The complicated relationship between musicians and platforms

Today’s Future of Music episode comes from Ariel Shapiro, The Verge’s lead reporter of HotPod, our weekly newsletter about the audio industry. Last week on the show we talked about old music… specifically how the back catalog is a big part of what makes “new” music. This week Ariel picks up right where we left off, with the revival of stars from the past on platforms like TikTok. But what about new… undiscovered talent? Is that even a thing anymore? Can a budding artist find their place in the world of viral video? Ariel explores the complicated relationship between musicians and platforms. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:48David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Four on the Floor. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the second part in our mini-series all about the future of music. Today's episode comes from Ariel Shapiro, who is The Verge's lead reporter of Hot Pod, which is our weekly newsletter about the audio industry. It's awesome. You should subscribe. Last week on the show, we talked about old music, specifically how the back catalog is a big part of what makes new music. This week, Ariel picks up right where we left off with the revival of stars from the past on new platforms like TikTok. But what about new undiscovered talent? Is that even a thing anymore? Can a budding artist find their place in this weird new world of viral video? It's more complicated than you think, but I'll let Ariel explain. Let's go.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  The powers that be anticipated music streaming a lot earlier than you might think. Back in 1995, before my parents even had a CD player in their Subaru, the late Senator Orrin Hatch pushed through a bill that would extend music copyright to the digital space. He emphasized the rise of what legal circles then referred to as "the celestial jukebox", a surprisingly poetic term for a tool that would allow listeners to access any music they wanted at any time. The tech available at the time was nowhere near that. This is before even Napster entered the scene, but it was on the horizon. For the most part, the promise of the celestial jukebox has been realized.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Practically any song is available with a tap of a finger, maybe for $10 a month, or maybe for nothing at all if you're willing to sit through ads. People are listening to more music than ever before. In the first six months of the year, consumers streamed songs 2.5 trillion times. And if you ever dreamed of being a rock star, a rapper, or a pop queen, it has never been easier to make and share your tracks. Anyone with a song in their heart, a laptop, and a subscription to TuneCore could upload their stuff right alongside Beyoncé. It should be a golden age for music. And yet, many of the artists reaping the benefits of this new landscape are not who you would expect. Like Fleetwood Mac, going viral on TikTok thanks to Nathan Apodaca,

• 3:02Speaker 02

  cruising on his skateboard, half gallon of Ocean Spray in hand, simply vibing to "Dreams."

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Or Kate Bush, the art pop queen of the 1980s, who finally got her due when a well-placed spin of "Running Up That Hill" in Stranger Things catapulted the song to the top of the Billboard charts.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Or the 81-year-old Paul Anka, whose 1959 classic "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" was remixed and slowed down for a sexy silhouette challenge on TikTok.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  The remix has appeared in over 600,000 videos on the platform. But if streaming is reviving the stars of the past, how do aspiring stars fare in the new music landscape?

• 4:01Speaker 02

  More new music is flooding the platforms than ever before, and plenty of amateur musicians go viral. They have a moment, maybe even a hit, and then they fade as quickly as they rose. And that's not just my elder millennial negativity. That's in the data. According to Luminate, the research firm behind Billboard's charts, the amount of time consumers spent listening to new music declined 1.4%. Even as listening to older music, or catalog, jumped 19%. There are also simply fewer hits to stream in the first place. In the second quarter of 2021, 126 new albums debuted on the Billboard 200. During the same period in 2022, only 102 did.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  So, what gives?

• 4:47Speaker 03

  I think discovery is the biggest challenge for, certainly for new artists.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Rob Jonas is the CEO of Luminate and worked on the study.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  There's been lots of coverage in recent months around the number of new songs per day. We're now seeing about 74,000 new songs a day right now coming into different platforms. It's just very, very hard to get discovered and break through right now, probably harder than ever. One thing we hear consistently is they're struggling with the fact that they have to be always creating new pieces of content. Right? So it's not just around creating the music anymore. It's like, how do I create something that's relevant for this platform or this platform? It's a continuous marketing challenge and content creation challenge. Because there's so much out there, they have to make sure they're top of mind and relevant all the time.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Was it always this way? In the late 2000s, early 2010s, it seemed possible for artists to get big on the internet because artists were getting big on the internet. And a good chunk of them became bona fide stars. YouTube gave us Justin Bieber.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  And The Weeknd.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  MySpace gave us Taylor Swift.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  And Adele. Adele.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Before we go on, a disclosure of bias. I was in my late teens during that time, which means the music that I found on MySpace that populated my turquoise iPod Mini, for which I paid a full 99 cents per song, will forever be burned into my brain. I can't remember where I put my wallet at any given time, but I still know the harmonies of Mykonos, despite having listened to Fleet Foxes maybe a few times in the past decade.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  That being said, there seemed to be something objectively special about what was happening on MySpace, and the industry knew it. Courtney Holt saw it firsthand as an executive at Interscope Geffen.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  MySpace was the first time that I really saw artists and fans coexisting in a space. For me, it sort of replicated that idea of seeing a band you loved in a small club before they were big. So I don't know how I could describe it other than it was just a feeling I had. I don't remember something feeling like that in the music industry. It hadn't felt like that in a long time.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  MySpace was such a hot music destination that MTV wanted to buy it, before being undercut by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

• 7:10Speaker 05

  News Corp has been, I think, smart enough to let us continue to do what we do and really keep hands off, which is not typical for a big corporation like that. You sort of expect them to screw it up.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  It continued to grow, and in 2007, had 67 million users, when Facebook only had a third of that.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  Now, Facebook, well, it was created by a guy from Harvard. People praise it for its clean looks and controlled feel, but at the same time, it's a little stuffy, dare I say, geeky?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  In 2008, the company pushed to make MySpace a one-stop destination for music listening, to make it more like the celestial jukebox that was promised. Holt was tapped to lead the music division and bring established catalogs from Sony, Warner, and Universal onto the site. There was just one problem. While MySpace was great for bonding over bands and building fandoms, it wasn't actually that good for everyday listening.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Some of the features became bugs. The idea that I could self-express and I could make this cool player and I could promote my music and I could celebrate my fans was great, but then to actually make a playlist at a point in time when we were starting to move towards mobile, MySpace wasn't ready for that. In discovery, lean forward, click, play, consume, interact, MySpace was great at that. Lean back, I just want the music I want, I want to take it with me, I want to have a playlist. It became a lot harder for that to be the case. So you sort of look at the lack of investment and innovation that News Corp wanted to put into it at the time that there was an evolutionary shift in how music was being consumed.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  So they had this really incredible magic engine, but it wasn't adaptable for all of the evolutions that were going to happen in music discovery and demand.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, how we got from MySpace to TikTok and saw the rise of the artist slash influencer.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  As MySpace attempted to build out its music platform, it was declining on the social side. By 2011, it had less than 1/10 of the number of users of Facebook, which was pretty agnostic to music sharing. That same year, Swedish music streamer Spotify launched in the US. And unlike MySpace, it was very good at the lean-back experience.

• 10:34Speaker 07

  Whatever you want.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Whenever you want.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  It gave you exactly the music that you wanted, with little to no interference, at a price once unimaginable: 10 bucks a month. In Spotify, the celestial jukebox was realized, and pushed companies like Apple and Amazon to build similar subscription services. But all that scale has made it harder for new artists to break through. Larry Miller, who leads the music business program at NYU and has his own podcast, Musinomics, explains what experts have witnessed.

• 11:05Speaker 08

  One thing that we've observed is that the magnitude of most hits is smaller. We've also noticed that the amount of music that is uploaded to all of the major streaming services every day has increased, and the vast majority of them don't ever get listened to more than once or twice, including by the uploader's mom and dad or grandparents. They're just never, ever, ever listened to.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  So for an aspiring musician, there are a few ways to break through the noise. You land on a great Spotify playlist, or you ride the algorithms onto a streamer's radio station. But the golden ticket is going viral on TikTok, which happens constantly. Last year, Nigerian artist CK became a global phenomenon when his single "Loved Wantidi", which had been released a year prior, blew up on the app.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  It has since been certified platinum. In August, Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-McLloyd posted a minute-long clip of her song "Complex", which got 7.4 million views, and landed her a contract with Columbia Records.

• 12:24Speaker 08

  The streaming services, including TikTok, are amazing at breaking a track. They're less great at breaking an artist and building a career. And that is what record companies are still really, really good at. Just ask Lil Nas X. Just ask Olivia Rodrigo. And so, on the one hand, the opportunity, the potential, that still exists in these services and the open distribution policies that they have and the platforms that they utilize are fabulous and have dramatically furthered this theme of the democratization of music discovery and consumption that's now more than a generation along.

• 13:07Speaker 08

  There's a big difference between having a moment and having a sustainable career or actually being the biggest artist in the world.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  For Erykah Loebman, a singer-songwriter based in Rochester, New York, who goes by Boy Jr., social has definitely opened doors.

• 13:23Speaker 09

  I think most of the things that have come my way have just been because I'm putting myself out there and just having my weird little ideas and being a weirdo online.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  With spoofs of indie rock culture and remixes of beloved songs, like a hyperpop version of "Mr. Brightside,"

• 13:40Speaker 02

  she has over 300,000 followers on TikTok. That's helped drive ticket sales to her live shows and garner over 2 million streams on Spotify.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  She's gotten sponsorship deals with companies like Fender and Extra Debit Cards.

• 14:01Speaker 09

  There were people who were like, "Yeah, I saw you in an ad, so I discovered your music that way, and now I'm here at your show." And I was like, "Wow."

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Loebman's not a star yet, but she's making a living as an indie artist, which may not have been possible without the exposure she gets through social and streaming. But she's also realistic about how fickle the algorithms can be.

• 14:21Speaker 09

  Sometimes it has a lot of benefits for artists who are not working with a team, with a budget for really significant marketing. It can be a great stroke of luck, but it is so easy to become kind of addicted to that kind of luck. And the way that people come in with their comments and the way that it's treated when a video gets viral and that people are instantly like, "Oh, my God, how are you not famous? Someone get this person a record deal immediately. You know, you need to be on TV shows, blah, blah, blah." And I'm like, "Oh, I appreciate those comments a ton, but there's a really good chance you won't see another video from me for months because your TikTok algorithm is gonna just show you other things and you're gonna forget about me."

• 15:02Speaker 02

  The pressure to perform on TikTok bleeds into the songwriting itself. Certain types of lyrics are more likely to go viral than others, and artists are keenly aware of that.

• 15:12Speaker 09

  I think it's very easy to become jaded about that concept as like, "Oh, if you wanna make something that does numbers, you have to like sell out and just like make songs where you list different personality traits or characteristics. So the people will make TikToks where they put green arrows or red X's next to it." There are certain things I'm writing now that I know are not gonna be really like TikTockable. And like, that has to be okay, otherwise I would lose my marbles as an artist.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  The kind of work Erica puts into her content, in addition to her songwriting, is standard now. It's not enough to just make the music anymore.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  I think you need to be a multi-hyphenate in today's ecosystem to do that because you're competing with people who are multi-hyphenate and multi-sku. And if that's the reality of what it takes to be an artist today, yes, there'll always be those artists that are evergreen artists that can break through because they already built that before this whole world has changed. You have artists that are gonna come up that might have a moment of virality where a song breaks through, a video breaks through, it's a meme, it's something that cuts through. But then it's the capacity that you have to take that advantage of that, to take that and turn it into something else.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  So for an aspiring artist, what is more daunting? Impressing the gatekeepers of old? Label executives influenced by their own whims and prejudices? Or the bottomless, unfeeling algorithms of the celestial jukebox, which can make you a sensation for one day, just to forget you the next? I'm not sure I have the answer to that. But even if I have trouble making sense of the kind of stardom that emerges from this new landscape, these hybrid influencer artists, there is some 19-year-old out there who will look back as fondly on the TikTok era of music as I do the MySpace era. Less Fleet Foxes, more Boyz II Men.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Liam James, Andrew Moreno, and me, Ariel Shapiro. Nori Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back with another episode of The Future of Music next Monday.

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