Blog: culture

The music industry has a culture problem. An overabundance of data –– from streaming services and social platforms alike ––has fostered a dependence on digital performance that does not reliably translate into fandom and cultural value.

The music industry is racing in two different directions at once. On the one side is the push for more music to be made by more people for less money – underpinning the $500 million valuation of Suno , the generative AI music platform.

Entertainment today is almost inseparable from streaming – for better and for worse. The tech infrastructure that underpins today’s entertainment industry has had a huge impact not only on how content is delivered, but who consumes it, how, and why.

More than three fourths of audiences believe that the music they listen to reflects who they are. This rises to more than four fifths of people aged 25-44. Music listening is also incredibly personal –roughly a third of people listen to playlists they curate themselves when exercising, hanging out with friends, working or studying, or just when they are out and about.

FaZe is going public via a SPAC merger. It is positioning itself as the company who can help brands reach Gen Z. Can it succeed? Every generation or so, there is a company that builds its narrative to investors around being the company to help reach and influence the ever-so-fickle young demographic.

When Spotify announced that Adele had broken the record for the most streams in one day, with 19.8 million streams , the caveat was that this was true as long as you do not include all of the streams BTS had accumulated in 24 hours for ‘Butter’ in May.

When the balance of Netflix’s value proposition swung from mail-delivered DVDs to the then-mind-blowing idea of a streaming service, the implications stretched far wider than for the movie and TV industry.

Creating something which will please audiences in the moment and also have resonant staying power among the surrounding culture is a puzzle faced by the content strategists of today. It is also the age-old struggle of artists throughout history.