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.
New to MUSIC x? Subscribe to the free newsletter for regular updates about innovation in music. Thousands of music professionals around the world have gone before you.
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.
New to MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE? Subscribe to the free newsletter for weekly updates about innovation in music. Thousands of music professionals around the world have gone before you.
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.)
Facebook recently launched a sound library including tracks you can use for free on videos. People criticized the concept in a music business discussion group (also on Facebook, ironically). I would hear the same rhetoric that people have when they say bands shouldn’t perform for free, because it’s not just a bad practice, it is also bad for your peers.
But let’s look at the reality that people in music are complaining about.
1. There are many different types of artists
There are always going to be people who find it awesome to see their music used by other people: even if they don’t get any money for it. They may be college students who are just happy to see their music travel. They may be people working full time jobs who do a little music on the side and don’t depend on the income. They may be professional producers who put out these tracks to libraries as a type of calling card.
Either way: there is always going to be free music and you will always have to compete with it.
2. Giving your music away for free can actually work
You have to have a monetization strategy at the end of this, but the easiest way to win attention online is to make great ‘content’ (in this case music). This content should be available with as few barriers as possible: which means making sure it’s available for free. The second part of your strategy should include steps on 1) how to hold people’s attention after you capture it, and 2) how to identify opportunities to monetize your fanbase (I wrote about it in detail in this thesis).
But sometimes you don’t need a strategy for monetization. It’s not easy to get signed to big labels nowadays and it usually requires you to show that you can build up your own audience. One of my favourite examples of someone who successfully leveraged free is Alan Walker. An EDM artist with tracks that have more plays than some of the most popular tracks from stars like Kendrick Lamar. How? He released his somewhat odd music through NoCopyrightSounds, which specialised in providing YouTubers and Twitch streamers with music they could use for free, without fear that their videos would get taken down. Eventually, they soundtracked the whole subculture and put a new sound in EDM on the map (read more).
3. AI is going to one up everyone
We are seeing amazing developments in AI. The most recent example is GoogleDeepMind‘s AlphaZero, which beat the world’s best bot in chess after spending just 4 hours practicing. Startups from Jukedeck, to Amper, to Popgun, to Scored are all trying to make music generation easier.
We already see more music being released than ever before, but so far it has still depended on human output. Through AI, music is already being untethered from human productivity. Standing out in abundance is a minuscule problem compared to what it will be 5 years from now.
Free music libraries are the least of your problem
There is no singular music business or industry. Everyone is playing by different rules and all those rules will be upended every time there’s a big shift in technology. From the record player, to the music video, to the internet, to AI and blockchain, music is the canary in the coal mine and you have to have a pioneer mentality or else you are falling behind every day.
The people who are one step ahead may be underground today, but some are the stars of tomorrow.
By all means, let us discuss the ethics. But be careful not to let your opposition blind you to the point where you cannot see how a new generation of music is thriving and leaving you behind. Because then it’s too late. For you.
The average smartphone user downloads less than 1 app per month, according to comScore. The era of apps is ending, and we’re moving in an era of artificial intelligence interacting with us through messaging apps, chatbots, voice-controlled interfaces, and smart devices.
What happens to music in this context? How do you make sure your music stands out? How do you communicate your brand when the interface goes from visual to conversational? And what strategic opportunities and challenges does the conversational interface present to streaming services?
What will the next format be to usher in a new music industry, like the record did in the 20th century?
The 20th century saw the rise of consumerist culture as a response to mass production causing supply to outgrow consumer demand. An example of this phenomenon is 20th century fashion which became highly cyclical (and wasteful), marketing new clothes for every season. After World War II, it became common to use clothing to express oneself through styles and fashions which often went hand-in-hand with music subcultures, just think of hippies, skinheads and punk music, hiphop, funk, or disco.
“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
– Victor Lebow (Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955)
Consumerism helped turn the recording industry into the most powerful part of the music business ecosystem, something which had previously been dominated by publishers. It changed music. The record player moved into the living room, then every room of the house, and the walkman (now smartphone) put music into every pocket. Music gained and lost qualities along the way.
Previously, it had been common for middle class families to have a piano in the home. Music was a social activity; music was alive. If you wanted to hear your favourite song, it would sound slightly different every time. With the recording, music became static and sounded the same way every time. And the shared songs of our culture were displaced by corporate-controlled pop music. People stopped playing the piano; and creators and ‘consumers’ became more clearly distinguished culturally.
With streaming, we are reaching the final stage of this development. Have a look at the above Victor Lebow quote and tell me streaming does not contribute to music being worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.
The rules of mass production don’t apply to music anymore, since it’s no longer about pressing recordings: anything can be copied & distributed infinitely on the web. The democratisation of music production has turned many ‘consumers’ into creators again. Perhaps this started with drum computers, which helped kick off two of today’s fastest growing genres in the 70s and 80s: hiphop and house music. Today, this democratisation has turned our smartphones into music studios, with producers of worldwide hits making songs on their iPhones.
We see more people producing music, our Soundcloud feeds are constantly updated, Spotify‘s algorithms send new music out to us through daily mixes, Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Fresh Finds, and we now have the global phenomenon of New Music Fridays. With this massive amount of new music, we are simply not connecting to music in the same way as we did when music was scarce. We move on faster. As a result, music services, music providers essentially, place a big emphasis on music discovery as a result. We shift from the age of mass media, and mass production, to something more complex: many-to-many, and decentralised (music) production on a massive scale.
Has consumerism broken music culture? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, consumerism is also what producers of music creation software and hardware depend on, which contributes to the democratisation of music and returning musical participation to the days of the piano as the default music playback device.
If streaming is the final stage of the age of the recording, then what’s next?
Embedded deep in the cultures of hiphop and house music, we can see what cultural values are important to the age of democratised music creation. Both genres heavily sampled disco and funk early on in their lifecycles. One of the most famous samples in hiphop and electronic music culture is the Amen Break. With the advent of the sampler, the drum break of the Winston‘s Amen Brother became widespread and instrumental to the birth and development of subgenres of electronic music in the 90s.
Not so long ago, ‘remix culture’ was still a notion one could discuss in abstract terms, for instance in the open-source documentary RiP!: A Remix Manifestowhich discussed the topic at length. Things have changed fast however, turning the formerly abstract into a daily reality for many.
Since the documentary’s release in 2008, social networks have boomed. Back then, only 24% of the US population was active on social media, but now that’s ~80%. With the increasing socialisation of the web, as well as it being easier to manipulate images, we saw an explosion of internet memes, typically in the form of image macros which can be adjusted to fit new contexts or messages.
The same is happening to music through ‘Soundcloud culture’. Genres are born fast through remix, and people iterate on new ideas rapidly. A recent example of such a genre is moombahton which is now one of the driving sounds behind today’s pop music.
Snapchat filters and apps like Musically let users playing around with music and placing ourselves in the context of the song. Teens nowadays are not discovering music by some big budget music video broadcasted to them on MTV, they are discovering it by seeing their friend dance to it on Musically.
Music is becoming interactive, and adaptable to context.
Matching consumer trends and expectations with technology
Perhaps music is one of the first fields in which consumerist culture has hit a dead end, making it necessary for it to evolve to something beyond itself. People increasingly expect interactivity, since expressing yourself just by the music you listen to is not enough anymore to express identity.
Music production is getting easier. If combined with internet meme culture, it makes sense for people to use music for jokes or to make connections by making pop culture references through sampling. Vaporwave is a great example. But also internet rave things like this:
Instead of subcultures uniting behind bands and icons, they can now participate in setting the sound of its genre, creating a more customised type of sound that is more personally relevant to the listener and creator.
That’s where the future of music lies. Not in the static recording, but in the adaptive. The recording industry that rose from the record looked nothing like the publishing industry. It latched on to the trend of consumerism and created a music industry of a scale never seen before. Now that we’ve reached peak-consumerism, and are at the final phase of the cycle for the static recording, there’s room for something new and adaptive. And like with the recording business before, the music business that will rise from adaptive media will look nothing like the current music industry.
Through c a r e, he teamed up an interdisciplinary collective called 
