🔵 Why we need to think more broadly about the music ecosystem

The music industry is working hard to engage disruptive tech companies, but what is the focus beyond that?

It was with great interest that I read about Merlin’s new Connect initiative, aimed at engaging select tech firms that might shape the future of music monetisation. It is simple enough: Merlin wants to help encourage more work in the music space in ways that might generate more money for its members.

But let’s stop for a moment and unpick this all. Perhaps it is leaping to conclusions, but I suspect that Merlin will be focusing very much on platforms that generate immediate revenue. An example of that would be Spotify of course: plays generate royalty payments, so rights holders consequently get paid.

As we move into changing times though, I find myself wondering if the focus here is simply too short-sighted.

It is a problem we often see in marketing; companies want to drive immediate sales, and focus on metrics that speak to that. A good example would be any paid ad that says “listen to our new album now!” and links you to the record on your DSP of choice.

This approach, however, entirely misunderstands the nature of marketing. I would argue that in most cases, people rarely see an ad, click it and listen to an album in full. That is just not how it works. A potential fan needs to be sold on the artist, their story, their world view and the layers they bring through their artistry, before someone will really commit fully to playing that record over and over and over.

Investing, therefore, in more startups that simply provide an immediate return for rights holders might be a little myopic. What we actually need is more space to celebrate artists, to engage with them beyond just streaming music in the rather anodyne space of a DSP or equivalent.

Merlin, if asked, might respond that this is not within its remit, and on that I suppose it would be correct. However this highlights the issue: there is nobody tasked with preserving the wider music ecosystem, investing in that to preserve the outlets, curators and storytellers who, in reality, are capable of breaking tomorrow’s Next Big Thing.

As each day passes I feel more and more convinced that priority now needs to be put not to the consumption of the music itself, but the context and wider significance around it. Music is becoming like a fast food meal; something you snack on, not something you commit to. When it was reduced to just the raw file itself, largely stripped of any wider context or packaging, music became stripped of a huge amount, and I feel the state we are now in, where massive stars are less frequent, album campaigns disappear more quickly and Top 40 hits seem to be an endless parade of largely faceless stars who we’ll have forgotten in a few months’ time, all point to this.

Ergo, I feel investment in new businesses is great, but that focus should now shift to asking how people connect with music, and what can be done to amplify that.

After all, I might hear a track in passing, anonymous in some playlist, and play it for a day. Sell me on a band whose music, vision, style and artistry all connect with me deeply however, and I’ll be playing that album for life.

Have a great evening,

D.

🎶 listening to “The Fool - Andrew Weatherall Mixes” by Warpaint. I never knew that the band had asked Andrew Weatherall to mix this whole album, so when I saw this as a post-RSD item the other day, I had to snap it up. It does not disappoint either. Wonderful stuff. “Fail we may, sail we must” ❤️

📺 watching (though really listening to) “Steve Albini & Ian MacKaye interview (2015)” on YouTube. A truly wonderful listen as Albini and the Dischord legend share stories and opinions. One of those great, respectful chats that is wholly engrossing. Highly recommended.

---

Stories from the Music Industry:

Merlin steps up its licensing efforts for emerging tech firms

It has launched a new service called Merlin Connect, which will focus on “a select group of promising emerging technology platforms”. Note the ‘select’ part of that: startups will need to apply to take part, with Merlin choosing which ones are promising enough to be accepted. “Merlin Connect is our commitment to finding and unlocking new opportunities for our members in a disruptive industry,” said CEO Jeremy Sirota. “Our audacious goal is to partner with the next suite of platforms that shape the future of music monetisation for Merlin’s members.”

👆🏻Hot take: superficially this is a positive step, but it reminds of the time EMI made much of opening its catalogue for tech startups to work with circa (I think) about 2010. Nobody really used it, and the initiative was quietly mothballed. Fingers crossed that doesn’t happen here.

Sony, Universal, Warner and Merlin strike music licensing deals with Twitch for DJ livestreams

Twitch has struck deals with all three major music companies, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music, and a large number of independent labels via Merlin. According to Twitch, since early 2020, the number of DJs streaming on the service has more than quadrupled and that “over 15,000 of them have been able to build and monetize communities of music fans on Twitch”.

👆🏻Hot take: great to see, though I’m mildly perplexed that it has taken until 2024 to make it happen. Just me?

WMG eyes other distributors after declining to bid for Believe

In its announcement, WMG merely said that Ryan-Southern will “identify and acquire companies and catalogs that can enhance WMG’s growth and earnings”. However, Billboard fleshed out those plans, reporting that “the first item on his shopping list will be an independent distribution company, smaller in size and cost than Believe… a ‘bolt-on’ acquisition to help grow WMG’s market share in the independent distribution and services business without affecting its overall profit margins.”

👆🏻Hot take: DistroKid and CD Baby are mentioned here but personally I’d be looking more towards the likes of Republic of Music here in the UK, where there is perhaps less scale but certainly a lot more quality and therefore value.

Stop Fetishizing Data

Tech execs say they’re all about eliminating gatekeepers. Sounds great on paper, right? But they’ve installed new ones – and they’ve replaced the old ones with the shallow metrics of popularity: Streamcounts, monthly listeners, skip rates, save rates, what-have-you rates. This is not how you move culture forward.

👆🏻Hot take: I’m in complete agreement with this whole article, which states a solid case for moving away from this data reliance in decision-making. Arguably though this might leave the way open for the pioneers who always followed their gut and often saw unprecedented success as a result.

Stability AI releases free, open-source text-to-audio model that ‘respects creator rights’

Stability AI says its new model was trained on a dataset of audio clips from Freesound and the Free Music Archive,. “This allowed us to create an open audio model while respecting creator rights,” the company said.

👆🏻Hot take: a curious u-turn of sorts here from Stability after the exit of Ed Newton-Rex amid claims of rampant copyright abuse. Personally I quite like the concept of spinning up ‘samples’ using a prompt, though really the devil is in the detail here (i.e. is it actually any good).

William Doyle on how to Make Touring Work

We’ve written thousands of words on Doyle over the years we passed the pen to him, and he’s put together a fascinating breakdown of the costs and practicalities of life on the road as an artist at his level, something of a partner piece to the recent articles about how tough it is at the pot-of-humus-leading edge of culture. William Doyle, over to you

👆🏻Hot take: often any article about touring has a kind of innate bias, so this is a highly refreshing read in that it simply details the realities of touring for what I’d term a “working class” artist, i.e. not someone selling out arenas and travelling in a luxury bus. Well worth your time if only to get a simple, objective insight as to the realities of it all.

---

Notable stories from the world of tech:

Apple Intelligence is the company's new generative AI offering

The company promised the feature will be built with safety at its core, along with highly personalized experiences. “Most importantly, it has to understand you and be grounded in your personal context, like your routine, your relationships, your communications, and more,” CEO Tim Cook noted. “And of course, it has to be built with privacy from the ground up together. All of this goes beyond artificial intelligence. It’s personal intelligence, and it’s the next big step for Apple.”

👆🏻Hot take: I’m finding this story is being wildly mis-reported by most outlets. Apple has built its own AI, and whilst it has an option to fire a query out to ChatGPT in the event it cannot find an answer on its own, this not something wholly powered by OpenAI, as most headlines would suggest at first glance. Personally I think it’s a momentous step purely because Apple is recognising a need to protect privacy - even when using ChatGPT - which is something more companies are simply ignoring.

Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia investigated over monopoly laws

The DoJ will lead on investigating whether Nvidia, the leading maker of chips that train and operate AI systems, has broken antitrust laws that oversee fair competition in business and aim to prevent monopolies, the NYT said on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the FTC will scrutinise OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, and Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest investor and a considerable financial backer of other AI companies.

👆🏻Hot take: what is fascinating here is the speed at which the DoJ is moving to take action. This is all about the AI sector, and that’s only about 2 years old, perhaps less. It has taken almost two decades to have similar antitrust cases brought against other Big Tech companies.

Independent UK retailers claim £1bn damages against Amazon

The claim, brought by about 35,000 sellers and headed by the British Independent Retailers Association (Bira), asserts that between October 2015 and the present day, Amazon used non-public data belonging to the retailers to inform the launch of its own rival products. It also alleges that Amazon manipulated access to its “buy box”, where most sales on the platform take place, to divert shoppers away from independent retailers to its own items.

👆🏻Hot take: really curious to see how this pans out, as the implications for Amazon could be massive if judgement goes against it here.

---

Looking for something else to read? Here you go:

The End of Merch

Graphic tees, dad hats, tote bags and coffee mugs ruled the fashion universe for the better part of a decade. But suddenly, once-highly coveted merch doesn’t hit like it used to. From Yeezus to the Eras Tour, what’s behind the rise and fall of wearing your interests on your sleeve?

👆🏻Hot take: a great piece highlighting how the saturation of merch has made it fundamentally uncool. Food for thought for any artist manager, methinks.

Come on, feel the noise: how I unplugged my headphones and reconnected with the world

Come on, feel the noise: how I unplugged my headphones and reconnected with the world Worried she was missing out, Ella Glover took off her headphones for a month and rediscovered the soundscape of humanity, made space to listen to friends – and tuned in to her own thoughts

👆🏻Hot take: a great argument here for stepping out of the headphone bubble when you’re next out and about, and just taking in the sonic environment around you.

---