Perhaps this is overstating the obvious, but the music industry has seen some seismic changes over the last 18 months. Live gigging ground to a halt, and despite several false starts in attempts to reopen, shows little promise of returning to pre-pandemic levels any time soon. NFTs caught everyone’s attention, and then lost many of us in an open sea of whales and ballooning price tags. The influence of TikTok, criticism of Spotify, and the visibility of Bandcamp all reached critical mass. But lately, there’s another trend I’ve picked up on — one that’s silently crept onto playlists, internet radio broadcasts and record label catalogues: the remix album.
Remix albums aren’t new. It only takes a quick search through Discogs to find countless remix releases of Janet, Britney, and Mariah 1990s and 2000s radio hits. Underground producers have been reworking each other since the turntable entered into music consciousness. While remixes can offer artists the opportunity to collaborate across genres, or lend quantized kickdrums to songs you might not otherwise hear on club sound systems, it’s in the shadow of platform capitalism that I find myself increasingly critical of the format.
Platform capitalism, as documented in Nick Srnicek’s book of the same name, finds music consumption on grounds predicated by network effects and data mining. When music’s commodity form becomes one that is highly shareable, traceable, and monetizable, where do we draw the line between albums as means of artistic expression, and pieces of content to be upsold?
Two remix albums that have particularly caught my eye in the last year come from opposite ends of the pop spectrum. In June, Kelly Lee Owens presented a collection of remixes from her 2020 release, Inner Song, with reimagined entries from Roza Terenzi, Coby Sey, and Lorraine James, to name a few. Here, the remix album is a testament to the community in which Owens is situated — the release speaks not to a single genre but to many, a prism refracting the many shades which have come to light up electronic music production.
On the other side of the remix rainbow is Dua Lipa’s Club Future Nostalgia, released at the end of summer 2020, and weeks before her Guinness World Record-setting livestream Studio 2054. The album, with remixers running the gamut from up-and-coming to big-room superstars, strikes me as not much more than a marketing campaign, a recycling of sounds to fuel the major label steam train. While I’m happy to see the likes of Jayda G and Midland score this level of visibility (and the large paychecks that surely followed), I can’t help but feel this release is more reappropriation than remix.
So, when does remixing become repackaging? When does community building become social climbing? In ruminating on answers to these questions I find myself, as I often do when thinking about the function of music as talisman of both financial and cultural capital, arriving at the conclusion that a one-size-fits-all consideration is not going to provide sufficient space to explore and be critical of the platformed music ecosystem. If Kelly Lee Owens and Dua Lipa represent opposing ends of a spectrum rather than diametrically opposed rivals, perhaps that allows us to situate Lady Gaga’s recent Dawn of Chromatica remix album somewhere in middle — an opportunity for her record label to gleefully send out Spotify push notifications, and an excuse to play LSDXOXO for my mom.
Developments in Web 3 technology also offer new opportunities for remix to break out of its commodified jewel case. Though attribution models on user generated content platforms have helped to mitigate and adjudicate copyright claims on unlicensed remixes, and licensed remixes are indeed becoming more widespread (case in point: this Eris Drew remix of Alanis Morissette’s recent single, or the B-52s, Britney Spears and Rob Zombie mashup that has taken TikTok by storm), both ameliorations are based on an ownership model which struggles to credit and compensate both the remixer and the derivative artist equitably. New decentralised ownership models, proposed by the likes of The Song That Owns Itself and Songcamp, renegotiate the relationship between a song and it’s owner, and propose meaningful integration of community into the commodity status of a song. What if remix albums started to look more like DAOs and less like marketing ploys? Platforms which rely on endless streams of individualised content might not be thrilled, but it sounds like music to my ears.
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