Loading — James Blake
#365Songs: March 8th
“The brainwashing worked and now people think music is free.” — James Blake
My son is 13. If my math is correct, I estimate I’ve been pushing music at him for roughly 13 years. Over the years, he’s gone from loving my tastes to ignoring it to loving it again, but he’s also always been a discoverer. I think he was three the first time one of his “play it again” tracks hit my annual ‘Best Of’ list. The kid is good.
Spotify launched a year after he was born, which means he only knows music as an unlimited resource available in volume whenever he wants it. (He went through a phase when he played with my vinyl, but that didn’t last.)
Yesterday, his class put on a morning presentation. Each kid recited a famous speech. Mine chose Steve Jobs’ iPhone launch speech — if you know me well, you know this was a tough parenting moment. It IS a brilliant piece of product marketing, but there’s a specific line that stood out:
“In 2001, we introduced the first iPod, and… it didn’t just — it didn’t just change the way we all listen to music, it changed the entire music industry.”
That line hits a lot different now. At the time, we were peak Napster — which taught us for the first time that music can, in fact, be free. The iPod wasn’t the first of its type — naturally Apple stole the product from another company and then Steve claimed it as his own brilliant innovation — but it was the universal vessel that put all those songs in our pockets. To Apple’s credit, they led the charge in making music worth money again, and though they paid artists, the tracks were too expensive: a digital album was the same price as a physical CD, and Apple kept the rights to take those tracks away from you at any time.
“If we want quality music somebody is gonna have to pay for it. Streaming services don’t pay properly, labels want a bigger cut than ever and just sit and wait for you to go viral, TikTok doesn’t pay properly, and touring is getting prohibitively expensive for most artists.” — James Blake
In the car on the way to school, I talked to the kid about his speech and after he did a read-through, I said to him, “You know in retrospect that innovation did in fact change the music industry, but not in the way he suggested.”
He said, and I’m paraphrasing here: “Huh?”
So I continued to tell him about Spotify, how musicians can’t make a living. He reminded me that it costs $16 a month, and I said sure, but that’s roughly the price of one album. Together, we probably listen to 10k minutes of music a month — thanks, Spotify Wrapped. I said Spotify is worth $52 billion, but the vast majority of artists can’t survive. I broke down the math.
He said, and I’m still paraphrasing here: “Wha?”
As we were pulling up to school, he said, “Yeah, but platforms need to make money too.”
Upset, I said, “Music can’t survive if artists don’t make money.”
“Dad, you don’t understand.”
I felt frustrated all day. I tend to get worked up about this topic, but then I really thought about it. This is all he knows. He never spent allowance money on a cassette tape, he never bought a CD stack for his car. That’s not the world he’s grown up in. In his world, everything is free because he’s the product. We’re all the product.
Listen, let’s be clear about something: the music industry was broken long before Napster, Apple, and Spotify. Labels robbed artists in other ways, and exploited fans by dropping great singles that convinced us to purchase horrible albums. The recording industry buried indie labels and defined tastes through mainstream radio. But at least artists got royalties. At least we bought the albums, went to the concerts, bought the merch.
I know my son is not the problem. We are. We’ve bought the hook that everything is free, and now we’ll never go back to any other system. As a result, we don’t fight for the change that would teach the youngest consumers that the system isn’t working, that art is in fact not free.
As of now, tech companies have won the war, and we’re waving their victory flags with every tweet, post, binge, and listen. For those of us born before 2000, we should know better. We should know that nothing in this world is free, and if it is, someone somewhere is getting fucked.
But wait. It’s about to get a whole lot worse.
“And by the way, since it’s cheaper to produce fast, synthetic music to drop on streaming every week to capitalize on the strengths of the model, watch how the model is preparing you for AI generated music that pays musicians nothing at all.” — James Blake
To be clear, I listen to music on Spotify. I listen to a lot of it. I do my best to support artists in other ways: I buy vinyl that I don’t listen to often enough, purchase t-shirts that make me look like an old guy trying to stay cool, and do my best to attend concerts when I can. It’s not enough. Nothing is enough at this point.
Every Thursday night at 9pm, I listen to my Release Radar. Over the course of a week, I eventually listen to all 30 songs. But something weird has been happening over the past few months. Once a week, what is clearly an AI-produced track shows up with two generic artist names plus someone I listen to often.
Here’s an example from three weeks ago:
Sometimes, the track is doing enough to keep me listening for at least a while, but eventually the absence of the voice I want to hear triggers my doubt.
I searched for that same track yesterday, and this is what it looks like now:
Notice what’s missing. And this isn’t a one off occasion. Again, it happens at least once a week. I suspect eventually enough people report the track, or the artist does, and the name is removed. But the damage is done.
I worked in tech long enough to know a few things:
Everything is by design, or when a product reveals a new problem they’ll find a way to monetize it.
Data matters. Knowing how long any of us listens to an AI track before turning it off gives key insights. It helps them make it better, less discernible.
Spotify needs AI-generated tracks to survive. Their business model is unsustainable, even at their valuation and by not paying artists a working wage. Daniel Ek, the CEO, recently said, “We will not ban AI music.” While I don’t expect transparency, the why is quite clear if you’re paying attention.
I’m not saying Spotify is in on this Release Radar hack, but I AM suggesting they’re turning attention away from it because they need the insights from the experiment to perfect an AI model that, per James Blake, will in fact finally make music free.
Need more proof? In a summer intern job posting for an “AI Research Scientist,” Spotify gaslights us by writing:
“You’ll help to develop resourceful, efficient and intuitive new ways to search, explore, re-use, and process audio. Your work will impact the way the world experiences music, and the way artists can make a living.”
Come on now. That requires another number on the list:
4. Tech companies are master bullshitters. They hire the White House-worthy spin doctors on their Communications teams to convince you they care about you, that they’re fixing a problem, even as they double down on the same strategy.
I love that my kid loves music more than anything. Of course I hope he learns an instrument, starts a band, tours the world, changes lives. But none of it will matter if we can’t find that music, and if we’re trained to not discern the difference between what humans make and what algorithms create.
Y’all this is serious shit. If you love music art writing or anything else creative, which I’m assuming you do because you’re still reading this novelistic rant, then this impacts you too. And the future of every creative thing you love. AI is here, it’s not going anywhere, but for fuck sake keep in mind that the same people developing it are of the same cloth as the folks who brought you Theranos, Fyre Fest, fake news, FoMo, social media-borne mental illness, Microsoft Windows, and the Tesla Cybertruck.
