Artist friendly platforms: the platform lifecycle
In this series, we’re looking into various tech platforms for artists, within the context of how artist friendly they are. Last time, we talked about some of the mainstream music streamers like Spotify.
Today, we’re shaking the snow globe up: after all of this talk about platforms and how they work, let’s consider that maybe the best platform for some artists might just be no platform at all.
We’re currently living through the first time in music history that independent artists have had the ability to self-fund their entire creative output, at professional quality, all by themselves, outside of the label system.
Depending on the size of your band and your location, it’s possible to self-fund your entire group, in perpetuity, for around $15-30 per week per member. You can run those numbers for your own group by using my handy band budgeting tool here.
Artists truly do have a real economic choice now as to how much they want to engage with platforms, or not. That’s amazing!
How online platforms live and die
All platforms have a lifecycle. As a creative, understanding how that lifecycle works is key to understanding if, when, and how you might be getting taken advantage of when placing your creative work on any platform.
As coined in a popular term this year coming from the blogger Cory Doctorow, this platform lifecycle is called “enshittification”. We’ll talk about it in general first, then as how it applies to artist platforms.
One of the highest profile examples of enshittification in semi-recent news is the battle between Reddit and its creators over API access. But, that’s just the latest example. This kind of thing has been going down in the digital space since at least the founding of Facebook in 2004.
If you include predatory major label behavior in the music industry as an “analog” example, enshittification has been a thing since the advent of recorded music in the early 1900s.
This is a summary post to give you a small taste of this complex topic. I encourage you to fully read through the source material listed at the bottom, for a more complete picture.
Enshittification, defined
This term describes how online platforms evolve: they start off by giving immense value to their users to attract the attention of venture capital. Then, they shift that value over to their business customers at the expense of their original users. Then, they shift value again, this time over to their public shareholders at the expense of both their original users and their business customers.
And then, having now become a useless pile of shit everyone hates, they die. From Netflix to Amazon to Uber, this is the large online platform lifecycle. Some quotes from the various source material for this article:
“This is enshittification: surpluses [from the platform] are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”
“Imagine if your boss made up hundreds of petty rules and refused to disclose them, but every week, your pay was docked based on how many of those rules you broke. When you’re an online creator and your “boss” is a giant social media platform, that’s exactly how your compensation works.”
“We think of social media as being very democratizing and giving everyone the same opportunity to reach an audience,” said Evelyn Douek, a professor at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. But that’s not always true, she cautioned. “To some degree, the same old power structures are replicating in social media as well, where the platform can decide winners and losers, and commercial and other kinds of partnerships take advantage.”
“Never forget how Reddit began as an empty website, which its founders populated with hundreds of fake accounts to give the illusion of activity and popularity. Remember that without us, the users, Reddit would be nothing but [a] digital dollhouse.”
Facebook has been in late-stage enshittification for many years now. Instagram I’d say is in the middle stages. TikTok is still in the early stages, but that’s changing fast: they’re already developing and rolling out tools that make it easier for businesses and big brands to get their advertised content out on the platform, to the detriment of their original user base.
Moving past platforms
The lesson to take away from all of the posts in this series on platforms is not “all tech platforms are bad”, or “all artists are screwed”.
Rather, it’s a call for artists to become more self-aware as to how your creative work is being used out there in the real world, once you’re done with the fun time making it in the recording studio. And, to encourage us all to make more intentional choices about where we put our work, how we present it, whom we present it to, and how that intersects with the real-world economics that effect our daily life.
If you don’t understand exactly how your creative work (or your time) is being used/monetized by any kind of platform, whether it’s a social media company, record label, movie studio, or music venue, it’s always possible that you could be getting taken advantage of by that platform. Don’t invest your time or your money in things you don’t fully understand.
It’s the same old story of the young artist signing their first label deal and then getting fleeced by the record company, but nowadays it’s all just been placed onto a phone app and sped up by modern technology.
Taylor Swift is currently re-recording her entire back catalog of music for this very reason: she doesn’t own the copyrights to her early songs, due to a bad label deal made at the beginning of her career. If it can happen to her, as one of the most privileged and well-resourced artists on the planet, it can happen to you.
To break this cycle, education is necessary, and it starts with artists at all levels educating themselves about how their creative work is being used by real people in the real world, after the making of it is finished.
Further reading and source material
https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df91979
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves
