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## What happened to our dreams?
It's a fairly simple and common story. It wasn't a dream but an illusion\! We thought that the music market operated differently from other markets. We thought our new tools would be a remedy to a social problem. At least i did. I was convinced that if Internet could suddenly put a [freshly grown global multi-billion dollar industry](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/inside/cron.html){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} on the brink of fall, Internet had to be bringing a new variable to the table. And it's almost true: music is a bit different. But the variable internet brought to that table didn't change anything. Was it even worse?
It's a fairly simple and common story. It wasn't a dream but an illusion\! We thought that the music market operated differently from other markets. We thought our new tools would be a remedy to a social problem. At least i did. I was convinced that if Internet could suddenly put a [freshly grown global multi-billion dollar industry](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/inside/cron.html){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} on the brink of fall, Internet had to be bringing a new variable to the table. And it's almost true: music is a bit different. But the variable Internet brought to that table didn't change anything. Was it even worse?
###### ![](/images/posts/photo-2020-10-22-13-59-23.jpg){: width="749" height="403"}Meme stolen from a meme-thief in [AnarchoMemes](https://t.me/AnarchoMemes/8505){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}
The music market is shady. I haven't lived long enough to say it always was, but reading about it's history unravels vast amounts of drama. Eitherway it's not the shadiness of the music market that sets it apart from others. It's how it's value is being created. In that sense, making music is like any art: it can be compared to printing your own money. You do something with a couple of tools and little funky shit. And boom\! Well… if it was that simple right? It has to be determined by some marketing chief that the music may generate profit first. There are many acts that are being blown up by the marketing department of a major record label, who never see any real success in the usual megastar sense. But it's out there and known. Not first because of any particular magic musical value, but because millions of people were made aware of it. Music doesn't have to bring any actual value to society to become valuable: it will not transport goods, build housing, make food… At best it might bring motivation to someone doing all those things, but that's about where it stands in terms of meaningfulness. The value of music is organic and arbitrary at the same time. Like a living-dead [Schrödinger cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}. Or a ticket to an upcoming lottery. And entire buildings of people depend on it to pay their rent and feed their families…
The music market is shady. I haven't lived long enough to say it always was, but reading about it's history unravels vast amounts of drama. It's not the shadiness of the music market that sets it apart from others. It's how the value of music is being created. In that sense, making music is like any art: it can be compared to printing your own money. You do something with a couple of tools and little funky shit. And boom\! Well… if it was that simple right? It has to be determined by some marketing-chief that the music may generate profit first. There are many acts that are being blown up by the marketing department of a major record label, who never see any real success in the usual mega-star sense. But it's out there and known. Not because of any particular magic musical value, but because millions of people were made aware of it. Music doesn't have to bring any actual value to society to become valuable: it will not transport goods, build housing, make food… At best it might bring motivation to someone doing all those things, but that's about where it stands in terms of meaningfulness. The value of music is organic and arbitrary at the same time. Like a living-dead [Schrödinger cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}. Or a ticket to an upcoming lottery. And entire buildings of people depend on this music to pay their rent and feed their families…
The shadiness remained while the transfer to the Internet went on, Worse: it got amplified. Now music wasn't only a mean to generate capital or motivating workers to produce, it also became a tool of surveillance. The industry abandoned sales and opted for [rentification](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giovanni_Dosi){: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}. Why sell an album for 19$ when you can rent it out for 9$ per month? Centralization like this comes with added benefits: there is no need to risk capital in producing a bunch of expensive packages that might end-up in a pile collecting dust if the product flops. And the nature of a central source of the music being a database, enabled for exact monitoring of what plays, when and by whom\! Better yet: If the data gets correlated with social media profiles, age, gender, sexual orientation and religion can be extracted added to this data, commonly refereed to as ["mood-and-moment" data.](https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly){: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}
The shadiness remained while the transfer to the Internet went on. Worse: it got amplified. Now music wasn't only a mean to generate capital or motivating workers to produce, it also became a tool of surveillance. The industry abandoned sales and opted for [rentification](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giovanni_Dosi){: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}. Why sell an album for 19$ when you can rent it out for 9$ per month? Centralization like this comes with added benefits for a crook: there is no need to risk capital in producing a bunch of expensive packages that might end-up in a pile if the product flops. And the nature of a central source of the music being a database, enables for exact monitoring of what plays, when and by whom\! Better yet: If the data gets correlated with social media profiles, age, gender, sexual orientation and religion can be extracted and added to this data, commonly refereed to as ["mood-and-moment" data.](https://thebaffler.com/downstream/big-mood-machine-pelly){: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}
###### ![](/images/posts/deathofadream.jpg){: width="1024" height="678"}Photo: ["August View"](https://www.flickr.com/photos/99804259@N00/20809008233){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} by [Rantz](https://www.flickr.com/photos/99804259@N00){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} is licensed under [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/?ref=ccsearch&atype=rich){: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}