Better ways to music industry

Meaningful, sustainable success with a moderate but deeply devoted fanbase can only arise and flourish when we nurture the very things that make the creative process seem, within an efficiency-biased culture, too inefficient. Far more than technology, this requires time.

Musicians (and every other kind of artist for that matter) should revel in our inefficiencies. An overly-optimized creative process is at risk of forfeiting precisely what is most precious to it — idiosyncrasies, mistakes, accidents, spiritual urges, and other crucial intangibles.

The pressure to be as efficient and productive as possible has a way of sneaking into one’s mind and body, reconfiguring one’s priorities, and directing one’s creative decisions without being detected and called out for what it is.

It is not my intention to blame musicians for wanting to make their practices more time-efficient. For a full-time music worker, one’s consistency of income depends very much on quantity of output. For a musician whose practice is pushed to the margins of their life by their day job, the amount of time available to nurture that practice is frustrat... See more

While a concept like “consumer-creator” might make the average artist wince, it’s nonetheless viewed as an exciting opportunity for anyone hoping to make commercial gains in the music technology industry. Not everyone sees themselves as artists, but everyone is a consumer. What could be a more efficient way to expand your total addressable market t... See more

This is why I think we slightly miss the mark when we say that streaming has “devalued music”. If the amount of capital flowing to the sites of consolidated power in the industry is any indication, music is perhaps more valuable than it’s ever been. What has been devalued is the labor that creates it. Left unchecked, a process squeeze is ultimately... See more

The perceived value of a given piece of software must urgently be communicated, and many brands are either unwilling or unable to invest the creative and material resources required to create music-making tools that are truly unique and intrinsically valuable. The most efficient approach, then, is to simply build a value proposition on efficiency i... See more

Being a phenomenon of the attention economy, streaming platforms rely both on vast quantities of content and a competitive, almost gambling-like environment to attract artists who hope to go viral in the playlist ecosystem, particularly on Spotify. This leaves an opening for various commercial parties to double down on the incentives that are float... See more