Streaming

Let's start with a bit of historical context.
There was a time were music was something you could actually touch. Vinyl, cassettes, CDs and their covers and booklet, had a special value that people wanted to own.
Back then people sent records by mail across countries, music spread word of mouth. Social movements were born driven by music. Each album told stories, like a book reflecting the artist’s feelings and social situation where people wanted to pay to own a part of that, because music was art and art had value.

Then in 1999, Napster comes in.

With the internet also came piracy. While labels and artists fought legal battles to protect themselves, most people got used to instant and free access to music. This chaos not only hurt the industry financially but also shifted how people perceived the very value of music.

So at the start of the 2000s, Apple presented iTunes selling it as the solution to piracy with its pay-per-song idea. It sounded good, but quickly made things unfair for artists since more middlemen got involved in managing the royalties. And aside from that, iTunes didn’t just change how money was split, it changed even more the way people consumed music.

Albums stopped being listened all the way through and instead, you could buy singles and make your own playlists, boosting the “hit” culture. Meanwhile, platforms took control of the income, collecting also all the data about what people played and when, resulting in the origin of the algorithms.

Money is a duck call, so more platforms like MySpace and Pandora popped up. It is true that some gave independent musicians the possibility to reach millions without the middlemen, but it also solidified streaming as the main way people consumed music. This went on through some years of greed and capitalism, more greed and more capitalism, until some tech bros thought, What if instead of paying per song you pay one fee to have access to everything all the time? That’s when Spotify showed up and streaming became hegemonic.

From the beginning, this time the big record labels entered the wheel as partners or investors, making sure to get a piece of the pie. So, while people received the idea of a digital revolution that "benefited everyone", the bulk of the money was now distributed according to the number of plays without caring about originality or connection with the audience. Everything started to be a matter of numbers and, as we all know, numbers can be manipulated. Opaque contracts were signed to give visibility to some artists over others, algorithms were refined to handle those contracts and monopolies were created over the very concept of “fame.”
By analyzing that data, “hits” could be manufactured, which not only perpetuated user´s listening trends, guiding them on what they “should like,” but also left less and less room for the less “friendly” proposals to the algorithms. These trends, along with unlimited access for a single payment system, gradually lowered that value of music we talked about at the beginning. If songs had to be 3 minutes long, they were made that way. If arrangements had to be cut or the chorus put at the start of the song, it was done. If talking about certain topics, like politics for example, could be a problem, lyrics were changed. All for the numbers.
Other platforms also appeared, like Bandcamp, but we’ll get into those streaming models another time.

As users grew, the income per stream was adjusted downward in an attempt to maintain profitability, reducing more and more the musicians earnings. Platforms like Spotify have millions of users, but the income they generate is distributed unevenly and most of it ends up in the hands of the big record labels and the platforms themselves. Sounds like a good business, right? Well, from what it seems streaming is still not profitable.

So here we are today, where the situation has led platforms to ask themselves, How could we make even more money? And what if, by some dark magic, we didn’t have to pay artists or labels at all?And here comes AI and the synthetic bands. (We have another entry in the blog where we talk about these creatures, you can read it here.)

AI songs are included on platforms as cheap content that can compete for streams and flood playlists stealing streams from real artists, a huge and constant slop at the cost of decreasing real musicians already minimum income. And it’s not just the platforms doing this, there are also people creating AI profiles that absorb huge amounts of this traffic. Dark magic.
There is people arguing that they have the right to create these bands because it “democratizes” music for everyone and all that… we will get into how AI is trained, ethics and other related stuff some other time too.

So, why do we think we’ve gotten to this point?
If you look at the history and evolution of the music industry and how we’ve gotten used to (and allowed) this model, AI music kind of “makes sense.”
On one hand, because of the concept of the algorithm itself. What you put into the music doesn’t matter apparently. If you don’t fit the mold of what’s profitable you don’t exist and many choose to become a brand rather than art. If the innovation, the experiences or experimentation no longer matter, then the very meaning of consuming “music” created by AI could fit the wheel, right? We are in the era of absolute devaluation of music as art.

Also, nowadays, a musician’s impact isn’t measured by their ability to move emotions or by their talent, but by streams, monthly listeners or followers.
Now “success” is talked about not when an album makes people feel but when it goes viral, valuing the artist based on quantifiable visibility, as if art were an advertising campaign. But those metrics are built on a system that doesn’t reflect reality, they only reflect their capacity of retaining attention and often not even that, because there are bots everywhere artificially inflating numbers. And yeah, the concept of success has always been tied to numbers, like sales for example, but those numbers used to be organic.

And on top of that, another terrible consequence of this system isn’t just that musicians get paid poorly (or nothing) or that art is measured by clicks, it’s that they loose the desire to create something genuine. When facing this landscape there are a lot of artist that simply stop trying or fold to a logic where everything must sound like something that already exists. Not because they want to copy, but because they know that the different doesn’t fit the trends. And everybody wants fame, right? (spinning Bowie in my mind right now).
And the industry loved this stuff (up until now ) because it made a lot of money, the numbers could be controlled really well and let’s just say everything was super profitable overall.

Most of the people accepted all of this until creating a dangerous paradox where, what once was subversive and generated emotion, now gets replicated as an aesthetic formula without context or risk. So with all that, what difference would it make if music is made by a human or a machine?

In summary, we feel we have all contributed to this. Companies and labels wanted to make money because that’s what companies do, the media, radio and other wanted to get clicks and traffic and amplified the trends because that’s their business, bands wanted to get into the trends because they also got clicks and traffic and wanted recognition as well as making music, because wanting to be recognized for your work it’s human and normal, the public actively ignored the inequalities, instead of continuing to buy records, merch or going to concerts like they did before because it was convenient and cheap. We have all collaborated in making the concept of an AI making “music” possible, by action or by omission.
And now we find ourselves in a moment where that monster we’ve all allowed to exist has the possibility of erasing us.
We’re screwed. Listeners, musicians, the industry…everyone.

Well, here we are now. We could pretend that nothing is happening and keep going as always, but the thing is, we know what’s going on. It sucks, but we know it and we can’t stop knowing it. And every time we pick up the guitar, piano, drumsticks, post something on social media or open Blender, we KNOW it. For us, it has become impossible to keep pretending everything’s fine because this time it’s really different, this time feels as if it is not a matter of a new platform or something, it is worse, much worse.

We can’t change the entire world, the entire industry or prevent some things from happening, but we can choose better from now on.

So we’re researching and have found alternative initiatives, tho most are still in early stages. We’re also reading a lot about the legal debates regarding how to protect our work from scraping, regulations… we read everything that comes out. And to be honest, the feeling we have for now is that it’s all a fucking chaos and it will be even more so in the coming years, but also that it doesn’t have to be necessarily a problem.

What’s clear to us is that human music must remain and we’re sure we want to keep creating because we really love it, we enjoy the process a lot and can’t imagine not doing it.So for now let’s say we’re approaching it a bit like before streaming but with streaming.

If streaming platforms are invaded by AI, then we’ll have to find another paths. Or we can use or not use the platforms, look for other platforms, be on all at once or none, or strengthen “offline” paths (some crazy ideas we are having). A mix of everything. Let’s say we’re in the 2000s but 2.0 and we have to keep trying and researching where are the most ethical technologies, support them and help spread them. And meanwhile support other artists trying the same.We could just wait to see what happens, which is also fine, but we’re more about experimenting (like mixing doom with flamenco and all that).

From what we’ve seen, there’s massive rejection of generative content in general, so we hope this mess will get regulated eventually. But if it doesn’t there will be other ways to share music because there always have been. And we know all the pieces that make up the music industry right now will have to adapt or die because, friends, it looks like the robots want to swallow us all!

So we’ll keep talking about all this we’re testing in upcoming blog posts, starting with how to use Bluesky as a band (and other alternatives beyond Meta), that might be helpful to some of you.

That’s what this blog is about, not just sharing what we’re up to as project but also what we’re discovering that might help others at a time when everything seems to be falling apart, because we believe that together we can build a new system, like people once did by mailing records to each other.

Let AI cannibalize itself and let’s keep fighting to give back music its value.

Dream, create, rebel.