The music industry’s boiling frog moment

Throw a frog in a pot of boiling water and it will instantly jump out, terrified (and very hot). But put it in a pot of cool water and slowly increase the heat to boiling and it will stay there until it dies. Gruesome? Yes. But a useful analogy for the music industry? Also ‘yes’ – here’s why.

Streaming and social media define today’s music business. This ecosystem delivers vast commercial benefit but with great cultural cost. There are few who do not understand the costs and yet, they tolerate them because the commercial upside is simply so big. Crucially, the cultural costs were neither as visible nor impactful at the start, instead creeping up over time until suddenly they became the fault lines of today’s business. In the immortal words of Calvin and Hobbes “You know what’s weird. Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon… everything’s different.” The result is a boiled frog.

This is what is going on:

• Audience control: Labels and artists flocked to social and streaming because those places were the only ones that had ‘all’ of the audience, which the platforms then proceeded to parcel up into minuscule slices of niche for everyone else. It was the perfect execution of the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy. The platforms ‘own’ the audience and rent it out in nibble-sized chunks.
• Always, always on: Social and streaming are content machines with insatiable appetites. Labels and artists feed the beast, knowing that a gap in output risks being forgotten by the algorithm, eliminated from the feed. Could you imagine a Bon Iver disappearing to a log cabin for six months in today’s music world? Everyone has to play the double V game - Volume and Velocity. Always creating, always releasing, always posting. Always on.
• Art in, content out: It doesn’t matter how much craft goes into making a piece of music, nor how long it took. Once it is released into the system, it will burn brightly for a brief moment and then disappear. There is simply so much new music that every release becomes another drop in the ocean. Yet, everyone keeps releasing masses of new music because that is what the content machine demands.
• Artists become story-less: Every good label and artist has a story to tell and wants to tell it. Except there are few places that can now happen. Curation has become frictionless, invisible and automated. Narratives have been replaced by shallow social content and music journalists replaced by, well, nothing. The collapse of context leaves artists story-less. Their music exists as a few minutes of semi-attention in a sonic wall of playlists.
• Patience disappears: All of the above results in diminishing patience. Few labels (but there are some) will be willing to wait until the third album for an artist to kick into gear. The lightning pace of today’s music business is stacked against the slow build that used to characterise the rise of so many artists that went on to enjoy longevity. (See our latest “Independent label and distributor survey report” for more on how independent labels are trying to go back to a patient, ‘less is more’ approach).

Where does all this leave us?

In a place where the power resides with the platform, where the music is the tenant not the landlord. In a place where creation matters more than creators. It is an environment where focus shifts to optimising for success, leveraging data, tech and ad spend to squeeze out the extra bit of advantage that drives market share and chart position. That ad spend goes straight back into the platforms - the house always wins.

When the game becomes about volume, velocity, and optimisation, humans risk becoming ineffective. Computation power, algorithms and, yes – you guessed it, AI can do it all, faster, better, and more effectively.

Which is why it is time to play a different game, to build places where artists can build careers and fanbases at whatever pace suits them. Places where the algorithm does not forget you if you didn’t post what you had for breakfast this morning. Places where individual pieces of music are what matter, not the endless scroll of a feed or a playlist.

Fantastical utopia? Perhaps.

It is hard to see the destination at the end of the current path as being anything other than dystopian.

It is time for the frog to jump.