It is a directory to create more visibility for organisations and initiatives that make the music industry greener, less impactful on the climate and ecology, and more sustainable overall. đą
By making it easier to find and share best practices, organisations, products, and research, I hope we can accelerate the progress towards our sustainability goals.
Why am I launching MUSIC x GREEN?
The environment is something I always cared about. I stopped eating meat in 2007. Whenever reasonably possible, I travel by land. In the midst of the forest fire crisis in Brazil earlier this year, I started going to the Fridays For Future rallies in Berlin. From small demonstrations with one or two hundred people, to bike rallies, to Extinction Rebellion’s blockades, to a protest with over a quarter million people: every time I was inspired by young people taking a stand and demanding governments and corporations acknowledge the climate crisis and take stronger measures towards preventing further catastrophe.
My day-to-day is in music though and when I left IDAGIO, it was time to kick up my music innovation newsletter again: MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. It is subscribed to by thousands of people in the music business and adjacent industries, and I have always used it as a means to put items on the agenda that I think are important and underdiscussed.
Sustainability had become one of them. I started researching it. I found out about the immense impact of tours, that audience travel often has the largest share in the greenhouse gas output of an event, and about the fact that music streaming puts a heavier burden on our climate than the CD business ever did.
But it wasn’t that easy to find these things out.
I found news articles quoting each other and reusing the same data from 2008 over and over again. I found blogs talking about a star’s initiative to get her fans to take climate action, but it didn’t go into any detail nor talk about the results.
Then still it would take hours of digging through websites, publications, references by others, getting tips via email, etc. to find stuff out.
If I’m spending that time anyway, I might as well make sure other people won’t have to do the same.
MUSIC x GREEN is where you can share projects, data, initiatives, organisations, professionals, case studies, and news about what’s happening in the space of music and sustainability.
Right now, it has the form of a simple filterable database where everyone can submit and upvote projects, somewhat comparable to Product Hunt. With your feedback and input, it will evolve over time.
How did I build MUSIC x GREEN?
MUSIC x GREEN was made with Sheet2Site: a service that lets you build a website from a spreadsheet. I had been playing around with the idea for a while, but wasn’t sure how to build it. I considered WordPress, because 20 years of blogging (of which at least 12 with WordPress) has made me rather familiar with the software. But it seemed to complicated and I wanted something simpler.
I wanted to get something up and launched ASAP, so I asked Twitter for good “#NoCode” tools for something like this. The next morning I reviewed the options and by the end of the morning I shelved over the 50 bucks to Sheet2Site and got busy.
The back of the website, where I enter all the data, looks like this and is stored on my Google Drive:
I added and organised lots of the great work I was already familiar with and by the end of the day the site was ready. Now all I needed to do was wait for the domain name to be connected (I went for MUSIC x SUSTAINABILITY at first, but sustainability is annoying to type in URLs), write this blog post, ask some friends for feedback, and make sure I didn’t have to do large edits taking the site down in its first days.
But the launch moment in my head was clear: Friday, at noon. The default rally time for Fridays For Future.
What’s next?
First of all: now it’s over to you. Please start submitting projects, initiatives, research, organisations, events. Let’s gather everything in one place. Go to musicxgreen.com, and hit ‘Submit a Project’ at the top.
I wanted to ‘start small‘. For me it’s important to get something out there, see how people interact with it, and feel the pressure of thousands of eyes while I improve things.
Ideas I’m currently considering are
More tags:
“New ⨔ to easily find items added in the last x days.
“Products đ︔ to find eco-friendly alternatives. I’m torn about this one, because I think we should basically buy less, not more.
“People đââ︔ to highlight academics, professionals, and activists in the music and sustainability space.
Notifications:
Maybe a newsletter to stay up to date of new additions, perhaps once a month.
Something more automated like a Twitter feed.
Social?
I like the idea of adding some type of commenting system, although it’s not (yet) supported by Sheet2Site, so may have to migrate for that.
Fix the images
Currently a lot of the images are hosted on third-party sites, including Twitter and Facebook. This is not so privacy-friendly, the images may be larger than they need to be, and there’s a risk of them disappearing. Any developer who can figure out how to grab all these images, possibly run them through optimization like imgix, and then replace all the URLs in the spreadsheet with the optimized images? Ideally as a script that I can trigger every now and then when a significant number of items were added… Get in touch.
If you have suggestions, feedback, or questions, the best way to reach out to me is on Twitter: @basgras or send me an email.
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Forty thousand. That’s the number of songs being added to Spotify every day. Per year, that’s nearly 15 million. With AI, we are approaching a world where we could easily create 15 million songs per day. Per hour even. What might that look like?
Can music experiences performed by robots be Authorful? (photo: Compressorhead)
The music trend we can most linearly extrapolate into the AI age is that of utilitarian music: instead of putting on an album, we put on workout music playlists, jazz for cooking, coffee time Sunday, music for long drives.
Artists have become good at creating music specifically for contexts like this. It often forms a big consideration in marketing music, but for also the creation process itself. But an artist can’t be everywhere at once. AI can and will be. Meaning that for utilitarian music, artificial intelligence will have an unfair advantage: it can work directly with the listener to shape much more gratifying, functional music experiences.
This will lead to the rise of Authorless Music. Music without a specific author, besides perhaps a company or algorithm name. It may be trained by the music of thousands of artists, but for the listener it will be hard to pinpoint the origins back to all or any of those artists.
Do we want Authorless Music? Well, not necessarily. However if you track music consumption, it becomes obvious that the author of music is not important at all for certain types of music listening. Yet we crave humanity, personality, stories, context.
Those familiar with trend watching and analysis, know to keep their eyes open for counter trends. When more of our time started being spent on social platforms and music became more anonymous due to its abundance, what happened? We started going to festivals in numbers never seen before. So what counters Authorless Music?
The counter trend to Authorless Music is Authorful Music. Although there will be a middle space, for the sake of brevity I’ll contrast the two.
Authorless Music
Authorful Music
Origin
AI-created or obscure
Human-created (ish)
Focus
Specialised in function
Specialised in meaning
Relation
Little emotional involvement
Strong emotional involvement
Trait
Personalized
Socialized
Authorless Music: primarily driven by AI or the listener is unable to tell whether the listed artist is a real person or an algorithm. The music is specifically targeted towards augmenting certain activities, moods, and environments. Due to its obscure origin, the listener has little emotional involvement with the creator (although I’m looking forward to the days where we can see AI-algorithms fan bases argue with each other about who’s the real King / Queen of AI pop). In many cases it will be personalised to the listener’s music taste, environment, weather, mood, etc.
Authorful Music: primarily created and / or performed by tangible people or personalities. It will be focused in shaping meaning, as it is driven by human intent which embeds meaning by default. This type of music will maintain a strong emotional link between artists and their fans, as well as among fans themselves. This music exists in a social way – even music without lyrics, such as rave music, exists in a social context and can communicate that meaning, context, and intention.
With the increasing abundance of music (15 million tracks per year!), the gateway to Authorless Music has been opened. What about Authorful? What experiences will we craft in a mature streaming landscape?
Two important directions to pay attention to:
Socialising music experiences
It’s so easy to make and manipulate music on our smartphones now. Whether it’s music as a standalone or accompanying something on Instagram or TikTok. One reason for this massive amount of music being added to streaming services is because it’s easier than ever to make music. With apps that make it easy for people to jam around with each other, we’ll see a space emerge which produces fun tools and basically treats music as communication. This happens on smartphones but is strongly complemented by the virtual reality and gaming space.
There is a lot of information around music. What experiences can be created by exposing it? What happens when the listeners start to enter the space between creator and listener and find their own creative place in the music through interaction? (I previously explored this in a piece called The future of music, inspired by a cheap Vietnamese restaurant in Berlin)
Examples of this trend: lyrics annotation community Genius, classical music streaming service IDAGIO, and projects like Song Sommelier.
Special thanks to Data Natives, The Venue Berlin, and Rory Kenny of JAM for an inspiring discussion on AI music recently. You’ve helped inspire some of these thoughts.
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Will AI replace human artists? What would the implications be? These questions grip many in the music business and outside of it. This weekend I decided to explore some lyric generation apps and see what I could get out of them – learning a thing or two about the future of music along the way.
Below I’ve posted the most coherent lyrics I managed to get out of one AI tool. I’m dubbing the song Purple Sun.
What I imagine the song’s artwork to look like.
You can make the sun turn purple You can make the sea into a turtle
You can turn wine into water Turn sadness into laughter
Let the stars fall down Let the leaves turn brown
Let the rainwoods die Let wells run dry
I love the turtle line. I guess the algorithm struggled with rhyming purple.
Two lines down is a wine / water line. Initially I was impressed by having a western cultural reference. But hold up… turning wine into water? That’s just evil.
Read it over once more. Or twice. By reading it over more, I became convinced that obviously humans are the superior songwriters.
But you know what, I’ve been lying to you.
The origins of the above lyrics are actually human, from a 90s rave song called Love U More by DJ Paul Elstak.
And they carry meaning. A lot of meaning to a whole generation of people in The Netherlands and other parts of Europe. Myself included. The meaning comes not necessarily from what the intent of the lyrics is. It comes from the music, nostalgia, memories, associations.
This is listener-assigned meaning. As soon as you release music, you give over control of the narrative to an audience. Artistic intent may have a lot of sway, but sometimes a song that’s a diatribe against fame turns into something stadiums full of drunk people chant.
A few statements to consider:
AI has a role as a tool to be used by people to apply their creativity.
Not all successful human created art objectively requires a lot of skill.
Creativity doesn’t end with the creator. The creator sets intent, the listener assigns meaning.
Let’s pair #1 and #3. In the first statement I talk about people, rather than mention specific roles as in the thrid statement. That’s because AI allows more people to be creative, either as listener, creator, or the space in between.
It’s this space in between that will be impacted and shaped by AI. Think of the dadabots projects, such as their infinite neural network generated death metal stream, apps like JAM, Jambl, and Endlesss which allow people to express themselves musically in easy ways, or technologies that turn music into something more adaptive like Bronze and FLUENT (disclaimer: I’m an advisor to the latter). Not all of the above use AI, but all cater to this space in between listener and creator.
The reason why I added statement #2 is because AI-created music doesn’t necessarily have to be objectively good. Music is subjective. Its sucess depends on how well it can involve the listener. That’s why AI is destined to be the most important force for the future of music in a more creative world.
Credits for the lyrics above: Lucia Holm / Paul Carnell. Thank you for the wondrous energy, the memories, the music.
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Coldplayannounced this week that they are not going to tour until they can figure out a climate neutral or climate positive way to do so. Touring has a massive CO2 output. U2‘s 2009 tour is said to have produced the CO2 equivalent of flying to Mars and back (or the annual waste produced by 6,500 British people, or the same as leaving a lightbulb running for 159,000 years, or flying 90,000 people at one of their stadium shows from London to Dublin – pick your favourite).
What are the implications? A single flight from London to Dublin produces about 100kg of CO2 per passenger, depending on the airline. Now consider this: “Each kg of CO2 ultimately melts about 650 kg of glacial ice.” Times 100, times 90,000. And that’s just for this one band, in perhaps the most polluting tour ever.
However, it’s audience travel that is the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in music. Oft-quoted research by Julie’s Bicycle, published in 2008, estimates audience travel accounts for 43% of the UK music industry’s greenhouse gas output.
The Guardian article about U2 that I linked above, ends with a quote of a review by Mark Reed:
“The carbon footprint of this might be quite large, but the spiritual rewards to the audience of this are those that enhance a life. If all life were bread and water, then there would be nothing to lift mankind above the amoeba.”
I personally dislike how dismissive the quote sounds, especially when it’s used to conclude an article about an important problem. Mankind has a much worse chance of surviving catastrophic climate change than amoeba after all. However, the author does touch upon something important. The experiences that the music business provides are important (so important that it’s moved someone to describe a U2 concert as a spiritual experience). So what drives me are the following two questions:
How can we continue to provide these experiences?
How can we use these experiences to inspire a better world?
What comes to mind is a quote by Sammy Bananas, founder of DJs for Climate Action. Talking to Stuart Swift in an article on Stamp the Wax, the example of transitioning from plastic straws to paper comes up:
“While Sammy admits its impact on the climate is negligible, it “may have a much greater effect on making people wonder why the venue took the effort to make the switch.” This creates a snowball effect where “individuals want to learn more and engage.””
Alright. I hope the doom and gloom in the paragraphs above is enough of a motivator. Let’s look at actionable steps players in the industry can take to reduce our impact and inspire a better world.
Measure
Whether it’s understanding energy use of a venue or festival, waste produced, or the audience’s footprint, the first step to tackling a problem is to start mapping it. This makes it easier to research and identify areas of high impact and not get distracted by working on things which have negligible impact.
Few venues have an accurate idea of the energy consumption of everything inside. Sure, stage lighting and audio is often well-considered and engineered, but what about cooling systems, lighting in other spaces of the venue, heating, etc.
Do artists know their CO2 footprints? Understanding better what the environmental cost of a tour or a gig is, can help identify ways to address or mitigate that cost.
Then there’s festivals and the audience that travels to them. In considering audience travel, the main question is often a logistical one: how do we get everyone on-site in a decent timeframe? Is there enough road and public transport capacity? As audience travel constitutes a majority of a festival’s greenhouse gas footprint (Dr Jillian Anable & Julie’s Bicycle put it at two thirds), it’s worth tracking the problem and mapping it out.
Audience travel
The problem of audience travel emissions is important to approach within its specific contexts. What type of event are people traveling for? What are their modes of transportation? What type of (public transport) infrastructure exists?
Festivals may consider offering discounted combined entrance & public transport tickets, organising events closer to urban areas, and offering camping equipment rental and supply sales on-site. The latter is an important why people choose to travel by car to multi-day festivals.
In general, organisers should make sure public transportation services are mentioned in event communications, as audiences are often not aware of these options.
Energy use at events
The UK’s Shambala Festival is often mentioned as one of the greenest festivals and managed to reduce its carbon footprint by 80% and is free of meat, fish, and disposable plastics.
Paul Schurink, co-founder of Green Events Netherlands, is an expert in the field of temporary energy supply and as such has worked with countless festivals to improve their energy use. In an interview with Clubbing TV, he explains some of the basics. Some takeaways:
Smart power plans for festivals take about 3 years to build. The first year you go for the quick wins, and in following years you get a feedback loop of expertise and new practices. After 3 years, festivals can save 40% of their power per edition.
If a festival uses forty thousand liters of fuel for generating power, they’d need fifteen thousand liters less. Financially, that’s at least fifteen thousand euros saved. It also means less generators to rent, less generators and fuel to transport, less transport costs.
If you use less power, you’re more sustainable. Using less power also makes it easier to make use of sustainable energy sources like solar panels.
Live events as testing grounds
Duncan Stutterheim, founder of dance event organisation ID&T and the legendary Thunderdome events, set up Open House a few years ago. Akin to a startup incubator, they helped partner innovative young companies with events and NGOs. Together, they could find out more about topics like how the same innovative energy solutions used at festivals can be used for humanitarian aid, and also looked into circular use of waste.
An organisation called Innofest matches innovative startups with festivals to test their solutions out in the real world. Since their website is completely in Dutch, I’ll highlight some of their cases:
Ditching single use rain ponchos (15 minutes of use, 500 years to decompose): a startup called Weather Underground did a test at Noorderzon festival with ponchos that can be repurposed as a bag and are biodegradable (video in English).
Building tables of festival waste: Futuretable made tables from recycled waste at Welcome to The Village festival. By communicating that these tables were made of waste, they successfully encouraged people to recycle more because they could see and try out what their waste would turn into.
E-waste Arcade tested better waste separation by making it fun through sound-producing garbage disposal units at Eurosonic Noorderslag.
Plantjebandje is a compostable festival wristband that’s biodegrable and filled with plant seeds. Take the wristband off at home, plant it and see what sprouts. (article in English)
&Cricket tested what it takes to get people to eat insect-based food as a sustainable alternative to meat (a major contributor to greenhouse gases). Their cricket fries sold out.
Connect & stay up to date
Sustainability is becoming a major topic of my music & innovation newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE – followed by thousands of people in creative industries around the globe. If you’re not on the list, please consider subscribing.
If you are professionally active in the music industry or sustainability and collaborate with creative sectors, please drop me a short email introducing yourself â I’d like to invite you to the Music Tech Network Slack. I’ve set up a #sustainability channel and I want it to be a place to exchange knowledge, experience, and build connections. Reach me at bas@musicxtechxfuture.com
My biggest gripe with most music business conferences is that I hardly ever bump into engineers, designers, or product managers. If they’re there, they’re presenting their company rather than talk about the work they do, like many other music professionals. There’s marketing talks, A&R talks, talks about bookings, management… Where are the design talks?
Part of this frustration is personal: when going to a conference, I want to learn from people. While music conferences help me build perspective, they hardly help me develop as a professional.
More importantly, I believe the people who have some of the biggest impact on the modern music landscape often aren’t actually part of the conference. It would help the whole business to better understand them, their goals, their motivations.
They’re the people who decide upon the interfaces through which we experience music and connect with creators. They decide upon algorithms. What feature goes in, what doesn’t. And they’re largely invisible.
How decisions get made in tech companies
Tech companies set themselves up for rapid growth. Either in terms of users, staff, or both. In order to do so, it’s important people inside an organisation have a framework for autonomy. They have to be able to understand the company’s goals at the top-level, and what that means for their team specifically. They should be able to derive goals from the top-level goals themselves.
This type of grass-roots level autonomy helps the velocity and quality of decision-making compared to old school top-down chains of command and approval.
One of the most popular frameworks at the moment is OKR: objectives and key results. A team decides what they want to accomplish in a certain timeframe (objective: “shape a delightful social experience around music”) and then defines ways in which they want to measure their performance on the objective (key result: “active users share music 5 times a week”).
Once everything is set, the time period is kicked off and the team works together to try to accomplish their objective. They might use data about the service, in-person interviews with users or potential users, and the advice from stakeholders around the company.
There is one metric so important, that you will almost always encounter it when spending some time in a digital entertainment company. Either as a “key result” or as a “health metric” to see how well the company is doing.
The most important metric in music
One popular concept in optimizing a company for growth is “One Metric That Matters“. It means giving company one metric to focus on improving during a given stage. This may be “customer lifetime value” (CLV): how much revenue does a user bring in as long as they use our service?
For many music streaming services, CLV will be composed of various factors. Does a user upgrade to premium or do they stay on the ads platform? How much are advertisers paying for ads? How long does a user stay with the service before ‘churning’ (leaving, and not returning)?
There is one metric that has arguably had more influence on music than any of the above: how do you make sure you get more ad revenue per user on average? How can you tell that a person is enjoying their subscription and are unlikely to unsubscribe (churn)?
Listening time.
How many hours per day, week, month, does a user spend listening to music on our service?
It can be a good health metric, and it can have a rather direct relation on revenue growth when applied to the ad-based free tiers of services.
So designers, engineers, and product managers get to work and try to figure out how to optimize the amount of time people spend listening to music on their service.
The never ending push for listening time
In come tools for curators to optimize their playlists: and out go songs that lead to skips. How many skips away from the pause button are we? Let’s not risk it.
Out come the algorithms which continue audio playback after an album or playlist finishes playing, which populate users’ home feeds with music they’re most likely to listen to at this time of day, which create context on artist profiles by showing the ‘related artists’ users are most likely to click on and listen to next.
What it also does is strip music of context. It removes music from circulation that is not optimal for performing on this metric. It values art based on metrics.
What happens when people listen to more music?
One could do academic studies on the above subject (and if you have done so, please get in touch with me), so for the sake of this article I’ll give a few examples of what happens.
Theme-based playlists and other features that make the friction of choosing something to listen to smaller. Indecisiveness = lower chance of playback = less listening time.
Decreased familiarity with the artists one listens to. Listening to a higher number of artists means that on average people will be less familiar with each individual artist and their music. This does not mean that people’s familiarity with their absolute favourite artists is necessarily affected. However when they don’t know which of these artists to tune into, they might go for option 1 and just pick something theme-based, put it in the background, and listen to hours of music from anonymous artists, because the user was never confronted with their names.
Decreased importance and awareness of context. Think of a feature like Spotify’s Discover Weekly. A great tool to get people to come back to the app every week and listen to something, perhaps even explore some new music. The challenge is that it presents music stripped of any context. It’s just a list of tracks based on what you’ve been listening to. Recently, that’s sent me into 80s dark wave and industrial, but I honestly have no idea about the landscape. Who were the important artists? Where did they come from? Who inspired them? What subgenres, microgenres, and adjacent scenes exist? What does the subculture look like? All sacrificed for convenience. (I actually think there are interesting business opportunities here, now that the music streaming landscape has matured in many countries)
All that, because of a business decision to focus on a metric, and hundreds of thousands of small decisions by thousands of designers, engineers, and product managers that then influence the future of music styles, scenes, and the way artists connect to fans.
Why focusing on listening time is inevitable
I love this age of music and although the last section may sound pessimistic, I’m actually excited by the ease of access of music and all the experimentation that exists now. I’m excited by how easy it is, relatively speaking, to build up a listener base these days.
The hard thing about the world we’ve created is that with infinite free media (which I consider a good thing, inherently) we’ve opened up a massive competition for attention. The amount of music people would listen to used to be as large as people’s disposable budget for music. Now, for $10 / month or even $0, we can listen to music 24/7 and never hear the same song twice.
This is the landscape in which companies have to build their business models, and the landscape in which the music industry has to identify business models. With advertising-based models it’s simple: you lose attention, you lose the revenue. With subscription-based models, it’s similar.
Music competes with podcasts, video game streamers, tv shows, cat videos, and unfunny pranks. Either on one platform like YouTube, or spread out over various platforms (Apple Music competing for attention with Netflix, for example). This competition for attention, unfortunately, has become a rule of the web.
The part on which we can work together is the how: how do we hold people’s attention? How do we connect them to what they care about? How do we generate revenue around that?
What do you think?
I’m curious to collect more perspectives. Add on by penning your thoughts on Medium, LinkedIn, your blog, or as a Twitter thread. Email me or ping me on Twitter (@basgras) with a link and I’ll include it in next week’s newsletter (sent out 18 Nov, 2019 – 4pm Berlin time).
Bonus
You made it to the end. Here’s a video of every time Mark Zuckerberg said “more”, “growth”, or mentioned a growth metric.
MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE is on a bit of a hiatus. I started it 2 years ago with the goal of shedding light on topics that I felt were being neglected.
Two years later, I feel more positive about the conversation in the music business. Besides that, great newsletters (like Platform & Stream) and writers (like Cherie Hu) have emerged and cover a lot of the topics I set out to cover with MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. So what role can I play now in moving the conversation forward?
I have been doing a lot of thinking about whatâs next. How will all these trends we discuss combine? What are we not talking about? Where are the opportunities? What is the next generation of artists doing? What do they know that we donât?
By thinking about this, I have slowly been reinventing MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE along with the topics I cover. Music as a business is a complex ecosystem. Music as a phenomenon has kept generations of musicologists and philosophers occupied in discussions without conclusions for millennia. The question I have been answering is: what do I find important and what is nobody talking about?
Inspiration
By focusing on innovation in music, and always expanding my musical and artistic horizons, I have seen some developments over the last year that are starting to click together. I am now of the opinion that we are seeing the emergence of an important new generation of music that is going to spawn its own ecosystem.
Broadly speaking, music & the internet has had two phases so far:
Phase 1: the great disruption
Letâs call it the Napster moment. It led to the first new status quo. The rule it imposed was this: âanything that can be stored in digits can be communicated digitally through networks.â (this rule has also been called âinformation wants to be freeâ) This introduced music, and its business ecosystem, to the age of networks. Instead of moving products through distribution and media channels, it now moved through networks⌠and anyone that wanted to play the game, no longer had to find a way into the channelsâââeveryone was on the network.
MySpace Tom: a friend for everyone
Phase 2: the MySpace moment
This phase is probably heralded by what I call the MySpace moment. MySpace grew as piracy thrived. Communities formed. We understood what social media could mean for music. Then MySpace collapsed and there was nothing there to take its place. Instead, the smartphone enabled the next generation of music and social platforms. On-demand music services like Spotify and SoundCloud appearedâââboth making an impact on modern music culture far exceeding MySpaceâs. Communities formed again.
Phase 3: the SoundCloud moment
So whatâs phase 3? The streaming economy is maturing. We are still figuring out how it will work exactly. Let the constant lawsuits between musicians, songwriters, labels, and streaming services be a testament to that. The shitty smartphones we used to have, have been traded in for phones that are more powerful than the computers on our desks a few years ago. AND they have cameras on both sides, AND we have fast internet, ALL the time. Queue YouTubers, Instagram stars, as well as producers rebooting their careers by becoming Snapchat personalities. đ
Meme culture went mainstream. People retiring now, with lots of free time on their hands, have been using the internet for 20 years. People reaching maturity now donât know the world without internet. They may have been carrying smartphones before taking their first chemistry class. It introduces new questions and phenomena in our culture and in music. A 2017 headline that captured one of those phenomena well was: âRapâs Biggest Stars Are Depressed & So Are Their Fansâ.
Net art commenting on internet & mental health.
OK OK OK SO WHAT IS PHASE 3?!
I canât tell you. We can only see it once itâs there. But I can tell you how to be part of it.
With each of these shifts media culture shifted, so you have to look at what changes media culture is going through right now. Artificial intelligence, voice activated devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality all play tremendously important roles here. We still donât know what the SoundClouds, Facebooks, Spotifys, PewDiePies and Justin Biebers (discovered through YouTube) of this phase will be, but we do know what technologies and media formats they may employ.
When MySpace started collapsing, everyone wanted to figure out what the ânext MySpaceâ would be. There was no next MySpace. Not in the way anyone was thinking about it. Ultimately, Facebook and SoundCloud filled that gap and took things way further than MySpace.
So what would the next SoundCloud look like?
This is what I know about the next SoundCloud. It can be clunky. In fact, it may be better if itâs not easy to use (e.g. Snapchat): kids will spend time figuring out how to move into virtual spaces where they can do their own thing. P2P services were not easy to use at first, torrents werenât easy to use, and as elegant as it was, SoundCloud was not as easy to use as MySpace in its early days as long as you were trying to use it for MySpacey purposes.
It has to do 1 thing extremely well though (letâs call it âkiller featureâ). I remember that SoundCloudâs waveform & commenting feature was so great that artists were learning basic code, so they could remove MySpaceâs standard players from their profiles and add SoundCloudâs waveform.
Then it has to have high cultural appeal. The waveform helped SoundCloud travel. It was cool. Itâs hard to say what it will be like for the next SoundCloud⌠But perhaps itâs a cryptotoken. Blockchain is cool and cryptocurrencies are cool. They have cultural appeal, partly because of their association with ordering drugs online via the Tor network. But also because they represent dissent against the status quo, whether thatâs valid or invalid. And the first cryptocurrency millionaires in music are already here. 50 Cent.
Perhaps Mat Dryhurst, a prolific thinker and artist (some may know him from his work with Holly Herndon), will be proven right and we will see a tokenized SoundCloud. Fingers crossed, because I admire what theyâve done and the role theyâve played in helping modern music & internet culture take shape.
But what aboutâŚ
We assume too often that what comes next follows more or less linearly from what was there before. By doing so, we discount important developments and blind ourselves to their potential impact. In previous paragraphs, I have done exactly that. So itâs time to clean up my mess.
What is internet culture?
First of all, I need to clarify what I mean when I talk about internet culture or online culture. I am talking about audiovisual aesthetics, language, cultural memes like jokes, discourse about identity, politics, society and psychology. These emerge online. From bedrooms. From people of all ages and countries, connecting online to collaborate, iterate, remix, and discuss in virtual space.
This has manifested through music genres like vaporwave and nightcore (example below), but also more serious topics, such as a cultural emphasis on mental health, and identity (most notably gender identity). Then thereâs a darker side to it too. The alt right has been able to create so much impact, from bedrooms, by using the same internet culture dynamics that previous examples utilizeâââeventually memeing Trump into the White House. They accomplished it as part of an alliance of mostly pre-internet organisations, institutions, and structures, but those organisations couldnât have pulled this off without their internet army.
When I talk about internet culture, or online culture, I do not mean to suggest a separation between online and offline. Iâm just pointing at the origin. As a matter of fact, the internet has become such a standard part of our lives that we are online even when weâre offline.
On a free weekend day, leave your phone at home. Go explore the city. Go to parts youâve never been. Soon, you may get lost and want to check Google Maps. You may see something fascinating that youâd like to photograph and share on Instagram or Facebook. You might take a mental note to look that building up on Wikipedia when you get home to get more history.
By now, our minds are always online. Even when we believe weâre offline.
Always online
This is the number 1 thing that changed over the course of aforementioned phase 2. Even when smartphones arrived, we werenât online all the time. But now we are. The fact that we are always carrying devices around that are connected to fast internet, with cameras on both sides, and with great screens compared to those 5â10 years ago, is one of the most important realities for the future of music.
Musical.ly, sold last year for around $1bn, comes to mind.
Mixed reality
How platforms deal with âmixed realityâ may be as crucial as the question of how the previous generation dealt with the rise of the smartphone. Back in Facebookâs younger days, the company was struggling to crack mobile and eventually took drastic measures to become mobile-first. Getting ahead of the problem this time, Facebook entered the virtual reality space in 2014 through the early acquisition of Oculus VR for $2bn.
But I donât think itâs VR as a medium that will have the high cultural impact that the internet did. I think itâs about the interface to other aspects of our experience. Itâs why I believe the below video of Mark Zuckerbergâs wife, Priscilla Chan, calling Mark from âthe real worldâ while heâs in a VR version of his home, was one of the most important tech showcases last year.
Skip to 4:50 if the video doesnât auto-play from there.
Offline and online is blurring, so what does that imply for music?
Instreaming
Late last year I attended a gig that has really started falling into place since. A friend from Holland (Victor, also known as S x m b r a) was coming to Berlin to do a gig. I met him when he was mostly known for writing for Generation Bassâââan important blog for underground bass music culture. He is extremely plugged in and knows so much about trends in music (particularly online niches), so I really trust him as a music curator.
He is also part of something called c a r e, which is described as:
c a r e is a post-internet party taking place online. c a r e is about sharing together. c a r e is a future sensation. this digital experience enables you to connect with internet kids worldwide. it also provides the opportunity to meet and discover artists and people which have common interests. we are a based world community that meets at url parties. we are glad to invite you to this virtual concept of partying. we hope youâll enjoy the event! see you online.
Through c a r e, he teamed up an interdisciplinary collective called Clusterduck which specialises in internet culture. Together they organised a âurl / irl partyâ as part of Clusterduckâs Internet Fame project, which is part of the Wrong Biennaleâââa global event celebrating digital art.
During the event, an audio & video stream connected people from their bedrooms to the âirlâ event. These people could interact with each other online, but they were also âinstreamedâ so their chat messages & webcam feeds on Tinychat would be shown inside the party. The founder of c a r e, who wasnât present in person, is even billed on the poster and broadcasted a DJ set from url to the irl space in Berlin.
A lot of people at the âirlâ part of the event were familiar with some of the people they saw on the âurlâ part displayed on a prominent screen above the dancefloor & bar. So it created this sense of community & connection and blurring of irl & url.
You could walk into such an event and think itâs just some young folks who set up some webcams, but when you see it as part of the greater trends in our all-absorbing media & tech culture, what was happening there becomes way more significant.
Internet culture and music
I will be going way deeper into this in future articles and newsletters, but I want to give you an example of what I think people should be paying attention to.
For example, the Sponsored Content album by an artist called Antwood. Itâs a perfect example of the post-internet avant-garde expression in music. Antwood:
âIn the past year, I found that ASMR [dubbed by Google as the biggest YouTube trend youâve never heard of], which I had previously used as a source of foley in my music, was a fairly effective sleep aid. Iâd been using the videos in this way for a few months, when I noticed a popular ASMR YouTuber announced a plan to incorporate ads into her videos; quiet, subtle ads, woven into the content. What bothered me about this was that these ads would target viewers, such as myself, during times of semi lucid vulnerability. This disturbed me, and I unsubscribed.
Sponsored Content explores this idea of subversive advertisement, at least superficially. Itâs obviously about the ubiquity of ads and the commodification of online content. The unlikely placement of ads in the music aims to force the listener to become hyper-aware of being advertised to rather than passively internalizing it. But after the record was finished, it became undeniable that really it wasnât so much a âconcept recordâ about advertisement; itâs as much about intentionally devaluing the things Iâve invested myself into, and over-complicating my work. When I realized this, I considered taking the ads out, and playing the music straight. But I left the record as it is: honest, flawed, with a little humour, and slightly up its own ass.â
Iâve compiled over 25 hours of albums and releases that I feel adhere to this trend in music (Spotify playlist). My playlist biases towards the club & nightlife variants of this trend, but the visual and musical aesthetics & themes should give you a good understanding of what this is about. The most famous example is probably Arca, who has produced for Kanye West and BjĂśrk.
Aforementioned Holly Herndon, who toured with Radiohead, uses AI in her work: âWe have an AI baby that weâre training on our voices; on our voices and on the voices of our ensemble. Yeah, itâs learning how to talk and how to sing, so itâs freaking weirdâ.
Another great example of the post-internet trend in arts and music is YouTuber Poppy, who recently released an album called Poppy.Computer on Mad Decent.
Besides the obvious commentary on internet culture & society on her channel, Poppy plays with the uncanny valley hypothesis of robotics professor Masahiro Mori. The hypothesis suggests that humans feel fine with robots that are obviously not human, but the more semblance these robots get to humans, the stronger our feelings of eeriness and revulsion.
In music, perhaps the best known example of a post-internet genre is vaporwave:
Over the last 2 years, I have written a lot about the music business ecosystem. Always with an innovative angle, but often focused on the type of big issues that are discussed and decided about in boardrooms. While those things are immensely important, itâs also reactive. Reaction doesnât set trajectoryâââit can only adjust it.
My focus is going to shift from the boardroom to the bedroom. From complex issues with big financial implications, to profound ideas that may not always have a clear link to monetization. It is a focus on the creator, the inventor, the innovator.
The newsletter has always placed emphasis on utility. I want what I do to be useful in some way. The most important way in which I try to do that, is by showing what is next, which I will continue to do. What is next is already hereâââyou just have to know where to look.
This is our culture we are talking about. That is primary.
That is what enables the business around it. Which is secondary.
MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. Those words say it all.
(This post originally appeared on Medium, which I’m moving away from. When you can avoid the large platforms, you should.)
Through c a r e, he teamed up an interdisciplinary collective called 