional work on these platforms through the opportunity they promote as "being possible". These platform timelines are focused on single posts you make, they have no interest in allowing people to follow up on your music, and they do absolutely nothing to help listeners to find your music, the work is all on us... The process from scratch every time a new platform rises is excruciating when you don't pay a lot for shortcuts, and those "shortcuts" are what skews every stat you see on platforms.
That being said, I mostly go "viral" for the memes I post over our actual music videos... It's allowed me to polish my video production skills and I do get slightly more music sales than the old days of selling CDs out of my trunk.
I think there is a magic here that is under appreciated. The reality is that music often takes a few listens to appreciate, or perhaps the right mood/moment to really connect. indeed it seems to me that we learn to like that which we are exposed to, irrespective of whether someone with "taste" thinks it is drivel.
Seems like a feature not a bug
A feature for the platform and a select few artists, but not a feature for the listener.
Elitism isn’t the issue here. Limited access outside of funnels is
When the software world can convincingly create new songs that sound like the hit songs people like, but sufficiently different to dodge copyright law, then it's game over.
We don't blink an eye at efforts to do things like complete one of Beethoven's symphonies. But that is going to be increased treading a thin line when it's something like create a new album by pseudo-David Bowie. And arguably over that line when it's extending the hit debut album of a living artist who just isn't recapturing that magic.
A wall of disruptive change is barreling towards the creative industry (as well as many other industries), and yet most are blissfully unaware, fighting over marginal changes to their status quo - maybe looking at demonstrations of what can be done today saying "that's neat, but it doesn't replace me" without properly looking at how quickly the other is improving.
Copyrights are about to become worthless, and so the fight over their management is going to be a short lived victory no matter who wins.
Will computers replace EDM and elevator music? I don't know, maybe, who cares?
It seems like the formula for an acceptable song is well understood. With the necessary push provided by Spotify these songs get streams in the millions easily. Perhaps it's cheap enough to have this music produced that they don't even have to move on to machine generation.
You can't generalise to pop in general, because being a pop headliner is as much about glamour, lifestyle, fashion, and branding as it is about music.
No one wants an imaginary Bowie album, because it's a glamour-free proposition - a curiosity at best, most likely irrelevant.
People have been trying to make an Idoru for decades for now, and they always fail. You can only sell fantasy and identification when they're implicit. When you try to attach them to an artificial marketing concept it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief and make the fantasy stick.
They're all going mad for an imaginary Abba concert
edit: I'm imagining what they would say. I'm not here to offend Bowie fans.
until it's new again, because young people of today are going to become old too and their kids are going to think tik tok hits are old, but will remember when their grandparents took them for a walk in the park listening to David Bowie.
I'd like to think the future is the opposite -- artists/bands managing themselves as disparate entities, forming around small labels or even their own labels, and having someone in charge to bring the resources they need to bear for touring or performance related stuff so that they can focus on their music.
On the flip side, Eve Selis is an example of an artist who broke on the scene during that time and maintained control over her art https://www.eveselis.com/ I agree that it would be great if more artists followed that path.
The Internet leveled the playing field for many years.
The industry has found that social media's dominance allows them the opportunity to distract independent artists from releasing their own quality music and also distract the public from hearing indie music through the illusion that social media helps them to be seen more.
The real question that anyone who works on these platforms needs to ask themself is "Is the platform really helping me?"
The only way they help people now is if you choose promoted ads, and it takes a ton of money for an unaffiliated indie label to break into their main feed on each single post, and that's true for any of the platforms that facilitate sponsored ads.
As long as it's generating everything on past data it won't. New stuff is interesting because it doesn't sound like old stuff, and usually that takes over and further mutates. I'm not a fan of trap, but it wouldn't have existed if everything was generated by the current gen of software. It moves fast towards an optimum of the current generation, but we're not at actual AI, so I don't think what you describe will happen (at least yet).
Bands have been creating music like that since forever. Most of small bands are like this.
I'd imagine trying to ever-broaden the concept of "derivative works", so your "completely new that sounds like Bowie" falls within their catchment.
Or aggressive license mandates on the data set used to train your ML model, so you aren't legally allowed to use it to produce competitive products in the first place. (In that scenario, I can imagine a run on used-CD stores as people rush to get unencumbered source material for that purpose).
On the other hand, it definitely feels like chasing local maxima. Yeah, they can try to fence in "the best song David Bowie never wrote", but that will just drive experimentation to unowned corners of the market. The AI-driven music industry might be a pivot on the scale of going from, say, Mozart to EDM in a matter of years.
I like your analogy of the tidal wave but without computers being able to generate the culture I don't see it coming.
Take football [or soccer]. Whole sports seasons can be simulated and are in games like Championship Manager. But these have never changed the collective & cultural shared experiences of real world sports.
In what way?
This is already a thing in shoes, clothes, handbags, watches... Yet the original brands thrive. I'd counter that listening to "cheap knockoff" music will have a similar appeal (or lack thereof).
I don’t imagine many people subscribing to an AI who can generate and release countless songs on it’s own without some sort of filter to discern desirable content from undesirable.
Barring some large development, having a human to curate the generated material will be a requirement for success, or else drown your audience in a torrent of unchecked content.
https://musically.com/2020/07/20/steve-stoute-if-drake-goes-...
The sales figures are quite exaggerated... 99% of artists never sell anywhere near the volume that Drake does.
I think it's important for artists to call out and quit pushing the mostly false profit models that the industry keeps pushing to put artists on a pedestal and to keep artists worshiping the big music industry machine.
If Russ was making $1m a week, he would not be doing self-produced promotional videos and tiktok posts about how to succeed in music. Even $1m a week for a well known music artist is not realistic in a good economy when Spotify only pays a fraction of a penny per play.
but also independent labels have much less negotiating power and human power to check for infringements or unauthorized reproduction, let alone legal authority.
All in all a good deal for them it's peanuts for a mainstream label.
(I have co-founded a small independent label)
A change in negotiation power seems like a good evolution of the industry for anyone but record industry execs.
But this "record industry is committing suicide" story that the software world likes to read about is even older than the "hollywood is committing suicide" story, since Napster was just music to start with. And yet here we are. Other than the shift in the cut (which is great!), what's going to change? There's still going to be centralization around platforms (TikTok, Spotify, radio) and a need for a partner for things like touring and marketing etc. So will the new boss look that different than the old boss?