| I thought I was ahead of my time. There was nothing like what I was doing—and they agreed, the music business. |
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| Erykah Badu in Brooklyn, June 21, 2003. |
| (Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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“I thought I was ahead of my time. There was nothing like what I was doing—and they agreed, the music business.”
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- Erykah Badu
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| rantnrave:// |
TikTok D’oh
Is it possible that bad news for TIKTOK is good news for the music business? Or, at least, not terrible news for the music biz? As TikTok heads to Washington today to face a bipartisanly hostile Congress, could its grip on music be slipping?
Record companies were furious when TikTok recently started experimenting with limiting the amount of major label music available to users in Australia. Some insiders thought the test was designed to weaken labels’ leverage in licensing talks by proving TikTok’s users could get by just fine without a major label soundtrack. But it may be proving the opposite. For three straight weeks after the test began, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, usage of TikTok in Australia dropped. The overall number of users and average time spent on the app both went down. “While it’s impossible to say definitively that the lack of music was the reason,” LUCAS SHAW wrote, “a comparison with other countries and apps indicates it likely had an impact.”
At the same time, Rolling Stone’s ETHAN MILLMAN wonders if the industry’s enthusiasm for TikTok as a marketing platform is waning. Artist managers tell him the app has become so saturated with content that it’s harder for any given song to break through the noise—at the same time that competitors like YOUTUBE and INSTAGRAM are offering viable alternatives for marketing artists and tracks. “I’m sure there isn’t a label, a manager, an artist who isn’t looking at their data and going, ‘Damn, my TikToks aren’t reaching what they were six months, 12 or 18 months ago,'” one manager says.
No one’s suggesting—yet—that TikTok doesn’t remain the most desirable place to nurture the next ICE SPICE. But if it turns out the app actually needs the music biz more than the music biz needs it, the details, and economics, of how the app and the biz work together may start looking a little different. And the biz may not have to stress out quite so much about what Congress and the White House might choose to do with the app in the coming days and weeks.
Fee Here Now
Elsewhere in Washington, the Senate Judiciary Committee has been talking tough on TICKETMASTER, but a bill introduced Wednesday by two Democratic members of the committee would give the ticketing giant two of the items on its own ticket-legislation wish list. The Junk Fee Prevention Act isn’t only about concert tickets but would directly affect how they’re sold: It would mandate all-in pricing, in which any fees are built into the original ticket price and disclosed at the beginning, rather than end, of a transaction, and would restrict speculative secondary-market sales. Ticketmaster and LIVE NATION are seeking a lot more than that, but that’s a pretty good start to meeting their demands. (Consumers generally want those things, too!)
The act also includes vague prohibitions on “excessive” fees, which, if you’re asking me, could stand to be a lot less vague. Consumers hate that service fees aren’t disclosed upfront, but what they hate even more is that they exist at all. There’s been a lot of bicketering and ticketsplaining in recent weeks about where those fees go and who’s responsible for adding them, but ticket buyers shouldn’t have to think about those things any more than soap buyers should have to think about how the slotting fees and retail markups work on a few bars of IVORY. The manufacturer and distributor and retailer and all other interested parties should work that stuff out on their own and figure out how to make it all work at $4.99 if that’s the price they’re going to advertise. Right?
Of course, neither soap users nor sellers have to worry about the increasingly insane workarounds that soap scalpers will come up with no matter who's trying to stop them or slow them down.
Downturn
Tough week of layoffs. Sending love to the staffs at DOWNTOWN MUSIC and NPR MUSIC, two very different places that I have great admiration for, which are going through some painful downsizing this week. Downtown’s reorganization affects SONGTRUST, DOWNTOWN MUSIC PUBLISHING and DOWNTOWN MUSIC HOLDINGS. The NPR Music cuts are part of wider layoffs throughout NPR.
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| - Matty Karas, curator |
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Twenty Thousand Hertz |
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| Insurance Jingles... Why? |
| By Dallas Taylor and Jeanna Isham |
| In the last twenty years, jingles have nearly gone extinct. Many brands have dropped their melodic earworms in favor of spoken word slogans. But there's one industry where jingles are still as common as ever: insurance. Why? |
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The New York Times |
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| The Inevitability of Ice Spice |
| By Jon Caramanica and Jeff Ihaza |
| A conversation about the ubiquitous Bronx rapper’s rise, and her boosts from the meme universe. |
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Bloomberg |
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| Spotify Has Spent Less Than 10% of Its $100 Million Diversity Fund |
| By Ashley Carman |
| Spotify Technology SA’s $100 million Creator Equity Fund, designed to promote diversity in music and podcasts following controversial comments by the company’s star podcaster Joe Rogan, spent less than 10% of the money on that work as it rounded out its first year. |
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Tidal |
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| Erykah Badu: Finding ‘Amerykah’ |
| By Marcus J. Moore |
| On her 2008 masterwork, the singer and songwriter deconstructed Black life and, with Georgia Anne Muldrow, introduced “woke” to the cultural lexicon. |
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Bloomberg |
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| TikTok Lost Customers When It Took Away Music in Australia |
| By Lucas Shaw |
| The number of people using TikTok in Australia fell after the company limited the music some people could put in their posts, results that suggest the company is still dependent on its access to popular songs. |
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Complex |
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| How Will AI Impact The Future of Music? |
| By Michael Epstein |
| We spoke to artists, AI experts, and music industry professionals to find out how artificial intelligence could impact music in the coming years. |
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FWB |
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| Should Musicians Keep Believing in Web3? |
| By Marc Moglen |
| It's been a strange couple of years for music NFTS. Despite the challenges, independent artists still see them as a way to escape a broken industry. |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “Master Teacher” |
| Erykah Badu |
| "I have longed to stay awake." From "New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War)" (2008). |
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| Music | Media |
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| “REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask ‘why?’” |
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