| The consumer now is so impatient and they expect so much music in so little time, and then they’ll complain about quality. You have to pick one... Anything rushed is going to sound and feel rushed. And a huge part of the process of making music is living with it. |
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| The thrill of live, the danger of live, or both? The crowd at the Wireless Festival, Birmingham, England, July 10, 2022. |
| (Katja Ogrin/Redferns/Getty Images) |
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| quote of the day |
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“The consumer now is so impatient and they expect so much music in so little time, and then they’ll complain about quality. You have to pick one... Anything rushed is going to sound and feel rushed. And a huge part of the process of making music is living with it.”
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- Giveon
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| rantnrave:// |
Middle of the Ride
While NASA is looking deeper into the universe than anyone ever has—and discovering it looks like a bunch of pop, funk and disco album covers—researchers here on Earth have sent us the first detailed pictures of what it looks like when your music subscription dollars go directly to the artists whose music you play. It turns out, as experts have long suspected, it’s great for the music universe’s mid-sized stars and a little less rosy for the biggest ones.
That, at least, is the conclusion of a white paper issued by MIDIA at the behest of SOUNDCLOUD, which a little over a year ago became the first major streaming service to offer artists the option of getting paid on a user-centric basis (SoundCloud calls it Fan Powered Royalties) rather than the industry standard pro rata model. Which means most of your $4.99 or $9.99 monthly fee is divided among the artists you play each month, rather than going into a general pool that gets divvied up among the artists *everybody* plays.
More than 118,000 artists opted in in the program’s first year, and a majority of those with between 100 and 100,000 fans ended up with more money in their pockets as a result, according to the report, authored by TATIANA CIRISANO, PERRY GRESHAM and KRISS THAKRAR. Those in the 1,000- to 10,000-fan range did best—65% of them saw their income go up—and those with over 100,000 fans did worst, with 62% of the artists in that group seeing their income shrink. While the report is thin on the specifics of dollars and cents, that redistribution of royalties into the middle of music’s long tail matches what proponents of user-centric royalties have been promising all along. (“Most artists benefit,” Thakrar wrote in an accompanying summary. “Who f***ing knew,” quipped TOM GRAY of the #BROKENRECORD campaign.) What seems to be driving the shift are what Midia calls “active fans” and, especially, “superfans,” who tend to make up a smaller percentage of an artist’s audience the bigger an artist gets, and who deliver an outsize proportion of their favorite artists’ income.
Which is to say, user-centric royalties reward active engagement in an artist’s catalog and devalue passive engagement. Which works great on a service like SoundCloud, whose social features, says Midia, “has enabled it to function as a platform where artists and fans can connect directly.” Artists, up to and including superstars, would be incentivized to engage their biggest fans in a system that “rewards quality of fans, not quantity of streams.”
But would a service like SPOTIFY or APPLE MUSIC, whose core business is the passive engagement of radio and playlists and who presumably have an interest in making sure those streams maintain their value, be incentivized to hop on the user-centric train? The push for user-centric payouts has typically come from music’s middle class. If 10 DRAKEs and JACK HARLOWs are telling Spotify and Apple to keep things as they are, while a thousand MOUNTAIN GOATS and YOLAs are telling them to switch, who would the services listen to? What would be in the services’ best interest?
“There are caveats to this study,” Midia acknowledges. “The results for SoundCloud may not work out in a similar fashion for other services.” But it might be nice to see concrete test results from some of them, too.
In the Crowd
I’m mesmerized by the photo at the top of this newsletter, taken at the WIRELESS FESTIVAL in England last weekend. It radiates the pure, unfiltered joy of seeing live music, even more so after a couple years when so many people had to go without. But it also depicts a packed, barricaded scene that crowd-control experts say could, if enough things go wrong, lead to disaster. I see a perfect weekend, and I see ASTROWORLD. What do you see?
Rest in Peace
Experimental music archivist GARY TODD, who released music by Terry Riley, John Cage, Derek Bailey and many others on his Organ of Corti label... Nightclub impresario MARK FLEISCHMAN, best known as the owner of Studio 54 in the 1980s. He bought it from jailed founders Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager in 1981 and became, in his own words, the “ringleader” to “celebrities and stunning women [who] made their way through the crowd to sip champagne and share lines of cocaine with my golden straw or rolled up one-hundred-dollar bills”... British conductor and composer BRAMWELL TOVEY, who led orchestras in London, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Rhode Island and Sarasota, Fla., and had long associations with the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
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| - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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Korea Joong Ang Daily |
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| Critic explains why people know BTS but can't sing along |
| By Haley Yang and Yoon So-Yeon |
| K-pop acts are topping international music charts, selling millions of albums and racking up billions of views on YouTube, and yet many Koreans confess that they’ve never actually heard their songs or even really know who they are. |
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Zogblog |
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| Why Mood Is The New Musical Genre |
| By Tiffany Ng |
| Traditional classification systems struggle to be relevant in an age where the term “chill” means more than “R&B.” |
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GQ |
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| Quavo’s Unfinished Business |
| By Jewel Wicker |
| In order to really understand the kid from Gwinnett, you have to start from the beginning: before his childhood home burned down, before he found his long-lost older brother, and especially before the limelight. |
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Music Business Worldwide |
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| What will music streaming services look like in a Web3 world? |
| By Murray Stassen |
| As the music industry doubles down on Web3, optimism around the Web3 sector and the future possibilities within the space could be heard from a panel of Web3 experts at the Sandbox Music Summit in London last week. |
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DJ Mag |
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| Moonchild Sanelly's limitless universe |
| By Makua Adimora |
| Delivering explosive, quick-witted lyricism over beats that blend kwaito, amapiano and gqom with grime, punk and pop, South Africa's Moonchild Sanelly has become a global sensation. She speaks to Makua Adimora about freedom of expression and her new album, 'Phases.' |
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Twenty Thousand Hertz |
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| Twenty Thousand Hertz: Shock Horror |
| By Dallas Taylor, Amelia Tait, Patrick Feaster... |
| There’s a certain musical phrase that you’ve probably heard hundreds of times. It’s used to emphasize dramatic moments in movies, cartoons, commercials and musicals, most often as a gag. But where did it come from? |
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The New York Times |
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| ‘Elvis’ vs. Elvis |
| By Jon Caramanica, A.O. Scott and Alanna Nash |
| How much do fantasy and imagination play into how we remember pop culture heroes? |
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Culture Notes of an Honest Broker |
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| How a Doctor Killed the Baroque Era |
| By Ted Gioia |
| Dr. John Taylor treated Bach and Handel with disastrous results, perhaps causing the death of both composers. Did it impact the course of Western music? |
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| what we're into |
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| Music of the day |
| “More” |
| J-Hope |
| From "Jack in the Box," out Friday on BigHit. |
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| Music | Media |
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Suggest a link  |
| “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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