🔵 Music needs to find its own path again

Big Tech and music are now fundamentally moving in opposing directions, and change is needed

Hello everyone -

Earlier today I enjoyed reading the latest post from Taylor Lorenz's User Mag substack. In it, she details how OnlyFans creators are now taking to advertising on public billboards, both in the US and the UK, to drive awareness of their accounts and the subscriptions on offer.

By all accounts, the advertising is working too, with Lorenz detailing the great results these creators are seeing:

Baker reported that her billboard led to a 200% increase in her subscriber count. Chloe Amour, who has a billboard up in Los Angeles said that she’s gained about 70 new subscribers per day from her billboard, leading to thousands of dollars in monthly subscription revenue.

The reason for the billboard ads was mainly because, as adult content creators, their advertising creative was getting banned from the likes of Meta and Google. That creative is not, however, considered explicit enough for advertising standards bodies to ban the billboards, despite the nature of the content being fairly obvious.

Creators then, are moving away from the big social networks, instead electing to find other means to drive possible new customers direct into their high value OnlyFans sales funnel. They might have been ejected from the social platforms, but it looks very much like they are realising they simply no longer need them now.

This all got me thinking: is it not past time that the music industry also considers finding paths to audiences that don't rely so heavily on social media platforms and ad networks?

I've said a few times in the past that Big Tech and music, once quite cosy bedfellows, are now moving in opposing directions. As mentioned in my last article, we are at a point where social media networks are not there to help artists (or indeed any creators) build meaningful, long-term fanbases. Instead, they are simply wanting to keep users on the platform, consuming an endless stream of bite-sized content.

For artists, it is becoming a zero sum game.

The question should therefore be asked: how long do artists, labels and all the people that comprise the music business wait before concluding that these networks simply are not worth the effort any more?

Hence my interest in the OnlyFans article. It demonstrates that other creators are sidestepping social platforms now and driving business directly into higher value destinations elsewhere.

Is it not past time that we as an industry do the same?

For a long time, music has arguably had a marriage of convenience with Big Tech and social platforms in particular. It allowed artists to connect with fans directly, building large audiences in the process. Except, of course, this entire relationship was owned by someone else; Meta in the main, but also TikTok, Twitter and more. When those platforms then decided they had different priorities, reaching those audiences became harder.

Now though, the odds are stacked against artists and music as a whole more than ever before. This is also before a dystopian development comes into play - one in which these platforms potentially seek to provide AI-generated music and entertainment, replacing those artists with things the platform owns itself.

If that sounds preposterous, allow me to point you towards the ad agency sector, now reeling from Mark Zuckerberg's open admission that Meta's ultimate goal is to replace all ad agencies by simply using AI to create the ads for businesses directly, then running those ads in an entirely hands-off manner for you.

That's the future for ad agencies; why do you think music will be any different?

So at this point, I feel we are approaching a crossroads; one in which the music industry can make a concerted effort to uncouple itself from the Big Tech-led race to the bottom. Or, it can simply continue following the agenda set by Silicon Valley.

Which will it be?

Have a great evening,

D.

🎶 Listening to “Somewhere Decent To Live” by Space Afrika. After remarking to a friend that I suspect my music making final form “would just sound like someone's left an amp on somewhere while a dull throbbing kick happens in the background”, he suggested this album (among others) to me. It’s truly hitting the spot too; swooping 808 bass dives, mellow pads and ambient bliss. Perfect.

📖 Reading “AI, bot farms and innocent indie victims: how music streaming became a hotbed of fraud and fakery” on The Guardian. Eamonn Forde picks up this issue of streaming fraud and takedowns, highlighting just how big a problem it has become. I feature in there too, so including this article is, granted, a little self-indulgent, but it is still eminently worth a read.

📺 Watching “Wunderhorse - The Rope (Later... with Jools Holland)” on YouTube. It’s quite rare that something (and, with no dis to Jools, a Later performance) really lands like an explosion, with people sharing it and generally raving about how great something sounds. Wunderhorse’s latest certainly appears to have done that though, and with good reason. One commenter suggests that “These lads perform like every performance is going to be their last”, and I’d firmly agree with that. Electrifying stuff.

🤖 Playing with Ubuntu Studio, a linux distro aimed at music and video production. I make my music on my iMac (ie a desktop) but wanted a laptop to make stuff when on the go. By formatting an older Dell laptop with Ubuntu Studio I’ve been able to install both Bitwig and Renoise, and it works like a charm. There’s something oddly satisfying about recycling old machines into something like this.