Music is Cooked

Music consumption is at its highest point in history. Platforms and streaming have democratized access to music in a crazy manner. The entry barriers to produce music are falling down like crazy, yet good music remains a super scarce asset.

A Zero Sum Game

The music market is a zero sum game, a small market filled with fights and analytics. As soon as an artist generates enough potential to become one of those unique unicorns that move the market itself alone and return all the money that other tryouts generated as losses, the fight becomes fierce. The fight to control the 70-100 years of passive income that the work of this artist's lifetime is going to generate becomes brutal.

A few main names appear: Sony Music, Warner Music, and Universal, the trio calavera of the music market. Endless controllers of the supply chain with agreements with almost any key distributor, any considerable big enough venue to hold a big enough event, any legal path to remove a block on a potentially medium to amazing future regarding what it means to succeed in music.

Electronic Music Parallel

On the other side of this coin stays electronic music, with their labels, their fans, their distribution channels, their means of capitalization. Yet it's a mega small market in comparison with the rest of the music market, small but with their own quasi-sovereign dynamics. Clubs are private, curators are anonymous, music has no face, yet is being danced to for endless sessions.

There are stars too, underground faceless stars that everybody who knows, knows, cheering to have the vinyl once repressed, and maybe never again.

The Two Faces of Music

The two faces of music and culture consumption need to merge. The only way to return to a growing market is to assume that listening platforms are not monetizing platforms. Streaming payment is going to almost zero and there is nothing an artist can do about it.

It's easier to think about Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, etc. as discovery platforms, strategic discovery platforms that permit already monetized music to distribute to the public to get the long tail of revenue. Permitting super fans and lovers' capital to flow directly to the artist without intermediaries. The intermediaries get all the pieces of the cake when they mediate.

The False Perception

Yet artists want their music on platforms. There is now this false sense of perception that just because you know how to install Ableton and hit buttons and plugins around, just for having your track on Spotify, you are already a musician and your music is going to be listened to.

The reality check here is that 96-98% of what's uploaded to streaming platforms is of very, very, very bad quality. And no one is aware of that because the algorithms only make you navigate over music that is not in those ranges, but on the winning ones.

The Crazy Part

The crazy part of all this is that it doesn't matter if music generates money or not. It will continue to be created. It will continue to generate amazing cultural movements. It will continue to give you goosebumps and amazing happiness when a track gets to your heart.

It is a non-subject to capital thing first, and a capitalized thing afterwards.

Music is cooked, but it's also eternal. The platforms may change, the monetization models may shift, but the fundamental human need to create and experience music will always remain. The question is not whether music will survive, it's how we'll adapt to a world where the traditional gatekeepers are losing their power while new forms of discovery and monetization emerge.

The future of music isn't about fighting the platforms or trying to game the algorithms. It's about understanding that music exists beyond the market, beyond the analytics, beyond the zero-sum games. It's about creating something that moves people, that creates culture, that gives meaning to our lives.

And that, in the end, is what makes music truly valuable.