🔵The unfeasibly strange way things are pointed…

Aug 09, 2024

Spoiler: if left unchecked, it doesn’t look great for social media, AI, the music industry and yes, even free speech

I hinted in my last post that I wanted to cover a slightly wider angle on things, so today’s post aims to do that. This comes about largely through a desire to step back and take a broader look at the platforms and tools that we in the music industry utilise and often consider to be cornerstones of our engagement with fans.

As the US election heats up, we are once again back into a place that, if we’re being reductive, is basically a case of democrats (with a small ‘d’) versus fascists. I think the latter term is skipped around a little bit where Trump and co are concerned, but to me that feels very much like an applicable term, sadly.

JD Vance is now Trump’s running mate. This is a man who has been largely funded and progressed through the political system by Peter Thiel, the billionaire Paypal co-founder who has long established himself as a right wing advocate. Both Thiel and Vance are, according to this New Republic article, keen followers of Curtis Yarvin, a former software developer who, according to the article, has before now advocated for an end to democracy and the installation of dictatorships, not to mention the removal of all government employees and - well, honestly, just read the article, as it largely beggars belief, such is the extremity of it all.

Ultimately though, one sentence really leapt out at me in that piece: “Tech plutocrats like Thiel and Elon Musk already have money. Now they want power—as much as money can buy.”

This, I feel, explains why Musk is now interfering with as much as he can get away with, which right now includes heckling the UK PM on X, trolling with “what aboutisms” that echo the All Lives Matter lines uttered by some around the time of George Floyd’s murder. I don’t feel X has directly aided right wing morons in mobilising against immigration centres here in the UK**; Telegram appears to be the epicentre for that. I do, however, feel that Musk has once again jumped on this fragile political moment and attempted to centre himself within all the debate.

There is increasingly a sense that in all cases, those running these large platforms want nothing less than the destruction of all media that they do not own, alongside absolute control over governments. Hence buying into Trump in the case of both Thiel and Musk: it is simply a path to further make ground on their own desires for more power and control.

So what does this have to do with the music industry? After all, is Network Notes not a newsletter focused primarily on that space?

For me, it is that there is an increasingly complex problem presenting itself here. The music industry has become reliant on tech platforms. It isn’t alone in that regard; one might argue most public-facing conveyors of any kind of information do so through large tech platforms and infrastructures.

The issue is that I feel we are increasingly closing in on a point where, left unchecked, these platforms might simply stand up and reject all established laws and frameworks in order to achieve their end. Suno’s defence against accusations of widespread copyright infringement was something of an insight into this. The company is not saying it did not abuse copyright; it is essentially arguing that copyright is now a barrier to technological progress, and that therefore the likes of Universal Music are somehow exercising undue control that is holding back the march of progress for technology.

(Sidenote: I still wonder if there’s a turn of events in which Elon Musk, in a bid to maintain his Arch Agitator position, buys either Suno or Udio and simply turns it into an outright copyright theft machine using AI to clone pop hits. Sadly, in 2024, this doesn’t feel like an entirely ridiculous possibility; his dissent towards copyright is already clear, not least in the context of X still resisting all calls to pay rights holders for any music or music videos shared on its platform.)

Alongside the copyright issue around AI and music (though many other things too), you also have what is termed the “AI slop” problem that is now presenting itself on Facebook, but which might well spread to other social networks too.

If you’ve missed this, the AI slop problem is, as the term suggests, that of Facebook (for now) getting overrun with AI-generated crap that only serves to generate Likes. Why? Because Meta is paying creators for engagement, and therefore is fundamentally rewarding the creation of low value crap which people just click Like on. 404 Media did a terrific deep dive on this revealing who is creating the content and how this is all growing in adoption, and I’d strongly urge you to read it if you’ve not already.

Ultimately though, what the AI slop issue reveals is that social media’s flaws are now laid bare: if all you do is reward people based on stats, with no further qualitative angle, you instantly start the firing pistol on a race to the bottom. Previously, a simple barrier of sorts to this was the issue of how much content one person could post. Now, using AI, the means to both generate content like viral images, and to post them across thousands of Facebook Pages and other spaces in a few clicks, is becoming accessible to kids basically working on their phones because they can’t even afford a computer. In that regard, the whole picture is about as depressing as it gets.

For now, the problem appears largely confined to Facebook, but it’s quite easy to imagine it spreading to TikTok, Instagram and beyond.

Again, you might be wondering what this has to do with music. For me, it simply raises questions. Are these the platforms we want to focus our budgets into? Are they the kind of businesses we should all be engaging with, when at points it feels clear they cannot even respect art as something with intrinsic value? Serious questions need to be asked about how, as an industry, we might be complicit in further aiding platforms that, given half a chance, might well seek to replace this entire business with something it owns and controls completely.

To be clear, I am not advocating we reject all tech and move into caves. I love technology, but I feel a computer can be made to do great, wonderous, positive things. Alternatively, it can be used to do negative, harmful things. Right now, I’d argue there’s a case that at points we are, as an industry, leaning a little too much on platforms which simply don’t value music as a cultural commodity whatsoever. I feel it is right to look at the people in charge, ask questions of their own politics and question whether we are in fact complicit in that.

Superficially, things appear better than ever right now. Look at the stats and someone will quickly point out that the music industry is having a golden phase once more. However I still feel this is papering over a huge number of issues - ones that, if left unchecked, will fester into open wounds that infect the business as a whole. That sounds dramatic I know, but it’s the best analogy I can find.

I love music. I love the people that make the music. I love all the people around the music who work in its ecosystem, because I know they also love music. You have to; if you didn’t, you’d go and work in a bank and earn five times what you do in this game. But we are seriously undervaluing all of that right now by electing to ignore deep-seated issues with the platforms we use and the people who run them.

Questions should be asked. Solutions need to be found. We have to do better if we want music to remain the cultural force it has been for generations now.

Have a great weekend,

🎧 listening to “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” by Dead Kennedys. I think the title says it all here.

📖 reading “The Sound of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives” by Jude Rogers. I have Luke at The Quietus to thank for this recommendation, which examines how music affects our memories and emotional responses, all told through the author’s own choice of songs that have so affected her. It’s a wonderful, heart-warming book and if you have ever loved music (so that’s all of you I hope!) this is an essential read.

** If I may: can I just say how proud I was to see anti-nazi protestors defending immigration centres in the UK. We’ve had ‘Nans Against Nazis’ in Liverpool, we’ve had a samba band apparently turning up to lift the spirits of the protestors in Brighton - we’ve had scenes up and down the country of communities standing up to say “no more”, not with violence but with love and even humour. Every single one of those people are legends in my book. If you’re not in the UK and potentially getting the news through some kind of tilted lens, don’t believe this ‘civil war’ BS: this nation hates nazis and we’ll stand up to be heard on that, every time.