Darren, you bring up some good points here, but I wouldn't go as far as calling Blake's comments "tinfoil-hat-level paranoid bullshit."
A lot of music journalism is authentic and nobody is cutting checks for verdicts, on that we agree. But the big press placements, the magazine interviews, the publication album reviews?? Much of that requires a press team on retainer with a pretty large price tag attached. The writer may be incorruptible, but most of the time the pitch never reaches them without paid representation, and that access layer is invisible to the reader. So sure, no one is saying "hey, review my album, here's $500" to a thousand journalists - but paid access still decides what gets covered.
On fake fan accounts, I think this article downplays how blurry that line has become. Clipping campaigns are now the most cost-efficient form of social media marketing going, well beyond music.. real people, posting real clips, for pay. the viewer scrolling past has no way to distinguish organic enthusiasm from paid amplification, and that's the distrust Blake was actually pointing at, even if he named it clumsily.
On YouTube we mostly agree. I've run campaigns for artists, podcasts, and long-form video, and money put behind a video translates directly into views- no bot farm required, because the platform sells reach at a literal price per view. You know that metric as well as I do. So "buying views" is less conspiracy than product feature- the disagreement is about the word, not the mechanics.
Where I'd push back hardest is your summary of my article saying that all labels are evil, all journalists are corrupt, every corner is institutionally rotten. That exaggerates the point, which was narrower: a vast majority of the metrics the industry stares at are illusions. Monthly listeners, follower counts, press placements - none of them carry the weight they used to, and pretending otherwise serves nobody.
And for the record, I can't stand the term psyop either. Geese became popular because they make amazing music. How it got in front of millions of eyes doesn't change the fact that they're just a great band.
I'm not sure if the "industry commentator with no skin in the game" comment was directed at me but that one isn't true. I've spent a decade in this industry managing artists, working in the PRO system, music supervising projects, running music festivals, and booking tours and shows. I'd hope it wasn't, but as the only commentator named in the piece, you can see why I'd wonder.
I appreciate the commentary regardless.. thanks for the shout out.
RE: press and PR people... that's been there for decades now. It's always been there, in fact. I guess by the same logic you would argue that my company - a marketing agency - is also 'in' on this problem because we also need to get paid to do our job?
So that still doesn't hold up, sorry. You can't blame the fact that experts in their job need to be paid in order to achieve something as being an indication of a broken or corrupt system. That makes no sense at all.
Re: fake fan accounts - I feel the issue here is the totalitarianism of the statements. It is taking a truth I feel is universal - ie there are always people trying to cheat a system - and turning it into a global pandemic of corruption.
Ironically I think our alignment on the YouTube point highlights part of my annoyance here. We run paid ads on socials for our clients. We do paid spends on YouTube. But that is legitimate advertising, NOT 'algo hacking' or outright buying of views en masse via some sketchy means, which is the kind of thing I felt JB was alluding to.
Again, as I stated in the article, I feel the thrust of your point was basically right: we need more authenticity back. However using Blake's comments and repeating those as a universal truth is where the problem creeps in.
As to you not liking my summary of your article; I quoted you verbatim on stating exactly those points. Again, I stated that broadly I think your piece had the right intention, but it was starting out by repeating Blake's claims in a manner I felt was just amplifying bad wisdom and extending this trope wherein everything is rigged and nothing should trusted. There's absolutely a case for the value of all these metrics dropping over time. No question. But I see that as much because the value of the networks themselves is diminishing. I would argue a better article to write on that point would be to ask why it is that live agents and bookers, for one, still rely on those metrics, as that is often cited as a core reason for bands looking to push them up. Again, in our world (ie that of my company) we do 'proper' marketing in which you're not using subterfuge to get results. But if people come to us saying "we just want bigger numbers on socials to get bigger shows booked" for example, our response is to try and educate them as to why that is myopic, and why a broader, longer-term strategy to connect with audiences and grow your reach is surely a preferable route.
Delighted to hear you hate the term 'psyop' as well though - on that, we can most definitely agree!
The rise of the Grifter Industrial Complex in most areas of our lives coupled with the erosion of trust in just about everything have led us here. With music specifically, we've always been pretty good at turning on artists who fast-track the path from obscurity to mainstream success. "Psy-Op" is just the 2026 equivalent of "Sellout" in the 90s.
P.S. If every music writer is on the take, well, I guess I'd like to know when I can expect my checks to start rolling in...
Righteous stuff, and I appreciate you writing this! Like you, I've seen a flood of supposed industry 'commentators' appear, and to be quite truthful many of them are purely grifters. Reading though the bad faith / straw man arguments is simply tired. A sign of the times, perhaps!
This is one major reason I left Instagram. It rewards this zero-nuance polarizing discourse and leaves so many people in a perpetually rabid state. Unfortunately it has permeated our wider culture far beyond the confines of Meta’s algorithms.
A great read. I'm enjoying the fact that you are becoming more bullish in your newsletters, even though I didn't ENTIRELY agree with your "education" one....(!)
That's understandable Phil, and I am always open to the right of reply should anyone feel I've not necessarily seen the full picture on a topic. I think on the education piece though I was calling it from my position (ie running MU) so I would be happy to accept that others might answer to the effect of "hang on - we've hired loads of great people who graduated from these courses". I think really my point was that it could all be much, much better in terms of teeing graduates up for roles across a wider spectrum of the industry.
Agree with Joe here on the downplay, and first hand being invovled in the music business with all these artist release processes, manipulation it being heavily used through pay-to-pay models
"....no skin in the game. By that, I mean that they have no actual professional experience working within the music industry..."
I'd suggest that even those with actual 'professional' experience (though I'm unclear what is supposed to be meant by 'professional') are rarely entitled to comment unless their skin in the the game is actual cash money, and *their* own cash money at that.
Unless you are involved in the writing, recording, releasing and seeking to promote music day to day using your own talent and cash you can have zero idea of what is involved.
The number of lumbering non-beneficial intermediaries taking the vast majority of artist income both before and after it has reached them (sometime years after it has been 'earned') is almost equal to the excessive number of artists and bands creating and (regrettably) releasing to the public music of such average 'quality' that the general public is simply swamped by mediocrity and has lost (if most ever had it even 50 years ago) all interest in original contemporary music as anything other than background and vacuous 'noise'.
Whilst culling commentators can we please cull most of the artists and bands distributing their music into the world.
There are times when I miss some aspects of the gatekeeper business of the 70s and 80s and even 90s. Democratisation of distribution has resulted only in large dollops of slop infecting the musical pathways of life. AI music is simply the excessively sweet and unnatural chemical sprinkles on the top of the cake. I'm unconvinced AI is making music worse, just adding extra worse to the steaming pile of musical shite already there from the last two decades or so.
Oh I'd agree that we have a saturation problem. Absolutely no question. Too much of everything such that the signal/noise ratio is now painfully tilted in the direction of the latter.
The only DSP in the US showing vanity metrics to the public is Slopify.
Maybe Blake and others should stop using Botify to describe "streaming" the way some use "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissues". It is a habit that most music writers engage in. They have been programmed to think that Slopify is the only DSP out there and that people don't use anything else.
We need to encourage these people to use "streaming" as a general term, rather than a synonym for a company that is hostile to artists, uses fake bands, pushes slop, accuses artists of botted streams when they didn't do it, bundled audiobooks to deny royalties to songwriters, imposed a 1000 stream threshold per track per year before rights holders are paid anything, burned hundreds of millions on podcasts nobody listened to like Prince Spare, and then there's Ek's investments in the perpetual war machine. I'm sure there's other crimes I've forgotten about.
The other thing we should do is encourage listeners and artists to switch to other platforms. I love Qobuz and subscribe to it. Their weekly-updated Discovery section is human-curated, profiles all genres, and is better than any algorithm pushing the same slop over and over again. I mention it regularly in my Article writing and Notes comments.
I agree on the point that Spotify =/= all streaming. I do worry though that the model as a whole does not work at scale. I love Qobuz but wonder if, were it to scale to the size of Spotify, it would be all that different in terms of payouts. In between times though, there's no question it's a superior service. Looks better, sounds better, and the filtering on search etc leaves Spotify for dead.
When everything is based on cultural Marxism' this what happens. Look at the terms... Psy op. I spent from 1999 -2017 every active in the indie music game in U.K and U.S.A. This whole temporal synthetic digital drowning pool has created this. This social media You Tube TikTok culture where everyone believes what they say because they say it has credibility. Marketing has always been part of the music game. What do people think? You really have people that think songs happen because they are just amazing. I was very active in the indie music world in attempting to break an artist from scratch. Folks never been in the game. they never have done a promo tour. Never did a low budget tour. They never been to the radio station. They never promoted to radio. They never marketed and promoted a video. There has been this massive delusion taking place with people believing that the music industry is based on the political system and political ideology. The premise that the music industry is fair? what are these people talking about? Fair.... I just laugh. Silicon valley hood winked everyone and now this is what we have. Silicon Valley never paid anyone and A.I has done the same thing . Blatant theft over thirty years. Now people can't make a living based on their music at .004 cents per stream and folks have to do everything else but music. I remember when this all started. It was about the what were called the major label. At least the label gave cash to the artist. What have the tech platforms given an artist? please someone tell me! yes the labels had a bad contract but music has always been a math of one supports the ten. The many never got through. Just because everyone can make a song now how many get through. The math hasn't changed and in fact it is worse. No one wishes to confront this. Now Suno and Udio are making Al Capone blush with their level of disdain for the copyright. These people writing about music are in a utopian delusion. But so is the bigger public. This is such a wide convo but all of this politics in music needs to go.
I saw someone comment recently that there's almost more talk about the music industry and the methodology of marketing than there actually is about the music itself. Now, whilst in real terms I suspect that's unlikely, I definitely can understand how someone would draw that conclusion.
My premise is that Silicon Valley has lead the talk. The song has taken a backseat from my observation. I am not active since 2018 and then covid got in the way. However, i am about to activate myself and relaunch. Much of what I see is the algorithm. I look at Hypebot and see very little about artistry. Well I understand it is a new game now. But all of the utopian political B.S I just shake my head. This people are a train wreck creating train wrecks.
Darren, you bring up some good points here, but I wouldn't go as far as calling Blake's comments "tinfoil-hat-level paranoid bullshit."
A lot of music journalism is authentic and nobody is cutting checks for verdicts, on that we agree. But the big press placements, the magazine interviews, the publication album reviews?? Much of that requires a press team on retainer with a pretty large price tag attached. The writer may be incorruptible, but most of the time the pitch never reaches them without paid representation, and that access layer is invisible to the reader. So sure, no one is saying "hey, review my album, here's $500" to a thousand journalists - but paid access still decides what gets covered.
On fake fan accounts, I think this article downplays how blurry that line has become. Clipping campaigns are now the most cost-efficient form of social media marketing going, well beyond music.. real people, posting real clips, for pay. the viewer scrolling past has no way to distinguish organic enthusiasm from paid amplification, and that's the distrust Blake was actually pointing at, even if he named it clumsily.
On YouTube we mostly agree. I've run campaigns for artists, podcasts, and long-form video, and money put behind a video translates directly into views- no bot farm required, because the platform sells reach at a literal price per view. You know that metric as well as I do. So "buying views" is less conspiracy than product feature- the disagreement is about the word, not the mechanics.
Where I'd push back hardest is your summary of my article saying that all labels are evil, all journalists are corrupt, every corner is institutionally rotten. That exaggerates the point, which was narrower: a vast majority of the metrics the industry stares at are illusions. Monthly listeners, follower counts, press placements - none of them carry the weight they used to, and pretending otherwise serves nobody.
And for the record, I can't stand the term psyop either. Geese became popular because they make amazing music. How it got in front of millions of eyes doesn't change the fact that they're just a great band.
I'm not sure if the "industry commentator with no skin in the game" comment was directed at me but that one isn't true. I've spent a decade in this industry managing artists, working in the PRO system, music supervising projects, running music festivals, and booking tours and shows. I'd hope it wasn't, but as the only commentator named in the piece, you can see why I'd wonder.
I appreciate the commentary regardless.. thanks for the shout out.
Hey Joel - appreciate you taking time to reply.
RE: press and PR people... that's been there for decades now. It's always been there, in fact. I guess by the same logic you would argue that my company - a marketing agency - is also 'in' on this problem because we also need to get paid to do our job?
So that still doesn't hold up, sorry. You can't blame the fact that experts in their job need to be paid in order to achieve something as being an indication of a broken or corrupt system. That makes no sense at all.
Re: fake fan accounts - I feel the issue here is the totalitarianism of the statements. It is taking a truth I feel is universal - ie there are always people trying to cheat a system - and turning it into a global pandemic of corruption.
Ironically I think our alignment on the YouTube point highlights part of my annoyance here. We run paid ads on socials for our clients. We do paid spends on YouTube. But that is legitimate advertising, NOT 'algo hacking' or outright buying of views en masse via some sketchy means, which is the kind of thing I felt JB was alluding to.
Again, as I stated in the article, I feel the thrust of your point was basically right: we need more authenticity back. However using Blake's comments and repeating those as a universal truth is where the problem creeps in.
As to you not liking my summary of your article; I quoted you verbatim on stating exactly those points. Again, I stated that broadly I think your piece had the right intention, but it was starting out by repeating Blake's claims in a manner I felt was just amplifying bad wisdom and extending this trope wherein everything is rigged and nothing should trusted. There's absolutely a case for the value of all these metrics dropping over time. No question. But I see that as much because the value of the networks themselves is diminishing. I would argue a better article to write on that point would be to ask why it is that live agents and bookers, for one, still rely on those metrics, as that is often cited as a core reason for bands looking to push them up. Again, in our world (ie that of my company) we do 'proper' marketing in which you're not using subterfuge to get results. But if people come to us saying "we just want bigger numbers on socials to get bigger shows booked" for example, our response is to try and educate them as to why that is myopic, and why a broader, longer-term strategy to connect with audiences and grow your reach is surely a preferable route.
Delighted to hear you hate the term 'psyop' as well though - on that, we can most definitely agree!
All the best,
D.
The rise of the Grifter Industrial Complex in most areas of our lives coupled with the erosion of trust in just about everything have led us here. With music specifically, we've always been pretty good at turning on artists who fast-track the path from obscurity to mainstream success. "Psy-Op" is just the 2026 equivalent of "Sellout" in the 90s.
P.S. If every music writer is on the take, well, I guess I'd like to know when I can expect my checks to start rolling in...
Righteous stuff, and I appreciate you writing this! Like you, I've seen a flood of supposed industry 'commentators' appear, and to be quite truthful many of them are purely grifters. Reading though the bad faith / straw man arguments is simply tired. A sign of the times, perhaps!
Amen Robin! Thanks for reading 🙏🏻 Enjoyed your Fantano piece too btw!
This is one major reason I left Instagram. It rewards this zero-nuance polarizing discourse and leaves so many people in a perpetually rabid state. Unfortunately it has permeated our wider culture far beyond the confines of Meta’s algorithms.
Amen
A great read. I'm enjoying the fact that you are becoming more bullish in your newsletters, even though I didn't ENTIRELY agree with your "education" one....(!)
That's understandable Phil, and I am always open to the right of reply should anyone feel I've not necessarily seen the full picture on a topic. I think on the education piece though I was calling it from my position (ie running MU) so I would be happy to accept that others might answer to the effect of "hang on - we've hired loads of great people who graduated from these courses". I think really my point was that it could all be much, much better in terms of teeing graduates up for roles across a wider spectrum of the industry.
Agree with Joe here on the downplay, and first hand being invovled in the music business with all these artist release processes, manipulation it being heavily used through pay-to-pay models
"....no skin in the game. By that, I mean that they have no actual professional experience working within the music industry..."
I'd suggest that even those with actual 'professional' experience (though I'm unclear what is supposed to be meant by 'professional') are rarely entitled to comment unless their skin in the the game is actual cash money, and *their* own cash money at that.
Unless you are involved in the writing, recording, releasing and seeking to promote music day to day using your own talent and cash you can have zero idea of what is involved.
The number of lumbering non-beneficial intermediaries taking the vast majority of artist income both before and after it has reached them (sometime years after it has been 'earned') is almost equal to the excessive number of artists and bands creating and (regrettably) releasing to the public music of such average 'quality' that the general public is simply swamped by mediocrity and has lost (if most ever had it even 50 years ago) all interest in original contemporary music as anything other than background and vacuous 'noise'.
Whilst culling commentators can we please cull most of the artists and bands distributing their music into the world.
There are times when I miss some aspects of the gatekeeper business of the 70s and 80s and even 90s. Democratisation of distribution has resulted only in large dollops of slop infecting the musical pathways of life. AI music is simply the excessively sweet and unnatural chemical sprinkles on the top of the cake. I'm unconvinced AI is making music worse, just adding extra worse to the steaming pile of musical shite already there from the last two decades or so.
Oh I'd agree that we have a saturation problem. Absolutely no question. Too much of everything such that the signal/noise ratio is now painfully tilted in the direction of the latter.
There's a song for that ; )
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t-T0knZt3pk
The only DSP in the US showing vanity metrics to the public is Slopify.
Maybe Blake and others should stop using Botify to describe "streaming" the way some use "Kleenex" to mean "facial tissues". It is a habit that most music writers engage in. They have been programmed to think that Slopify is the only DSP out there and that people don't use anything else.
We need to encourage these people to use "streaming" as a general term, rather than a synonym for a company that is hostile to artists, uses fake bands, pushes slop, accuses artists of botted streams when they didn't do it, bundled audiobooks to deny royalties to songwriters, imposed a 1000 stream threshold per track per year before rights holders are paid anything, burned hundreds of millions on podcasts nobody listened to like Prince Spare, and then there's Ek's investments in the perpetual war machine. I'm sure there's other crimes I've forgotten about.
The other thing we should do is encourage listeners and artists to switch to other platforms. I love Qobuz and subscribe to it. Their weekly-updated Discovery section is human-curated, profiles all genres, and is better than any algorithm pushing the same slop over and over again. I mention it regularly in my Article writing and Notes comments.
I agree on the point that Spotify =/= all streaming. I do worry though that the model as a whole does not work at scale. I love Qobuz but wonder if, were it to scale to the size of Spotify, it would be all that different in terms of payouts. In between times though, there's no question it's a superior service. Looks better, sounds better, and the filtering on search etc leaves Spotify for dead.
When everything is based on cultural Marxism' this what happens. Look at the terms... Psy op. I spent from 1999 -2017 every active in the indie music game in U.K and U.S.A. This whole temporal synthetic digital drowning pool has created this. This social media You Tube TikTok culture where everyone believes what they say because they say it has credibility. Marketing has always been part of the music game. What do people think? You really have people that think songs happen because they are just amazing. I was very active in the indie music world in attempting to break an artist from scratch. Folks never been in the game. they never have done a promo tour. Never did a low budget tour. They never been to the radio station. They never promoted to radio. They never marketed and promoted a video. There has been this massive delusion taking place with people believing that the music industry is based on the political system and political ideology. The premise that the music industry is fair? what are these people talking about? Fair.... I just laugh. Silicon valley hood winked everyone and now this is what we have. Silicon Valley never paid anyone and A.I has done the same thing . Blatant theft over thirty years. Now people can't make a living based on their music at .004 cents per stream and folks have to do everything else but music. I remember when this all started. It was about the what were called the major label. At least the label gave cash to the artist. What have the tech platforms given an artist? please someone tell me! yes the labels had a bad contract but music has always been a math of one supports the ten. The many never got through. Just because everyone can make a song now how many get through. The math hasn't changed and in fact it is worse. No one wishes to confront this. Now Suno and Udio are making Al Capone blush with their level of disdain for the copyright. These people writing about music are in a utopian delusion. But so is the bigger public. This is such a wide convo but all of this politics in music needs to go.
I saw someone comment recently that there's almost more talk about the music industry and the methodology of marketing than there actually is about the music itself. Now, whilst in real terms I suspect that's unlikely, I definitely can understand how someone would draw that conclusion.
My premise is that Silicon Valley has lead the talk. The song has taken a backseat from my observation. I am not active since 2018 and then covid got in the way. However, i am about to activate myself and relaunch. Much of what I see is the algorithm. I look at Hypebot and see very little about artistry. Well I understand it is a new game now. But all of the utopian political B.S I just shake my head. This people are a train wreck creating train wrecks.