Can music still cut through in 2026? DiS meets a leading researcher

0:00If you're prepping for 2026 and you want to know what links, easter eggs, lo-fi beats and gaming streams, well if you create content and if you're a musician or if you're someone that works with them or if you're a fan of them, this is the conversation for you. in that I've met a researcher who really knows what's going on in both the music industry and the creator economy and the gaming streaming world and the social media platforms that we all live and exist on and the reason why I had this conversation was because I really want to empower music fans but above all musicians with the knowledge of how they can cut through and connect on the current platforms that we live on.

0:44I think that economically, things are more challenging than they've ever been. And if you're a music fan, trying to celebrate the music you love, it is really difficult to understand how you can post about the music you love online because there's copyright takedowns, there's loads of warnings if you post music that you don't own the rights to. If you've got a monetized channel that you could worry that you're going to be completely demonetized by using music that's available. that you love that you're only maybe using a few seconds of just to illustrate how good it is and I think that if you were a young guy or a young girl getting into gaming streaming yourself playing games online you would not face any of the same problems if you were a movie nerd loving the films that you love you would probably struggle to get as many issues that you would as a music fan because you know that the trailer's out there and you can probably get away with using bits of that.

1:39So in this conversation with Hannah Callert, she speaks to me all about what she does at Media Research, a company who specialise in insights, analytics and deep research into how the entertainment industry works. They focus on music, or at least that's how I know them best, through all the great work they've done, trying to make sense of the mess and the muddle, which the music industry which is kind of what this podcast is all about too so without further ado this is the drowning sound podcast brought to you in partnership with kobuzz and if you head to drowning sound.org forward slash playlists you can find a playlist that accompanies this series of our podcast i'm sean adams your host and let's get into the conversation i had with hannah in late 2025 at shore studios in london

2:44what are the problems that face musicians and creators i'm joined today by someone who's literally just been studying this the differences in a good way and a bad way welcome to drowning sound podcast hannah thank you happy to be here what have you been studying what's the kind of like i saw your linkedin post i was like yes someone has finally written the thing and i was like okay i'm just having to confess to actually reading a linkedin post and enjoying it my goodness i know trust me i have to write them all the time um yeah i mean i kind of started the linkedin post a little bit cheeky like this is the problem the music this is the problem with the music industry um but one of the things that i study at the moment i mean i work with media research so we're a research and consulting firm in digital entertainment largely music but we like to take on the bigger picture so we look at more broadly the creator economy and it's very interesting to me when we look at the problems that creators face specifically artists actually when we do our artist surveys some of their top problems are time because they're spending so much time on social media our discovery because of social media algorithms and then following that you know you have all of the other issues with rights monetization all these sorts of things and so largely their daily lives are fairly similar to any other type of online creator um anyone running any online business basically yeah you know it's all got to be like content content content we're all working for zuckerberg and google zuckerberg and tiktok yeah which is larry ellison now i guess we're technically all working for a live reality uh no i don't think they bought it's not finished yet no it's not finished it's the ongoing drama that is never gonna i don't know we'll see um accuracy is important so maybe at the time this has gone out maybe he would have done maybe um so one of the big things i manage musicians and i've run a label and obviously being a journalist you have to promote your stuff online um you have to sometimes be cringe on your main feed and like all of the things which musicians face on a daily basis like i ran six music social media channels for six years or four years sorry um say the word six twice in a sentence you're going to get it wrong um and i worked with the composer max richter running some of his channels for a year as well so i've been sort of all different sides of the challenges of trying to get stuff out there i'm also friends with quite a lot of content creators and the youtubers i know that do like like jimmy the giant and people that have got like 30 40 million views on their youtube channels they face a lot of similar things that musicians do but they don't have to go on tour they don't have to worry too much about copyright um they are mostly quite self-sufficient almost as self-sufficient as self-producing artists and so i guess like i'd be curious of some of the takeaways i really liked how you compared like two young boys one wants to make videos about gaming and one wants to put their guitars like play music with guitars like what are some of the things that you found with your research yeah i mean i think um especially with the rise of independent musician uh which has been pretty much explosive especially since covid um is reflective of this changing dynamic you have with your audiences as a creator you know you used to have to rely on bigger institutions that had relationships with distribution channels like who's the person who has a recording studio who's the person who has a contact to get you on air and now you know you have a lot of programs you can do it in your bedroom you can immediately just click share and then suddenly potentially millions of people can see it on tiktok so a lot of the old challenges no longer exist and obviously new challenges emerge but what it's like to be an independent artist has changed a lot.

6:39So it's become more like being any other kind of creator. And you kind of see this on the industry side as well, especially with the rise of like label services deals, independent labels kind of offering more one-off engagements, retention of rights is more common. And they kind of start to function a little bit more like creator talent agencies um like UTA or the creator talent association digital creator association where you you work with a creator and you kind of take a bit of a load off like we'll do your editing for you or we'll do your you know your promotion or we'll manage your audience engagement or something like that which are time challenge needs and often stressors because you know you have a lot of most creators are are in it for like the love of the game for the art basically um and i mean you do see i think it's also there's a good reason to conflate music artists with creators which is that they often behave the same way and now the industry started calling musicians music creators yeah and i think there is like a distinction in the broader creator industry um i was speaking to someone who works at one of these creator agencies and they kind of break them out into three camps.

7:50So you have your talent who's just using social or digital distribution as kind of their like way of getting stuff out. You have storytellers who are kind of using it as their medium, but it's about the story rather than a craft. So talent would be like a music artist or a visual artist or an actor or someone. And then you have your storytellers who are kind of using it, using this as their medium. So that's a lot of YouTubers. And then you have your influencers who are basically the ones who are like i'm on holiday yeah my like beautiful pictures um and when you kind of break it down that way you can see that there are there are differences um and when you're looking to work with creators you know you can't just look at oh this one went viral therefore we have to sponsor them it's like what are they actually working with like where are they going to go um did you find that many of the music industry was working with creators because like i worked on some political campaigns and one of our big things was getting we worked on this campaign called stop the tories which was about tactical voting so our mission was if someone was making a video being critical of the government to say and you do know at the general election if you vote tactically we can get rid of them because often the margins of victory were quite small so people like um there's this guy called femi super tansky marina perkus all these people we just gave them a really simple and i was like why don't we do this with album campaigns but there's not the same like payoff at the end of most videos it's not like it's not like you can approach someone and go oh you make music about you make videos about um windsurfing do you want to talk about our music which would sound perfect when you're windsurfing it's like it's a bit of an odd fit but i'm curious if you've seen examples of labels working with creators um i have not i think because the artists themselves are expected to kind of do that yeah um yeah there's a lot the artist is expected to do yeah yeah it's a huge i mean when we do our our creator surveys and our interviews like a lot of them complain i have to spend so much time making content for social media i don't have enough time to make music i got into this because i wanted to make music this doesn't make sense to me anymore um but it's kind of like a catch-22 right like if you want to be out there you need to make the content and it's also if like if you're an artist that's relying on selling merch selling tickets transitioning people from one platform to another like spotify or patreon or bandcamp like all of that relies on like i guess one of the things like this is a podcast for music fans to try and understand like what are the musicians that we love up against yeah and i think that we hear a lot about the different crisis in music but if someone's working a full-time job touring doing everything else like the the act of being a content creator as well and like learning the skills of shooting editing sounds like it's a whole other skill set yeah which yeah there are some great young artists that upskill that watch youtube tutorials and get good at it um but on the whole it's like it's a big challenge for most musicians and i think that we hear a lot of people going oh why the tickets like five pounds more than they used to be or why is this piece of merch like 25 quid and i think that when you start to see the amount of work artists put in you start to appreciate the value of of everything like the extra 15 to 20 minutes just to send a package because of brexit is like something the average music fan is not aware of yeah for sure um so what are some of the things which you think the musicians could benefit from learning from the creators you've looked at um well I think it's more of an industry learning I think a lot of music creators are kind of on like they understand the situation because they're they're living it on a daily basis um a lot of it is the industry kind of struggling to keep up with that uh you have I mean I think the point of the the LinkedIn post is that as a person filming your gaming habits monetization is way easier way faster and often a lot higher return versus when you're a music artist putting stuff online like you know you've got payouts here there the other thing you've got so many different agencies well even if you did a twitch stream and played your own song yeah you'd be demonetized yeah it's it's actually crazy and like the amount of times i've had to spend an extra hour like the artist has uploaded their video and we thought it was whitelisted but it was wide listed for the label channel and not the artist channel and like all of this stuff is like really complicated yeah and i mean it shouldn't be but there's obvious reasons why it is yeah but if like if you're sitting and playing a really popular video game the video game maker isn't asking for royalty yeah it's because the video game creators first of all they have very good monetization so they don't need to worry about yeah the um 45 to 60 pounds for a game versus the points of a penny for a stream.

12:53Yeah, so they obviously have more to work with so they can afford to be more forgiving. But I mean, I think the complexity of the music system and the monetization when it comes to artists is one of those weird dynamics of the industry where we kind of do things the way we do them because we feel like we've always done them. So it's this very complicated system of rights that are protective, especially when it comes to AI kind of asking us to, oh, let's ignore copyright. we can just train on everything obviously not great um but there is a inherent complexity in a system where the current model of digital distribution is so simple um and that doesn't really like add up um necessarily and it's about rethinking like okay what are other ways we can monetize what are other ways we can we can do this that the reliance on streams and gatekeeping becomes at least less prohibitive

13:54this episode of the dranninsand podcast is presented in partnership with kobus the platform that pays artists four times more than the industry standard that has high quality audio that has human curation which as a human curator is something that i truly value over the kind of algo slop that you get on some platforms you can really hear the difference i know lots of places talk about the audio qualities. And as soon as I moved across, it sort of felt like I was rediscovering music, which is one of the platform's slogans. If you're worried about your playlists, you can use Soundiz. It's a really good tool that's part of the signup process when you join Cobuzz.

14:35It just transfers everything across. If you'd like a free trial of this platform that's independently owned and made for music enthusiasts, head to drownedinsound.org forward slash playlists, where you can hear not only our playlists but get a free trial you can also find these details in the show notes to this episode and now back to this episode of the joining sound podcast brought to you in partnership with kobuzz

15:06maybe it's a little bit more philosophical but a lot of the way the music industry runs now we feel like oh this is how we have to do it because this is the way it's always worked but the recorded music industry as it exists is only like 80 to 100 years old and before that music was a participative thing that was the public good it was it was something that you did in spaces as a community and it wasn't really something that you know you would consider a commodity it was just part of culture and being a normal person I think relevant to your company name I think it was almost like the newspaper as well like folk songs would share the kind of like big stories and news of the day and yeah not that it was a form of journalism but it's i mean a lot of the legends and myths oral oral history is largely based in in music right and then someone came along and they were like oh sick we can record this and package it and sell it to millions of people um which kind of changed it so it became a very like one-way direction um and the like there's always been kind of new music new genres have always come the other way so starting in like community grassroots spaces like house music started in houses um like jungle started in community centers that used to have recording studios i thought you'd better say it started in jungles then no no no the name doesn't really match up on that one house is a little bit better yeah um it was like breakbeat and breakdancing or sort of came from the same kind of like spaces and yeah it's like and it's like when you think about garage rock it's like that it's some of these genre names are quite literal they're literally like came came from the garages um and weirdly we're in a position where streaming almost and this like digitalization and covid especially where everyone went to their bedrooms so now the cult it's bedroom culture um and it's immediately like create distribute but it's also become almost that old way of being interactive and part of a broader like fabric of of nothing ever being quite finished because people will upload versions tracks people like audiences will edit there are people who will like oh you should do like this first and then they'll do like a riff and the artist will go oh my god that's really cool so it's actually become a very communicative process again and I think that's one of the reasons that it can be quite hard because the industry structures are built around this one way distribution model um and we've kind of gone back to like pre-recorded industry where it's like nothing's really final recorded everything's like part of this iterative process which leads me perfectly into my next question i saw a talk that you did online you did it in a real space but i saw it online and um you were talking about lean through audiences which i guess is different to leaning in and i think at the time it was just after the kanye record had come out where you could kind of like play with the player and the like i've always wondered like like i did some work with the guys from well it's actually now image and heap that runs endless where you can sit and make music together in real time and it's a really like for the people that are doing it it's like jamming but with like a pocket synth and thing that you can plug your gear in and it's really exciting as a kind of non-finished format that you can just join in with and And with Joan and Sam, we started an online community 25 years ago.

18:30And like the idea that you can be online and be present and have conversations has always been there. And we've seen things like, was it called Turntable, where you could like listen to Spotify together? But it doesn't seem like there's been the same, like there's going to be a generation of Minecraft kids growing up. And like music is not the same. They can't like deconstruct it and reconstruct it. and yeah so what are some of firstly could you explain what you meant by lean through because i thought it was a really i mean maybe you didn't i don't know if you made it up or whether it's something you'd come across and then like it's well there's any other examples and like maybe what the barriers are too sorry that's three questions in one three questions okay uh so um we argued over that terminology for a while so i think we did come up with it um basically you have the idea is there's three kinds of consumption you have lean back which is i'm chilling and listening to my music you know whatever like that's lean back um and especially with streaming you'd also conflate that with like passive listening maybe in the background while doing something else which is by and large like the the biggest way people listen to music streaming um which is a pro and a con because you can multitask which means they're not as time competitive but also like you have less concentration i think it's also the same with radio as well isn't it it's like it's often there as a companion rather than as yeah and i think a lot of people have just switched some of their radio listening to that and i think makes sense i mean the amount of hours i must have spent with headphones in not fully presently listening to the music that was playing yeah um and i mean there's different i think even within that there's a little bit of nuance i don't want to go on too much of a tangent but like the podcast what tensions that's true actually that's you can tell i'm not a podcast um there's like um so passive listening you can think of lean back as like i've put on a record i'm leaning back and listening to the record um or i've put something on in the background and i'm i'm messing about um and then you have this like constant barrage of discovery that spotify is like really incentivizing right now and i know this because of like my own spotify wrapped which last year i listened to like 5600 600 songs my top artist made up like three percent of my listening which is crazy I mean I love I love music I love this artist and they're on to loop they're like a really great like genre mix I've been to their shows I've bought their vinyl like clearly a fan but I spent like you know that's 3.5 percent of my listening time was dedicated to my top artists that's insane and the rest of them I probably couldn't remember and then it also becomes an issue with monetization where like if I'm listening to like 3 ,000 artists a year I cannot afford as a normal human being to pay each of them what you know they arguably are due because they're they're contributing to to my life and that of like thousands if not millions of other people the counter to that is you wouldn't be able to afford to buy all of that music unless you were very wealthy yeah that's true right it's um well I remember as a kid we used to go to the library and borrow cds and then we'd rip the cds so like there've always been ways there were there were mixtapes back and you know whatever the amount of cds that i bought returned taped or turned taped like oh sorry this it didn't sound like i expected the one argument you could get away with i worked in a record shop for a couple of years yeah and people would come in and say yeah i really liked the single but the rest of the album wasn't very good and they were allowed to exchange the record wow that was a valid reason yeah often the i bought it as a gift for someone and they've already got it yeah it was also the other way anyway i don't know if that's still relevant but i just remember like the amount of music i must have i must have owned yeah but it's like the wealthy probably do go out and pay it forward so the rest of us can can do it anyway sorry that's just the tangent but so i guess like so you've got your lean back so that's your lean and then then what's the second one that's kind of active uh i think we started on like lean in yeah um and this is like oh i've heard i've liked it i've added it to a playlist i've like left a little comment i've like sent it to someone um which is engagement right so arguably better than a view uh if you're looking just at the metrics um but even that becomes quite like passive like you kind of just do it all the time and you know when you speak to artists or you know managers or whatever they they go yeah well we had this video or this this reel or something or this tick tock and it performed really well and we had like all of these likes and all of these comments and then we tried to sell tickets to a show and we couldn't fill the venue we had to cancel and it's like okay well there's clearly a metrics problem there that we need to look at and address and then one of the big ones being that that audience was around the world yeah your show was in one place also like maybe you just like the video yeah maybe you were just scrolling and you were like this is a pleasant content experience thank you for entertaining me for two minutes thank you for entertaining you for two minutes um and there is a role that the platforms have to play in this um especially you know a platform like tiktok that has such a unique brand and identity and you know experience people are tiktok loyal so you see like its value is you scroll through and you can see millions of creators from around the world every day but you're very unlikely to see the same one more than once yeah um unless you like comment dm the video to someone else and complete it complete the video yeah and then you might see them again yeah you have to hit like five points of engagement or something like that um which i mean valid right it is it is a way of judging it but it does mean that there's a struggle when you know managers or artists or whomever look at a video and they're going yeah like okay well number high good but we can't get people to take the next step and that's what lean through kind of is is just before we move on from that do you think it's always been like that with like one hit wonders and things like for instance i know that okay go exist and i know that there was a song of theirs i really liked like i know the new radicals had like one big song yeah i'm trying to think of more contemporary examples but i can't think of many like i'm sure there's loads of people that've heard the pink pantherist like section of the segment of the song yeah and might not have even ever heard the full song but they really like that segment yeah yes um for sure it's just that everyone could be a one-hit wonder now yeah like anyone literally yeah uh with any type of content yeah like yeah with anything um so then it's like there's a mix of this i mean i think it's kind of funny i went to i uh was lucky enough to be invited to the Brit Awards by one of our clients um so I was like you know chilling there listening to the the artists who were performing and I was really falling into the trap of like I don't know this person I don't know this song and they'd be like oh I've heard this on TikTok yeah and I'm like I am part of the problem um but it's also because they'll see okay this performed really well therefore the artist must be big and um kind of my latest report actually looks a little bit at this where you have some platforms that are really good for reach and getting a song out there but the trap you can fall into is that song becomes associated with a different context so you're like oh this is the tiktok song and then when it chases you into the grocery store and it starts playing on the radio you go oh my god why has this followed me into the grocery store like um i've had that happen and it's really annoying yeah like i can't imagine jess glenn has picked up that many fans from the jet 2 holiday thing yeah no it was jess glenn wasn't it yeah um great sound by the way apparently that's the song of the summer 2025 which says a lot about where we're at right now um but yeah so it's it can be kind of easy to fall into that trap and what you really need to look for is more like just stronger communities however small they may be quality of metric over quantity of metric and that's where lean through kind of comes in which is that just clicking a like is no longer really enough to gauge relationship with the artist is someone actually a fan or did they just like that video or that sound or whatever um i feel like i said whatever like too many times and it's all right pull back the american a little bit you're allowed to be american i'm allowed to be american this podcast is listened to around the world it's not just not just brits with a stiff upper lip cool no pressure well that the that leads me on to one other thing that's like related to the kind of lean through listeners was there was a talk i saw that you did about super fans yeah and i think one of the things she said is are super fans real which made me think of the the birds birds aren't real meme that goes around the internet um so i guess like do you think those people that are like the lean through fans are like are actually the super fans that people are thinking about yeah uh so when i kind of ask the question are super fans real uh i like to ask it because everyone loves to be like oh my god we have such a problem with like monetizing and making artists money and people will sit around in their multi-million dollar offices and be like hmm how do we make artists more money guys i think the call is coming from inside that yeah um you're sitting in a basement full of records maybe you should try and get some people to buy them um but uh yeah so every the the answer is oh super fans are the solution but how do you who is a super fan how do you measure what a super fan is how do you pick them out of a crowd um and the answer is it kind of depends on what you're looking for um i think i break it down in terms of you can measure people as how big of a fan they are by how much money they spend how much time they spend or how active they are in the fan community or related to the music um the time is sometimes a better metric than money because you're measuring the wealth of a fan and like if you're a really big music fan you might be really into like 20 or 30 acts yeah and the same way to like if you're really into journalism you might be into 20 or 30 blogs or newsletters but you can't afford to support all of them every month yeah and i think that there's there's definitely a confusion a lot of time between the financial return on music and the like time investment because i think that's such a different way of looking at it and it's like i'm always up for the fans that want to spend lots of time chatting and like having their own community or like with the hayley williams campaign the amount of time those fans must have spent making videos with their theories and yeah it was like such a beautiful campaign to follow like just like i mean the record's amazing but hearing fans like deconstruct lines they're like i've just realized she quotes like a movie in every single song and i can only work out three of them and then you go with the tiktok full of people going yeah isn't this a line from like what's he in gilbert grape and like yeah anyway that's a whole that's a sidebar but i think that really to me like shows the artist that understands what being a fan is about because i think the my favorite musicians tend to be the ones that are also obsessed with music yeah and like you can tell in like the merch they make and the fact that they often are seen wearing other people's merch because they actually go out and get stuff and yeah they know they're like i would want this so i'm gonna tell this and i mean it's definitely you it's really bad to like gatekeep fandoms by money and interestingly enough games kind of nailed this pretty quickly because of all the pushback they got when they had like pay to improve or pay to progress and fans kicked off and they were like that's not fair i have spent like thousands of hours on this game and you're telling me this like nobody who just like just bought the thing yesterday and like paid you is now like has higher stats than me like that's not cool so yeah it's like you can't really when you gatekeep things financially it really loses like the oomph that makes it real and that people actually care about because when it becomes money it's a transactional relationship and transactional relationships don't really have a lot of emotions related to them it's just business right um and time as well just as a pure metric of like how long someone spent just watching the video or how many times it's been streamed can be tricky because if you're just on a per stream basis and that's your only concern like sure okay that can be good but you also have like lo-fi hip-hop study girl how many people are like super fans of lo-fi hip-hop study girl I mean people like it like probably there are some super fans um but it's still kind of different so what you want is people who will put in the effort to like chase down the easter eggs which is something Taylor Swift is really good at um she's also very good at getting them to spend money um hence the i think it was like the average spend to go see the aero store was like 800 pounds or something which is insane it's insane to give a billionaire that much of your money as well it's not like there's like it's not like oh i'm super rich so there's a 25 pound ticket if you're going to a food bank you can still come to it's like there's none of that it was like oh you should actually buy tickets and come to like fly halfway across the world and chase me on tour it's nuts yeah and i think also there's there's a lot of interconnected things there but i think when you look at how she launched the album it felt like a qvc presentation yeah like on her boyfriend's podcast it was like it just felt like here's my product yeah this last one has felt like yeah she's maybe done the icarus and gone a bit too close to the sun a little bit a little bit honestly tinfoil hat theory i was like so convinced that after she got married that she was gonna like do the heiress tour make bank get married and just like go off grid for a while and then like come back for the heiress tour revival in like five to ten years and make like twice as much money and instead she went and dropped like an album that even her fans who are normally rabid online were like i kind of wish i hadn't pre-bought like all five versions of this and you're like that is not something you would ever expected yeah so fan to say so there is there is like overplaying your hand as well and being like really getting too much into the money thing but it really shows the music matters and the music does matter um and it's it's the community as well like the fandom and being i mean anyone who's a fan of live music knows that it's like about being in the room with other people who are like sharing the same experience with you and knowing you have something in common with them even if it's just appreciation in that moment so are super fans real uh super fans are real but i think as a music fan who loves the culture of music and going to events and seeing artists and and um i find it kind of reductive to frame it that way it's like you either are a super fan or you're not a super fan i found the industry taking on as a term was very strange it's like it's like it's a search for a magic silver bullet that will fix the music industry's woes and suddenly magically pull money out of nowhere and it's like well just like nfts were going to do yeah i know like everyone's looking for a solution it's like maybe the solution is just making it a more sustainable process because you know at the moment most live tours break even at best right like you know the costs are so high associated with it you know like maybe we should look at fixing those things that what people are already doing is enough

34:23Hi there, it's Emma here. I'm gatecrashing the podcast to quickly tell you about the Drowned in Sound newsletter. Every Wednesday, I invite myself into your inbox, with permission, of course, to share opinion writing and resources, tell you about cool things that you should be involved in within the world of music, activism, etc. I also bring track of the week and a little bit of hopeful news for you because we all know that the news cycle can be grim at the best of times. Drowned in Sound newsletter every Wednesday in your inbox. Sign up now. So is there anything you found when researching creators, and I know it's not just one piece of work you've done, it's quite an ongoing project for you.

35:03One of my big things has always been, I'm not just a fan of artists, I'm a fan of often an entire genre or entire movement, or sometimes I'll be into loads of bands that all just happen to be from the same place. like there was definitely a moment when Saddle Creek arrived and I was like why do I like everything on this record label and they're almost all from Omaha and I was like that's really cool um Omaha really pulling out of the bag there and I think it's that thing like you discover Bright Eyes and it's like yeah and then I've discovered all these other artists and like there's people I know that like they go to download every year and they're like read kerrang every week or metal hammer and like there's a certain type of fan that's more into a genre like i don't know if you're a regular resident advisor reader you're probably going to be into certain type of acts but you then have to become like a consumer of each artist not of the genre is there anything you saw when looking at creators where there's like like for instance i know there's like collaborative podcasts and things where sometimes you can just support for creators by supporting that podcast rather than individually was there anything like that that you saw when you were researching um i mean we've been doing a lot of work around scenes basically um and i think the what's kind of behind that is genres used to be based in artists used to be based in a context kind of inherently like what venues you performed at you know the aesthetic like what you wore like these things all used to be more like lifestyle defining almost like who you hang out with what you look like and some of them have retained it i mean um one of my close friends like manages some metal bands is like really into metal and you can spot like i've gone to a few gigs and you can spot them like down the road you're like that's where it is because everyone's got the uniform on right like the dark martins battle bus right um and so that's still got this like sense of context and place and time and community um and a lot of artists now are kind of removed from that because it's all just tiktok and so that it's like oh we'll focus on the artist focus on the artist focus on the artist but we've actually lost the sense of context that was quite intrinsic before um so when you look at scenes that's kind of what that is right it's like building that context back in in a or rediscovering that context in a digital space um so you have like um again gaming comes out as a good example i'll use league of legends as this one but um it's got you know imagine dragons a lot of k-pop artists they have a tv show they have a couple of games they have like this whole thing around it they have a lot of creators involved you know they have youtube creators and twitch streamers hosting their tournaments as like official partners like they don't need sports broadcasters on a network they've got twitch streamers who are doing this kind of thing so it's this whole picture and then as a fan you might be just a fan of the artist you might be just a fan of the tv show you might be just a fan of this twitch streamers personality because they cover a couple of different games and all of these people together create this like variated audience that are all like that's that's your audience base that's the culture you're creating so like a festival i guess like i guess we've short-circuited in the industry by you get a fee to play at a festival and like i guess they get a fee to perform and be at those events and i guess like one of the big things i've noticed is the more fragmented things have become and siloed and individualized the more people are talking about ideas which like collective like sub stacks where there's like i think there's a few like flaming hydra where i think there's like 30 different writers yeah i'm like okay but you've basically just invented a magazine there's a lot of reinventing going there's a lot of twitch streams i'm like this is just talk radio on a video and you're like okay but people are seeing them as a different format and going this is the future of this and it's like no this is just the past that on a digital platform yeah and i think a lot of musicians are going to need to figure out going forwards what those shifts are because and i think also for fans like if you're a fan of an artist do you want to spend six hours watching the equivalent of hassan piker for music probably not yeah do you want a quick 15 minute guide to like this is what's out this week that you might want to listen to or like and i think that one of the big things i've noticed is the struggle for anyone that's a music fan to share the music they like online outside of here's a link to my playlist yeah which is going to get buried because links take you off the platforms and it's like and i've seen these amazing content creators on tiktok making videos and they can use the sounds on tiktok as soon as you move on to youtube it becomes like justin hawkins anthony fantano and rick Beto all have posted videos this year about how they've either been demonetized had copyright infringement issues with their accounts and I was thinking back to when you were talking about those kind of like two young boys one wants to be a gaming streamer and one wants to be a guitarist and the guitarist if they did a cover they might or they might like play a bit of the song that they what they're they're doing a cover of and suddenly their channels yeah kind of in the sin bin and taken offline like do you think the music industry from the research you're doing is like really falling behind because of the way in which kind of iep and copyright is enforced like it feels it feels to me like i'm maybe that's a leading question but yeah the the thing that i find is for instance if i wanted to like the first version of this podcast was in 2005 we played music on it yeah and i had to stop because after chasing the prs to find out how we pay a royalty like a yeah like a hospital radio station we couldn't and the fees they introduced were going to bankrupt us yeah we're like there's no there's absolutely no way we can make a podcast and pay you that amount of money yeah because they were treating it like a compilation album each episode yeah so i guess that's 2005 things haven't changed that much um is there anything you've seen that the music industry could learn from gaming and from creators so that's a very long question it's a very long question i think there is a lot to learn uh in terms of how you approach ownership um i want to be careful like not not to particularly does anyone in particular we'll put it this way if i wanted to pay five pounds right now to pay an artist to play 30 seconds of their song so we could talk about it yeah like i can't easily do that yeah but i can go on epidemic sound which is a sound library where artists have to opt out of certain collection societies like quite a complicated literally like even the mention of of this kind of thing that you just dive into this this rat's nest wormhole of like different complexities you need like a music business master's degree yeah to understand even the barest minimum of what is going on uh which is obviously a problem when you have like teenagers making music in their rooms and distributing it and then someone chases something like you didn't register with this pr you didn't do this you didn't do that like by the way we've demonetized your video and the kids sitting there going what like but my friend just posted their video playing a game and they're completely fine why are you chasing me like my friend sophia smith gala has been making these videos about rosalia on tiktok and instagram and they're brilliant they are she's got a but she's got a background in languages and she was worked in the bbc's religion department yeah and she was an opera singer she is and she's a tiktoker with a huge huge following she was talking about putting them on youtube and i dm'd her going you should be really careful if you're going to play any of the tracks because you're suddenly she's like huh like and she's like very online very clued up it's the copyright is that thing that no no one even in the industry wants to talk to the 10-foot pole you bring up i don't i don't understand it properly and i said to you before this interview how much do you i think and it's like i think the big secret is no one understands it properly except a handful of lawyers everyone else is just going like oh um and then the problem is that so much is built on it like it's become such a critical problem and it's one that most of us in our day-to-day do not understand properly because it's so complicated um and of course it's a legacy system that exists since like what the 1700s because someone wrote on a napkin and was like ah this guy's playing my piece i want money and there was a lawsuit right so you have like a 250 year old gay sloth yeah that's dictating like the entire future of this industry but if musician died 70 years ago you can play it yeah exactly right like so there's not very many recordings from 70 years ago that you can actually play and if it's out of copyright and if the artist is opted into like creative commons yeah it's like the thing with all those sound libraries is often sound alikes yeah so i could probably play something now that sounds like acdc yeah and pay someone four pounds for it yeah but acdc won't get anything they won't get anything um and i could probably type it into a ai and get it to spit something out exactly and no one that's been sampled or been trained on i want to say because especially when we talk about ai it's like oh ignore copyright copyright sound important obviously it is important because it is the one thing protecting creators right now from having all of their life's work taken and sold by a company that never had anything to do with it um but the system is obviously too complex and we fixate on like tiny uses like some TikTok creator using a sound in a video that objectively probably promotes that artist and we treat that as an infringement and then actually cut back on the willingness to do that people's willingness to enter the industry.

45:05It feels a little bit sometimes like the industry is kind of like drowning in its own confusion and meanwhile like the next generation of artists are moving on and just being like I'm gonna I don't know what this is and there are a new generation of companies um there's I've met a few startups who are trying to do like micro sync or using these tools to like make the process a lot easier so you don't have to go to five different places that you don't know where they exist or how you would even find out that they exist and register independently and do all this different metadata stuff like simplifying these processes is really the end goal um i think i saw one called licked without an e and i think they're based in brighton or somewhere and but it's like depending on how many subscribers you have to your views you have on your channel you pay a different royalty rate yeah but as soon as you stop paying them you've got to take the video down with the track in it i think that's how it works it was like huh so and like i've i've seen like the stuff with Justin Hawkins and Rick Beto and Anthony Fantano like there's a couple of videos and I can link them on the end of this YouTube video if people are watching it there rather than listening um and I'll put in the caption um they talked about videos that were like three or four years old where they played like 10 seconds of a song with the artist on I think it was like one of them was like one of the guys from the Eagles and he was doing a talk through of his song like sitting and playing it and they played a bit of the studio recording for like 10 seconds and the entire video was demonetized taken down but i think his entire channel was demonetized and i was like that's crazy anyway thank you so much for answering all of my other questions i've got two final questions for you so dronin's down turn 25 this year so we've been asking most of our guests and what music would be like 25 years from now and i feel like you've had such that you work at a company and you're and i've followed some of your work and i know that you've got a lot of thoughts like what would you imagine music could be like in 2050 and that can be both optimistic and dystopian if you want to do both you can oh man i mean it's a tough question to answer because i think at the moment everyone's struggling with like what happened yesterday what's going to happen tomorrow um much less like what's happening next year i mean this is something as a research company we've noticed the questions we're getting are much more immediate like you know five ten years ago our questions were like oh what's 2032 gonna look like 35 like what's in the next 20 years and now a lot of the questions are like yeah what's happening tomorrow like what's happening what that thing that happened yesterday what what does that mean for us like do we have to change so i definitely have felt that with like some of the artists i work with i've got records coming next year and you're just like yeah i knew sort of what worked three years ago yeah like i don't know what worked six months ago and like i kind of know lots of things don't work yes i can imagine that's exactly what people are coming to and it's there's so many changes so quickly um this shift really the covid shift to social video was a massive one um changed marketing changed distribution and the rise of creator tools changed creation um and then you know now we have ai and there's this huge question about what does that mean for creative industries for um for everyone really i mean it's it's a question of if if this program can do the job that's not just mass unemployment in the creative industries because as an advertiser do i pay for rights because it's very complicated system or because it's expensive or do i pay a five pound subscription to suno and make all of the music that i want um a lot of that does hinge on copyright like what do these um these programs have to pay out i think the um i saw something again on linkedin embarrassing was reading something on linkedin um but we could just say it was on the internet it's just on the internet everything you see on the internet is true yeah uh there's something like suno's cost breakdown the training data training capable like the actual compute costs were like crazy high and then the information they trained on was like you know like many factors of zero like less so they're not paying for the library at all um now you can ask whether or not ai is ever going to be financially sustainable because like we're talking i mean if you look at like that nvidia open ai bubble it's literally a circle they're just passing trillions of dollars around to each other i love that that was a graphic someone shared that i saw as well and i'll put it on screen it's literally the new york times article of like i was in the new york times it's one in the i don't know if it's the only one but there was one in the new york times and it's literally like all of these companies passing money in a circle economy go burr but meanwhile like actual growth outside of that is 0.1 so we're looking at like also like a giant economic meltdown but it's also that thing when they talk about growth in the economy and it's often just rich people passing money between different countries yeah and then you have okay so artists are the ones creators are the ones normal people are the ones actually making the stuff yeah that is a value and so you have a crisis kind of in music but outside of music i mean this is a all-inclusive dynamic that is reflected kind of in every facet you look at music's often the canary in the coal mine on a lot of these different things creators usually are right i really liked that anna neil from seasac i heard her speaking an event last year and she just said this is a human rights issue yeah like it's a workers rights issue and it's a human rights issue and it's like talking about copyright makes it sound complicated yeah and i think it's the exact same problem the climate movement scott yeah as soon as you say climate it's complicated extreme weather protecting nature feels a lot easier yeah sorry that's slight aside no but it's yeah it's very much it's a similar discussion right it's a question of like i mean and i hate that oh it's democratized creativity creativity has always been democratized you can get a box of crayons and a piece of paper like come on like you can hum you can bang like just kitchen spoons on a pot right um it's i think there was a good quote on this and i'm going to get it wrong but it's the ability for capital to access the results of labor without labor being able to access the capital um it's a redistribution of wealth upwards basically which is again not a problem specific to ai it's just exacerbating problems that already exist as with all things sometimes it's almost like these things have to become a metaphor to make sense of oh so this person's making loads of money from this yeah and that like because there's so many other things in our lives we don't think about the fact that we're giving money to someone who's using essentially like our natural resources for energy or like you're paying like we're to owe our net zero targets you're like well actually we've offshored it all to china yeah and it's like you start to realize that sometimes it's really easy for people to understand if elton john and jua lipper are saying you are taking music by musicians like me and creating new music that sounds just like me that's got nothing to do with me that feels pretty easy for most people to understand me saying all of like I can get it to spit out a review that's written like in the style of Drowning Sound because it's scraped all of Drowning Sound and it knows what our vague tone of voice was which is I mean I would struggle to figure out what that was but it's like it's able to reproduce introduce yeah a work that's not that dissimilar yeah and i think that no one is going to get upset that like well you're just someone posting on the internet yeah it's like because people feel like that's in the public library almost of like yeah because it's it's out there i mean it's the relationship that people have with ownership now i mean growing up especially in the digital generation where like everything's online you can kind of pirate anything you want you can kind of remakes whatever so i think almost to bring it back to the question of like what can music learn there's a difference between um like commercial i mean it's basically the commercial use versus casual use but then because casual use can become commercial use because of how easy distribution has become it becomes like super complicated but it's also the arguments around like critique is like if like if you're taking a paragraph from a book that's different to reproducing the entire book yeah it's different from like slightly rewriting it yeah being like oh it's mine yeah you know um that's it's called fan fiction and even fan fiction writers give attribution and usually unless if they want to monetize they have to change all the characters i feel like i should get you back and we should just do this question because i feel like the answer is we don't know what's going to be happening five months from now not only 25 years from now it's it's really it's a really hard question um i mean there's just so many it's really hard to like look at the news cycle and not feel like vaguely overwhelmed and kind of want to scream.

53:55I have a lot of floor time these days, especially looking at like the American news cycle. Yeah. And I mean, that has but that has ramifications on entertainment, right? Like what's going to happen with TikTok? What's going to happen with these tech companies? What's going to happen with copyright? What's going to happen with consumer regulations and corporate regulations on consumer goods? Like all of these things. How do you how are these cards going to fall? um major question then you have like the technology you know does it continue to develop does ai become the magic thing that magic wand that everyone loves to tout that it will or is it realistically confined by you know it's basically trained on all the data that exists so far there's no new data that's not tainted by ai stuff so it starts cannibalizing itself and in order to improve it requires an exponentially higher amount of energy and processing power and water and they're already running into into barriers right like they're nowhere near profitability um and you know so prices are going to have to skyrocket if they're ever going to come even close to it we're talking factors of trillions not even billions um which is insane to me but whatever um and yet it's this like almost cult-esque like but it'll be magic and it will do and it's like personally i like to see results before i invest like my entire life savings into something and that's basically what these economies are kind of doing right now which is terrifying one thing that's given me a little bit of hope as i spoke to someone who's working on something that can reverse engineer and work out the source of some of what the ais are spitting out um and i think there's there's obviously loads of complications of that like musicology studies of yeah like the ed sheeran case and things like that it's all really complicated but it's almost like what will our wally be like that goes through the debris of ai and figures out you took my thing and you've used it and now you've discarded it um because often the people making stuff out of ai are not even going to profit from it they're actually just creating slop and noise that we've all got to battle i think what's very interesting about it and maybe the more the less dystopian take um near-term dystopian but like long-term actually weirdly not um the reliability of being able to tell what's ai and what's not ai and where stuff comes from is both incredibly difficult and increasingly difficult because one of the things that uh like ai like what a program can do best is trick itself um if it's making what it thinks is the most human version of a thing it's gonna this it's gonna be very hard for it to tell the difference but also as this stuff just proliferates it becomes less meaningful like at the end of the day who cares one person listened to something once that's happening like millions of times every second every day among billions of people right um we can't really i find it hard i find when i like scroll through the internet i go like i alternate through this this thought process of like I don't know if I believe that that seems unrealistic haha that's funny but like you know whatever um and like I don't know if that's true or like oh I'm gonna forget about that so it's become less enjoyable and less like meaningful at all you're just like all of this is slob none of it could be true and what it means is that people are turning less to digital I've done some work on analog revival um which is really interesting and while it's not reducing quantity of time spent on digital platforms yet we are seeing an increase in like people's attention being paid to things that feel real that they can like hold in their hands that they can be out that they can actually own and some rights thing isn't going to change and they're going to lose access despite having paid like you know 10 pounds a month for years the second season of this podcast was pretty much trying to make sure my theory makes sense that magazines are going to have their vinyl moment yeah and i keep seeing all these different things like these zines are blown up and like i keep meeting people that oh i've got my own like you've got your own zine like and it's really interesting especially in activist circles how much bigger zines have become like i think there's something in that i think we're a few years away still i think yeah definitely a few years away but i can you can kind of feel it accelerating because when i did this work it was a year and a half ago or two years ago um i guess i guess also as a researcher like doing work that can be trusted yeah like and i think also with journalists like the fake news media nonsense that we hear spewed out there is a lot of yeah fake media like there's like the day we record this uk budget's being announced there's a whole generation of people that are in the top one percent whose family members work in our media and own our media and they are going to have a very different view around what their interpretation of the budget is because they've not really got skin in the game they don't know anyone who's yeah get on the two child benefit cap or anything like that and i think that's a whole other layer that the internet sort of unlocked more working class voices yeah but sorry i realize this is a tangent no no it's interesting because it's um when we look at so ai's eating everything your distinction point for you guys for us as well is our commitment to like this is impartial we've checked our notes we've done like actual surveys this is not synthetic data like this is not ai has spit out this analysis for you which there's so many you know digital outlets now that it's just ai ai right um so that's your that's what makes you stand out is like doing the work putting in the effort this is something quality the humanity of it humanity of it and arguably like that handcrafted you know um handcrafted appeal um but what's interesting is if you want to stay competitive, you have to almost remove yourself from being able to be scraped and like monetized by somebody else, especially if this continues.

59:55So what I think is going to happen is we're going to see like already kind of seeing it where people are retreating into like corners of the internet, like pockets. So you have more meaningful interaction happening in niche places like Discord or Substack, which on a weekly active user level, very low, but very meaningful interactions right so you can really you know if you have an artist like Fred again uses discord to do like fan parties worldwide worked great um you know sub stack it's one of the highest rates of people actually paying money to an individual creator um having a creator subscription um users are are retreating to direct messages like instagram ceo kind of said they've been seeing that but you also see people on like whatsapp groups and using that as like their means of communicating with each other rather than these broadcast channels that no longer really work to connect with your network so you're you're seeing this shift from like front page of internet is where everything is that you need to see to front page of internet is a hot mess and i'm going to go to my little like bubbles like little safe spaces you know whatever um that's called like the dark forest yeah i had yansi um from metalabel on the podcast who's one of the dark forest collective who i think wrote the first essay that went yeah um yanti was the co-founder of kickstarter and that episode yanti and i ended up talking about the beastie boys and the royal society um so one last question because i feel like we could both talk for about three hours and i know that joe rogan does podcast that long but i'm not didn't grabbing you on your lunch break yeah just just the final tagline the tldr um internet's going to fragment into big public place it's a hot mess versus like small gated communities which means reliable stuff is going to be behind paywalls not everyone can afford everything um you're going to see like more fragmentation into like different i don't know like along geographic lines because of regulation also along like cultural lines like i believe in this thing or i like this artist or whatever you live in your own little version of the internet um and then i think people are actually going to return back to analog and real life stuff just to feel a little bit more grounded in reality and connected to things because the digital space is becoming crazy i'm loving all the conversations about new third spaces because people are now living at home a lot more they're craving having somewhere to go and hang yeah and like and a lot of like venues could benefit from like open an hour earlier and like have video games or something so that rather than a support band people can just hang out and talk to their friends and be in a collective space and maybe this dovetails into what we were just discussing because you switched to being hopeful towards the end of that um if you had the 600 million that daniel leck invested in helsing which is money extracted from the music industry is why i've been asking this question this year what would you spend it on to address some of the things that we've been discussing or if you could spend on whatever you want i mean anything buy a yacht no i would absolutely not buy a yacht.

1:02:59You might be able to get more than one yacht for 600 million euros. Yeah, I don't really know how money that big feels so surreal. I don't know what I would do with it. It's like, I'd get really nice headphones, then what would I get? I was like, that's a really small percentage. Maybe I'd go on holiday.

1:03:19I mean, if I had 600 million dollars and I wanted to actually make a difference in the music industry or just more generally, I would not invest it in anything that demands an immediate return on investment if you're doing it just for money's sake you're not really going to make a difference just going to make more money um the I think talking about third spaces especially not only are they important for people but even if you're putting business hat on it's important for building the culture that eventually becomes valuable meaningful you need to give people time to be bad at stuff for them to be good at stuff you need to give them spaces where they can actually get together and fool around largely um you know you've got your 10 000 hours theory and that's how the beatles got really good is all those months they spent in hamburg um and so i would probably invest in like community spaces like studios i mean i think a really weird fact i found out that um a lot of like community centers in london used to have recording studios in them that were free for like local kids to to access uh i feel like that would be huge if you just make these spaces for young people to get together in a place that's not their bedroom and just like throw shit at the wall and see what sticks so the thing that you don't know is this is probably gonna be the last episode of this season the first episode of this season was an interview the ceo of youth music yeah and he was and they literally go out there and raise money to create these spaces for young people so accidentally on purpose full circle wow it's not an ouroboros where the snake's eating its own tail but it's not far off thank you so much for your time hannah yeah thank you so much

1:05:13well that conversation was probably the one i expected but also completely not the one I expected. Hannah was fantastic. I followed her online for a while, as I mentioned in the interview, and it was the first time I met her. We went quite in at the deep end. And I really liked that she's able to process so much of what's going on in the creator economy and with social media platforms and how that all impacts artists, but also how it impacts us as fans. Because the ways in which artists reach us now, the ways we discover music, are very reliant on algorithmic platforms and unless we fight for human curation we're going to just increasingly see that this shift that's going on in culture where those that have the money to drive the algorithms can cut through and we see that with political donations with the parties that have got huge huge sums are able to compete far more ably and agilely and we'll see that with major label artists where you can have an incredible tune but if you've not got huge sums of money it's quite hard to get it cut through.

1:06:23I made a few other notes here. Simplifying everything is crucial was one of them and by that I mean intellectual property, copyright, the ways in which everything works because as a fan it's, I don't know, it just feels like that scene of Krusty the Clown stepping on rakes if you just want to just post about the music you like online sometimes whether you're a massive content creator or whether you're just a fan just trying to put stuff out there it shouldn't be as hard as it is to support and be part of the community of the music you like i think that we need to find new ways of making copyright make sense and it probably needs like global awareness campaigns because i think it's going to be very difficult once ai has fully gripped everything if it hasn't already for people to understand that the works involved in training artificial intelligence and actually what i mean by training it is the source material the sounds and the samples and the songwriting and the lyricism and all the other things that go into what makes a great song is all there in the data and i think that if you go back to the interview i did with hayley bosher she really talked about intellectual property and how it works and what it is and I think that there's something quite broken and the industry does sort of need to educate everyone and I'm assuming if you've got as far as listening to this podcast you're probably not someone that needs that educating but I think that generally music is really struggling because like in this conversation you can post up gaming videos and there's no real problem you can take an image of a famous person and put a meme on it and no one's really gonna have an issue with it the photographer probably does quietly in the background but they're unable to police it and to reach out to every single person that's used their photo same with if someone chopped up this podcast i would struggle to find them having done it and i think that's pretty bad for all of us as a culture and a society especially when we're meant to have this intelligent technology which should be going out there and chasing it down for you i think a lot of those things are quite terrifying and worrying anyway not to be dystopian in what was a quite hopeful and hopefully provocative conversation or at least agitating some thoughts conversation because i think the research that hannah does is really powerful and really impactful this was obviously quite a deep piece of research that hannah's done but it's actually part of if you look up look her up online you will see that it's very consistent with all the other work she does this piece of research so um yeah thanks to hannah for her time um and thanks you for all listening to my what will music be like in 2050 kind of series of conversations i know it's not been the core of the chat but i think as a kind of consistent conversation prompt and something that when I'm asking people to prep I send them those questions in advance they can think about them a little bit they're like how would you spend the huge sums which were spent on either Helsing or Joe Rogan and the what would music be like in 2050 question and I think that it's also led me to like pick guests that I think can answer that question I'm gonna be curious what their answer is so that's about as far as it's been as a kind of theme for this year thank you for listening thank you to josh crags for producing this episode and i think this is me signing off for 2025 we will have lots coming in 2026 and i hope that this episode is useful to musicians and creators and music fans trying to understand how we are going to get through another year of tech dystopia but the joys of music.

1:10:23I've been Sean Adams your host of the Drowning Sound podcast. We are here to empower music fans. You've been you. I'll see you next time. Bye.

1:10:42You