Because the writer told them so
Platformisation refers to the way technological platforms insinuate themselves into more aspects of our lives. We most know and experience platformisation through the Big Five tech companies, and your garden-variety disruptors (Uber, Airbnb, et al), but platforms are everywhere. Ostensibly, their point is to bring two or more groups together in some sort of social exchange or transaction. Creating that infrastructure takes work, work that is paid for in many ways: targeted advertising, selling user data, developers licenses, a percentage of each sale, upfront or subscription fees. Platforms only become commercially viable when they monopolise, organising the world according to their image. On social media platforms, for instance, cultural practices are only promoted if they’re legible to the platform and geared toward maximising engagement metrics (views/listens, likes, five-star ratings, etc.). This generates value for the platform itself, of which creators receive a tiny fraction, if any. There is also a cognitive aspect to platformisation that is less well understood. If you’ve ever felt like scrolling Instagram or Twitter in bed every morning is turning your brain into mush, then you might understand this.
Most discussion of platformisation in music focuses on Spotify. Rightly so, but the more I read about it the more it stays the same. Massive publicly-trading corporations masquerading as record labels. Tech behemoths undeterred by the embarrassment of perpetually losing money. A predatory investor class who treat cultural production and arms manufacture as interchangeable wealth pools. Musicians who are, unambiguously, the reason the music industry exists, yet in all but rare exceptions cannot make a living under this condition. What’s less understood is how platformisation is enacted through musicians’ tools and instruments, such as DAWs and plug-ins. Music production has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and the venture capitalists are already circling.
I wrote the essay ‘Plug-in Capitalism’ to address this, published last month through the new Bellona Magazine. I’m pretty pleased with it, and to be included in fine company. Bellona comprises music and culture writers emerging from the detritus of Tiny Mix Tapes, Condé Nast-era Pitchfork, university complexes et al, jaded by the critical vacuum the music industry enjoys. The four other pieces in the first edition are precise and flow like chilled water. I hope you’ll consider supporting them by subscribing to their Patreon.
A postscript on the essay. A few folks reached out to describe recent big investments that slipped past me. Some are quite surprising. Splice, a subscription service for royalty-free samples and plug-in licenses, got US$45 million in private equity in 2018, and have no doubt received much more since. I’m seeing more students submitting composition assessments using Splice content lately, which I’m ambivalent about. Output, a company I hadn’t heard of before who sell sample libraries and studio furniture, got US$40 million in 2020. On the day the essay was published, two things happened: Fender acquired the music production tech company Presonus; and Music Creation Group, the focus of the essay, announced a new CEO. Mark Cattini has no experience running a music company—there’s a trend of music company CEOs validating their leadership credentials by saying that they are musicians too—but he has a lot of experience being parachuted into software companies to oversee their transition into software-as-a-service companies. If you own any Native Instruments or iZotope products, now’s a good time to stop updating them, your DAW, and your operating system, if you value autonomy over your instruments. More recently and promisingly, Ableton CEO Gerhard Behles revealed that he’d turned down massive investment offers from an unholy trinity of shit: Diplo, Scooter Braun, and Jared Kushner’s brother. This space will get more saturated. So will amusing Reddit and Hacker News pile-ons on my writing, it seems.
There are difficult discussions to be had around what it means for culture when finance is invested in musicians spending more and more on the tools to make music. Making music and consuming technology have always been entwined, but it feels like it is tipping toward the latter as the industry embraces subscription pricing. I assume more venture capital in music production is a bad thing, though I’m not yet sure how to accurately describe its effects. I think I’ll be writing about the transition from instruments to platforms for a long time.
Following mostly full-time crate-diggers on social media has rendered the year-end best-of list a tiring performance. True to platform logic, it's become its own algorithm, an opaque process for sorting culture along geopolitical lines. But I have some gnarled conceits around posterity that prohibit me from not mentioning them, despite their uniformity—I wasn't an adventurous listener this year. I can’t wait for caroline’s debut, their singles so far are remarkable. I got a lizard-brained kick out of yab; yvanko’s pointillistic dub concrète. The other day I had a wide-eyed moment listening to this goofy sibling effort en route to the hospital to meet my newborn nephew. Albums by L’Rain, Dialect, Karima Walker, and Space Afrika ruled. Isaac Goes’ short film Worlds and its score by James Enrick blew me away; there’s also this hilarious film about dudebros at experimental music shows. Locally, it was Nika Mo’s and Rat Columns’ year. Sakidasumi’s performance at Aesoteric the other month was stunning. I’m also partial to the box set of Ross Bolleter’s ruined piano pieces that I co-produced.
Finishing anything expressive was worth celebrating this year, a year I thought would get easier but accumulated more brain fog than ever. I suspect this is because everything felt like work, and I haven't yet located that vertex where the labour that is extractable diverges from the labour that is nourishing. A mood board:
Cher Tan, By signalling nothing I remain opaque:
A Conversation with Donald Fagen:
Anne Boyer, the governing grass of a dream language:
Fran Lebowitz, The Paris Review:
