A Letter to Damon Krukowski

Hey Damon,

I just finished reading your latest piece on Pitchfork, How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming — excellent work. As a musician, booker, promoter, and all-around evangelist of the extreme realms of musical exploration in vastly underrepresented areas of the world, I’m really glad to see what feels like a slowly rising cadre of notable artists beginning to call out the systems that are failing the creative communities that pop up in and around the musical experience so very badly, and failing them doubly so when it comes to scenes of non-”1st-tier” regions.

But your article is the first one, for me anyway, that really hinted at what you called another world, and it resonated very deeply with my own beliefs about what we, as members of the Arts appreciating community, are currently up against and where we’re headed. So much so that I wanted to take a chance and write to you to add my own thoughts, ask about that new world you were suggesting may be possible, and to humbly present our aggressively DIY and admittedly subversive attempts to rejigger the entire international system under their noses to the benefit of the masses.

In your article, you dance around a few very important issues relevant to the music ecosystem: certain types of scale; audience and band experiences as relative to festivals, stadiums, and local venues; the divide between Big Tech and the likes of Aaron Swartz; hippies & punx; and, (briefly) physical releases & (by extrapolation) vinyl. Oh, and bands getting paid out what they’re due.

Scale of economy comes in many shades, and you specifically mention VC’s lust for the massively scalable unicorn, but they’re only really focused on one in particular: the scale of (digital) distribution. As you also noted (and I’m taking your word for it), 99% of streamed music plugged into the ears of 140M Spotify users (70M paying) is of the top 10% most-streamed music. This phenomenon isn’t specific to streaming music, though it certainly plays a very big role in it, but rather to the entire role of search as it’s currently implemented in popular consumer technology.

To be honest, at it’s core, I don’t have a problem with this. Or, rather, I see it as the natural state of intelligent databases that are charged with documenting all the world has to offer, determining and then logging the interlaced relevancy between the constituent parts of that singular massive dataset, parsing out user input, preference, and opinion, and then finally developing and applying an algorithm that takes all of that into account to determine a success rate. It seems likely (bearing in mind that I’m no mathematician, statistician, or cultural anthropologist) that in such a contained system, and taken as a given that in any population of sufficient size a certain majority will agree on the relative acceptability of particular elements contained within their cultural system, certain things will naturally filter to the top.

Considered in isolation, that things float to the top of popularity in a given system seems innocuous at worst and probably sounds more like it is a system functioning pretty well: input & output, much like a calculator. But when you consider that Art, which of course includes music, is not a static product but rather a dynamic, self-propagating, and ever-evolving representation of a particular creative inclination that at once is both at least partially compatible and incompatible with other representations but that also resonates differently with each and every one of us regardless of affiliation, and then further consider the above statement on what really seems to be a cultural tyranny of the majority, well, now we have a system which not only filters the most popular things to the top but subsequently and necessarily obfuscates those non-winners because they’re all lumped together into 1 system with the same goal that treats all entrants similarly. I generally refer to this conundrum as The Problem with Everything, which is a problem of relevancy, and it applies to Facebook, Google, Amazon, Spotify, and pretty much every other major player in the modern tech scene. We’re trying to do complex cultural calculus with basic arithmetic.

So I wouldn’t give Spotify credit for creating some nefarious system that exploits musicians and audiences alike; they’re merely smart enough to see those systems in place and leverage them to their advantage. Spotify and most if not all other streaming services (though I, too, have a soft spot in my heart for Bandcamp), while certainly interested in appearing to be an open platform for musical exploration, in fact don’t give a fuck about Music as expression, but merely as a label they can slap onto an otherwise nondescript product bucket. It goes without saying, but their business is in consumption, not appreciation, and they and others like them just want users to think they’re being served something great and to gobble that shit up asap.

You also mention festivals, and they, too, are largely focused on a single scale: the scale of instance. This is actually something, as an experienced booker, I’ve never fully understood. I mean, yeah, I attend festivals and even frequently enjoy them, but the logistics load climbs exponentially the bigger you go. “Why,” I ask myself, “would you want to make that Leviathan of a headache your bread & butter?” Handling hundreds of thousands of people is, to coin a phrase, a major pain in the ass, not to mention provides gargantuan risks for both financial and bodily harm.

Let’s consider audience management briefly. In a few quick searches for acceptable ratios of staff to attendees at festivals, I wasn’t able to find much of a consensus, but the Government of Western Australia’s Department of Health suggests two staff for the first 100 attendees, and an additional one staff for each additional 100 attendees. For the sake of an all-inclusive bare minimum, I’m going to go with Dunbar’s Number, which suggests an individual can coherently associate with (and in this case, by that I mean manage) a max limit of ~150 other individuals; but also know that some business advisors feel a single manager can only take responsibility for 70, and that Navy SEAL team leaders max out at 6. Point being, there’s a finite range with a maximum and minimum of how big a population can grow without necessarily creating another population to manage it.

If we accept Wikipedia’s estimate of Coachella 2017’s audience of 250,000, by using Dunbar’s Number to estimate the absolute minimum number of staff needed to safely manage that audience, you’d need 1,667 individuals. Of course, you’d also need an additional 11 to manage those staff at a bare minimum of safety, for a total staff count of 1,678. And that’s only for managing audiences, not taking into account technical staff, the members and crew of 150 bands, and innumerable vendors; Coachella’s host city of Indio provides private security at a cost of $2.77M in 2012, and I don’t know how many individuals that comprises.

Considering that Coachella 2017 is reported to have grossed $114.6M (but I’m not sure from what, just tickets? Tickets & advertisement? Merch & beer?), it is very difficult that, given a decent wage for time committed and not relying heavily on volunteers, this can result in anything but a net loss, variable but generally low-balled pay outs for bands, and a staff roster that makes the event necessarily risky for attendees, to a certain extent. And that’s without even knowing stage rental and upkeep costs. Presumably the hospitality industry covers the costs Indio and investors have to be shouldering, but that brings in its own management demons I won’t go into here. But what this all boils down to is, festivals are really fucking complicated.

And yet we have Fyre Festival which needs no introduction, once-proud Burning Man & SXSW basically hijacked by Corporate Tech, and Metal festivals in Las Vegas and on cruise ships, so obviously there are some rather monied people pulling the marketing strings in some rather varied genres, leading the chant of “Harder Better Faster Stronger” directed not at the musicians themselves but at the spectacle in which they perform, and the audience, enthralled, falls in line. And in three or five days time they leave their craft beer and water bottles behind, slink back to the slog of modern existence, nary seen at a concert until the next iteration of the Festival of Spectacle comes around the following year, imploring them to prepare for something unlike anything before. If that doesn’t sound eerily like a real-life Pied Piper, I’m not sure what does. Or maybe cicadas are a better analogy…

But this all segues nicely into the conspicuously absent third scale that I nevertheless hear in a lot of PR talking points but rarely see meaningfully pursued: the scale of experience, or in more common parlance, sustainability.

As I’ve briefly tried to elucidate, festivals, or what we currently recognize as festivals, are hardly sustainable on their own and require sponsors & subsidies, which are, of course, paid out by cities and companies looking to cash in on the PR boost a cool festival provides. They also have this efficient system, really, though I prefer to think of it as a meat processing plant: Spotify front-loads audiences with hyper-produced, stylized tracks intentionally composed to be as accessible as possible, generating an ever-growing “fan” base due in large part to droves of cash ($17B last I checked), ultimately producing a very large market share.

Because Spotify has veritably become a “tastemaker,” it has presumably turned the tables on Top 100 lists worldwide, which now reflect not so much the zeitgeist of what is and isn’t popular in music, but rather how successful corporate marketing campaigns about streaming artists have been. This then pressures other distribution channels to play ball, which further builds audiences, and then, right before the audience can’t take it anymore (intentionally ambiguous: could mean that hype has reached a fever pitch, but it could also mean that I presume most Americans are now only a few steps away from putting a gun to their head and pulling the trigger), festival season hits and the diaspora commences once again.

And here’s the thing: if I were a big city, I’d probably dig this, regardless of it’s factory farminess. It makes a whole lot of sense: It puts to work a whole bunch of different local groups, it offers expanded visibility on the national and/or world stage, it should offer a decent bump in my city’s brand, etc., etc. But what confounds me so much is not that they do this, but rather that, for all intents and purposes, it seems that most if not all big cities can’t for the life of them imagine another way to affect the same result. They’re out of ideas and the big players are feeding them exactly what they’re starving for: “proven” profitable methodology that they know will be a success. This is precisely what’s going on with Thrival Festival in Pittsburgh: amidst their massive campaign to become Seattle 2.0, they’re also taking notes from Austin while adding very little to the methods. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And that methodology of Harder Better Faster Stronger, while profitable and with latent growth potential, is exactly what we’re talking about here. That push for maximal impact on a given population has its pitfalls, which seem to hover around efficiency, viability, and creativity. There isn’t a festival I know of that isn’t a constant anxiety rollercoaster due to bumbled communications, low staffing, or jack-of-all-trades-ism; I can only think of one major festival that was 100% financially self-contained (Obscene Extreme) and operated on its own without any sort of sponsorship or partnership, but Curby had to scale it back because it was way too much work. Though Shadow Woods also seems to be doing a good job, but they draw maybe 400 people; and almost by necessity, the bigger the festival gets the less adventurous the lineup becomes and the more it resembles a Spotify list.

So how do you easily do sustainability, without sacrificing creative license or financial well-being? It’s not as complicated as you think, though it does require some pretty serious gear shifting.

Aaron Swartz was right in his actions but wrong in his target: that there was someone so possessed by the spirit of democracy and making the world a better place that he would risk everything, and ultimately die for, to liberate educational and research libraries from the clutches of conglomerates and distribute them for free to the masses is perhaps one of the most inspirational stories of my time. But like it or not, ownership exists in the current iteration of society, and when actors plot to steal what someone else lays claim to, the reaction can be unpleasant for the liberating party. Aaron likely knew the rules of the game he was playing, and those rules are heavily weighted towards those in favor of corporate and organizational privatization.

Napster, too, was right in its actions but short-sighted on scope; That a service existed in the early 00’s which liberated users from Sam Goody, MTV, and WXDX and allowed them to brazenly explore entire worlds of music they otherwise would have never been exposed to is still frighteningly progressive territory despite all of the ”progress” we’ve made since. However, just like with Aaron, capitalism and all that goes with it swooped in and cleaned house, thanks in no small part (as we all know) to Lars Ulrich, the coward.

So what am I getting at? I’m talking about walking out on Corporate Music entirely, and diving head first into the “deep web” of music — those bands either mistreated or more often simply ignored due to their genre, location, politics, or any other metric that the Masses deem distasteful. I have no problem with satisfied Spotify users continuing on with their blind mole life, but there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of undocumented, independent musicians of all types world wide which fans of that type of music would engage with, but those bands simply aren’t trackable. They have no licensing deals. Maybe a few almost-empty entries on Discogs. They play all the time locally, but have little web presence, and language gets in the way of connecting with international fans. Usually they have self-released albums, which often enough are on CD-R. Spotify can’t touch them because they can’t see them — they are functionally invisible in the economy of digital; they both exist and do not, just like the cultures that pop up around them in their resident countries.

But downloads aren’t the point of music, are they? In fact, music isn’t even really the point of music. It’s a delivery system, much like pizza is a delivery system for cheese and hot sauce. By itself, sure it’s pretty great! But what it brings into fleeting existence with every performance is truly the holiest of holies: community. Music, on its own, is individually consumable and static. Music, applied to a population, and absent any significant interruption or interlocution by Big Business (note that I am not saying any business is bad, merely the scourge we see running around in Silicon Valley and New York these days), is a creative catalyst for scalable community organization. And when you consider that the further underground you go, the further left audiences tend to lean, well, you might get a hint of what I’m getting at here. Not revolution, but renaissance.

You want the system to work for you? Too bad, it won’t. It’s too profitable, and they’re blinded by greed, just like Aaron said, though their PR campaigns will for sure spin a different story. But do you remember how Google indexed the entire web? Let’s build a tool that supports the independent, physical, communities that form in and around local scenes, something that can index the IRL indie scenes of the entire world, throw it out there to individual members of communities in Tokyo and Pittsburgh and Reykjavik and Singapore — notice that those are all cities and not entire nations — for free, and get people off of this terrible digital opiate they’ve become hooked on, and on to the real-life experiences that live music is is so very well tuned to generate.