By Calling Artists ‘Creators’, We’re Feeding the Big Tech Beast

How the creator economy has been leveraged to devalue music

A stat that spawned a million long-reads, Blue Skys and LinkedIn hyperbole landed in our laps last week in the form of this gem: more music is currently being released every day than was released in the whole of 1989. This mouth-watering fact for the commentariat (guilty!!) was delivered by Spotify’s former Chief Economist Will Page in an interview with MusicRadar, which was actually focused on plug-in subscriptions and the increasing demand for music software – we’ll come back to that.

At first glance, it’s a shocking, despairing figure for both artists trying to fight through the noise and music fans fatigued by the relentless onslaught of releases.

There are a couple of aspects to this, so let’s start with the obvious: The democratisation of music-making has meant more music is being made than ever before. The democratisation of music distribution has meant more people CAN ‘release’ (let’s swap release with the more accurate ‘upload’ for the rest of this article). And the democratisation of music listening through streaming and social platforms has meant that reaching a (highly) theoretical audience has never been easier. We’ve heard this story a billion times before and while it is true, it’s not a new phenomenon.

What is relatively new is of course AI and more specifically AI-generated music. Back in May, a musician called Michael Smith was accused of $10m worth of fraud from royalties generated by AI-generated music uploads. There’s plenty of meat in this story and I encourage you to dive into the details but while Smith got greedy and stuck his head above the crowd, you can almost guarantee that there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of people who are bumbling along generating far less – but still more than most artists – and are not being identified. There’s a huge incentive to pump out music – generated by AI models with questionable training data – and reap the semi-lucrative rewards. Anecdotally, the amount of sub-two minutes, hyper-generic tracks that appear in my Discover Weekly or recommendations has soared in recent months to the point that I tried to find a script to filter out anything under three minutes. Let me know if this exists!

Spotify overlord Ek has already said AI music will not be removed from Spotify and why would it? A huge part of their audience is the passive listener, and AI-generated coffee-shop jazz and sleep music take market share away from the big-bad majors, increasing Spotify’s eventual margins. The streaming giant also recently lowered the mechanical royalty rate it pays to songwriters and publishers after adding audiobooks to the platform – hehe! Whoops! Oh well!

To be fair, dangling a shiny new carrot to rightsholders, playing nice, changing consumer habits, and then changing the rules once you’ve captured their audience is Big Tech Walled Garden 101, so we shouldn't be too surprised.

Who cares?

On the other hand – so what? Does it matter that 120,000 tracks are uploaded every day if we only hear a tiny percentage? If a tree falls in the forest, etc. Sure it’s a staggering number and more than hints at a dramatic over-saturation, but who cares? We don’t see 99.999999% of that music, none of us will ever hear it. Why not allow it to take up space on Spotify’s servers? They don’t even pay royalties on the vast majority of it. Distributors who monetise throwing shit at the wall are also more than happy to oblige – Spotify still has a stake in the biggest distro on the market so they’ve extra incentive to encourage you to keep uploading, beyond reducing their reliance on major rightsholders.

So if you or I, the humble listeners, never hear this music and DSPs and distros are just lining their pockets with the hopes and dreams of the average bedroom producer/AI-music grifter, then what’s the problem? Sure it’s bullshit but welcome to 2024. Look around. Over-saturation is everywhere. Check your feed. It never ends. And it never will.

Besides, there are 82 years’(!) worth of content being uploaded to YouTube every day and no one seems to care about that, so why is this stat so alarming to so many? And then, it hit me.

There’s been a conscious effort to re-brand music as content by big tech, triggered by the growth of new music-makers during the pandemic. This sinister pivot is intended to devalue music, to both introduce apathy to the next generation of music makers – or ‘creators’ – to undermine existing music remuneration systems and to knock music off its pedestal and reduce it to ‘data’ that’s fair game for training in the age of AI. Here’s how.

The ‘Creator’ Dichotomy

The term ‘creator’ was first coined by YouTube in 2011. It was used to refer to DIY content creators who were attracting huge audiences and executing their own sponsorship or brand deals as a result, or at least were attracting brand attention. At the time, there was no formal or even informal mechanism for these deals to be executed and often it was up to the individual to negotiate on their own terms. As is usually the case in tech, a few self-titled disruptors spotted an opportunity and agencies representing said content creators began springing up to facilitate deals and professionalise the ‘creators’ newfound internet fame. Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz’s book ‘Extremely Online’ tells this story in a lot more depth.

Most of us know how the rest played out and are still feeling its echoes today. Influencer culture grew to become a dominating force in social media, including YouTube, with the top creators raking in millions while a further million lookalikes and wannabes attempted to feed off the scraps.

But it didn’t stop there. Although podcasting had been around for a long time, it had remained more of an internet subculture than the behemoth it is today until NPR’s true crime saga Serial became an internet sensation in 2014 and propelled the format into the mainstream. Much like their YouTube Creator cousins, the financial success of the top 1% (realistically more like 0.1%, which rings a bell) of podcasters became fuel to the fire for a million wannabes and the ‘creator economy’ became an all-encompassing name for those who essentially made content with the end goal of monetising said content through ad revenue, brand deals and other audience engagement and growth avenues.

Music artists though, remained largely untarred by the same brush, and there was a quiet understanding that music was different. Where content creators were entrepreneurial at heart, almost always aiming to grow their audience to ultimately monetise said audience – Like and Subscribe for more, and don’t forget to hit that bell – music meant more. While DSPs pay a laughably low amount per play, music’s value to music fans is incalculable. Music is present at countless key moments in our lives – we look up the record that was number one the day we were born, we make mixtapes/playlists for a special road trip or reunion and we decide what songs will play at our funeral. I’ve not (yet) been to a wedding where the first dance is a podcast.

And as much as podcasters, social media influencers and YouTubers might complain about the platforms that made them, many are children of the platforms themselves. Musicians, on the other hand, were dragged into streaming kicking and screaming and by the time they realised what was happening, it was too late. Add to that campaigns like Broken Record, high-profile artists pulling their music from DSPs and general sentiment around the streaming economy’s role in the gutting of the middle class of artists, and it’s fair to say streaming’s relationship with those who provide its content is significantly more tarnished.

Music’s passionate audience remained ripe for the picking, but tech platforms couldn’t get to them without going through rightsholders who held the keys to the biggest artists’ catalogues. What it needed was to quietly and subtly reduce the market dominance of these ‘gatekeepers’ who were a core reason Spotify failed to turn a profit for the first 18 years of its existence.

In March 2020, the perfect opportunity presented itself.

The Creator Explosion

I've written about this before – and you can read that article for DJ Mag here – but the pandemic was a boom time for music tech. While the rest of the industry went up in flames around it, furloughed and house-bound workers suddenly decided to take up piano, learn the guitar and download a demo of Ableton. Music instrument retailer revenues soared, as did Google searches for terms like ‘How to DJ’ and ‘How to Make Music’.

The rapidly growing business of selling the tools to make music, previously seen as something of a fringe industry to the more glamorous music biz, had investors sit up and take notice. Native Instruments was acquired by Francesco Partners, which in turn acquired iZotope and Brainworx, Moog Music was acquired by InMusic and you could argue – as I did here – that AlphaTheta’s attempted acquisition of Serato is a product of the same era.

This ‘consumerisation’ of music making – and the growth of DIY distribution as a direct result – has led to what MIDIA Research are calling the ‘bifurcation’ of music, a theory that claims the industry has and will continue to split in two. On one side there are the traditional artists, labels and rightsholders who are engaging in standardised contracts, ecosystems, distribution and marketing campaigns. Then there are the ‘creators’ – more than half of those from MIDIA’s survey had less than five years under their belt as music-makers as of 2023 – who are less sensitive about the amount of music they are uploading, and are looking for instant gratification across multiple platforms, not just streaming. In fact, the report says; “progressively more creators are starting with lower expectations for streaming. [Instead], they are becoming critical of streaming’s ability to further their careers.”

This new gen of ‘creators’ is less concerned about ‘monetising’ their core ‘product’ (in this case music), and instead want to grow their fanbase to leverage them against other income streams. As MIDIA put it: “Many next-generation creators are realising they will simply never reach the scale needed to earn meaningful income from streaming. They are therefore shifting focus to building fan relationships on social media and monetising them elsewhere, be it via merchandise or brand sponsorships.” Sound familiar? Don’t make me tap the sign.

It’s Not That Deep

Hold on. Maybe there isn’t some conspiratorial pivot at play. Maybe the term ‘creators’ is a useful way to make a distinction between these more traditional ‘artists’ and the next-gen fast-paced, disruptive, consumer music makers. Fair enough. Also – democratisation DOES open doors to previously marginalised communities who might not have access to these tools and platforms, which is undeniably a positive thing. And hasn’t it always been next to impossible to ‘make it’ as an artist, long before the age of streaming? Certainly. Isn’t it also arrogant to lump more authority and meaning on those traditional ‘artists’ with expensive studios and plugins and assume everything they make is from the heart, versus those who make beats on Bandlab on their phone and are only interested in going viral for a brand deal? That’s also true. But to engage in these ‘us vs them’, debates we are walking directly into a perfectly laid tech industry trap.

When the RIAA sued the gen AI music platforms Suno and Udio earlier in 2024, Suno’s CEO Mikey Shulman released a pretty laughable statement. Within it, he made the claim: “Each and every time there's been innovation in music — from the earliest forms of recorded music, to sampling, to drum machines, to remixing, MP3s, and streaming music — the record labels have attempted to limit progress. They have spent decades attempting to control the terms of how we create and enjoy music, and this time is no different.”

This David vs Goliath narrative is a classic tech trope that it uses for all kinds of tactics, including avoiding regulation, accountability and criticism. Tech wants to be branded as the underdog – the image of Amazon, Apple and countless others starting in a humble garage is long-running lore, pedalled to help trillion dollar companies feel more relatable and aspirational. You have a garage too don’t you? What’s stopping you from being a trillionaire?? Smdh.

And now in the age of AI, it’s being wheeled out again by any companies that’s not immediately allowed to blitzscale, steal IP, disregard all copyright and if there’s even a sniff that there might be regulation on the horizon. We’re all in this together – you the bedroom producer, me the garage guru – plucky startups and creative geniuses, innovating our way into the future, and the powers-that-be – the man, the dinosaurs – want to stop us from pursuing our dreams.

Except for the startups, the dream is a multi-billion dollar exit.

The Musical Pipedream

It may be true that rightsholders are too litigious and that the licensing system is overly complex, but it's also true that most in Silicon Valley would rather copyright and IP remuneration were a thing of the past. The danger here is that as music becomes lumped in with content, it becomes lumped in with data. And data is the currency of AI. How do you change the narrative so that music – which means an incalculable amount to humanity – is seen as fair game for training and no different to any other data on the ‘open internet’? By flooding the market and saturating its perceived value to the point that 120,000 songs are uploaded daily, and doing nothing to stop it even if it undermines your product. The number ultimately means nothing because we won’t hear any of these tracks, but it reduces music, songs and art to another statistic that’s shovelled into the great data furnace to fuel our AI-powered future.

Daniel Ek’s recent quotes continue to sow this seed. The man who cashed out $283m of shares in Spotify in 2024 alone compared musicians to pro footballers who’ll never make money from their passion and just play for fun and – a few months ago claimed music is so cheap af to make that it shouldn’t be valued any differently to any other piece of data. To quote the man himself: "Today, with the cost of creating content being close to zero, people can share an incredible amount of content”. Notice the repetition of the C word. It’s not a coincidence. Another C word. I can think of a few more.

I used to think these were merely humorous PR gaffs from the Spotify CEO; now I’m not so sure.

Devalue, Defund, Destroy

Tech’s devaluation of music has been so successful that even those who make it see little value in it. By taking the bait and referring to artists as ‘creators’ we are doing the work of tech platforms for them and further granting power to the platforms over the providers. I’ve used the term myself many times, so this is no pulpit preach (no more than usual anyway), but more of a stark realisation triggered by the figure referenced at the top of this article.

The gap between music’s value to fans and its value as a commodity has never been wider, and possibly will now never be closed. If we are to accept this inconvenient truth, it can’t be on the terms of those who have no interest in maintaining music’s cultural relevance and only aim to further devalue and exploit artists who feel no choice but to express themselves through sound. Small words can have a big impact.