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Two recent events in the music industry stand as evidence of that industry’s secret origin (and final destination) in the broader, generalized churn of capitalist activity and yet, at the same time, encourage a revolutionary reappraisal of the work of artists and of the possible roles of music and other art in a post-capitalist society. At least, that’s my best attempt at an optimistic spin.
TechCrunch reports that Spotify has acquired WhoSampled.com, a consolidation that promises to bring their users a superior experience exploring the credits of songs, or so goes the milquetoast PR line that is dripping with about as much real excitement as a flu shot. To be fair to the publicist, painting Spotify in a positive light vis-à-vis the music ecosystem into which it has set its vampire fangs is becoming increasingly difficult; the corpse is looking pretty dried out.
No, what this consolidation actually represents is a last-ditch effort to scrape the factory floor of any remaining, possibly salable product. Spotify does not produce anything; the definition of a “middleman,” they are the most detestable kind of parasite in a capitalist economy. And as their dead-end, subscriber-based business model runs out of steam to pick up more users, they’ve hoped with this merger that they can at least turn back to their corpse meal and try to give it one more squeeze.
As new owners of WhoSampled, Spotify now has access to the largest crowd-sourced database of sampled, interpolated, remixed, and otherwise referenced copyrighted material. Since 2008 (and before that under a different name), enthusiasts of sample-based music like hip-hop and electronica—now among the most dominant commercial and popular forms of music—have contributed to this database out of the sheer passion and interest in the art form. This nearly 20-year project of accumulating information by hand via the work of thousands of unpaid, anonymized internet users now neatly lands at the feet of an entity prepared to do everything in its power to enforce any applicable property rights that emerge. To a capitalist, there’s no labor like free labor.
Sample-based music itself has forded various existential threats in its comparatively short life and rise to popularity. Forever preserved is the goofy footage of Vanilla Ice singing the bassline of “Ice Ice Baby” in court, desperate to demonstrate a divergence of one single note (and therefore to retain compositional proprietorship) from the Queen and Bowie tune “Under Pressure” from which it is so obviously mimeographed. If anything, this and other early lawsuits only fortified the legitimacy of sampling as a production tool, ensuring that the writers and producers of the original works could be cut in on any pool of new royalties that materializes in the presence of a hit song. If there ever was a legal threat to creativity, it’s more likely to come from litigious estates that have attempted to police things as broad as chord progressions (see Ed Sheeran vs. Marvin Gaye—or rather, vs. Structured Asset Sales, a corporation that indubitably lays claim to a unique and profitable creativity of its own, if we can base such a judgment on their name alone).
So it would be trivial (and wrong) to suggest that the merger will prevent anyone from making sample-based music, especially in light of successful companies like Splice, whose entire business model is selling thousands of bespoke samples for music generation (Ironically, Splice and other platforms have become so popular with producers that it’s become nearly impossible to use any of their samples in a commercially released song without an automated copyright enforcement system immediately identifying that same sample from its use in another, previously-released song and de-monetizing your version, even though the whole point of paying for Splice is to have access to samples that are pre-cleared for commercial use. Some music production YouTube channels have demonstrated the copyright takedown phenomenon in as few as a couple minutes).
The real rub is the further chilling effect on the already Ice Ice Baby-cold market of salable music. Except in cases of sheer laziness, it’s quite easy to manipulate a sample so as to thoroughly obscure it from automated copyright enforcement systems, and therefore get away with stealing it. These systems are not “listening” to music but scanning its digital fingerprint for matches to other digital fingerprints. But our own human intelligence, which is capable of so much more than the banal pattern recognition on which “AI” technology currently hinges, can easily spot recognizable excerpts even if they have been, say, pitch-shifted, slowed down, or reversed. Enter WhoSampled.
Sample heads, crate diggers, artists, or DJs—anyone eager to grow and flex their musical knowledge and skill—can contribute to this massive database with laser precision and full user interactivity (if you’ve never been to WhoSampled, here is the page for “Ice Ice Baby” where you can see and hear, down to the second, the bass sample from the Queen song). Sample connections are approved by moderators and voted on by community members as to their accuracy, which is to say that many human ears and minds contribute to the validation of a single discovery. Designers of automated music recognition software can only dream of this level of recognition and verification, and believe it: your new owners thank you very, very much.
Because while Spotify holds few copyrights themselves compared to their largest suppliers like Universal Music Group, any dangling royalty, however small, represents money on the table and is an irritating liability comparable to a pebble in the shoe. They are foremost motivated to bring such expenses, wherever possible, under the umbrella of their under-the-table agreements with those few large clients. WhoSampled, which has always operated independently from any enforcement authority re: copyright, is perfectly leveraged to automatically fill in the gaps in Spotify’s accounting record. It seems likely that independent artists, who lack robust legal and label representation to negotiate proper songwriting “splits” in cases where sampled material is used, will instead be forced to forfeit all claims of their share of royalties on such a song. Guess who will pocket the difference.
And so it seems destined that the long, pedantic arm of the law, somehow incapable of protecting the larger economic system of artists, fans, and business owners from one or two vampiric presences, will be leveraged exhaustively to scrape the deepest, smallest corners of profitability for those vampires and no one else.
The other news of last week is that Warner Music has settled their lawsuit against AI music company Suno, and this in the most glad-handing way that we can imagine from our forced perspective as observers. At least, I hope you didn’t think that WB would be swinging their weight in the interest of all the little guys, going to bat for artists and the sanctity of original art in the face of exploitative AI models that “learn” via copyright infringement.
No, instead they’ve just agreed that the next year’s AI model will be exclusive to Warner Music, with the model’s private parts duly licensed and paid for. This, Warners gladly assures us (or themselves), will open up generous new revenue streams for artists when their voices and likenesses are used to generate new music. At the moment they’ve diplomatically couched this as an “opt-in” opportunity for their artists, but anyone who’s ever read anything about the kind of contracts in which major labels trade would probably be correct to assume that the only one with any real options is the boss. Remember when holograms of Tupac and Buddy Holly graced the stages of music festivals in the last decade, much to the uniform unease of the audience? It will get worse.
Notwithstanding some interesting new science that suggests that generative AI models are quantitatively incapable of producing anything other than amateur creative results, it may be time to reckon not with the technology, but with the total system that enables its existence and encourages its decidedly unidirectional development.
This year I’ve been thinking a lot about my own relationship to producing music. Basically it’s taking me longer than usual to wrap a record that I started last year, and while I don’t typically hold myself to any kind of deadline or bar of progress, I do try to frequently meditate on my motivations for producing and my expectations for the life of something once I’ve finished making it. The latter are no doubt highly antagonized by the types of news which I’ve covered here, while the former, to a greater degree, must originate from within.
And even that origination—the creative spark, if you will—has been called into question for me lately. While in America we are firmly in our “bread and circuses” era of fascist decline, the whole earth is in the punishing thrall of hyperreal capital accumulation. “Hyperreal,” in the Baudrillardian sense, because the system has lost many (all?) of the real economic referents on which it is supposedly composed: the most “valuable” company on the planet right now (Nvidia) does not actually make the chips for which they are so prized. OpenAI does backdoor financing deals—with Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, etc.—the math of which doesn’t really add up and which hardly matters since the deals are reliant on meeting physically (like, capital-P physics) impossible productivity goals, that is unless there are 6+ new nuclear reactors immanently available for use that the U.S. government simply hasn’t told us about yet (there aren’t). The simulacra are swarming, and all serve the same function of obfuscation in the name of accumulation.
And among the dance of commodities, hype, and the exchange of capital-as-power is art itself. The depressing thing about French post-modernists like Baudrillard and Guy Debord is their fatalist assumption that we’ve already crossed the Rubicon with regard to symbolic representation. That all of our images come to/from a perverted “society of the spectacle” whose fundamental, non-human purpose is to uphold the ruling economic system, itself not even human. And/but the more time passes, the more they appear to have been correct.
Setting aside the challenge of participating in an unfairly gamed market (viz. alongside cheap AI-generated products), would-be artists in any medium must attend to this existential threat: the idea that, even beyond or before the accelerating technology of our day, the medium of their art is and has always been corruptible to the level of artifice—to the cellophane-smooth, touch-responsive experience that we increasingly recognize as the slick slip of money, fractions of a penny at a time, into ever-enlarging pockets.
The crisis works from two sides, within and without. The artist is constantly compelled, like Christ in the desert, toward the relief of participating in Debord’s “spectacular society,” but only on the terms of the spectacle. To be seen at all requires submission to the terms of modern seeing. In the vernacular of the spectacular, do we risk all pretense to our medium as the perfect mimesis—of emotions, of experience, of humanity—and therefore be forced to own the latent cynicism now laid visible in all works of art? The alternative is no less than the desert itself: the sheer wall of meaninglessness; the abrogation of power; contemplation of the void.
And the distressing question that results: is music as we know it—via the medium of the all-encompassing spectacle—in fact counter-revolutionary? Can it be true that our beloved music, which at its highest high feels like a spiritual kind of liberation, actually stands in the way of our true social freedom? What should we make of the recent wave of legacy artists selling their catalogs at the precipice of this AI slop era? Bob Dylan sold out to the tune of over half a billion dollars between 2020-2022. Even if you celebrated him vicariously for this move at the time, it now looks wildly irresponsible in the face of the Warner Music/Suno deal, which will be predictably not the last of its type. Somehow I expect that even Bob’s most ardent fans don’t look forward to a future of unlimited new “Bob Dylan” songs. One more squeeze, coming right up.
Marx offers little guidance here: the purely materialist underpinnings of the critique on capitalism suggest little as to what role creativity and art would play in a post-capitalist society. Debord is even more pessimistic: “Art in the period of its dissolution… is at once an art of change and a pure expression of the impossibility of change. The more grandiose its demands, the further from its grasp is true self-realization.” On a fundamental level, does Dylan’s business savvy reveal that he was never, in fact, a protest singer, much less a true protestor? How disappointing this must be to his fans, who are likely as not in the same or worse economic conditions than they’ve ever been.
For a small dose of hope, observe a toddler with paper and crayon. Yet uncorrupted by the image of production, they instead spontaneously produce the image of play. Perhaps we do have a collective, if vague, memory of a time when art was a medium of social exchange, resistant to commodification; a genetic memory of ancient ancestors, sated on abundant wild food and picking idly at the shape of a stone or a piece of wood; a pre-historical, pre-spectacular time when all of us were artists, and our art a mere byproduct of our living.
What Am I Watching?
Rest in peace Jimmy Cliff. The Harder They Come (1972) is Jamaica’s first native feature film, and even as such its impact probably stretches further into music than it does cinema. The film itself is at least ethnographically interesting before it falls into typical crime exploitation fare, but the soundtrack, man, the soundtrack. It will answer all your questions about reggae music and leave you clamoring for more. Both are ultimately worth checking out, and as with all things in our digital era, “you can get it if you really want.”