The Vergecast - The complicated relationship between musicians and platforms

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Today’s Future of Music episode comes from Ariel Shapiro, The Verge’s lead reporter of HotPod, our weekly newsletter about the audio industry. Last week on the show we talked about old music… specifically how the back catalog is a big part of what makes “new” music. This week Ariel picks up right where we left off, with the revival of stars from the past on platforms like TikTok. But what about new… undiscovered talent? Is that even a thing anymore? Can a budding artist find their place in the world of viral video? Ariel explores the complicated relationship between musicians and platforms. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of four on the floor. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the second part in our mini-series all about the future of music.

Today's episode comes from Ariel Shapiro, who is the Verge's lead reporter of Hotpod, which is our weekly newsletter about the audio industry. It's awesome. You should subscribe. Last week on the show, we talked about old music, specifically how the back catalog is a big part of what makes new music. This week, Ariel picks up right where we left off with the revival of stars from the past on new platforms like TikTok. But what about new undiscovered talent? Is that even a thing anymore? Can a budding artist find their place

in this weird new world of viral video? It's more complicated than you think, but I'll let Ariel explain. Let's go. The Powers That Be anticipated music streaming a lot earlier than you might think. Back in 1995, before my parents even had a CD player in their Subaru, the late Senator Orrin Hatch pushed through a bill that would extend music copyright to the digital space. He emphasized the rise of what legal circles then referred to as the celestial jukebox, a surprisingly poetic term for a tool that would allow listeners to access any music they wanted at any time. The tech available at the time was nowhere near that. This is before even Napster entered the scene, but it was on the horizon. For the most part, the promise of the celestial jukebox has been realized. Practically any song is available with a tap of a finger, maybe for $10 a month,

or maybe for nothing at all if you're willing to sit through ads. People are listening to more music than ever before. In the first six months of the year, consumer streamed songs 2.5 trillion times. And if you ever dreamed of being a rock star, a rapper, or a pop star, pop queen, and has never been easier to make and share your tracks. Anyone with a song in their heart, a laptop, and a subscription to tune core could upload their stuff right alongside Beyonce. It should be a golden age for music.

And yet, many of the artists reaping the benefits of this new landscape are not who you would expect, like Fleetwood Mac, going viral on TikTok thanks to Nathan Apodaca, cruising on his skateboard, half gallon of ocean spray in hand, simply viving to dream. Or Kate Bush, the art pop queen of the 1980s, who finally got her due when a well-placed spin of running up that hill in Stranger Things catapulted the song to the top of the billboard charts. Or the 81-year-old Paul Anka, whose 1959 classic Put Your Head on My Shoulder, was remixed and slowed down for a sexy silhouette challenge on TikTok. Put your head on my show. The remix has appeared in over 600,000 videos on the platform. But if streaming is reviving the stars of the past,

how do aspiring stars fare in the new music landscape? More new music is flooding the platforms than ever before, and plenty of amateur musicians go viral. They have a moment, maybe even a hit, and then they fade as quickly as they rose. And that's not just my elder millennial negativity. That's in the data. According to Luminate, the research firm behind Billboard's charts,

the amount of time consumers spent listening to new music declined 1.4%. Even as listening to older music or catalog jumped 19%. There are also simply fewer hits to stream in the first place. In the second quarter of 2021, 126 new albums debuted on the Billboard 200. During the same period in 2022, only 102 did. So what gives? I think discovery is the biggest challenge for certainly for new artists.

Rob Jonas is the CEO of Luminate and worked on the study. There's been lots of coverage in recent months around the number of new songs per day. We're now seeing about 74,000 new songs a day right now coming into different platforms. It's just very, very hard to get discovered and breakthrough right now, probably harder than ever. One thing we hear consistently is they're struggling with the fact that they have to be always creating new pieces of content. Right. So it's not just around creating the music anymore. It's like, how do I create something that's relevant for this platform or this platform? It's a continuous marketing challenge and content creation challenge.

Because there's so much out there, they have to make sure they're top of mind and relevant all the time. Was it always this way? In the late 2000s, early 2010s, it seemed possible for artists to get big on the internet because artists were getting big on the internet. And a good chunk of them became bona fide stars. YouTube gave us Justin Bieber. and the weekend. MySpace gave us Taylor Swift and Adele.

Adele. Before we go on, a disclosure of bias. I was in my late teens during that time, which means the music that I found on MySpace that populated my turquoise iPod Mini, for which I paid a full 99 cents per song, will forever be burned into my brain. I can't remember where I put my wallet at any given time,

but I still know the harmonies of Mekanos, despite having listened to FleetFoxes maybe a few times in the past decade. That being said, there seemed to be something objectively special about what was happening on Myspace, and the industry knew it. Courtney Holt sought firsthand as an executive at Interscope Geffen. MySpace was the first time that I really saw artists and fans coexisting in a space. For me, it sort of replicated that idea of seeing a band you loved in a small club before they were big. So I don't know how I could describe it other than it was just a feel.

I don't remember something feeling like that in the music industry. It hadn't felt like that in long time. MySpace was such a hot music destination that MTV wanted to buy it, before being undercut by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. News Corp has been, I think, smart enough to let us continue to do what we do and really keep hands off, which is not typical for a big corporation like that. You sort of expect them to screw it up. It continued to grow, and in 2007 had 67 million users, when Facebook only had only had to

had a third of that. Now Facebook, well, it was created by a guy from Harvard. People praise it for its clean looks and controlled feel, but at the same time, it's a little stuffy. Dare I say, geeky? In 2008, the company pushed to make MySpace a one-stop destination for music listening to make it more like the celestial jukebox that was promised. Holt was tapped to lead the music division and bring established catalogs from Sony, Warner, and Universal onto the site. There was just one problem. While MySpace was great for bonding over bands and building fandoms, it wasn't actually that good for everyday listening. Some of the features became bugs. The idea that I could self-express and I could make this cool player and I could promote my music and I could celebrate my fans

was great. But then to actually make a playlist at a point in time when we were starting to move towards mobile, MySpace wasn't ready for that. In discovery, lean forward, click, play, consume, interact, MySpace was great at that. Lean back, I just want the music I want, I want to take it with me, I want to have a playlist. It became a lot harder for that to be the case. So you sort of look at the lack of investment and innovation that Newscore wanted to put into it. At the time that there was an evolutionary shift in how music was being consumed, so they had this really incredible magic engine, but it wasn't adaptable for all of the

evolutions that were going to happen in music discovery and demand. We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, how we got from MySpace to TikTok and saw the rise of the artist slash influencer. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought.

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with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. As Myspace attempted to build out its music platform, it was declining on the social side. By 2011, it had less than one-tenth of the number of users of Facebook, which was pretty agnostic to music sharing. That same year, Swedish music streamer Spotify launched in the U.S. And unlike MySpace, it was very good at the lean-back experience. Whatever you want?

Whenever you want. It gave you exactly the music that you wanted with little to no interference, at a price once unimaginable. Ten bucks a month. In Spotify, the celestial jukebox was realized and pushed companies like Apple and Amazon to build similar subscription services. But all that scale has made it harder for new artists to break through. Larry Miller, who leads the music business program at NYU and has his own podcast,

Muzonomics, explains what experts have witnessed. One thing that we've observed is that the magnitude of most hits is smaller. We've also noticed that the amount of music that is uploaded to all of the major streaming services every day has increased, and the vast majority of them don't ever get listened to more than once or twice, including by the uploaders' mom and dad or grandparents they're just never, ever, ever listen to. So for an aspiring musician, there are a few ways to break through the noise. You land on a great Spotify playlist, or you ride the algorithms onto a streamer's radio station. But the golden ticket is going viral on TikTok, which happens constantly.

Last year, Nigerian artist Sikai became a global phenomenon when he was a global phenomenon when his single Loved Wantidi, which had been released a year prior, blew up on the app. It has since been certified platinum. In August, Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-McLeod posted a minute-long clip of her song, Complex, which got 7.4 million views and landed her contract with Columbia Records. The streaming services, including a track of, they're less great, and that is what? And that is what record companies are still really, really good at. Just ask Little Mouse X.

Just ask Olivia Rodriguez. And so, on the one hand, the opportunity, the potential that still is still exists in these services and the open distribution policies that they have and the platforms that they utilize are fabulous and have dramatically furthered this theme of the democratization of music discovery and consumption that's now, you know, more than a generation along. You know, there's a big difference between having a moment and having a sustainable career or actually being the biggest artist in the world. For Erica Lubman,

a singer-songwriter based in Rochester, New York, who goes by Boy Jr., social has definitely opened doors. I think most of the things that have come my way have just been because I'm, like, putting myself out there and just, like, having my weird little ideas and being a weirdo online. With spoofs of indie rock culture

and remixes of beloved songs, like a hyper-pop version of Mr. Brightside, she has over 300,000 followers on TikTok. That's helped drive ticket sales to her live shows and garner over two million streams on Spotify. She's gotten sponsorship deals with companies like Fender and extra debit cards. There were people who were like, yeah, I saw you in an ad. So I discovered your music that way, and now I'm here at your show.

And I was like, wow. Loveman's not a star yet, but she's making a living as an indie artist, which may not have been possible without the exposure she gets through social and streaming. But she's also realistic about how fickle the algorithms can be. Sometimes it has a lot of benefits for artists who are not working with a team, with a budget for really significant marketing. It can be a great stroke of luck. But it is so easy to become kind of addicted to that kind of luck. And the way that people come in with their comments and the way that it's treated when a video gets viral and that people are instantly like, oh, my God, how are you not famous?

Someone get this person a record deal immediately. You know, you need to be on TV shows, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, oh, I appreciate those comments a ton. But there's a really good chance you won't see another video from me for months because your TikTok algorithm is going to just show you other things and you're going to forget about me. The pressure to perform on TikTok bleeds into the songwriting itself. Certain types of lyrics are more likely to go viral than others. And artists are keenly aware of that.

I think it's very easy to become jaded about that concept as like, oh, if you want to make something that does numbers, you have to like sell out. and just like make songs where you list different personality traits or characteristics, so the people will make TikToks where they put green arrows or red X's next to it. There are certain things I'm writing now that I know are not going to be really like TikTokable. And like that has to be okay. Otherwise, I would lose my marbles as an artist. The kind of work Erica puts into her content, in addition to her songwriting, is standard now. It's not enough to just make the music anymore.

I think you need to be a multi-hyphenate. In today's ecosystem, do that because you're competing with people who are multi-hyphenate and multi-skew. And if that's the reality of what it takes to be an artist today, yes, they'll always be those artists that are evergreen artists that can break through because they already built that before this whole world has changed. You have artists that are going to come up that might have a moment of morality where a song breaks through, a video breaks through, it's a meme, it's something that comes. cuts through. But then it's the capacity that you have to take that advantage of that, to take that and turn it into something else. So for an aspiring artist, what is more daunting? Impressing the gatekeepers of old, label executives influenced by their own whims and prejudices, or the bottomless, unfeeling algorithms of the celestial jukebox, which can make you a sensation for one day just to

forget you the next. I'm not sure I have the answer to that. But even if I have trouble making sense of the kind of stardom that emerges from this new landscape, these hybrid influencer artists, there is some 19-year-old out there who will look back as fondly on the TikTok era of music as I do the Myspace era. Less Fleetfoxes, more Boy Jr. This episode was produced by Liam James, Andrew Moreno, and me, Ariel Shapiro. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with another episode of the future of music next Monday.