Thinking small: a meditation on scale vs success for artists

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 4, pause for 4… Repeat.

When we think success, we tend to think big numbers. Most familiar examples of success have big numbers in common, especially those examples discussed around the world in newsletters and blogs like this one. The logical conclusion: success = big numbers.

Yet, when discussing success with musicians, I’ve found most would just be happy to make a difference to some people & be able to make a living off of it. If the goal is to make a living, then why does success necessarily involve racking up small amounts of royalties through thousands of plays until you finally have enough to make a living when combined with live gigs?

Our success maps are lousy. They’re based on highly visible examples of success which leads to a biased map. It also models strategy after something that worked in the past, but may not work as well now. If an artist achieved scale by cleverly playing the game of early-SoundCloud & the iTunes charts (Yellow Claw comes to mind) it’s impossible to copy that exact foundation since the context for the methodology has changed.

Breathe in, breathe out, think small

If the goal is to make a living, why bother playing the game of big numbers? Pitching playlists, building various social media profiles, gaming algorithms and spending countless hours on all that in the hope that the thousands of followers will translate into sufficient streams and bookings. It’s considered ‘the way’ to do it, but what if the goal can be achieved more efficiently on your own terms?

  • What does making a living mean for you? How much would you need monthly?
  • What do you enjoy doing? What would you like to have more time for?
  • How much time do you want to spend on your craft?
  • What do you dislike doing?

Take a moment (actually, take a week, or a month: this is your life we’re talking about). Breathe. Reflect. Define your goals by what you want, not by what you think is needed. Is having hundreds of thousands of fans a fun goal or is it actually methodology masquerading as as a goal? Achieving massive scale as an artist may look like success, but it’s often just a symptom of the methodology to achieve goals and not the goal itself.

Question your goals. Carefully & deliberately choose the game you play.

Why scale matters / mattered

Scale is a game. For companies that make money exploiting catalogues, scale is required in order to turn low margins into a big business. The same is true for ad-funded business: each individual ad serving isn’t worth much, but if you manage to get lots of people to constantly pay attention to your platform and your ads, you have a business. These dynamics underpin a lot of the modern music landscape: labels, social networks, music services – they generally all play a game of scale.

In the past, the range of available business models for musicians was quite limited, so musicians often opted to play the game of scale in order to sell lots of low margin products to make a living.

Thinking small(er)

Imagine you could only ever have 1,000 fans (not necessarily ‘1,000 true fans‘). How would you turn that into a business? Your livelihood would depend on the patronage of these people: how would you win that patronage?

But a fanbase is not actually the starting point of either your strategy or the ‘user journey’ to becoming a paid fan. Thinking small requires you to question how people discover you and your music. What do you need to convey in order for people to understand that being a fan of your music is different?

Inhale, hold, exhale, wait, repeat.

Ask: What are you leading your fans towards? What can you ‘sell’ to them and at what price? Remember: the higher the price, the smaller you can keep your numbers. Small scale has considerable advantages: the communication overhead is smaller, signal to noise ratio is better, you personally feel much more connected to your fans and so will they, plus it will be easier to reach them. A common trap is that people focus on ‘how to get heard’ by new people without thinking carefully about ‘how will they hear me again?’ In the case of small scale, you could potentially drop everyone a personal note or even a call.

Be brave in imagining scenarios. What if 90% of your art was only available to your Patreon, Substack or OnlyFans subscribers?

Create scarcity early

Figure out what’s the smallest number of fans you could monetize in order to make a living. Making abundant what’s easy to replicate is typically a good idea, as it helps with word of mouth & leverages the network effect of platforms & organisations that play the game of scale. But pause there.

Hold your breathe for 4 seconds, breathe out for 4 seconds, wait, and breathe again.

Now consider the fan journey: if people discover you through word of mouth or a playlist, what do you want their first impressions to be? What type of relation do you want them to have with you & your music? Through what tools and platforms? How do you bring them there when they’re first introduced to you? What does this introduction look like?

Reward fans with scarcity and do so early on. Scarcity is everything that can’t be easily made abundant: a one-on-one call, limited edition items, an NFT, playing a video game with you online, etc. Align it with what you like & what your fans like. Consider how you reward: perhaps you reward everyone who completes certain steps in the fan journey with something scarce, which can be as simple as a personalized message or a public shout-out. Of course, in order to build a business model, you will also reward people with scarce items in exchange for currency.

You can’t start early enough. Set your goals. Think about scarcity. Think about your fan experience, even if nobody has heard your music yet. Build it out together with your community.

(And if you decide you want scale: that’s fine)

Exhale.

The value of piracy: future back thinking

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

We don’t talk a lot about piracy in the music industry anymore, but it still exists. In 2018, more than a third of music consumers still pirated music. In 2020, INCOPRO, on behalf of the UK’s PRS for Music, showed that piracy in the form of stream-ripping grew by almost 1400% between 2016 and 2019. The question is how to analyse this activity, how to analyse the pirates, and how to determine the effect and impact of piracy on the current state of the music industry.

How piracy has changed

Back in 1999, when everybody I knew used Napster and Kazaa, piracy involved quite elaborate peer-to-peer networks. The music I hosted, for example, would be shared and downloaded by others through those networks and vice versa. Nowadays, the main act of piracy comes through ‘stream-ripping’ which is most common from YouTube streams, but also happens from streaming services such as Spotify or Deezer. In 2019 MusicWatch published researched into ‘stream-ripping’ showcasing growth of the phenomenon. The two main reasons provided are: 1) being able to listen to songs offline; 2) liking a certain song, but not enough to buy it.

Both of those main reasons are exactly why streaming services displaced widespread illegal sharing and downloading of music. They provide ease-of-access and in paid tiers offline listening is available. Moreover, back around 2014, just before recorded music growth kicked back in, MBW wrote how amazing it was that piracy had dropped almost completely, giving the example of Norway as a country with an early high adoption rate of streaming services.

That third reason highlighted on the infographic is actually the more interesting one: random searches for music lead people to apps and websites that allow them to rip streams illegally into MP3 files. This signals a broader issue then a simple narrative of ‘bad pirates.’

The Ethnographic approach

Considering the financial impact of piracy on the recorded music industry it’s no surprise there is a vast body of empirical, academic research into it. A paper from Steven Caldwell Brown from 2016 aimed to make sense of how people engaged with and defined music piracy. This built on the work of many others who had previously shown how illegal downloaders also spent the most money on music. One example comes from a cross-cultural research by Joe Karaganis and Lennart Renkema and published in 2011. In their ‘Copy Culture in the US and Germany‘ they showed that those who spend more on music were also those who downloaded the most illegal music files. There’s a question whether that value that these file-sharing pirates placed on music is now captured by the likes of Spotify. If you previously downloaded illegal music files but also spent $100 on recorded music each month but switched to a Spotify paid account right when they launched it’s only now, after 12 years, that you will have matched your previous yearly spend on music.

It’s not just music

Outside of the music industry, piracy also played its role. Again, streaming services, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, provided an ease-of-access and affordable way to access lots of content bringing piracy numbers down. However, the competitive model in video is much stronger than in music. There’s more focus on originals, differentiation of content, and exclusive deals. Take, for example, Batman Begins & The Dark Knight and imagine that happening to a major artist’s records.

The difficult thing is that with our audio streaming services we expect everything to be available. If that’s not the case, there’s a fear listeners will start downloading again. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing when those who pirate are also those who consume the most. Recent research by Omdia shows that even now pirates are just ‘content hungry.’

So why do these pirates pirate? Because they have reached a maximum they can spend on various streaming services per month or because they cannot find a specific title through legal services. In the video world, both of these reasons are fair enough. In music, they don’t hold up. Basically all music is available on each major streaming service. With a subscription to one of these you get access to all of that music.

The future back thinking we need

The problem with piracy isn’t a problem with pirates. In the music industry, those who traditionally pirate the most music files are those who, in terms of spend, value music the most. What we see in the video business is a big phase of unbundling: multiple subscription-video-on-demand services, cable TV operators, free-ad-supported-streaming TV, etc. In the music business, we have an era of the bundle: buy-one-get-all-music-ever. Those artists who lean into the creator and passion economies try to differentiate their income streams and escape the bundle. This differentiation is necessary because for the vast majority of artists the bundled streaming service system doesn’t offer a good valuation of their art. Due to the increased competition surrounding video, creators are better valued. Perhaps, then, piracy is a necessary evil in a system that better values the art created?

Deplatform yourself: how to leave Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Social media is designed to be addictive. By monopolizing aspects of your social life, it also locks you in. Here’s how to break the cycle.

Concentration of power

My reasons for not being on Facebook and soon deleting WhatsApp and Instagram are manifold. I won’t go into them here, but I will highlight the deciding factor and hopefully pre-empt common whataboutisms. Facebook Inc., which runs FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and other social brands, is too powerful.

If all of the above were separate apps, there’s a good chance I’d be using all of them actively. They’re not, so one company controls nearly all of my digital social footprint and that of billions of others around the world.

Do I trust them? Not really. For many of the reasons you can read on DeleteFacebook.com. Meanwhile I, together with billions of other users, am building the value Facebook extracts through its advertising business. One day, I decided to stop rewarding the company and deactivated my Facebook account, before eventually deleting it. In the next weeks, I’m finally deleting Instagram and WhatsApp too.

For simplicity, I’ll be referring to Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and other brands of the social media giant as Facebook Inc. throughout this article.

Delete, deplatform

The first thing you should know about leaving Facebook Inc. is that you’re not just deleting. Instead, you’re switching platforms. You’re still going to get your news from somewhere, have digital social interactions with friends, need info about events, etc. This is the value you’re getting out of the platform. So, your first step is:

Step 1: start building value in places other than Facebook Inc.

A good example of this are events. Bonus: this example also allows me to address the local underground scenes here in Berlin (and around the world) who have many issues with Facebook policies ranging from female nudity, sex work, to human rights more broadly. Too often, the only place where one can find information about a rave doubling as a fundraising event for marginalized people is on Facebook. If we know and acknowledge that Facebook is problematic, why are we giving Facebook the information monopoly?

Giving Facebook Inc. an information monopoly accomplishes two things:

  1. It makes it harder for you to ever leave the platform, since all your audience & connections are on Facebook Inc.
  2. It makes it harder for other people to leave the platform.

Whether it’s for solidarity or for yourself, it’s time to build audience outside of Facebook. I recommend a mix of channels owned by various companies, plus something owned just by you: phone numbers and email addresses. For the former category, depending on your purpose, think LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Reddit, etc.

Start deplatforming yourself.

Build value elsewhere.

Free yourself and others.

Limit the data

Everything you do on Facebook Inc.’s apps is tracked. Everything you type (even if you delete it & never post it), scrolling, tapping, zooming, pausing on stories, everything you see, share, like, geolocation, photo metadata, contacts in your phone, etc.

Step 2: limit the data you give to Facebook Inc.

This is basically as simple as interacting with the apps less. There are a bunch of ways to do that. You can limit the screen time of specific apps, you can set your phone display to black & white to make apps less interesting, you can just delete the mobile apps and go mobile web / desktop only.

For me, this meant I stopped posting to professional communities on Facebook Groups years ago. They’d been really valuable for me, since I moved between countries a lot and groups were a great way to network with music professionals wherever I was. Due to step 1, I already had many of these people on my newsletter & other social media platforms and figured I would just have to write so well, that this group would make sure my reach would extend to the group I was leaving behind.

Take a vacation

Before I even considered deleting, I would occasionally deactivate my Facebook account (and recently did the same with Instagram). This allowed me to disappear from the site temporarily and see:

  1. How the social media designed to be addictive was nested into my daily habits and thinking patterns.
  2. Whether I would feel better without it.
  3. What information I would miss.
  4. What social connections I would miss.
  5. Which accounts I created using Facebook (e.g. Spotify).

Step 3: deactivate your Facebook Inc. accounts for short periods of time

To most of us, it feels daunting to delete these accounts, so go experience what it’s like. Deactivate your account and remove the app. If after a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks you feel like you want to return, you can reactivate your account.

During one of my first breaks a friend asked me a question I hadn’t considered: wouldn’t I miss the ability to visit a deceased family member’s profile? It held me back from deleting, but after months of going without Facebook I realized I didn’t care, made a digital backup just in case, and decided that I needed to deplatform myself asap if I was seriously considering giving Facebook a role in how I remember a dead relative.

Backup

I’ve posted thousands of bits of information to Facebook Inc.’s services. This includes photos from all the places I’ve lived in, videos, chats with friends, etc. This is how I got the most value out of this social media: as a place to collect, share and create memories. Now it’s time to take that data back.

Step 4: download your data from Facebook Inc.

Facebook’s various services have functionality that let you download all your data. Do this. Review your data. Consider what’s important to you and check if it’s in there: photos, likes, private messages, etc.

Make sure to have more than one copy of this data. I have mine on multiple hard drives & a copy securely in the cloud (basically: a digital hard drive).

You will want to follow this step multiple times: once to review all the data, so that you know if anything needs to be backed up more manually and once before you finally delete your account.

Contact

If you’ve been deplatforming yourself for a while (see step 1), you’ll probably have something like 10-40% of your contacts on platforms outside of Facebook’s realm. Through experimenting with deactivation, you should have a good grasp of who you care to stay in touch with (probably not that person who you haven’t seen for 15 years, only post a yearly ‘happy birthday’ to, and then enjoy the photos of their dog the rest of the year).

Step #5: make sure you stay in touch with the people you value

This step is probably the most work. It involves sharing & requesting contact info from people. Whereas on Instagram & Facebook, it’s easy to post updates in your feed so that people know what you’re doing, on WhatsApp you’ll need a more one-on-one approach. When direct messaging people, you’ll probably get questions about why you’re leaving. While your decision to simply not do business with Facebook Inc. anymore is simple and straightforward, people might challenge you. So make it easy for yourself and have a brief explanation or account deletion epitaph you can link to (preferably hosted somewhere outside of the Facebook Inc. realm).

Be firm: not wanting this company to dominate and monopolize your online social life is perfectly reasonable. If people want to chat about it, you can always say you’d be happy to do so on Telegram, Signal, or Zoom.

Delete yourself

Then comes the moment of liberation. Whereas a deactivation means Facebook Inc. can keep your data and use it for their extractive business model, a deletion in many countries requires Facebook to actually remove your data permanently.

Step #6: delete your Facebook Inc. accounts

There are a few important details you should not miss here and hopefully deactivating your accounts have prepared you for this: make sure to unlink your Facebook account from other accounts. If you created accounts using Facebook, make sure to have an alternative login method for them.

Here’s a guide to help with the rest, including the need to manually delete things shared in social contexts, that might not get removed when you delete your account.

A note for those who want to, but can’t

Unfortunately, deleting social media profiles can be a privilege. It makes certain things a lot harder, especially if you depend on social media for your business, as so many in music do. In my case, it means saying no to freelance jobs I was previously able to say yes to.

The most important step in this whole piece is step #1. Build value elsewhere. Instead of Facebook Groups use Discord communities. Instead of Facebook Events use Resident Advisor or your genre’s equivalent. Use both whenever necessary.

If you can’t afford to leave the platform yourself, at least make it easier for others to do so. This will eventually also decrease your own reliance on Facebook. Every little bit helps.

For marketing professionals reading this: consider being explicit about setting up campaigns that happen outside of the Facebook realm. It’s a great differentiator. A lot is possible with a mix of Twitch, YouTube, Clubhouse, Discord, Twitter, Telegram, WordPress, Shopify, Patreon, Medium, Substack, Bandcamp, etc.

All of this may take time

I first started deactivating my Facebook in 2015. Now, 6 years later, I feel confident enough to pull the trigger on Instagram and WhatsApp too, despite needing the former for professional reasons and the latter for family groups.

Start now. Take back power step by step. You can do each of the above steps without having to follow through with any subsequent step. They all have standalone benefits.

Resources

Lil Nas X, Wendy Carlos & the attention economy

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

Lil Nas X made a meme out of replying to all who responded with cries of satanism to his latest music video. This is part of the performance piece Montero which puts Lil Nas X in a history of intertwining life, music, and tech into one unassailable immersive identity. Music as art has a way of attaching itself to certain personalities through the form of new technologies. How that works and why ‘queer’, in a very broad definition, is often in the mix for those personalities as they seek to rise through the noise and grab our attention is what I explore here.

Queer, being queer, queerness, otherness

When Lil Nas X released Old Town Road it was a watershed moment for TikTok, a watershed moment for country music, a watershed moment for beats marketplaces. In the end it was also a watershed moment for Lil Nas X himself as he came out as gay from a position of fame and thus from a position of some power to take control of his narrative.

Part of what made Old Town Road a success was the controversy it created within the country scene. The artist Lil Nas X rode that wave to perfection and he seems to have meticulously planned out his new controversy.

According to Aja Romano, writing for Vox, Lil Nas X showcased Montero and, of course, the satan shoes to prove the point that to be queer, to be gay, still means to be seen as an evil in many circles. In fact, it’s queer and queerness have always meant many different things. The historian Matt Houlbrook explains in his book Queer London – about male queer experiences in the mid-20th Century city – how

“in its simplest sense, queer signified men’s difference from what was considered “normal” … Yet is could also encompass differences in behavior and appearance. Queer, in this sense, could be a mode of self-understanding, a set of cultural practices, and a way of being. Its meanings were, moreover, never self-evident, stable, or singular.”

Houlbrook, ‘Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis (2005), p. 6-7

In other words, being queer always means you are defined against something else. In extremis Lil Nas X shows in Montero and the accompanying video what it means to define yourself as queer in the face of Christianity.

Gamifying the narrative

Besides the graphic imagery in the music video – and Time has a great explainer of the iconography – there’s another striking part: it looks like a videogame most of the time. Looking through the religious symbolism it’s clear that the video tries to appeal to a certain online experience. As if Lil Nas X constructs his own queerness within the spaces he knows: memes, TikTok virality, Fortnite. More than just absorbing Christian typologies the video also absorbs very current cultural trends. Just look at Lil Nas X’s own concert in Roblox not even six months ago, which had 33 million views across two days and four performances. Many in his fanbase expect the visual experience they get in Montero. It becomes difficult to see the artist Lil Nas X outside of his online personas, aided by him playing all the various characters in the video. He’s as much the virtual avatar as he is the real-life performer. Part of why he has to position himself this way is exactly because he sits outside of the norm. Attaching his identity to the technologies that allow him to express himself strengthens our perception of him as a performance artist.

From queer to trans: Wendy Carlos as a vocoder

Back in 1964 the vocoder was mostly known for warping voices to transmit secret war messages. But it was Wendy Carlos who, through the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange, brought the vocoder into our pop sensibilities (e.g. Outkast‘s Synthesizer or Ginuwine‘s Pony). Of course, she did the same for the synthesizer through her collaborations with Moog. During most of her life though, Wendy struggled to perform different versions of herself. Just as queer is a set of cultural practices as much as a way of being so is trans. For many years of Wendy’s life, however, this was not accepted on either of those levels in any level of mainstream life.

It’s almost too easy to see Carlos’ warping of the human voice through the vocoder as a way of expressing her own warping identity. Or, as Sasha Geffen puts it in her book Glitter Up The Dark:

“by developing the synthesizer as an instrument capable of creating new forms for the voice, Carlos preempted the work she would do by coming out as a trans woman.”

Geffen, ‘Glitter Up The Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary (2020), p. 87

More interestingly, I think, is how she personified herself through her music and the technologies that made it possible.

Attentive listening or a flow of atmosphere

Not all the music Wendy Carlos made was ‘disruptive’ in that sense. See, for example, Sonic Seasonings, an album of what we would now call ambient music. The radical exploration here is in timbre, but also in how to listen. In her own words:

“the idea was to find a music that didn’t require lengthy concentrated listening. We thought that if you enlarged each gesture and slowed the pace, you could stand back and still have the same perspective … It was more than ambient noises in the other room, surf near a beach house when you’re trying to sleep. Something in-between attentive composition and a flow of atmosphere.”

Wendy Carlos interview for NewMusicBox, 2007

Wendy Carlos can thus be seen as a trans woman who explored and struggled with her music much as she explored and struggled with her own identities. Through the synthesizer, she was able to process the technology that allowed her to create the sounds she wanted to hear. These days, she is the personification of the synth, but she not just questioned musical identities, but also listening identities.

The attention economy requires performance art

Carlos’ Sonic Seasonings was a reaction against what she perceived as a music that was becoming ever more intricate and precise. It jolted listeners as it allowed them to listen, but perhaps not just listen; to also allow the listener the opportunity to do something else. “The way you find the limit is by going past it,” Carlos said in that same 2007 interview with NewMusicBox. We are currently experiencing the limits of the attention economy.

MIDiA recently warned of the impending ‘attention recession‘ but before we get there we find ourselves confronted by non-stop Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces sessions, endless livestreams, a deluge of user-generated content across so many platforms, etc. and so on. What Hanna Kahlert – the author of that MIDiA blog – also puts forward is that fandom is the differentiating factor in surviving the attention recession. There’s no better way to grab your fans’ attention then embodying your music.

Wendy Carlos found fame by electrifying classical music, scaring people with synthesized voices and by challenging listeners to slow down. While her identity resonates strongly through her music and the technologies she helped develop and popularised, she was unable – for a long time – to express her own identity directly. This is different for Lil Nas X, whose subversive queerness confronts us with how our societies still others those who are different. By embracing the full spectacle of a set of cultural practices designed to suppress anything that’s queer, he grabs everyone’s attention in a way that’s reminiscent of Madonna more than Wendy Carlos. And yet, the embodiment of the queer and the trans connects Lil Nas and Carlos as it forces people to engage. Within our society, within the attention economy, it is almost necessary to force this type of engagement to pull people out of what they’re immersed in.

Web3, the internet of value, and concerning barriers to participation

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The current NFT furor is partially fueled by early crypto buyers converting virtual money into something that might retain value better: art. This has been the case pre-Bitcoin, as this BBC article from 2017 about traditional art investments points out well:

“As art has no correlation to the stock market, it means paintings can go up in value even when the market crashes, making it a good diversification for an investment portfolio.”

One of the reasons why people are excited about blockchain is the fact that it allows for further decentralization of the web. Whereas the ‘web 2.0’ focused on feeds, social data, APIs and ultimately led to the creation of mega-platforms, discussions around the current ‘Web3’ tend to focus more on protocols, not platforms. That’s exciting, because we’re discussing the building blocks of the next generation of connected applications and their infrastructure.

One of the concepts the Web3 enables is the ‘internet of value‘: an internet where anything of value, from money to intellectual property, can travel as fast as information itself. Currently, transactions of money often flow slowly since they move through centralized bodies (hello, last year’s royalties) and that’s exactly where technologists hope to reduce friction.

This is also why there’s so much talk about trust. Systems, and the networks that support them, need to carry a certain legitimacy for people to adopt them.

One of the most exciting developments in the internet of value, and one that may shape fan culture for the next generation, is that of social tokens. Oversimplifcation: a creator of music sells ‘tokens’ to a community of fans, in order for those fans to unlock perks. These tokens become more valuable as the creator becomes more successful. If you thought BTS fans were everywhere already: just imagine a scenario where they’re holding tokens and the more popular BTS get, the more valuable their tokens get.1

Here’s my concern, though:

Many of these communities (and economies) are currently designed in a way that you have to buy yourself in by converting cryptocurrency into tokens or earn your way in by creating value for the wider network. The latter phenomenon can be seen in ad-free free-to-play games like those of Supercell, where the majority of users create valuable context for a small minority of users to spend their money. After decades of creating value on other people’s platforms and then having to pay to reach your own audience (e.g. Facebook), the token model is a very welcome change – but how do we make it inclusive?

Not everyone is able to buy themselves in early. While it’s true that you don’t always have to buy yourself in, e.g. in the case of Audius airdropping tokens to its users, the amount of effort required to earn your way in later on may increase with the value of tokens. Yet it’s not exactly about effort.

The goal is typically to make sure that those that provide an adequate amount of value to the network or platform get a token, so they can share in the overall value of the network. Kind of like getting a share in Facebook for posting cat pictures that get tons of likes (or your own music). However it’s not just a share: tokens often represent access. Access to communities, access to voting on the future of the network, access to features or perks, etc.

Tracking value

For the sake of inclusivity, it’s crucial that such systems accurately track and compensate value creation. But value is abstract, as anyone familiar with discussions about the value and price of music will know. Unfortunately, many systems are set up with the assumption that all value will be fairly compensated. While I admire the idealism and drive behind them, it does mean that people will be left out – either because they can’t afford to buy themselves in, or because they don’t get awarded a token for the value they create. For example, the person posting cat photos in the above example might get a token, but the people who took those photos don’t get anything.

The NFT market currently also has this problem, with minting fees being a barrier to entry to many artists who can’t afford it. This is an issue that’s being addressed, but for the time being it can be prohibitively expensive to mint NFTs on some of the more popular blockchains like Ethereum. Meanwhile, the Mint Fund is a great example of an initiative that helps artists fund their NFTs, placing emphasis on the underrepresented.

Without taking these exclusionary issues into consideration when designing systems, we risk the next generation of internet culture to be one of currency and speculation. An internet where people with less money (fiat or crypto) get locked out or have less power over the platforms they use, despite perhaps creating more value that can’t be translated into currency.

That’s possibly still a step up from the internet of extractive megaplatforms like Facebook. Plus, if a platform or community decides that’s actually the way they want to work, that’s fine. However, there are a lot of instances where this is not an explicit decision, but rather something that’s believed will be resolved in the future through improvements in technology.

We messed this up with the web 2.0, where the promise was an interoperable internet, but we ended up with an internet where a few platforms extract value from everyone at the cost of privacy and the value of content. 20 years later, we have another shot at this. Let’s get it right this time. From the start.

Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash.

1 It’s not always a good idea to create extrinsic motivators for behaviour that is already the result of strong intrinsic motivation.

AI-powered robot rappers: a 100 year history

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

The word ‘robot’ is 100 years old. Czech playwright Karel Čapek coined the term in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots which premiered in January 1921. Back then, most people in Europe knew someone who had died in the First World War. The idea of sending robots to war instead of humans seemed quite compelling in that context. Nowadays, armies aim to actually downsize in preparation of more drones and combat robots.

A different, but related, development also gained momentum around 1921: the idea of noise generated by machines as music. This idea stems from the thinking of futurist Luigi Russolo and specifically his intonarumori.

Luigi Russolo & his assistant Piatti with the intonarumori (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

These machines are not robots, but the idea that machine-generated sounds combine into music has had a profound impact. How that idea currently plays into our thinking of what music is, is what I explore here.

Robots & music in 2021

Thinking about robots in music right now often centers around AI music stars. A couple of months ago, I wrote how robots could create a connection between the virtual and physical worlds. What does it mean, though, to have a robot, or even just an artificially powered intelligence, create music?

FN Meka

A self-proclaimed ‘AI-powered robot rapper’ FN Meka has more than 9 million followers on TikTok. He just dropped a new track this month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxrNcbcc8fo

FN Meka isn’t actually a robot, there’s a team of people behind the avatar and while the music is AI-generated, the voice is human. Yet, this is a great example of physical and virtual worlds colliding, similar to what we’ve seen with, for example, Gorillaz. The main difference with the Gorillaz being the shift in music production from human to AI-based.

What Russolo’s intonarumori could actually do was make very specific noises that the composer related to everyday industrial sounds such as hissing, crackling, exploding, etc. In total there were 27 variations of the instrument. Inside the instruments a lever controlled the pitch to fix or slide across a scale in tones and gradations thereof. Which, in a way, isn’t too dissimilar to how Auto-Tune works, a technology that FN Meka isn’t one to shy away from.

Visual impact

During the first months of the pandemic there was a clear shift from audio to video in terms of music consumption. This implied that people wanted to lean in more, pay more attention to what they listened to with an added visual element. The rise of FN Meka on TikTok fits into this narrative. He’s an engaging visual appearance who entertains by drawing viewers into his world.

@fnmeka

Which song 🎵 is your Favorite ⁉️ #iphone13 #airpod #iphone

♬ original sound – FNMeka

The importance of this visual aspect to musical culture is what prompted researchers at Georgia Tech in the US to create Shimon, a musical robot that looks, well, kind of cute.

The visual cues – like the ‘head’ bopping to the beat – are important for both audiences and fellow musicians to help connect to Shimon. Moreover, the researchers who developed the robot not only drew on artificial intelligence – more specifically deep learning – but also on creativity algorithms. This means that Shimon has the power to surprise, to sound creative in his own way.

Creative robots?

The connection between creativity and machines is significant, because it allows for a future that exists beyond the boundaries of what we know right now. When Shimon surprises his fellow musicians by shifting rhythm or pitch he softly pushes a boundary that often seems very far away.

In his blog on the AI Revolution Tim Urban explained how developments in AI research are propelling us towards artifical superintelligence – the moment computers become more intelligent than humans. What Urban doesn’t discuss is creativity. A trait some argue will never appear in a machine. And yet, this all depends largely on how we define creativity. Arthur Miller, for example, asks not just whether machines can make art in the future but also whether we will be able to appreciate it. Perhaps we will have to learn to love it, similar to how some of us enjoy the sound of Auto-Tune and others do not.

While the threat of a superintelligent being is not something to dismiss, right now any AI-powered music still leans heavily on human input. To create music with an AI, so to speak, is to create a set of parameters – a training set – which the machine uses to process sound. For Holly Herndon‘s album Proto she worked with her own AI which she called Spawn. From the data fed into the machine by Herndon she was able to draw a voice. To then incorporate this voice into the music in such a way that it felt musical, or creative, meant splicing and editing that vocal sonic output.

The final leap

What Herndon does is similar to what Russolo did with his intonarumori. He had 27 instruments to recreate the sounds he heard and aimed to combine those into a music that fit into a certain tradition of composition. She built not a physical machine, but a synthetic singer whose voice she created with data input and subsequently rearranged into her musical vision. FN Meka plays around with the idea of an AI-powered robot but leans more heavily into the visual culture of a virtual music star. Where the next jump in history sits, then, is closer to what Shimon stands for: a robot capable of listening and by virtue of his data, his knowledge, being able to jump just that bit further than the training set supplied to him. That already leads to surprise, which in itself is a prerequisite for creativity.