008! The State of the Culture, 2024: Music Edition
i.e. why this newsletter exists
Every year, fellow Substacker and music journalist Ted Gioia publishes a piece called “The State of the Culture”, which is his culture-focussed interpretation of the State of the Union speech. This year’s edition just came out a few weeks back, and it’s worth a read. He argues that “2024 may be the most fast-paced - and dangerous - time ever for the creative economy”. He talks about struggling entertainment companies, the state of the TV and movie businesses, and he briefly touches on the music industry which he says is “maybe in the worst state of them all”.
His leading point across the article is something that we have likely all heard before, that the attention economy is coming for us all: “the fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping, but it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity”. Demand for new entertainment is shrinking, he says, and being replaced by inane distraction. Social media companies and streaming platforms are currently built to keep us in a dopamine doom spiral, endlessly and mindlessly consuming what the algorithms serve us, until we reach some kind of collective anhedonia.
It’s a bleak but cogent take, and one that seems to be on the mind of many other culture critics and writers lately, from Jon Caramanica talking about the enshittification of TikTok, to Kyle Chayka’s new book, Filterworld, to Leonardo Bursztyn et al’s recent research on social media traps. And, this morning, as I finish writing this, I see Shawn Reynaldo’s latest newsletter focuses on a similar topic.
It can feel like old-hat to be talking about the disappointments of the internet, but this very particular scroll-and-swipe culture has had some very real, tangible effects on music over the last few years, for the artist and the listener.
Shorter, faster songs
How music is distributed has always had an impact on how music itself is made. The average length of a pop song has been shortening over the past five years, and apparently by over one full minute since 2008. Pinkpantheress’ top streamed song, from 2021, clocks in at 1:38. There’s nothing inherently wrong about that - keep it short and sweet - but it does speak to the systems of Spotify and TikTok. The shorter the track, the more you might replay it. The more you replay it, the more it feeds the algorithm and tells it that this song is “a success”, and thereby feeds it to more people.
To make sure you get to the catchiest part of the song immediately, song structure is now often chorus-verse, hooking the listener in and trying to guarantee that they stay past the crucial 30-second mark that triggers a royalty on Spotify.
If you can’t get the chorus to come in any quicker, you can just speed up the whole song and release the sped-up version, so that it can fit into TikTok’s “optimum video length” of eleven to seventeen seconds. You can also release as many versions as possible, as both a way of buying a lottery ticket and a way to superserve your fans. Teddy Swims’ current hit “Lose Control” has eight versions in the Top 30 of US iTunes:
While song length is down, overall album length is trending upwards. The more songs you have in the game, the more likely you are to gain some traction, whether a 23-track long album makes for a coherent offering or not.
I think it’s fair to say that uniqueness is not rewarded by the algorithm, and in fact creators are rewarded for rehashing what’s already been proven in the market. Mash-ups and remixes do really well on TikTok, and can often catch the eye of the official label once they’ve hit terminal velocity. That’s not to disparage remixes, they are a vital part of club music, but when there is little space for unique sounds to come through, and an encouragement of more-of-the-same, we end up with homogeneity. It’s the absolute opposite of the cream rising to the top, the Blank Street Coffee of music.
These concerns aren’t just for developing acts either. Beyoncé touched on some of these ideas in a speech she gave during her Club Renaissance tour: “A lot of the songs right now are two minutes long, they’re super short because of people’s attention spans, and I’m not gonna just accept that people don’t have the attention span. It’s not true, you just have to challenge people. I think people wanna hear good music and bridges and they wanna hear vamps and they wanna hear arrangements and they wanna hear melody.”
Platforms creating passive users
Most of the major social and streaming platforms have one prerogative: to keep you on the app as long as possible, to harvest your data for profit. If they served up something they thought you might not like, they would risk losing you to another app. If they gave you inspiration or information, maybe you would get off the app and do something. By only serving things in your feed that you already like, there is no risk for the platform. And by making who you follow almost irrelevant, listeners become passive, and often totally uninformed about what they’re listening to or watching.
Labels being risk-averse
In Ted Gioia’s piece, he says the music industry is in the “worst state” of all the entertainment businesses. But, importantly, he’s not talking about growth. The majors have been in a state of steady growth for the past decade (even if the streaming boom is slowing up some). Despite that fact, there have been layoffs happening across the board. The old guard of radio and press are being replaced by swat teams for content creation - which frankly makes a lot of sense in this day and age. Labels are looking for acts that work well in this current paradigm, often signing artists that have already blown up on TikTok, have proof in the market, and are less of a risk. As Ted mentions, catalogue is king for the majors. It’s safer, it’s got proof in the market already and it doesn’t need time to develop. Major labels are, after all, financial institutions. Investing in Michael Jackson’s catalogue is a much safer bet than overspending on signing a new act who might not show up for that expensive PR campaign.
It does seem as though the majors are struggling to define what’s next in music, and just picking up what’s there. But honestly, this is good news for independent teams and labels, who have an ever-growing share of the market.
Artists becoming brands
The general consensus now is that “waterfalling” releases - i.e. releasing a lot in quick succession - is the way to go to build and maintain a fanbase. Taking time off in a culture that moves this quickly is difficult, and usually discouraged. When music becomes more like marketing than art, artists become brands, where music is just a small part of your overall “sell”. Maybe that’s fine for an artist who’s built for a life on social media.
Research shows that many people who use social media would prefer it didn’t exist, but that not using it would be of more detriment to their career than participating. This is what’s called a “product market trap”. I’d guess that a high percentage of artists are stuck in this trap, not wanting to spend half their life making content. It’s easy to understand why artists might not even contemplate a career in music when this is the price to participate.
For those that do participate, it’s hard to go at anything but full speed. In recent months, Spotify has made changes to its royalty system, in which only tracks that amass over one thousand lifetime plays will see a payout. It’s a bid to curb scammers on the platform, but it also reinforces a message that is already rife within this system: appeal to a broad audience, or your art is worthless. Artists are supposed to take on the mindset of a start-up: grow, and quickly.
Mr. Beast - one of of YouTube’s biggest creators - is said by a recent article in Polygon to see “personality as a limitation for growth”, which sounds a lot like something a corporation might say. Being a human being in this game is risky to your bottom line.
When engagement is everything and everyone is fighting for attention, it becomes a competition of who can proverbially shout the loudest. We are both overstimulated and bored. For DJs, a bid for attention might mean filming a big transition at a gig and getting a huge reaction from the audience, whether that was the thing that made the most sense in the room at the time or not. Gigs aren’t about the now, they’re just as much about the after, if not more. How it looks comes before how it feels, and the more stunts and exaggerations, the better.
For those few that do make it through the hype cycle, some are thrown very quickly into stardom. The TikTok hype cycle has intensified in the last few years: the time it takes to go from zero to one hundred is quicker than ever, whether you’re ready for it or not. When Ice Spice was propelled to fame, she had never performed live to an audience, and was promptly ridiculed on social media for her first performance at Rolling Loud Festival. Labels, platforms and fans prefer artists to come fully made, without any time for development.
It’s a time-consuming and expensive endeavour being an artist and creating content, and once they get to the stage of even being able to do headline shows, artists are realising that fans might only know eleven seconds of their hit song.
As we stand at the edge of a possible blanket TikTok ban in the US (and as UMG is still in a stand-off with the platform over royalties), perhaps there will be a renewed sense that going viral is not artist development and that we can challenge audiences in the way they want to be.
The internet is not a place that rewards nuance, and there certainly are a lot of negative things to say about these systems we’ve set up, and continue to perpetuate. It isn’t conducive for good art being created, or seen. But, the point of the internet was to make the world better and I think, by and large, that has happened. It’s still easier than ever for artists to participate in the system if they want to. Good luck if you do.
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, since you’re subscribed to this newsletter, and you - like me - don’t only want to be fed what the algorithmic overlords tell us. So here’s to putting in some effort into making niche scenes sustainable, and allowing ourselves to at the very least think about alternatives.
Thanks for reading! I’m off to switch off Tiktok’s Hamster Rave and fire up the Criterion Collection instead. Or maybe I’ll just have both on at the same time.
And lastly, some random things I’ve enjoyed lately: