The production capitalism is destroying the artist!

 We all know that we are consuming too much for the planet we have. A third of all food we produce is thrown away as waste. That is 50 000kg or 110231lb a second thrown away as waste in the world and as Greta Thunberg has pointed out it’s not sustainable.

In an interview not long ago Marcus Ek from Spotify told that artists need to release more content when he the question that Spotify paid out to low to artists.

I just feel that we are doing the same stupid mistake in the music business as we do in the food consumption. The new streaming economy is just one click and then forget. Same as the food we produce a mountain of apples so you can have one. The same here we produce a mountain of songs for you to listen to one. Of course, this will affect the quality. To be able to produce a mountain you start to give fertilizer to the project, and you need everything to grow faster. Yes, you will get a decent product but it is not that perfect product that you had before.

During the pandemic now people suddenly got more time to grow their own things. Even I bought a greenhouse and now the harvest comes. Yes, my slow grown tomatoes, cucumber, and chilies taste much more and better than the ones I buy in the supermarket. Probably also that I put in quite much love into growing these vegetables. I have been out there every day watering and cutting off bad leaves and stuff. The end result is better then if just had grown a thing in less nutrient soil and just gone for fertilizer to grow it fast to just consume it.

It feels as the new space for creating music are more and more going this way. But why is that necessary? Easy the music that you create and produce is driving the systems. You are not an art creator you are a content creator. We if we stopped feeding posts on Facebook and Instagram. Stopped put up videos on Youtube and TikTok and music and pods on Spotify. They won’t exist. They need all people to give them free content.

Also, they are feeding on you in a very strange way. If you have a fan base on these sites. They only let around 10% of these fans see that you have released a new song in the mountain of songs the expect you to produce. If you should reach more you need to pay. Funny thing it’s like the apple producer to grow the apples then after that when they sold 10 apples has to pay extra fees to sell more apples. At the end that just leaves you to produce with less quality or just leave the whole thing since you won’t be proud of what you produce.

Question, do you really need these sites? In a way yes streaming music is around 25% of the economy of the music industry. The live side though has been 50%. We don’t know what happens after the pandemic. But I can easily say that music won’t die and the live scene won’t be replaced by streaming content. We have a great opportunity to build up the new live industry, so it benefits the artist that just release every third year. The ones that want slow quality music should have a chance here to perform quality art. the ones that want to leave the hamster wheel of social media.

We know for sure that even if you have millions of Spotify streams don’t mean that you will draw thousands of people to the concert. Almost the opposite around. We can easily see that the mass consumption of music in just the form of a post on social media is just fun for the audience in a couple of seconds. A concert is something that contains fun for hours. You might meet up with good friends before.  You go out and eat and then go and listen to quality music. That might be a whole evening to sustain your mind. Not just ten seconds click.

I have a good hunch that the stress and mental illness around the music community have two things. One is that we start talking about it. Witch is really great. The other is that stress of making content for a non-stoppable social media. I start though to see artists that more or less leave the race. And I think they are right. I don’t need a post from my favorite artist every day. But I need a function so when you release a song, I would be certain to see that post. Yes, that could be done by social media sites. Or I would love to get the knowledge that you play live close where I am so I can see your performance. We need that kind of system too.

I guess this will never happen. We just have to look at how we restart the live industry and start to build it so the artists can have a chance to write and record quality music and have time to rehearse a great live show. My mind needs more of that quality, the same with this planet. We need more sustainable plans.