Changing face of nostalgia; Regulating excesses of streaming; and why virality is a bad strategy
Edition 06
Hi folks
Happy Wednesday! Welcome to The Industry Playlist 🎵
This week I dive into the changing face of nostalgia, governments getting involved in regulating the excesses of streaming, and why virality is a bad strategy if you are an 'undiscovered' artist.
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The pandemic launched many remote-first organizations, but have you come across any remote-first bands? 53 Thieves are a transatlantic electronic quartet making music from four separate areas of the world, mixing hip-hop, R&B and disco. Check out what you do to me
Now, let’s get to it.
SONIC SHIFTS
If you are an ‘undiscovered’ artist, you shouldn’t use a viral Tiktok as a strategy
“According to Chartmetric, most artists that do make it to Superstar level make the jump from the Mainstream category and not from Undiscovered or Mid-Level. That means that you’ve probably already had considerable success before you break out into true superstardom. It also means that you shouldn’t use a viral TikTok video as a strategy”
If you are an artist reading this- deep dive into the ‘Career Stages & Artist Movement’ section of Chartmetric’s annual report(PDF attached)- to situate yourself in the right economic stage of your career and see the likelihood of the jumps you can realistically make and then adjust your strategy.
Changing face of nostalgia - Nostalgia will not have the same cultural transmission value in the future
Nostalgia festivals and tours are back in vogue. Whereas festivals that prioritize new acts (e.g. Coachella) are struggling. What gives? There are multiple hypotheses - a decade-plus of the streaming revolution has -
Had a flattening effect on musical eras and what is perceived as ‘old', so there is a reignition of past acts;
Surge of new music on DSPs had pushed listeners down deep rabbit holes (i.e. of new artists/genres) that there isn’t a critical mass to put new acts on stage to be economically sustainable;
Music culture, of socially discovering acts in live grassroots venues, has definitively been replaced by independent consumption that involves shallow/distracted background listening, playlist culture (opposed to albums) which reduce the artist-fan connect.
Point #1 is powering nostalgia today and bringing in the $$. When you layer other trends such as the anonymous star, kids losing their love for music along with Point #2 & #3 - mass nostalgia quotient (i.e. sufficient to make money out of it) will peak in the coming decade but will likely suffer a slow death afterwards. This comes at a cost. The Guardian warns: “There will be no nostalgia in the future if the present is not properly tended to.”
Countries are increasingly imposing streaming tax on DSPs to support the local music industry
Thanks to globalization, the revenue that DSPs generate in a local country are basically extracted and sent back to their home country. With streaming becoming the dominant revenue stream in the music industry, the local music industry along with their government, are fighting back. Some version of local streaming tax is increasingly being proposed by countries as a way to channel that tax to support the local music industry. Canada imposed a 5% tax, France a 1.2% tax - expect more countries to adopt this in the near future, and DSPs to push that additional cost to consumers (you’ll see subscription prices going up in those countries). The bigger point is that everyone is feeling the heat when it comes to DSPs (who are tech-first, culture-second); governments are stepping in to redistribute the value created back to local industry, which are languishing thanks to DSPs taking all the earshare.
Average Indian consumers wallet share for music is tiny/nascent
That’s a guess but I’m pretty confident I’m right (maybe CRED is the best place to know on what categories the Indian economic elite are spending their disposable money). In the US, a mature/advanced market, the average US subscriber has 4.5 subscriptions and spends about $924 per year (~INR 6,500 pm). Music is the third most popular category, behind retail (e.g. Amazon Prime) and video (OTTs). If music is 3rd in the US (the largest music market in the world), I wonder where music sits in India. Music culture hasn’t caught up to the Indian consumer to prioritise their wallet share - if you come across any market study on this, please send them my way!
READ THIS SHIT
Songs as cultural moments - The right song in the right place, at the right time, creates a moment that becomes more than the sum of its parts. Older music scenes were almost always rooted in physical spaces, social values, and atmospheric qualities. They created ‘soundscapes’ to life in these places, communicating the values and messages of the community at home there. As GenZs spend more and more time online, the music that underpins their cultural ‘moments’ will happen there more often. Have we lost the cultural common ground in the Tiktokification of the music industry?
Related: Have Underground Music Scenes Shapeshifted Into Viral Moments? Evolution of technology has drastically changed how culture is transmitted and how communities are connected.
The Label Recovery, Part I: Purpose - Patrick Clifton writes a music industry blog where he touched upon the crisis in the record label business. He writes again on how the label business has a cultural and commercial purpose that it must reignite to reinvent itself and bring back music culture.
In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War - Big tech rely on microculture for their dominance (user generated content), even while they punish with their algorithms when you go off-platform. Music culture is a big casualty in this culture war.
Related: We are now in the "mega/microculture" era for music: Unpicking what has changed in music over the last couple of years - and what that means for the future.
KEEP TRACK OF
SoundCloud is linking songs with brands by vibe - Ever watched a movie where you saw a subliminal brand product placement that is part of the script/screenplay? This is audio’s version of the same. Soundcloud is giving brands they work with more power over the music they’re working with. This is a targeting mechanism that works without looking at personal data. Advertisers can choose from a combination of 9 moods including Angsty, Celebratory, Chill, Energetic, Focused, Happy, Soothing, Love, and Relaxed.
Related: Clever brand placement in Bollywood movies; It goes all the way back to Hera Pheri in 2006!
First Queer Music Agency - Representation is a big part of curation; these guys solely represent queer artists, with the aim to foster a community for their artists, but also the backend, in the business part of the industry for queer people. Collectives are rising everywhere and we’ll likely see more slicing and dicing of niche subcultures emerging across the scene. Check out their public playlist of queer artists.
South Asian diaspora artists are getting their time in the sun - Sony Music and D36 have entered into a global venture to expand the reach of South Asian artists in the US as well as help break diaspora artists in key markets outside the US. D36 is a LA-based record label and community platform started 3 years ago, creating South Asian lanes under the umbrella of global music. These diaspora focussed labels are popping up - I wrote about another one in the UK called Lila who helped deliver the first-ever dedicated South Asian space at Glastonbury’s Shangri-La.
INTERESTING STUFF
13 Observations on Ritual - Ted Gioia continues his exploration of breaking free from dopamine culture. For many, making your morning coffee is a ritual, it gives us wholeness, balance, joy - a genuine ritual is always embedded in time and space, and cannot be uploaded or downloaded. No digital experience can elicit the same emotional response to rituals, which is why rituals might be an antidote to the addictive nature of mindless digital distractions.
That’s all for today. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.
Thanks for reading,
Rohit