Some interesting thoughts about how to be an artist under the precarity of platform capitalism:
In the weirdest way, it’s quite paradoxical: the last horizon of independence is through social self-promotion, but then those socials are already being farmed and mined.
Metricized. In terms of next steps though, I think one thing we could jettison is this concept of independence. It’s not that helpful. In many ways, the meme of independence won. Now everyone is individuated, and independently free to compete with one another to sell their time and wares on the platforms, and the reality of that is a pretty precarious and unfulfilling existence for most. When everyone isindependent, it turns out that we don’t have much collective bargaining power to influence anything all, or at least those with the most wealth or resources will dominate. Counter intuitively, I think that when you take the independence narrative to its logical extreme, most people have less agency than they did without it. So it’s interesting to call that bluff.
In a music context, I think it’s only playing out to eviscerate the ways in which musicians as a community came to accrue collective wealth and agency. That’s what labels are, for example, or festivals, or venues, or magazines. Legacies that get to keep a thread going as a result of the work created in their community. Fortresses that get to represent something.
If they disappear, which is happening, what we then have is a chaotic sea of competing, individuated artists, serving as a free-ideas factory for those at the top of the pyramid to extract value from them. So someone like Kanye, or whoever, can hire scouts to do a quick survey of stuff percolating on the fringes, and then hire teams of producers to create some kind of weird scrapbook of a bunch of culturally interesting moments that happened over the past year, and collect all the profits from that labor. It’s a trickle-up ideas economy. That’s where pure independence gets you. When everyone has access to everything, those with the most money and best ability to survey that information win out, which is why we see a monarchic class emerging across culture.