Music Has Been Commoditised, Now What? 4 Causes and 3 Possible Solutions [Part 3]
In the previous article in this series, we saw that fan-based business models can help solve the music commoditisation problem. At the forefront of this new (super)fans-driven business approach is Tencent Music. In stark contrast to Western music streaming services, the Chinese music behemoth doesn’t monetise consumption. Rather, it monetises a music experience that provides strong emotional value to fans. Tencent Music’s de-commoditisation strategy is driven by one clear goal: bring fans closer to their favourite artists. Are you a die-hard Ariana Grande fan? Not only can you listen to her music while chilling on your sofa, but, if you’re loyal enough, you’ll also get signed posters and the chance to win VIP tickets to her LA concert. This means you’ll enjoy a musical and personal experience with your music idol.
Tencent Music is already offering its users tools to interact with artists. However, there’s great room for improvement. How can we foster the relationship between music audiences and artists in order to turn listeners into fans, and fans into superfans? Meet customisation and, one of the world’s favourite buzzwords right now, Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Fortnite’s important lesson
Let’s take a short detour to drive home a point. You may have heard of a somewhat famous post-apocalyptic game called Fortnite. It currently has two hundred million avid players who challenge each other in last-man-standing style battles. Fortnite regularly makes more than fifty million dollars a month by selling in-game virtual goods.
Most of the items players buy have nothing to do with the gameplay — they’re cosmetic items that change the look and feel of your avatar. You want a ridiculous, somewhat creepy teddy-bear-like cloth your avatar can showcase while trying to shoot down enemies? Buy the Cuddle Team Leader ‘skin’. (It only costs 2,000 V-bucks, or roughly $20).
The secret of the (monetary) success of Fortnite is customisation. Buying a skin, or the latest special dance move, is a way for players to have ownership of their avatars. In a virtual setting, like an online game, the appearance of the avatar expresses who we are, and, most importantly, how we desire to appear to the external world. Fortnite is hardly the only game that monetises this. In fact, a good chunk of the games industry capitalises on this basic human instinct.
Music customisation: Feeling ownership of the music
I already hear you asking, “How is Fortnite’s customisation related to music, and, most importantly, to the de-commoditasation of music?” The key isn’t the specific area under analysis, it’s the underlying principle. With the advent of social media and user-generated content platforms, people are in the habit of creating, remediating, and customising content. They want ownership of their experience. On Instagram, they publish fun pictures of the bar they’ve been to with their friends. In a game like Fortnite, their customised avatar expresses their inner self. In this sense, customisation is a tool people use to feel ownership over an experience.
Let’s go back to music. What kind of ownership do you have over the music you listen to? Almost none. Apart from choosing whether to listen to Ariana Grande or Mahler, there’s little you can do to customise the actual listening experience. The sequence of musical events in a song remains the same, regardless of whether you’re happy, sad or if you’ve listened to the composition more than a hundred times. There’s really nothing you can do to change a piece in such a way that suits the things you’re experiencing here and now. There’s no equivalent of the Fortnite Item Shop for music. You can’t customise a song and feel full ownership over it.
I appreciate that someone could argue that music is the result of the personal expression of an artist and should, therefore, remain crystallised and unchanged in a recording. But this is already problematic if you think about classical music, for example. Beethoven wrote the Ode to Joy. In order for this movement to be brought to life you need, for instance, Sir Simon Rattle, who leads the Berlin Philharmonic, in a performance of the piece. Both the conductor and the orchestra are mediators that transform a piece of paper into a sonic experience. Can we, the fan, act as a mediator?
Musicians may not want for musically untrained listeners to play around with their work, and, worst case, butcher it. I get that. However, I also reckon that in the Instagram and Fortnite era, meaningful experiences are linked to ownership, whether it’s customising avatars, posting pictures, or listening to music. In the music realm, this is more than a hypothesis. We ran a survey among two hundred gamers and found that 70% of them would love to customise the music they experience in a game, if this was easily achievable.
A few musicians have already started experimenting with music customisation. In 2011, Bjork released a number of music apps for her album Biophilia, which blend music, visual and interactive elements. Listeners (users?) can customise their visual experience while listening, and interact with the virtual world, for example, by picking up crystals in the space. However, there’s no way for a Bjork fan to interact directly with the music.
With the app Bloom, generative music guru Brian Eno gives users the tools to co-create music with him. Listeners, now elevated to the role of creatives, can interact with the app by tapping the screen and setting variables that the generative system reads and integrates in the music it produces. Although embryonal, Bloom is a clear experiment of how music can be customised and, in the process, provide a feel of ownership to the experiencer.
What are some of the possible forms of music customisation in the future? To answer this question we have to enter the incredible world of AI.
Artificial Intelligence: The gateway to music customisation
Most people have always thought of music as a linear, fixed media — video game music is obviously an exception. When you listen to Bohemian Rhapsody, no matter the context, you’ll always get the same a cappella polyphonic intro (Is this the real life?…). What if you’d like it to start with the same melody, but, say, at the piano, and then build up the arrangement with techno electronic instruments instead of the classic Queen line up? You’ll either be fortunate enough to see your sonic dreams realised by a quirky Berlin EDM producer, or, most likely, only imagine it in your mind; painfully regretting saying no to your parents’ wishes to send you for private piano lessons.
This was the case, until now; AI will change that forever. There’s already AI technology capable of creating remixes of songs based on your taste. (I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a millennial out there longing for Bohemian ‘Trap’-sody with a set of African drums).
Think of AI as a way of empowering an artist’s music to be heard across different genres and emotional states, depending on the listeners’ taste. An intelligent music system could enable listeners to interact with the music, in order to customise it based on their preferences. New remixes, melodic lines and unexplored harmonic trajectories are only some of the possibilities that AI could open up. Keep in mind this isn’t the plot to a sci-fi film. Companies like Melodrive, Jukedeck, AI Music, Google and IBM are already exploring intelligent music solutions for a number of verticals, from video game music to songwriting.
With these technological advancements, listeners will have the ability to directly interact with their favourite artists’ music. This new, heightened level of music customisation facilitated by AI will likely boost the audience’s sense of ownership, thereby deepening the fan-artist relationship. As we’ve seen in the previous post, a strong emotional experience is central to de-commoditising music.
Adapt or fade into obscurity
In this article series, we’ve explored the causes of music commoditisation and offered several solutions. As cognitive scientists would say, the cause behind the commoditisation of music is multifactorial. The illegal file sharing craze of the early 2000s, music streaming, technological advancements and the inertia of music labels to change have all contributed to the devaluation of music. But hope does prevail.
To de-commoditise music we first have to acknowledge that the value of music is not in its consumption any more, rather in the shared lifestyle experience built around and between fans and artists. Music industry players should implement new business models that put fans and superfans first. Music customisation is going to play a key role in boosting the intimate relationship between fans and artists, providing a sense of ownership to the audience. AI will provide the tools to realise that music customisation.
Record labels and music streaming services have two options: adapt to this seismic change in the perception of music value and embrace these new models, or mindlessly continue down the road they’re pursuing, and, in all likelihood, die. Even if this happened, it wouldn’t be that disconcerning. Music is a fundamental natural human trait that will persist, as it has for dozens of thousands of years. It‘s the infrastructure around music that will change, favouring new players that know how to respond to the new musical needs of their audiences.
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