Platforms & Profit
The Egyptian god Thoth was the creator of language and, along with goddess Seshat, writing. He was also in charge of weighing the hearts of the dead.
When a person died, Thoth weighed their heart against goddess Ma’at’s feather of truth. If the heart balanced, the dead passed on to the afterlife. If the heart proved heavier than the feather… it didn’t go well for them.
Earlier this week, I spent time with a close friend talking about the value of our work in this age.
You may remember Bob Dylan recently sold his song catalog for a reported $300M. This is, of course, an outlier situation. Most songwriters, even well-established ones, don’t have publishing catalogs that could fetch a fraction of a fraction of that.
My friend, who is an established songwriter, looked into what their catalog might be worth and learned that its market value today is not necessarily evaluated by record sales, radio spins or popularity from film and advertising placements. It’s largely valued by how much it is streamed on platforms like Spotify.
And, to a platform like Spotify, a song’s value is measured solely by how well it keeps listeners on that platform. In other words, the song is valuable only in so much as it keeps people engaged with Spotify — better engaging Spotify’s own advertising and subscription revenue.
At face value, this is not so different a measurement as radio or tv airplay once was. The monetary value of a song is of course measured by the money it generates for interested parties. I’m talking capitalism, not art criticism. It’s the same in the visual art world, in film, in everything. At the end of the day, a creative work’s monetary worth is judged much the same way as that of an SUV or a hamburger.
However, there’s something more insidious lurking within this concept of worth evaluated by platform time evaluated by streams. The best way to get your music heard on Spotify and other platforms is to be placed on their playlists, i.e. “Get Turnt,” “Breakout Country,” “Deep Focus.”
In turn, these playlists are curated by AI in much the same way your Netflix recommendations and Facebook ads are and are based on how much engagement they receive and if they fit what they perceive to be your interests.
Our access to new art, be it music or film or painting, has always been to some degree dictated by a series of gatekeepers. The advent of the internet, of social media, of all these strange, wonderful new bleeping doo-dads and connections, promised a democratization with access to all. A democratization that never manifested.
Instead, we now operate within a framework where the gatekeepers are algorithms, big data, and systems specifically designed to increase profit in the most streamlined and low-overhead manner possible.
Platforms like Spotify and Netflix are designed to maximize their own profit over the artist in much the same way Uber is designed to maximize profit off employees that it refuses to acknowledge as employees. It’s a tenuous system that is based on entirely intangible things that could be erased with one hefty electromagnetic pulse.
These systems are so intensely designed to maximize profit at the expense of other groups that many cannot survive if they must share profit with the groups that create it (Uber is a case in point).
So, to Spotify, the worth of your work is measured against the feather of engagement.
Engagement is built by engagement, and the artist is forced to spend more time on many platforms to increase engagement on those platforms, thus contributing to the revenue of the platform itself. The snake eats its tail.
I’m no Spotify expert any more than I could even begin to explain to you what the hell an NFT is or why somebody would spend so much money on one.
I’m just here to pose a question: How does the way we engage with art and entertainment affect us as artists, as audiences and as human beings?
When our engagement becomes consumption, how does that change the experience? How does it change the value we place upon the thing consumed and the creators of that thing?
In the past year, our craving for new, diverting at-home entertainment expanded exponentially. Worldwide tv streaming viewing time grew 44% in the last three months of 2020. Netflix has more than 200 million subscribers. Spotify has 345 million users and 155 million subscribers.
Numbers this astronomical demand an astronomical supply of content. An endless supply.
Spotify adds an average of 60,000 songs a day.
At the rate that we consume music, film, television, art and information, can we really value it?
One month after I binge-watch a program, I’m hard pressed to recount much of the plot or any of the character names. My endless Instagram scroll has become a colorful and endless ribbon punctuated by Amazon ads and sod-roofed Faroese houses — and I forget whether I’ve seen the same picture before, who posted what when and, half the time, which ones were ads.
I no longer remember the names of songs.
Author and Buddhist teacher Sebene Selassie recently wrote, “Are you overstimulated but undersensualized? The constant equation of eyeballs plus screens leads to overstimulation. Coming back to our senses … is the remedy. Embodied awareness is key.”
Or, as the band Dry Cleaning sing in their new song “Scratchcard Lanyard,”
“Wristband, theme park, scratch card, lanyard
Do everything and feel nothing”
I’m aware that I’m blurring some lines here between art and entertainment, between social media and the movie industry, etc. But one reason I’m doing so is because our own lines are blurred.
I’m no longer fully certain when I’m actually experiencing something or simply observing it.
A year of interacting with the world through screens has not helped this confusion, and I don’t know what our reentry into the world will hold.
The few live events I have been a part of have felt like rebirths — but how long will that feeling last, and how long will it be before I’m sleepwalking through life, half-distracted by the bleeps of phone notifications and alerts created by scraping my data and observing my habits to let me know that Levis’ are 25% off, or there’s yet another Marvel show on Disney+?
How much of this is my own doing?
How beholden have I let myself become to my devices, to my streams, to my Insta feed? To the beeps and buzzes of my phone?
On the beeps and buzzes, our poet laureate, Joy Harjo, recently said in an interview,
“It’s like Pavlov’s dog, this — and it’s shocking. It shocked me, when I realized that here my body was reacting, and that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to stay on my track of listening. And it was disturbing to me. And I’m thinking, what is all of this leading to? Why is it necessary? What I usually come down to is, somebody is hungry for money, so if they keep you there with these sounds, if they addict you, then they will have your attention, and your attention means money, for them.”
Our attention has become not only fleeting, but numbed. We are increasingly disconnected from our bodies, from the physical experience, from slowness and silence, nuance and contemplation. We consume and we consume. We’re hungry ghosts, always craving more, but with throats too small to swallow any of it.
Is a song 3 minutes of entertainment, or months of an artist’s effort? Both, of course.
Let us hold both in our hearts.
For my songwriter friend, is the value of their body of work to be weighed by how well it keeps consumers on a platform?
For myself, I have to ask “what do I value and why?” What is the heart and what is the feather? How are they measured against one another?
