How mean-driving is impoverishing art

Since we've started to create art, the medium in which it was transmitted always shaped its form and content, from painting the walls of caves in spain to songs in your ipod shuffle. Phonographs, popularised by Thomas Edison, are a great example of this. It was created around 1870, by that time, the only way to experience music was to go to a live performance. Those would last for about one hour, and be lost forever. The phonograph was bound to change this forever, for it could be sold, landed to a friend or replayed. But its technological limitations would shape the nature of the music shipped within. The record could hold about 3 minutes of music, so artists, like Stravinsky, in 1925, started chopping their songs to 3 minutes to reach a brother audience with the phonograph. That reshaped music to create the classic 3-minute pop song format.

With the portability offered by cassette tapes, people could distribute their music way easier. Also, it was much simpler to record, so it allowed a lot of new artists to record songs and become famous without needing expensive machinery or hard to get contracts with music labels. The distortion that cassette tapes have was a technical problem, but nowadays people seem to miss it, so software plugins that emulate it have become ever more popular, shaping the sound of genres like Lo-Fi hip hop.

With Spotify things couldn't be different. There are a lot of advantages of its technology and it has collateral effects on the music being streamed there. Quality is great, its cheap and sharing your own music has never been easier. But the real impact of Spotify is around playlist creation, as a lot of people have pointed out. Spotify decides which tracks should be in the official playlists, those, are listened by millions of people, so the artists will potentially benefit a lot from having a song in one of those playlists.

The thing is: the playlist is called "Friday with friends" for a reason, it's not about who are the artists on it, nor about the genre or the country, it is about the "vibe". Spotify created a listening experience that can (if you want to) be empty of consciousness, curated to be in the background, to fit every environment, or to be precise, to fit the average environment.

It doesn't make sense for a "Friday with friends" playlist to be filled with Portuguese post-punk or Hard industrial Techno, as the average user prefers something else. But artists need money to eat, not artistic appraisal. So getting a song on one of these generic playlists is a great objective to have making music. Maybe start with a repeating chorus, put in some rap verse, or use trap style beats instead of exploring what would be more fitting to communicate what you want as an artist.

Spotify makes it a lot easier to know what the artistic goal should be, it shows you a few examples from these playlists and now you know that is what you need to do. Even if you try to be "yourself", you're still very influenced by the repeating structures playing everywhere, the motifs, the scales, the percussion sequences. That is what I'm calling mean-driving.

Mean-driving always existed in some form, you go to a concert in 1910 and see people applauding the artist, you have an incentive to go closer to his style. You listen to the radio in 2008 and Sean Kingston directs your thoughts to that kind of lyric. What Spotify differs in is the intensity and clarity of the incentive towards the mean. It's never been so easy to know what is the most popular songs, how popular and what is the secret recipe to make something like that.

With the rise of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) like Ableton, FL Studio and Logic, the amount of bedroom producers skyrocketed, like Martin Garrix, the 25 years old DJ whom started making beats on his laptop at home and now has 25 million monthly listeners. Many of these thousands of producers are aiming at something like that, instant fame, no matter how. Trap and EDM are two genres very sought up by these producers.

But with so many new producers music could be increasing in a priceless diversity, but the mean-drive incentives these new artists to make more of the same instead of going for their long, exhausting and low-paying journey of self-discovery. The artists makes more money in average, more music is produced but diversity (or variance) is dropping.

This effect is especially notable in platforms like TikTok or Instagram's Reels. Trends are exactly means, or directions for the creator to go, those who follow the trend might get a lot of followers and the necessary traction to move forward with their career on TikTok. But see how little diversity is there, 10 or 15 songs are played in the majority of the videos, content is mostly following threads and not much new ideas.

As more people are driven to the mean and get famous with it, the incentive to go to it are stronger to the ones trying to be themselves.

Even though this is a real effect, there are more people than ever getting into art, most of them might go towards the mean, but even if a minority creates things to express themselves, society will undoubtedly benefit from it. Access to otherwise unreachable genres and forms of art is now trivial. Everynoise is an amazing platform to let you discover these new genres and even creates spotify playlists for you get to know more and maybe fall in love with it. Art museums now share their collection on instagram and new painters and performers get a chance to expose to their public reaching them at their home's comfort.

I don't know the future of art, but it think it is important for us to reflect on who we are, that is the only way we can keep our voice amidst so many other voices singing in choir.