Author: Riley Urbano
Music travels along two intermingled paths: one in culture, another in commerce. And we all know cash, as Raekwon da Chef says, rules everything around us. So, as this singular and sad decade comes to a close, let’s together explore how changing models of music consumption in the world may or may not have affected the broader culture surrounding that music.
The Culture story is one that I think most people probably know about. Step backwards with me: the 2000s had hipsters, right? A scorned class of American Bohemian notorious for their shrewd rejection of anything that could scan as acceptable to a “mainstream” audience. It’s an easy stereotype to knock but given the nature of how music was disseminated and consumed in the twilight of the “free internet,” this personality type made a little sense. Those days, it was easy to move .mp3 files around online between groups of people, so long as everyone kept relatively quiet about it; the whole system relied on no one blowing up their spots. Some artists got hip to the model, and began even personally distributing their music themselves, straight to the blogs… And some of it was actually really good. In the era of free information, it was something like a commune: everyone could share, but only cause the commune wasn’t much bigger than a family household, right? If a blog started attracting too many people, by say, posting music with too much of a mass appeal, they risked losing everything they’ve ever shared (and therefore all their cred) at the hands of greedy labels who were still milking the fixed price of a CD or a digital release. Missing the point as always, clever little venture capitalists of the time were even beginning to have the bright idea of aggregating this stuff in places like the essentially-derelict Digg, or that scrappy upstart Reddit. (The Internet preserves most of this old scene, even as the file sharing sites where bloggers actually posted their music crumble one by one. You can still see all of this stuff, like fossils in digital amber.)
The easy case study for the hipster-Medusa of yesterday would be Pitchfork, limping through 2010s bearing a totally compromised journalistic philosophy, propped up by periodic cash injections from a massive corporate conglomerate, Condé Nast. I doubt anyone reads them anymore, but these days, a Pitchfork piece is hardly distinguishable from a Billboard piece; those two outposts probably even share a writer or two. The true bellwether came late in Hipster Runoff, headed by the mononymous Carles: he who named chillwave, he of vague and pretentious conversation with living legend Ezra Koenig, Carles, the blogger that half-accidentally tied the disparate threads of 2000s online music culture into a “grand narrative” and, in doing so, rang that world’s death knell. He was really it, whatever it was: reflexive to a fault, a “personality” fragmented into several layers of ironic schtick, wary of anything remotely popular, the hipster archetype. At the turn of the decade or so, everything shifted around him in a whirlwind: indie labels succumbed to the seductive appeal of capital, and suddenly the culture he was participating in and critiquing was a multi-million dollar industry. Carles, the smartest and funniest of the late bloggers, had unwittingly gone “mainstream” (or the newly minted term, viral) along with the rest of it. True to form, he sold the Hipster Runoff domain for something like $20,000 in 2014. Echoes of his distinct style live on in weirder corners of the internet: @dril affects a similarly absurd and ironic tone.
Anyways, who blew the lid off of this whole operation? Who undercut the labels’ ability to set their own prices, and the blogs’ cultural position as the arbiters of taste? It was those banal, sinister streaming services that killed both birds with one stone. Although moving around music for free clearly isn’t anything new, clever upstarts like Daniel Ek (founder of Spotify) figured out ways to introduce advertising into the fold, convinced labels to buy in, and had all the sudden developed a legal way to listen to music at no cost to the average consumer. (I should add, totally draining what was left of the money in the music industry, at least as far as any working artist would be concerned. Spotify’s ballooning net worth has led to increasingly obscene payouts for record label executives, but songs only make a fraction of a penny per stream, and artists are seeing less compensation for their work than pretty much ever before.) Whether anyone knew it or not, streaming services opened up what was once a community of nerdy online bloggers, chided for their poor social skills, into an industry that has all but supplanted pretty much every other way music can be bought and sold. I mean, you probably stream your music, don’t you?
Little harmonic shifts began to register within the broader vibrations of the culture. Gone was any call to secrecy among the music enthusiasts of the internet, and therefore any stigma against that which was blatantly Populist in its intent. Once it stopped being nebulously dangerous (both socially and, to a lesser extent, legally) to be sharing the pop stuff around, a cultural reevaluation of the critical worth of massively appealing music seemed to catch hold in the collective consciousness. Pitchfork gave out its first 10/10 since the ‘90s – to Yeezy, a populist (poptimist?) more transparently desperate for public approval than pretty much anyone else at this point. What was once a diverse ecosystem of blogs and bloggers bringing wildly different tastes into the sphere of popular culture all consolidated, mostly being bought up or conglomerated into massive networks like Complex. Just take a look at any “about” section of a given, still-popular outlet:
Stereogum: “[…] is an affiliate site of Billboard, a subsidiary of Prometheus Global Media, LLC”
Townsquare Media, owner of Brooklyn Vegan, Gorilla Vs. Bear, XXL, and Hypemachine: “Every day we inform and entertain over 50 Million highly-social activators, a “lean-forward” audience who engage, act, amplify and mobilize others”
Pitchfork: “[…] has been acquired by Condé Nast, the media company that owns Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, and Wired, among many other esteemed editorial brands, and we’re honored to join their family”
“The culture” for you. And whaddaya know, by now the coverage offered up by this mind-numbingly vast array of blogs is similarly homogenous; checked out any of those “best of 2018” lists yet?
The silent killer that turned this online culture into a zombified version of its former self is a lot to do with streaming services. It’s something that I think people can intuitively feel at this point, even if it isn’t being too widely articulated – labels are just giving you music for free or near-free at this point, which totally cuts out the middleman position that blogs once occupied. So now, the powers-that-be just tell you what they want you to listen to, in the form of the “Curated Content” so proudly touted by services like Spotify. Playlists like RapCaviar, Most Necessary, or their flagship, Discover Weekly, all pretty much exist to funnel content that highest bidders want pushed directly to you, with the aid of micro-targeting catered to your taste and listening habits, under the guise of “taste making” the way the blogs used to. 2018 was the year that this got particularly obvious. Look at who blew up this year, and how the old guard responded: the blog community at large was absolutely repulsed by artists like XXXTENTACION and Tekashi 6ix9ine, but that didn’t come close to halting their momentum, because the blogs don’t really dictate taste so much anymore as they respond to it. And what’s more, the abhorrent crimes these guys committed might constitute a scarlet letter to the blogs, who not only curate but interpret culture… but it doesn’t seem to mean much to whoever runs RapCaviar.
So, what can we do, then, as bloggers – satellites, relics from a more innocent era of music history when listeners had a reprieve from moneyed interests dictating the broader movements of “culture”? I mean, the bigger outlets have their idea: they’re pretty much tabloids at this point, covering the social media antics of the biggest of the big pop stars. It can be hard to distinguish the front page of Stereogum from Snapchat’s discover page at this point, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. In my opinion, the way forward for blogs and for music enthusiasts in general is entwined with the potential of the internet: it’s never been easier for people to communicate with each other, and spots online devoted entirely to the open discussion of music have pretty much become the last holdouts of a vibrant and enthusiastic online music culture. I’m thinking mostly of Rate Your Music or the decidedly more niche We Are The Music Makers, but communities like this can happen pretty much anywhere. I guess what I’m saying is, let’s talk to each other about this stuff, and not just within the narrow confines set out by the new gatekeepers of culture like Spotify and Apple. They’re so representative of the industry’s naked attempts to commodify art and to turn around a much profit as possible; how could they possibly have our best interests at heart? Don’t let Them aesthetically deprive you. The decade’s almost over; let’s free ourselves from their chokehold on our taste and prove that community is stronger than their algorithms, and their analytics, and their money.
RILEY URBANO | KXSU Music Reporter