Unknown artist: Ivory Grogger (noise maker), Middle East or India, (20th century)

" … almost all the actual effort should seem lost in rounding."

A recent New Yorker article (The Next Scene by John Seabrook, February 5, 2024) reports on Sir Lucian Grainge, the chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, the "largest music company in the world." In his decades in the music business, Grainge has survived many disruptions. He began his career in the LP era before facing the transition to CDs and then file sharing, each shift threatening to nudge him and his industry into oblivion. Now, AI looms. From a world where "labels were the only game in town" to one where platforms proliferate, … of the hundred and eighty-four million tracks available on streaming platforms, 86.2 percent received fewer than a thousand plays, and 24.8 percent—45.6 million tracks—had zero plays." Competing against a hundred and twenty thousand new tracks appearing online daily is tough.

Grainge dismissingly refers to most of this flood as "noise," and some of it certainly qualifies. From Grainge's perspective, his system of scouts, producers, studios, and agents reliably produces better products than any odd army of independent individuals producing videos on their phones. Still, enough Billie Eilishes exist to create noteworthy exceptions. The Noisemakers might not generate a billion dollars weekly with their combined efforts, but they do make some difference. A decade ago, labels produced ninety percent of the music consumers accessed. Now, it's less than ten percent and shrinking. With AI, almost anybody can ask some artificial intelligence to create a track that might sound as professionally produced as any product of the largest music company in the world. As owners rush to create some regulatory safety net, their once-secure platforms continue shrinking. If history serves as any guide, their domain will continue disappearing.

Few will shed tears for the diminished billionaires. Most of the art producers in the world qualify, under Grainge's classification, as Noisemakers. We run on a form of aspiration unaccounted for in the most popular career calculations. Most would be financially better off simply settling for some menial position where they might toil by the hour to perfect their "Would you like fries with that" speech. Our world would be worse off, though. Few Noisemakers engage with the idea that they might one day become rich or famous. It might even be true that those who do become rich or famous have never been the pick of the crop. They were just the ones the machine chose and presented as if they represented the crown of creation by some PR machine. We innocently believed it. There were Elvises never discovered and Beatles overlooked. The Industrial-scaled business never intended to present the best. Some who were better refused to give the machine the respect it required or accept the recognition it offered.

The data this article presented about the music business mirrors that experienced by the book business, the ever-shrinking magazine industry, and newspapers. Democracy in the form of technology continues to undermine the hegemony various would-be monopolies have always attempted to maintain. Throughout history, creators have mostly been judged Noisemakers by their contemporaries. A few became fabulously wealthy, and many forfeited something essential to collect their winnings. Nothing might be sadder than a seventy-year-old teen idol performing his greatest hits on the casino circuit. Nothing might be more reviving than another idiot trying to change the world by cranking out half-baked homemade hits on some street corner or obscure web platform. Next year, the count should exceed a hundred and thirty thousand new tracks posted daily.

A naive audacity might be the primary qualification for producing world-class noise. Of the four million book titles that will be published this year, what else could convince me to produce four of my own? We were all raised to become accountants in this culture, and we're poorly served by the perspective this lends. We might be sorely tempted to project returns on investments and let our calculations convince us that our Noisemaking efforts aren't worth the effort when the accounting's the faulty party. Hardly anything qualifies as suitable for accounting, and even that mostly qualifies only in retrospect. We must imagine our masteries if we're ever to experience them, and we must invest blindly if we ever expect to receive any return on any investment. The present holds the space for Noisemaking. Later generations, after the Noisemaker leaves, might judge their product music. Until then, almost all the actual effort should seem lost in rounding.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #iAlogue , #PureSchmaltz