Thread by @jamesblake

I know I've gone on a lot about streaming but I don't think most people realise how it's affected our collective experience of music over the last decade - Some thoughts on how big tech changed the art form and why musicians shouldn’t take cues from it. Warning - long thread!

Firstly - tech guys imagine problems that don’t exist and then raise millions in funding from other disconnected entrepreneurs to build a profitable solution to it.

Suno is a perfect example. The CEO is quoted as saying music isn’t enjoyable to make and takes years of work, so Suno’s AI should make it for us. Obviously this man is a danger to everything I love and I highly doubt he will enjoy the world he’s trying to create.

By lowering our attention spans, making it free to use music in social media and making it artist’s biggest promotional tool, tech has, intentionally or not, created a situation where we are incentivised to write for it. Not for ourselves, not for a venue type, not for a scene, not for a specific audience, not for a cause - just for use in <1min videos aimed at any audience.

By making content creation more instantly profitable than art, tech incentivised many artists to market themselves before they were ready - before they’d really put the work in to hone their craft. I don’t blame the artists - I blame the platforms.

Festivals too have suffered from filling lineups who blew up on TikTok but when it came to it, just couldn’t really perform well - and it’s not really their fault.. they were put out on stage before they were ready. I hate that many artists are being set up for failure when they could have real longevity if they were given more time to incubate.

By making quantity on an album more profitable for artists than careful curation, and offering listeners endless choice and playlists being the dominant way of listening, streaming services have incentivised short (or no) intros, monotony, and lack of creativity. We don’t need a song to offer variation within it if we can just skip.

Chord progressions, bridges, learning theory before you even hit the DAW, learning an instrument at all, honing a craft before turning the camera on.. These things affect not just the quality of music as a whole but are crucial to longevity for a musician and if you don’t learn them. Yes, it’s possible to have a career without them, but I believe a much shorter and less versatile one.

Not every genre or song needs bridges or lots of chords, but by incentivising shortcuts, tech is limiting artists from learning the vocabulary with which to express their emotions.
Paradoxically and some glimmer of hope - the barrier to entry financially for people to learn music theory is lower than ever (YouTube has been helpful here), which might be one of the few things I like about tech.

So, when you hear new music, and it has no dynamics, no interesting chords, no bridge moment to refresh your interest, and the artist even sounds bored, that’s some of the reasons why. And yes, I haven’t been immune from this either, as hard as I’ve tried.

So artists - I really wish there was a better alternative for releasing right now, but just know that the more you learn your instrument, the building blocks and vocabulary to express yourself, and tune into yourself, the more you will be prepared for the inevitable devaluation of recorded music, and should be able to make a living playing live. Soon that will probably be the only thing worth paying to experience.