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| Streaming to the masses | Most musicians carry a dream. In the beginning of the new millennium internet had an intrinsic promise that spoke directly to that dream: to liberate the market from the middle-hands. | 2020-10-22 12:07:00 | set | highlights |
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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 put a freshly grown global multi-billion dollar industry{: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} could suddenly be 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. And while the variable internet brought to that table was indeed new, it wasn't any different. Was iteven worse?
{: width="749" height="403"}Meme stolen from a meme-thief in AnarchoMemes{: 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. Sure, 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… Sure, 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{: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}. Or a ticket to an upcoming lottery. Yet entire buildings of people depend on it to pay their rent and feed their families…
And the shadiness remained while the transfer to the Internet went on, worse it got amplified. Now music wasn't only a mean of generate capital or motivating workers to produce, it also became a tool of surveillance. The industry abandoned sales and opted for rentification{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}. Why sell an album for 19$ when you can rent it out for 9$ per month? Centralizing 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, enables for exact monitoring of what plays, when and by whom! Better yet: If the data gets correlate with social media profiles, age, gender, sexual orientation and religion can be correlated to this data, commonly refereed to as "mood-and-moment" data.{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}
{: width="1024" height="678"}Photo: "August View"{: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} by Rantz{: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0{: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"}
But did the dream die though?
Of course not! Dreams don't die, silly. If anything adversity tends to sharpen the escapism they contain. As the corporation and government slowly catched up with the web. Huge silos where emerged, capturing the social essence of it into the well known services that have come to be almost familiar. (They certainly don't need another mention here). And the information flow halted. What was once a wild jungle of cross-pollinating ideas and wildfires became a massive apparatus of advertisement and monitoring. A wall was built around the general public. To most people joining internet after 2010, it quickly felt like technical progress was merely another button in their favorite app or a better way to weed out annoying acquaintances. But beyond those walls, passionate geeks kept on building. This time with the errors of the past in mind. Not aiming for perfection, but for alternatives. The silos had to be gone and to do this, protection from it had to built-in the tools, getting inspiration from century old techniques of power-shattering: decentralization and federation. Making it impossible for a single entity to control the network had to become an integral part of the system. The fediverse,{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"} the dweb,{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"} IPFS{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"} among others. They didn't just appear of course! And while a majority of the public had their eyes on social media, getting adicted to dopamine, a forum called "P2P Foundation"{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"} was exploring new ways to approach one of the most fundamental tool of communication between humans: money.
"We can’t imagine to enter the Information Age without changing the fundamental and most used communication tool: Money"
– Bernard Lietaer{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"}
Yeah, right! Drop the bass already…
Now, i understand this is a lot to unpack and I'm doing my best not to devolve into details. In fact, I'm writing this shit because I'm trying to get clarity in my own ideas and you are just a guinea pig lol! Not like that, but… OK sorry.
You see, all of the above super simplified geek shit is useful for this bomb: people have{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"} built{: target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"} tools{: target="_blank" rel="noopener"} to solve the problems the silos got us into!!!!
- The lack of ownership over your own brand?
- The centralized nature of the data-base?
- The complexity of running your own service?
- How to incentives participation?
- How to distribute a revenue stream according the listeners choices instead of a platform average?
- How to enable real time of this distribution of revenue?
- ...
The list much longer, of course but by combining decentralized Content Delivery Networks with the new means of communication of executive power (money) developed at the P2P foundation a new paradigm for the industry is possible. One where owner ship isn't just about your masters, but also the very platform where an artist meets it's audience. Collective ownership, built into technology. And the promises aren't small and the whitepapers are spectacular.
If it sounds too good
Certainly, these up and comers have yet to prove their value.