Transcript
00:00:03 Veena McCoole
Hello and welcome to The Human Interface, brought to you by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.
00:00:10 Veena McCoole
This is a podcast about how developments in technology impact our work and life as told through the research and insights of a brilliant roster of experts and industry practitioners from the university and beyond.
00:00:22 Veena McCoole
I'm your host, Veena McCoole.
00:00:24 Veena McCoole
This episode explores the future of cultural labour under platform capitalism.
00:00:28 Veena McCoole
While it's never been easier for musicians to release music, the economics of the music industry and online streaming mean earning a living has become even more challenging.
00:00:38 Veena McCoole
Dr.
00:00:38 Veena McCoole
Sun-ok Lee is a sociologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
00:00:43 Veena McCoole
She's currently working on a project that examines digital platform workers and the gig economy in South Korea and the Netherlands.
00:00:51 Veena McCoole
Dr.
00:00:52 Veena McCoole
Robert Pray is an Associate Professor of Digital Culture at the OII.
00:00:56 Veena McCoole
At the University of Groningen, he is principal investigator of a European Research Council-funded project that investigates how streaming and social media platforms influence the creative practices, identities, and working conditions of musicians around the world.
00:01:12 Veena McCoole
Sun Oak and Rob, welcome to the show.
00:01:13 Veena McCoole
Thank you very much for inviting us.
00:01:16 Veena McCoole
I would love to start with kind of an understanding of what it even means to be a musician today and how this might have changed over time.
00:01:24 Robert Prey
First of all, there are many different types of musicians, right?
00:01:26 Robert Prey
There are hobbyists who just play guitar in the evening.
00:01:29 Robert Prey
There are musicians who belong to the London Symphony Orchestra, right?
00:01:33 Robert Prey
In our research, we mainly focus on music artists who are trying to make a living in popular music genres.
00:01:40 Robert Prey
So for much of the 20th century, this meant you had to try to get a record deal, right?
00:01:46 Robert Prey
You would be discovered playing in a
00:01:49 Robert Prey
little cellar somewhere or in a garage and then you'd get signed and they would, the record company would get you into a studio to record an album and then hopefully one of your singles would be played on the radio.
00:02:00 Robert Prey
So this was a really industrial system with all kinds of gates and filters.
00:02:05 Robert Prey
This system has been disrupted for good and for bad over the past 20 years or so.
00:02:10 Robert Prey
And technology plays a big role in this disruption.
00:02:13 Robert Prey
What we had like peer-to-peer file sharing,
00:02:15 Robert Prey
Some of you might remember Napster.
00:02:17 Robert Prey
And we have, over the last 30 or so odd years, cheaper versions of digital audio workstations, which allow musicians to produce outside of studios.
00:02:28 Robert Prey
But I would say that music streaming really opened the floodgates.
00:02:33 Seonok Lee
Yeah, it's never been easy to find music and listen to music from around the world or from different periods of history.
00:02:41 Seonok Lee
So when I think back to how I listened to music growing up in South Korea in the 90s, it doesn't really feel like a different world.
00:02:49 Seonok Lee
Now we just tap a screen and any song appears.
00:02:53 Seonok Lee
But back then, music took effort and a kind of a small ritual.
00:02:58 Seonok Lee
In the 90s, the main way to listen to music was buying physical albums, mostly at that time, CDs and before that, cassette tapes.
00:03:08 Seonok Lee
So I remember saving my pocket money just to buy a new album from my favorite artists, like Sataeji and Boys in South Korea.
00:03:17 Seonok Lee
It was really huge.
00:03:19 Seonok Lee
Going into the music shop or stopping by street vendors who sold illegal cassette tapes that were very common at the time in South Korea.
00:03:30 Seonok Lee
And when I got home,
00:03:31 Seonok Lee
I'd put the disc into my Discman or the tape in my Walkman, so small little cassette tape player.
00:03:40 Seonok Lee
And then somehow listening felt more personal that way.
00:03:44 Seonok Lee
So cassette tapes were everywhere before CD took over, right?
00:03:48 Seonok Lee
Maybe nowadays people don't remember anymore though.
00:03:52 Seonok Lee
So I used to record songs from the radio and waiting with my finger on the record button, hoping the DJ wouldn't talk over the intro as well.
00:04:02 Seonok Lee
So I made mixtapes, you know, quite a lot of work.
00:04:07 Seonok Lee
And so I put whatever songs I like onto one tape.
00:04:10 Seonok Lee
So sometimes I even make copies of mixtapes as a birthday gift for my friends as well.
00:04:16 Seonok Lee
In Korea, actually, the TV was also a huge part of how people discovered music, at least for me.
00:04:24 Seonok Lee
So we can do music shows.
00:04:26 Seonok Lee
were basically requiring viewing.
00:04:30 Seonok Lee
And strangely, I learned a lot of Western pop songs from TV commercials.
00:04:36 Seonok Lee
I still remember the first time I heard Radiohead's ****.
00:04:41 Seonok Lee
It wasn't from the radio or an album, but from a TV commercial.
00:04:46 Seonok Lee
A lot of pop songs entered my life like that.
00:04:49 Seonok Lee
So I just suddenly up appearing on TV.
00:04:53 Seonok Lee
I remember in the early 2000s,
00:04:56 Seonok Lee
everything changed with P2P sites like Soribada in South Korea, literal meaning is the sea of sounds.
00:05:04 Seonok Lee
So people certainly downloaded MP3s, mostly again illegal, but though no one around me really thought about it is illegal or illegal because that time we didn't have the concept.
00:05:18 Seonok Lee
So it felt like some kind of revolution, by the way.
00:05:23 Seonok Lee
So and then MP3 players came along, and the music became portable in completely new way.
00:05:30 Seonok Lee
So it was quite big changes.
00:05:32 Seonok Lee
But I want to say, interesting fact, many people think that Spotify was the first subscription streaming service, but it was actually South Korean streaming service, Melon.
00:05:45 Seonok Lee
So they introduced their subscription service way back in 2004.
00:05:50 Seonok Lee
So South Korea became the first country where revenue from digital music surpassed physical music.
00:05:58 Seonok Lee
So it's been over 20 years already?
00:06:00 Veena McCoole
Yeah, I think back to when I had to ask my mom to pay 99 cents for a song on iTunes or whatever, and thinking about the way that streaming is such a normal part of how we all consume music and podcasts.
00:06:13 Veena McCoole
Has streaming ruined music?
00:06:15 Veena McCoole
Is that a fair thing to say?
00:06:17 Robert Prey
Well, I think it's pretty impossible, luckily, to ruin music, and it's certainly not possible for one technology like streaming to do it on its own.
00:06:27 Robert Prey
But I think it's highly plausible that streaming has changed music, just like other technologies of distribution before it have, like radio changed music, or video, which apparently killed the radio star.
00:06:40 Robert Prey
So that's one of the arguments
00:06:42 Robert Prey
made by Liz Pelley in our recent book called Mood Music.
00:06:46 Robert Prey
That's gotten a lot of attention.
00:06:48 Robert Prey
But I would say that one thing that is, I think, indisputable, that it's becoming increasingly hard for musicians to earn a living from the sales of recorded music.
00:06:58 Robert Prey
Now it's always been hard.
00:06:59 Robert Prey
The music industry was always...
00:07:01 Robert Prey
a very exploitative and difficult industry to make a career out of.
00:07:05 Robert Prey
But nowadays, most artists see very little revenue from their recordings.
00:07:09 Robert Prey
And one of the reasons for this is because of how streaming services pay royalties.
00:07:14 Robert Prey
We tend to think that they pay a certain fixed rate per stream, you know, maybe half a penny or so.
00:07:19 Robert Prey
But actually, it's called the pro-rata model, which is a somewhat confusing
00:07:25 Robert Prey
model to explain.
00:07:27 Robert Prey
So I'll do it very briefly.
00:07:28 Robert Prey
It's like the share of a pie, right?
00:07:31 Robert Prey
Your piece of the pie.
00:07:31 Robert Prey
So if you as an artist, if your songs make up about 1% of all the songs streamed on a service, like Spotify, in a given month, then you receive 1% of all the revenue or the royalties.
00:07:50 Robert Prey
But then, of course, when the number of songs uploaded to a streaming service increase,
00:07:55 Robert Prey
the per stream payout for an individual artist decreases because the total revenue pool is divided by a larger number of streams, right?
00:08:02 Robert Prey
And the number of songs have really exploded in the past 5, 10 years.
00:08:10 Robert Prey
A few years ago, I remember being shocked to read that there were 50,000 new tracks being uploaded to Spotify every day.
00:08:17 Robert Prey
Well, that number has tripled since then.
00:08:19 Robert Prey
There are at least 150,000
00:08:23 Robert Prey
tracks uploaded a day to Spotify and other streaming services.
00:08:27 Robert Prey
Just last week, I read that the French streaming service Deezer announced that fully 50,000 AI-generated tracks are uploaded to its service every day.
00:08:40 Robert Prey
So AI-generated tracks now make up one-third of all the songs uploaded to Deezer daily.
00:08:49 Robert Prey
So musicians have always struggled to, stay visible or be heard over the, all the new music that's released every day.
00:08:57 Robert Prey
And they've always struggled to compete against all the old music that's available because people still love listening to old music.
00:09:05 Robert Prey
And actually something like 70% of all the music that's listened on streaming services is called catalog, like it's older music.
00:09:12 Robert Prey
Because of course we still go back to the music from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s.
00:09:17 Robert Prey
And so
00:09:18 Robert Prey
They've always had to compete against not only other contemporaries, but also the entire history of recorded music.
00:09:24 Robert Prey
But now they're also competing against this growing tide of AI music that's out there.
00:09:32 Veena McCoole
I'm curious how this links to your research.
00:09:34 Veena McCoole
I mean, that sounds super recent.
00:09:36 Veena McCoole
The fact that the platforms are being flooded with AI-generated music seems like a relatively recent phenomenon.
00:09:42 Veena McCoole
I'd love to hear more about the ways in which your research delves into that or other topics.
00:09:47 Seonok Lee
Let me tell you a bit about this study that we did on Korean indie musicians and how they're dealing with today's platform world.
00:09:56 Seonok Lee
So we published the article called Platform Closure and Creator Creep in the International Journal of Communication.
00:10:04 Seonok Lee
And South Korea is a really interesting place to look at because like I said earlier, music platformization hit there earlier and harder than in many Western countries.
00:10:16 Seonok Lee
So big music entertainment and the tech companies in South Korea are vertically integrated.
00:10:22 Seonok Lee
So they're involved in production, distribution, and promotion.
00:10:27 Seonok Lee
And they have a lot of control over who gets seen and heard on the main Korean music streaming platforms.
00:10:34 Seonok Lee
So what we found is that this has led to what we called platform closure.
00:10:40 Seonok Lee
So that means the big music and tech companies increasingly decide which artists get visibility on streaming services.
00:10:49 Seonok Lee
So if you are a small indie act, it's very hard to break through on those closed platforms because the bigger artists that are signed to big entertainment companies get more or most of the visibility.
00:11:07 Seonok Lee
What do Korean indie musicians do then?
00:11:10 Seonok Lee
So we found that they are shifting their focus away from streaming services and actually toward more social media like YouTube, TikTok, and the South Korean live streaming platform they call Africa TV.
00:11:28 Seonok Lee
But just last year, they changed the name to Soup.
00:11:32 Seonok Lee
So a lot of indie artists have basically decided, hey, we don't actually need the big Korean streaming platforms anymore.
00:11:41 Seonok Lee
So they instead, they are pouring their energy into YouTube and other social media platforms where they feel that at least they have a chance to build an audience without going through gatekeepers.
00:11:57 Seonok Lee
But this is important actually.
00:11:59 Seonok Lee
In order to succeed on these social media platforms, they have to think about their music differently.
00:12:07 Seonok Lee
So they treat their music not as an albums or songs, but as a content that they can be sliced up and fed into algorithms.
00:12:18 Seonok Lee
So they have to break their songs into different parts designed for particular platforms.
00:12:24 Seonok Lee
So maybe a hook that works as a TikTok or a little part of a chorus that fits a short YouTube video clip.
00:12:34 Seonok Lee
And then they need to complement their music by uploading non-musical content on a regular basis, like short videos of their everyday lives and routines or something like that.
00:12:46 Robert Prey
Right, yeah, and this is where I think things get really interesting.
00:12:49 Robert Prey
A lot of these musicians now feel like they have to act like YouTubers or content creators.
00:12:54 Robert Prey
creators, right?
00:12:55 Robert Prey
They record vlogs, they share cooking videos.
00:12:58 Robert Prey
I just talked to a musician yesterday who, started releasing content on TikTok and then he found that his audience is actually really like it when he shares food with them that he likes to eat or likes to make.
00:13:11 Robert Prey
So he started doing this as well.
00:13:13 Robert Prey
So they stream themselves doing this.
00:13:16 Robert Prey
They stream themselves making their music, like behind the scenes videos or opening up their everyday lives to fans.
00:13:23 Robert Prey
So some of the artists we talked to for this article that Sanok just mentioned, they really lean into this and they see this as a way of expanding what it means to be a musician or an artist.
00:13:34 Robert Prey
They like this sort of two-way real-time interaction with audiences that they can get on Twitch and YouTube and that they can't get on traditional streaming platforms.
00:13:44 Robert Prey
But others that we talked to find this really exhausting and intrusive
00:13:48 Robert Prey
They don't want to turn their entire lives into content.
00:13:51 Robert Prey
They don't want to invite fans into the creative process.
00:13:55 Robert Prey
And for some of them, this feels just like extra work piled on top of the work they really want to do, which is making music.
00:14:02 Robert Prey
So we call this broader process creator creep.
00:14:06 Robert Prey
And this idea comes from the work of Sophie Bishop, who wrote about influencer creep.
00:14:12 Robert Prey
She talks about the tactics of how the tactics of influencers
00:14:17 Robert Prey
creep into all different types of work, right?
00:14:20 Robert Prey
And in Korea, we really see something similar happening.
00:14:24 Robert Prey
The practices of YouTube content creators creep into the working lives of the indie musicians that we researched.
00:14:31 Robert Prey
So if you want visibility as an indie musician, you can't just be a musician.
00:14:35 Robert Prey
You have to be a creator, you have to be an editor, a streamer, or a personality.
00:14:40 Robert Prey
And like I said, the shift doesn't benefit everybody equally.
00:14:44 Robert Prey
It tends to benefit musicians who are already comfortable on the camera, who may have skills in video production, or who are plugged into broader creative scenes where they can collaborate with filmmakers, designers, and other artists.
00:14:59 Robert Prey
The other ones, the ones who don't fit into this category, tend to get left behind or they simply burn out.
00:15:08 Robert Prey
While South Korea is its own specific context, I think it's a glimpse of where things are heading everywhere, and one of the questions I'm really curious.
00:15:17 Robert Prey
about is what happens to creativity when musicians are expected to also become content creators or influencers, right?
00:15:24 Robert Prey
And I think Korean musicians, and particularly Korean indie musicians, are at the front line of platformization.
00:15:30 Robert Prey
They're moving away from music streaming platforms, reshaping their music and their daily routines to fit social media and live streaming platforms.
00:15:39 Robert Prey
and increasingly living like content creators with all the opportunities and the pressures that this brings.
00:15:46 Veena McCoole
Yeah, I know some of your research has kind of focused on how this experience of being a musician actually even differs across cultures and economy.
00:15:54 Veena McCoole
So it's not just having to wear different hats and be a musician, but welcome people into their creative process, maybe as an influencer or posting TikTok videos.
00:16:03 Veena McCoole
But like the fact that practice even varies depending on where you are and how the music
00:16:09 Veena McCoole
industry and infrastructure looks, what does that look like?
00:16:12 Veena McCoole
And what have you discovered through your research comparing this across cultures?
00:16:16 Robert Prey
Right, so part of my ERC project involves a survey.
00:16:21 Robert Prey
And we did a survey in the past year of almost 1,200 musicians across five countries.
00:16:28 Robert Prey
So we looked at musicians in Brazil, in the Netherlands, in Nigeria, in South Korea, and in Chile.
00:16:36 Robert Prey
And we really wanted to understand how different national contexts affect the everyday working lives of musicians.
00:16:44 Robert Prey
Overall, we found some similarities.
00:16:46 Robert Prey
In general, satisfaction with streaming and the royalties they received from streaming is very rare.
00:16:52 Robert Prey
It's hard to find musicians who were happy with it.
00:16:55 Robert Prey
But Brazilian musicians and musicians in Nigeria were generally a little bit more positive about streaming.
00:17:01 Robert Prey
musicians in the other three countries, Chile, the Netherlands, and South Korea, were generally more dissatisfied.
00:17:08 Robert Prey
One of the several paradoxes we found is that Afrobeats musicians in Nigeria reported some of the lowest incomes, but they also showed some of the highest levels of income satisfaction amongst our surveys.
00:17:21 Robert Prey
So we were trying to figure out why this is so.
00:17:24 Robert Prey
We did some follow-up interviews, and it seems like
00:17:27 Robert Prey
The Nigerian music industry before streaming had some extreme barriers for musicians.
00:17:31 Robert Prey
It was really difficult to get your music out there unless you really knew someone or you had connections.
00:17:37 Robert Prey
So streaming on social media, despite the very low payments from these platforms, at least allowed these Nigerian Afrobeats musicians to get their music out and be heard.
00:17:48 Robert Prey
There weren't many gender differences, but we did find some gender differences amongst Brazilian musicians.
00:17:55 Robert Prey
female musicians there were more likely to say that streaming had made things better or stayed about the same, while Brazilian male musicians were more likely to say that streaming had made things worse.
00:18:06 Robert Prey
And follow-up interviews there, it seems to some extent streaming has disrupted the quote-unquote old boys network in Brazil, where you had to really know someone in order to get your music heard at a label or a radio station to get played.
00:18:24 Robert Prey
We also found, what you could call streaming's paradox of importance.
00:18:28 Robert Prey
Lower income artists, musicians who were receiving less money from streaming, generally tended to say that streaming was more important in their careers than musicians that were earning more money.
00:18:41 Robert Prey
And I think this is because we found that musicians who were successful, at least financially successful, had learned how to diversify.
00:18:51 Robert Prey
They weren't as reliant on streaming.
00:18:54 Robert Prey
these tended to be musicians that their careers started before streaming, really became mainstream, so generally before 2015, and a smaller share of their overall income was generated from streaming, while musicians who were newer, younger, and maybe relied on streaming more, they, you know, had demonstrated lower incomes.
00:19:16 Robert Prey
There's also something we call the DIY ceiling, although
00:19:21 Robert Prey
The general folk wisdom is that you can do everything on your own nowadays, which is partly true.
00:19:27 Robert Prey
You can record an album at home and you can have it uploaded to all the major streaming services by the afternoon.
00:19:33 Robert Prey
It still really benefits you to be signed to a label.
00:19:37 Robert Prey
Musicians who were signed to a label generally had a higher income.
00:19:42 Robert Prey
We also looked at, you know, how the artists we talked to across these different countries, how they felt about promotion, how they felt about communicating with their fans.
00:19:51 Robert Prey
Nigerian artists tend to communicate the most with their fans.
00:19:55 Robert Prey
They spend the most, the bigger part of their day communicating with fans.
00:19:59 Robert Prey
They automate fan communication more than other countries where they would use certain services to automate communication with fans.
00:20:07 Robert Prey
And they had the most positive attitudes towards promotional work and relating to their fans.
00:20:13 Robert Prey
Well, musicians in the Netherlands and South Korea tend to spend less time communicating with their fans and tended to have
00:20:20 Robert Prey
less of an enthusiastic sort of response to the question of, how they felt about communicating with fans.
00:20:28 Robert Prey
And this goes with genres as well, because I really see genres as different worlds, right?
00:20:33 Robert Prey
Whether you're a pop musician or an indie art musician, you have different values, you have different ideas about how you should relate to your fans.
00:20:43 Robert Prey
And we could really see that Afrobeats artists, for example,
00:20:47 Robert Prey
R&B, pop, hip-hop artists tend to spend more time communicating with fans, while jazz, rock, indie, or folk musicians tend to spend less time.
00:20:58 Robert Prey
So different genres really demonstrate different ways of relating to fans.
00:21:04 Robert Prey
But in general, the biggest difference I think we could say, see in these five countries is that Nigerian artists really stood out.
00:21:10 Robert Prey
They checked their metrics most often.
00:21:14 Robert Prey
They spent most time doing promo.
00:21:16 Robert Prey
They were more optimistic about income or that they could receive from streaming, even though they tended to receive far less income from streaming than other artists.
00:21:27 Robert Prey
And they were more likely to see communication with fans as a creative practice, part of their overall sort of role of being an artist.
00:21:35 Robert Prey
So the big picture across these five countries is that there isn't just one single story about streaming.
00:21:42 Robert Prey
different national contexts, different genres, different generations of musicians have different experiences.
00:21:48 Robert Prey
So all of these artists are trying to make sense of platforms that they depend on.
00:21:52 Robert Prey
They sometimes resent these platforms and occasionally they manage to find a way to bend these platforms to their own purposes.
00:21:59 Veena McCoole
The thing that I'm thinking about here is creativity and
00:22:04 Veena McCoole
backpedaling to what you shared earlier, when a musician is expected to do promo and make TikTok videos and engage with fans and track their metrics and basically do all the things that maybe they didn't kind of like sign up to do as a traditional musician, what happens to their creativity?
00:22:19 Robert Prey
Yeah, it's a really difficult question to answer and something we're looking into increasingly as we go and in our interviews.
00:22:28 Robert Prey
Some of the musicians say that
00:22:31 Robert Prey
It enhances creativity.
00:22:32 Robert Prey
They have to think very creatively about what it means to be a musician in this contemporary era.
00:22:39 Robert Prey
And they try new strategies.
00:22:41 Robert Prey
They collaborate, as I said, with filmmakers.
00:22:43 Robert Prey
They collaborate with other content producers.
00:22:46 Robert Prey
But this is often genre specific.
00:22:50 Robert Prey
Some hip-hop artists that we talk to in Korea were like this.
00:22:54 Robert Prey
But most of the artists we talk to, they still prefer their creativity to be expended upon the actual music themselves.
00:23:02 Robert Prey
And they feel like it's a drain to their creativity.
00:23:05 Seonok Lee
I found that, you know, when we did the research on Korean indie musicians, actually I saw the generational differences as well.
00:23:13 Seonok Lee
So a little bit older generation, you know,
00:23:16 Seonok Lee
more used to the traditional concept of making music, they think that their creativity got violated or that kind of feeling.
00:23:26 Seonok Lee
But I see that the younger generation, like early, let's just say early 20s or something until like early 30s or something like that,
00:23:36 Seonok Lee
They feel, although it's a little bit extra work, but I think that they have a little bit different approach, I guess.
00:23:44 Seonok Lee
They kind of accept.
00:23:45 Seonok Lee
They think that is a part of the music making.
00:23:49 Seonok Lee
So I think what?
00:23:51 Robert Prey
We're really noticing is that the definition of what it means to be a music artist or an artist in general is changing alongside the rise of
00:24:00 Robert Prey
these platforms and what is expected of you?
00:24:02 Veena McCoole
So if we kind of zoom out here, I mean, why is all of this important for us to understand as we commute every day and put our headphones in and listen to Spotify or what have you?
00:24:12 Seonok Lee
I would say music is not a side issue.
00:24:16 Seonok Lee
It shapes, you know, culture, memory, identity, and how people relate to each other.
00:24:21 Seonok Lee
So music is everywhere and then you grow with us all the time, right?
00:24:26 Seonok Lee
So it is the part of our culture, part of our life.
00:24:30 Seonok Lee
So in this sense, if the people who make music are forced into more precarious and exploitive arrangement with the platforms, that actually tells us something about how we value cultural work, and by extension, other form of care and knowledge work as well.
00:24:48 Robert Prey
Yeah, and I also study musicians because they're kind of an extreme example
00:24:53 Robert Prey
of what platforms are doing to work more broadly.
00:24:55 Robert Prey
So music was the first sector to suffer the effects of digitalization and the internet 25 years ago.
00:25:02 Robert Prey
It's also one of the first sectors to be fully reorganized around streaming, social media, and now AI.
00:25:09 Robert Prey
So I think musicians experience the kinds of pressures that other creative producers and maybe other workers in general are feeling, but they experience it earlier on.
00:25:18 Robert Prey
So this type of massive overproduction, collapsing pay, dependence on opaque algorithms, and the sort of expectation of constant self-promotion.
00:25:28 Robert Prey
To answer your question, musicians matter here not just because we care about music, although we should, but because they make visible a set of dynamics that are spreading across many different types of work.
00:25:40 Robert Prey
They need to be constantly online, to pay attention to your performance metrics,
00:25:44 Robert Prey
or to treat every interaction as content.
00:25:48 Robert Prey
So I think if we can understand what platforms are doing to musicians, we can get a much clearer picture of what they're doing to labor more generally.
00:25:56 Veena McCoole
And I wonder if there are any kind of budding musicians who are listening to this episode, what can they learn from what you've researched and discovered about what it means to be a musician in 2025 and beyond?
00:26:09 Robert Prey
I would say there are a number of lessons.
00:26:11 Robert Prey
Maybe, first of all, don't build your house on streaming, right?
00:26:15 Robert Prey
Treat streaming as infrastructure.
00:26:17 Robert Prey
You know, maybe you can see it as a shop window where you can display your work, but don't treat it as your main business model.
00:26:25 Robert Prey
Get your music out there, but don't assume that more streams are going to solve all of your problems.
00:26:31 Robert Prey
As I said earlier, the musicians who are doing it best are the ones who diversify, the ones who are doing live shows, who are teaching, who are composing for others.
00:26:39 Robert Prey
And learn to diversify earlier.
00:26:41 Robert Prey
The earlier you build multiple ways to earn from music, the less trapped you'll feel when one platform changes its rules, as they always do.
00:26:49 Robert Prey
Another thing that comes out of our surveys is really understand the limits of DIY.
00:26:55 Robert Prey
Being fully independent is great, but it often means that you have to take on more work.
00:27:01 Robert Prey
So try to get some support from either a label or a strong manager or join a collective or a scene that can
00:27:09 Robert Prey
and share infrastructure with you.
00:27:12 Robert Prey
Another lesson I would say is like treat platforms as tools, not as your boss.
00:27:16 Robert Prey
Learn how they work, but don't let them tell you who you are.
00:27:21 Robert Prey
So things like fan communication, it's hard work.
00:27:25 Robert Prey
You're going to be required to do it, but you need to decide consciously how far you want to go and what feels sustainable and authentic for you.
00:27:32 Robert Prey
For some musicians,
00:27:34 Robert Prey
as I said, this is part of the creative practice, but for other musicians, this is just a drain.
00:27:38 Robert Prey
So you really want to know and be honest with yourself of, you know, what type of musician you are.
00:27:44 Robert Prey
Guard against content creep, right?
00:27:47 Robert Prey
Like our concept that we developed in that paper, the job of a musician, as we say, can quietly expand into being an editor, an influencer, a streamer, and always-on personality.
00:28:00 Robert Prey
So set your boundaries early.
00:28:01 Robert Prey
You know, what parts of your life are
00:28:03 Robert Prey
are public and what parts of your life should remain private, right?
00:28:07 Robert Prey
What feels like art, what feels like self-extraction?
00:28:12 Robert Prey
And I think a really important lesson for musicians in the UK is like learn from global differences.
00:28:18 Robert Prey
Don't just focus on the UK or US models.
00:28:22 Robert Prey
There are musicians all around the world that are surviving in different contexts and different scenes.
00:28:28 Robert Prey
Some of them are sidestepping platforms entirely.
00:28:31 Robert Prey
There's more than one way to build a career.
00:28:33 Robert Prey
And I think this is really important in an age of AI, and this is something I've really learned from musicians, is really lean into what can't be automated.
00:28:44 Robert Prey
So put serious care into things that are the hardest to automate.
00:28:48 Robert Prey
So your live presence, your relationship with listeners, your local scene, your voice, or your particular aesthetic that isn't just chasing trends.
00:29:00 Robert Prey
So if AI and platforms turn
00:29:03 Robert Prey
recordings into cheap, abundant content, the scarce things become important.
00:29:08 Robert Prey
And that's time, attention, trust, and genuine connection.
00:29:13 Seonok Lee
Last thing I want to say is don't forget, many of the biggest problems musicians face are structural.
00:29:21 Seonok Lee
So join collectives and musicians unions.
00:29:26 Seonok Lee
think collectively, just not individually.
00:29:29 Veena McCoole
And I guess my last question is, for the person who's listening to this podcast on a streaming platform or their music, that way, what would you like them to remember every time they open that app or play their favorite song?
00:29:43 Robert Prey
Yeah, think consciously about what you're listening to, who made this, who is behind this music.
00:29:50 Robert Prey
Look into the artist you're listening to.
00:29:52 Robert Prey
Don't just put on a playlist in the background and have no clue who actually made that music.
00:29:58 Robert Prey
And try to figure out a way how you can support the artists that you love in other ways.
00:30:03 Robert Prey
Go to live shows, buy physical recordings, support them on Patreon.
00:30:08 Seonok Lee
Yep, agree.
00:30:09 Veena McCoole
Amazing.
00:30:10 Veena McCoole
Thank you so much, Rob and Sunok, for joining us on this episode of The Human Interface.
00:30:15 Veena McCoole
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00:30:21 Veena McCoole
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00:30:28 Veena McCoole
Until next time.