Flotsam and Jetsam
Recent comments from Rob Stringer, Daniel Ek and Mira Murati use ill-advised language, but raise important issues
In early June, the Chairman of Sony Music, Rob Stringer, answered questions from financial analysts about his company’s streaming strategy.
Referring to the massive amount of music released by Sony’s independent competitors, he said a portion of it is “literally like flotsam and jetsam, […] it’s just stuff that’s taking up some of the marketshare because of scale.”
Around the same time, Daniel Ek, CEO of my former employer1 Spotify, posted a note on social media containing this sentence:
"Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content.”
And just a few weeks later, Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, went on record with this statement about the impact of generative AI on the job market:
“Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place – if the content that comes out of it is not high quality.”
Stringer, Ek and Murati are among the most powerful and influential people in music and tech. They should be weighing their words carefully.
They shouldn’t be referring to human-made ‘content’ that ‘is not high quality’, when they’re literally responsible for the fact that the internet is rapidly turning into an ocean of useless AI fodder.
They shouldn’t claim that creating this ‘content’ costs ‘close to zero’, when many artists feel that they are investing a lot without getting back much.
They shouldn’t compare creative work to junk that floats around the ocean and eventually drowns to its bottom to rot.
Then again, it’s easy to get outraged at these comments without looking at their context.
That’s the mechanism we’ve learned from social media.
I’ve fallen into that trap myself, but I don’t think it will lead us anywhere.
Sure, all of these statements contain sloppy, pejorative terminology for the work of artists. Still, they’re wrong more from a PR standpoint than in terms of their actual substance.
Getting past my initial emotional response, I kind of understand where they’re coming from, and I think we need to look at the underlying issues.
These days, with easy access to digital tools, everyone is encouraged to become a ‘creator’. The marketplace is getting more and more crowded to say the least.
As a former streaming music editor and playlist curator, I’ve experienced that unfathomable avalanche of ‘content’ first-hand.
80,000 tracks are getting uploaded to streaming services every single day.
This number contains new recordings by artists from all genres across the globe, but also loads of 31-second recordings of rain sounds and cabin noise, generic muzak cover versions designed as search hacks, bad demos from very early stage musical beginners, and cheap ‘remixes’ conveniently created in a few seconds with AI-driven software.
A quarter of all music on streaming services – that’s right, 25% – is not going to receive a single play in a year.
86% reaches less than 1,000 streams.
This is the foundation on which Stringer argues that there’s a certain amount of ‘flotsam and jetsam’ that takes away marketshare from real artists by sheer scale; the foundation on which Ek argues that the creation of content costs ‘close to zero’; the foundation which makes Murati think that no one should make a living from such low quality content in the first place.
And as a writer, I’d partly even agree with them.
Still, what’s important to note is that there’s simply no way of objectively determining the quality of music (or ‘content’, for that matter).
Let’s look at those ubiquitous lo-fi beats, for example.
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