Craft versus character: the equation the music industry needs to fix

I recently wrote about the unflattening of music: how creativity, craft, and fandom can – if done right – counter the growing commodification of music. Not surprisingly, I focused on the music side of the equation, but in doing so I missed the other big flattening challenge music faces. This challenge comes not from music but from artists themselves – or rather what artists are having to become.

Music (at least popular music) has always been more than just about the music, it is about the artist too. However, if there was previously some kind of equilibrium, the balance between craft and character has tilted firmly to the latter. It has done so because the social media ecosystems in which the music business operates, and which have a direct bearing on revenue, reward personality more than they do craft. The music business needs to find a way to extract itself from this culture meatgrinder.

A recent Rick Beato video critiqued a major label exec for his focus on the social prowess of artists. Social has done more than anything else to push the balance towards character. With its focus on the personal, social has inherently shifted the marketing burden onto the shoulders of the artist. They are the ones that most often build brand, audience, and streams from their social activity. Social now accounts for 17% of all entertainment time, more than streaming music (13%), but its soft power is bigger than its share-of-time hard power. This is because social is often our discovery entry point for everything else. For example, TikTok is the number one place that Gen Z discovers new music.

But music is just one sub-strand of social, which means that artists are competing with all other creators for attention. This is complicated further by the fact that algorithms nichify everything, making cutting through harder still.

Building fan relationships may be the ideal, but ultimately the algorithm rewards ‘buzzy’ behaviours.Artists find themselves not only having to continually say something, but having to say something that cuts through. So, it is not even artists’ character that is being pushed, but an exaggerated caricature. Artists end up, intentionally or otherwise, building a persona, a character. It is because of this double meaning (i.e., personality AND persona) that I use the word ‘character’ – that, and because it alliterates nicely with ‘craft’!

When labels (obviously not all of them, but many) look for artists that have strong social followings, they see that as a reflection of the artist’s popularity and potential. While it often is, it is more a reflection of the artist’s character and the suitability of that character to the social algorithm.

All of this might be a price worth paying, were it not for the side effects:

Social is not actually that effective: Despite all the effort put into social, its conversion rate is not great. Only a minority of people stream music they discover on social. Even among the superfans of superstars, social activity does not convert to streams or purchases as often as hoped (look out for a MIDiA report this month on the topic). The music business thinks of social as a funnel, but really it is more like panning for gold, with water streaming out of the bottom (pun intended) but what is important is being left behind – the gold nuggets of fandom, identity, and community.

We are unable to see the ‘whys’: Music marketers can measure the effects of virality (the ‘whats’) but not the causes (the ‘whys’). They cannot tell whether it was the song or the creator that created the viral moment. They can observe correlation but not causality.

Passive fandom: Viral moments are the result of passive fandom, but artist success depends on deeper, active fandom.

Character can be an obstacle: Artist character matters, but it is only part of why we like the music we like. However, when character becomes the main entry point, we risk not engaging with music at all if we do not like the artist. And with streaming flattening music, there is progressively less chance of us serendipitously discovering a ‘real’ artist’s music on streaming, sans character. In fact, the character-first approach means we are more likely to listen to music by characters we REALLY like – and when really liking the character is a prerequisite to listening, even the artists we feel neutral about lose out. Music becomes polarised into the same love-or-hate dynamic that social algorithms used to carve up wider society and politics.

Craft gets relegated: With the focus on doing and saying stuff that fires up the social algorithm, the craft of music loses ground. Either because artists find themselves with less time to make music, or because labels and management sign the artists who emphasise character over craft, content over composition. Often the answer is all of the above.

In many respects, artists and labels cannot be criticised for playing to the system. If they do not, they risk failure. They are caught up in a system that rewards character over craft. So, what is the solution? It is much easier said than done, but the music industry needs social places where music lives alone or at least has a starring role. Apple tried (and failed) years ago with iTunes Ping! – it was the wrong execution and at the wrong time. It was basically TikTok 10 years before TikTok, but not done as well.

To succeed, this new place (or places) will have to avoid making the same mistakes as today’s social apps. It will need to emphasise music over personality, which means more actual music than talking. It can also be showcasing the creative process, sharing demos, empowering fan creation etc. Crucially, it will need to be a place without trolling. This will likely mean gated fan communities, where bad behaviour is not tolerated, perhaps leveraging the Twitch model of community-led moderation. Ideally, it will also be a slow internet, a place where virality, likes, and follower counts take second place to community, culture, and real conversation.

Sounds ridiculously idealistic, right? Perhaps it is, but these are the underlying values of human society. Technology has shifted us away from them and AI threatens to push us even further away. People are forced into behaviours that make sense to the machine more than they do to humans. Anyone who has watches the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown will see an artist that wanted it to be all about the music – he did not want to have to be a 'star'. Things will never be like that again, and in many ways today’s world is immeasurably better. However, in the intervening decades, the pendulum has swung entirely in the opposite direction. Now the time is right for it to settle somewhere in the middle.