✘ Be the snailAnd: After Intelligence; Short intro to feral technology; Touching, not mastering; Death of the middle-class musician; Make Music Equal Report
If the music industry is the pursuit of status, and this gets measured in streams, likes, and followers then we value success within a toxic set of archetypes. These are deeply embedded in a lot of our online interactions - Silicon Valley has basically been built on these archetypes. It’s a result of a changed understanding of what technology is and means. Let’s take Ursula Le Guin’s definition:
Through these technologies of the past few decades and the way the technologists building speak about them, we have forgotten that first part of Le Guin’s definition. We, humans, are the first technology. Everything we use is a part of this, whether it’s a pencil, a fire, or a smart phone. But there’s more. Even this definition of Le Guin misses an important point about what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called the ‘essence’ [that’s a translation of the German Wesen] of technology. In his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ he wrote:
Beyond being the human interface, then, technology also reveals the world to us. This, however, happens at a different level than the metrics we tend to measure. There’s no truth in these metrics. Small and slowThis newsletter has a history of promoting starting small at various levels of a music career. And, of course, the above ideation about technology also seems to hint towards turning away from the technologist’s call for endless scale. So much in the music industry will never scale. Connection and creativity simply happen at a different level. Scale, especially industrial-levels of scale aimed at instrumentalizing everything, equates metrics that can more easily be quantified and therefore more easily turned into profit. Take the grandeur of most chatter around AI. It’s all about optimization, efficiency, and the like. But we all know, too, that this technology reveals something very different. In a simply fabulous piece of research from 2018, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler creating an Anatomy of the system behind the Amazon Echo. There’s nothing small and slow about this.
Diving in to what’s under the hood, so to speak, of a system like Alexa quickly dissolves into a capacity loss. We simply cannot grasp it. We see this reflected in discussion on musicians’ mental health and wellbeing. Easy does itIt’s hard to analyse and understand the impact of our generally accepted success metrics on a musician. Of course, we know a lot more about this than a few years ago. The first big backlash against social media happened around 2016 with the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Not long after, questions around equitable remuneration began to haunt the prevailing streaming economy. But to actually look beyond these metrics and assess this impact takes levels of unravelling complexity similar to what Kate and Vladan did with the Amazon Echo. Too often, we revert to the question of scale. In tech and start ups this means asking questions like: “how do we get this idea to 100x this investment?” Or, “how do we get the whole world to sign up as a user?” In music, this becomes: “How we make this artist as popular as Ariana Grande or Addison Rae?” There’s two main issues here:
What this means is that very little of what makes an idea or artist unique gets valued on its own merits. Flip this on its head, which is what starting small so often means, and it does invite us to think about the merits of a particular idea or artist. Thinking about what makes something or someone unique is an immediate invitation to take things slow. What’s more, it’s an invitation to play. The playgroundIf you read this newsletter, you like technology and you probably like playing around with technology. Perhaps you’ve toyed around crypto - releasing some NFTs with music, or dabbling in some day-trading. Perhaps you’ve been curious about generative AI and you’ve worked with an LLM and a large music model to get some music onto DSPs using a disto service. All of this is fun - I mean, who doesn’t want to listen to their own music while working, for example. It also happens in the realms and constrictions of the technologies and platforms involved. In that sense, it’s not too dissimilar from how a Facebook group can be fun. There’s a beauty in the connections that happen, and happened, through social media. Similarly, crypto may have veered into utter nihilism, but beauty came from it. Playgrounds need fences, but like any technology there essence is about revealing. The surface reveals how much fun it can be to bring people together around shared interests and to let them play and build together. Beneath that, we can see either extractive activities or perhaps the opposite. To be aware of this is the first step - the not-knowing or the simply taking the instrumentalization of the medium as its end-state. The next step is to reconstruct the playground. For creative endeavours, I think this starts with the thing to be created. Yes, this is dependent on the technologies and other tools used. But as we’ve learned, we are the technology as much as the tool is. It’s about the human interface to the world. A song, an album is part of this interface. What it reveals is up to you. The creation will always be a record of everything that went in. At the surface, this might reveal some collaborations and tools. Dig deeper, and it can reveal an anatomy worth supporting. Like Joni Mitchell once sang: “It’s love’s illusions that I recall, I really don’t know love at all” Here’s a call to go beyond the illusions and to truly know the technologies and what they reveal. This will never happen fast, or at scale. In other words, be the snail. A quick personal note. I’m taking a little writing break for the next three weeks, which means the next MUSIC x will hit your inboxes (or app) will arrive on 21 August. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, enjoy the summer. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, keep up the good work! Love, Maarten LINKS🌀 After Intelligence (AI) (Peter Limberg)“The first face is decision-making power: those who can make decisions have greater power than those who cannot. The second face is agenda-setting power: those who set the agenda hold greater power than those who merely make decisions. The third face is ideological power: those who shape worldviews and philosophies hold the greatest power of all.” ✘ This ‘three-faces’ thinking helps me understand how power works and who holds it in various stages. Beyond that, Peter triggers us to think differently about intelligence, not too dissimilar to the effort of Holly Herndon when she conceptualized Collective Intelligence. 🐺 A short introduction to feral technology (Austin Wade Smith)The idea that technology is fundamentally multi-linear—that it develops along many paths, not just one—is the basis of cosmotechnics. It holds that every technology arises from, and is shaped by, the cosmology of a particular people and place. In this view, technology is not universal but plural: it takes on different forms depending on the worlds it emerges from. ✘ Another model of thinking about the world. This time, it invites us to think of technology from the perspective of how it can help us better sense and communicate with the world around us. 🫳 Touching, not mastering. Materiality and hapticity in sound art and experimental film (Gabriele Jutz)“Haptic listening is a useful concept in sound studies. Understood as an interaction between biological and technical agents, it underscores texturality and engages the listener in a more bodily, visceral way. It emphasizes a “being with” sonic material – a form of “complicity” (to use Lange-Berndt’s term) with the sonorous world – and collapses the hierarchical separation between the listening subject and the object, which has ethical consequences for the position of the human subject.” ✘ Another essential rethinking of technology through the body. Especially when it comes to sound - so often thought of as something that passes us by fleetingly - there’s power in making our perception bodily. 💀 The death of the middle-class musician (Luc Rinaldi)“This is a moot point for most artists, however. Globally, the big three signed just 650 acts in 2017, the last year for which data is available. They’re not interested in working with the majority of Canada’s 37,500 professional musicians. Likewise, most of Canada’s musicians aren’t particularly interested in playing stadiums or posting multiple TikToks a day.” ✘ Some deep insights into what it means to be a professional musician nowadays. Through examples from Canada, but definitely applicable to indie musicians globally. 🏳️🌈 Chartmetric’s new Make Music Equal report tracks gender representation across 1 million artists (Murray Stassen)“Chartmetric has pronoun data on more than 1 million artists from 230 countries and territories. Of this 1 million, over 728,000 are solo acts. Today, according to Chartmetric’s research, 79% of these solo acts use he/him pronouns, while 18% use she/her pronouns and 3% use they/them and other pronouns.” ✘ Really interesting to see this, and something that the Music Gender Metadata project has been working on, too. MUSICKae Tempest’s new record Self Titled is another affirmation of their talent. It packs everything I always feel in the music and the words as they flow through Kae. Find the record here, or listen to the track Know Yourself.  MUSIC x is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell MUSIC x that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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✘ Be the snail
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