Hey everyone, just had this thought as I was cleaning the kitchen and thought it would be interesting to hear people’s thoughts. There’s a catchy slogan, “Every Billionaire is a Policy Failure”, that nicely sums up an analysis of what’s wrong with the world right now as it relates to extreme wealth inequality. It points to the fact that for billionaires to exist, people need to create policies and cultural frameworks to make that possible. It got me thinking about this in the music world—are those policy failures at the heart of the extreme inequality in how music circulates in the streaming era? Or, put another way: in the future we are trying to build, do pop stars exist or have they been replaced by something else (pop constellations, perhaps)?
Love the term “pop constellation” though!
Well, if a pop-star is defined by their commercial success, in other words, if this business is heavily and steadily successful, then the parallel to billionaires is very easy to draw: they have the same goal and same means and methods to achieve it.
As such, both billionaires and pop-star should disappear with the same kind of policies against predatory capitalism. That should at least take care of the most excessive commercial aspect of pop-stars.
Now through the lense of future ethical streaming/music sharing platforms, i think what sustains the pop-star system is definitely the social ranking aspects of those tools: how many listens they had, if your friends listened to it etc… so we should somewhat limit these to hinder the impact it may have.
For me it’s worth separating - or at least observing the difference between - the economics of pop stars and the aesthetics. I quite often make a point around the idea of ‘champagne socialists’. I get that there’s a jarring problem with people who live in the lap of luxury while advocating for the well-being of all in society. But also if we agree that champagne is ‘a good thing’ then everyone should have it (I wasn’t a fan when I did drink). Putting that into a more realistic context - in the current climate people should have a house that’s their own (I’ll put state ownership and expropriation to one side). In the UK a lot of people can’t afford their own property, such that having one seems like opulence. Having your own house (or a guaranteed property that fits ones needs) should be the baseline.
I make this point to make the next - should capitalism fail, we’ll still need housing; we’ll still need food. But also after capitalism we’ll still be humans - we’ll need culture, we’ll have ‘fancy food’, we’ll have luxury goods. Their acquisition and exchange won’t be as tightly prohibited.
Which turns back to - the problem of pop music in general isn’t necessarily the aesthetics; it is the grotesque disparity between the top and the bottom. It is that a small slice of ‘what possible music there is’ is rendered as the entirety of music. Popularity is not a guarantee of quality, and certainly not diversity.
However - that isn’t to say that there aren’t interesting developments that happen in pop music. One of the curious things about the eternal quest for ‘novelty’ in pop music is that it throws out odd juxtapositions. There’s a lot of asinine, workaday pish churned out but I find a lot of stuff comes out that’s unexpected. Doubly so in this world where I can hear what’s going on in a culture that I’m not part of - dembow, kuduro, pimba, kpop [etc].
My suspicion is that the existing framework where a limited number of styles proliferate as most popular would persist after capitalism; the point would be that the financial aspect would be less obnoxious. Like I don’t think that suddenly Derek Bailey or Masonna would be atop the charts - there’s a point to a lot of art that it exists by being defined as contrary to a given context (true of noise and free improv) which necessarily makes it a minority concern, or at least requires a lot of context to care about it (let alone enjoy it).
So broadly - yeah, the capitalism of pop is appalling. I’d maintain that there’s sometimes aesthetics that arise that are worth listening to (even if I wouldn’t maintain the economics that produce it).
Something I wanted to add (following on from the thoughtful post above about musical oddities and contradictions in pop), but I couldn’t find the article where I originally read it, is perhaps we need a more careful distinction for mainstream pop and outsider pop too, as broadly referring to all pop, when we specifically mean mainstream or “streaming star” interests/economics, could be misread as a kind of elitism that plays into unhelpful conversations about what’s “real music” and whatnot. I guess I was thinking about the war on disco and the book Glitter Up The Dark as touchpoints within this discussion and considering the language to distinguish between ecosystem and industry (as “constellation” does).
I’m sure someone can articulate this better!
@Alex I have been trying to think your question from two angles, and come up with an answer that contributes something. It isn’t easy. 
The two angles:
- Strictly your question in the subject.
- How to apply your question or any answer to improve the situation of TSMN music makers and friends.
About 1, very long story short, I wonder how many rich pop stars are out there, and then yes, I would tax them just like any other rich person.
For instance, it would be interesting to know the top 1% music artists by income and see how rich the artists in the lowest segment of that 1% are. Why do I have the impression that with luck they might be upper middle class people with not even a clear retirement plan. And in comparison, how are the top 1% of, say, software developers, lawyers, dentists, etc, doing.
Another big difference with billionaires is that… pop stars get their riches directly bringing happiness / satisfaction to millions, creating a product (music, dance, spectacle) that doesn’t cause the planetary harm billionaires create to become that rich. Also, while human time, attention, and money is limited, pop stars don’t get their popularity in a zero-sum game where billionaires’ wealth directly maps to the misery of billions of humans.
So, I don’t think pop starts are a policy failure per se, except when they are richer than whatever is the threshold of “reasonable wealth”. And even then the criticism would be towards their wealth and not how many millions of fans they have. I think humans (whether we like it or not) have a statistical tendency to congregation and following – at least in mass societies (take the double meaning of mass).
Imagine this argument applied to books. Would the Daodejing, the Bible, the Communist Maniphesto, El Quijote… be policy failures because they got superstar attention compared to gazillion other books that were published and are great creative works as well?
This brings me to the second angle, which is that even if I find the question very interesting and got me thinking these days, I’m not sure what can we take from it for TSMN. Would we promote a policy “cutting” on Beyoncé, Shakira, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Dua Lippa, Rihanna, Rosalía… to better redistribute… what among whom?
We could discuss which policies are TSMN-like music makers missing, because they don’t exist, or because they do exist but music makers don’t take enough advantage of them.
the war on disco
Yeah this plays on my mind - pop music is often complex in this way. What looks like simple cattle music can often mean enormous amounts to minority communities - queer folk projecting onto various pop stars, the 80s explosion in actual queers in pop, black folk seeing people that look like them (whether that’s hardcore intellectuals like John Coltrane or chancers like 2 live crew), maybe even the explosion in women-centered music in country (Kittie Wells, St Dolly, Loretta Lynn etc). It’s difficult to be prescriptive about how to interpret something that might have hidden subtext - even if that subtext is ‘I don’t see people that look like me in the public eye’. Someone like Monika Kuszyńska is a really good example - I don’t really go in for her music but there are pitifully few visibly disabled people in pop, so someone performing (what I think of as quite asinine) songs from a wheelchair is super important. [Dunno if there’s many Poles reading who’d know who she is so that might be a slightly obscure example].
@icaria36 makes good points - we tend to focus on the pop star, and they are typically not the major bread-winner, but definitely the locus and face of big industry. It’s publishers, producers, record label people who make the money - often the singer misses out on residuals like songwriting credits. I remember a statistic that Steps [who were a massive pop group in the UK in the late 90s] made £30k a year. That’s a decent wage for a mid-level office worker in the 90s but it’s not ‘retire young’ money. It’s certainly not the kind of money that’d justify everyone in the supermarket knowing who you are. Maybe they signed bad contracts and maybe they missed out on residuals - but my suspicion is that it’s worth sparing some compassion for how exploited the person performing the music is.
Taylor Swift
Probably the point to mention that I’ve written a book about TS so I’m more than very sympathetic to the idea that it’s possible for pop stars to make decent art. I’d also say that, while her wealth is outrageous and disgusting and the private jet usage inexcusable, she does a good job of raising awareness of how the performer (in her case, also the writer) gets exploited by the industry.
Great topic. Very incisive slogan, right to the root of the matter. Kudos!
I’ve always seen pop music as a prime example of totalitarian capitalism. During the time I was growing up, my society transitioned from a collapsed planned economy to a sort of cargo-cult capitalism; so I imagine my first experiences of “pop music” might’ve been somewhat similar in valence to those of a Chinese kid growing up throughout the opium boom.
(Pick your preferred point on this capitalist-beloved “hockey-stick curve”! Named thusly because “exponential” is a big word and those scare the money, see below.)
“Opium for the masses” analogies completely aside, it felt like so: there’s “that new thing”, fresh out of state prohibition, that everyone seems to like for some reason you can’t understand, given there’s so little to like about it on the face of it.
The secret? Basic induced autopoiesis: once bootstrapped through mass media, “pop music” is a commodity that reproduces the necessity for itself. By means of – mythological analogy on point – glamour.
“Wait, so these highly culturally advanced non-starving westerners who gave us the liberal democracy also actually somehow enjoy themselves to… this shit? And now we have to, too? Well fuck, I’ll steal me some punk rock instead!” Went exactly as planned…
Let’s call a totalitarian capitalist society one where the only shared value is money, and all else is reduced to flavors of bullshit which signify your distance to the closest money-fountain. (What causes money-fountains to occur is, correspondingly, a taboo topic.)
Present-day capitalism does not yet encompass the entirety of reality (for me anyway; for a tired service industry worker deprived of class consciousness who is just doomscrolling TikTok after work, it might be another matter entirely).
Yet, the capitalist mindset is already predominant to a totalitarian degree – and, as its guiding principle is that of infinite growth; and as growth is just a thing that living beings do (but not infinitely), totalitarian capitalism continually tries to subsume anything and everything that is living and growing, in order to prop up its illusion of “infinite growth”.
In this attempt to “eat the world”, totalitarian capitalism’s favorite means of attack is the pincer, enclosing your capacity for personhood from both directions at once: selling you both a manufactured desire-complex, and the means for its supposed fulfillment.
And this right here is the economics of glamour: a thing that both (1) legitimizes itself, by the sheer fact that a lot of money has been poured into it for some reason beyond mortal comprehension; and, in turn (2) demonstrates to the viewer what all the money-chasing they’ve been trapped into can (supposedly) accomplish. If only they sacrificed themselves even harder! They might just be able to purchase the requisite signifiers of this artificial desirable nothing, redeem the emotional debt incurred by living vicariously through the (designated) “superhuman” idol!
If only.
In this model, the art – art being that which brings novel values into being, even if it’s the perhaps ephemeral but distinctly authentic value of hearing a cool sound, or of realizing that someone else in the world has experienced the same fleeting emotional moments as you have – is entirely beside the point. Instead, pop stardom is a complex investment vehicle, backed not by material resources such as oil or steel, but by the ur-resource of Control: namely, parasocially constructed “connectome territory” in the minds of the audience.
You invest $X into attention-grabbing person A, you invest $X*N into the requisite technical facilitation (the smoke and the mirrors don’t make themselves); in return, you get a lever to subtly influence the aesthetic and emotional criteria of a large number of people - and, therefore, their market behavior.
“Stars” are thus walking, talking Schelling points for the socially uncritical; simulated “superhumans” put in place to dictate those layers of social desirability and acceptability which are considered malleable without risk of upheaval, i.e. “the fashions”: the arbitrarily (and inconspicuously unilaterally) changing manners of going about your life which serve to signal one’s unwavering commitment to (totalitarian-capitalist) “pro-sociality”. Plus, they drive consumption, which is the name of the game (popular commitment to tomorrow-will-be just-as-predictable-as-today being the necessary ingredient to impose machinic parameters such as “interest rates” over our beings.)
I’m quite partial to the Japanese term for pop-star, “idol[1]”. More honest as to what function these people perform in society: provide an “official” emotional outlet. Something for the mind to cling to. Hence “pop constellations” reminds me a little of “idol groups”, which are again a capitalist form, though perhaps one steeped in a culture with somewhat less individualistic roots. What I do imagine is a world with many kinds of good music based on many kinds of good ideas, where any interested participant would be welcomed to study them and build upon them, as a matter of societally rewarded human behavior.
Well, one can dream. In my experience, the adversarials are better at multiplying than the altruistics…
But this here rich-ass person (even if they’re only making 10x more than me and not 1000x) who is put on stage for the explicit purpose of telling me what to want, of telling me how to want things – or else! – with the “or else” being the more subtle threat of social exclusion and emotional deprivation, rather than the overt violence of the starvation or the cage – who’d buy that?
Someone who has never seen or needed or conceived of an alternative mode of relating to art, that’s who. The zero-sum competition imposed here is for attention, or rather for attention-legitimacy; people grow into the habit of listening to what is dictated to be popular, rather than any of the myriad available sounds which may do more good to a particular listener at a given juncture.
In the era before streaming and its coincident mass audience surveillance (“analytics”), some level of “factory-floor innovation” was necessarily permissible, in order for the intermediation industry to harvest desirable original styles from the grassroots culture. That’s how pop artists managed to smuggle legitimate critique of the establishment into their oeuvre.
However, that sort of business model has long since been saturated. And, somewhat more recently, become somewhat outmoded. When you have a smart endpoint in every pocket, and are able to measure attention on a second-to-second, person-by-person basis, you don’t really need to let dangerous originality past the gates – all it takes is a dopamine-looped paperclip optimizer, in a reverse Turing test race to the bottom. After all, glamour is only necessary to vex persons; after a certain scale and depth, simplifying your view of the audience till you can model it as an uniform mass of neural substrate to be nudged this way and that is, well, simpler.
(Not to be overly pessimistic, but I find it completely plausible that a generation raised on AI slop would accept uncritically whatever further debasement of the human creative impulse the market-makers will come up with, while the people advancing the art would remain an underfunded minority in a tenuous relationship with the mainstream which, after all, builds all the mics, instruments, speakers, mixers, DAWs, and what have you.)
In my personal hypoth-ethical society, everyone would be free to enjoy themselves as much as pop stars are paid to pretend to! World-renowned musicians would still exist; but they would live up to their image of people who “sing into being” new worlds of experience – as that would be exactly how they had earned their renown in the first place, rather than by concerted action of the owners of the means of communication.
So, to the slogan, I’d say… every pop star is an empathy failure; a symptom of a large-scale inability to empathize with each other without first needing to project the artificial, quasi-emotional life induced by living the unreality of capitalism, onto a designated vicarious intermediary (idol).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3BIO_55Y-E – I don’t know if this is a critique of idol-hood per se, but it definitely constitutes a personal value beyond the monetary; which is the other incomprehensibility-taboo of totalitarian capitalism. ↩︎
Hopefully, while it’s certainly slowly eating up our asses, we’re not entirely swallowed by the systems, and will never be ! And if this forum and the music community certainly told me something, it’s that we still do have empathy for each other
That’s where the “pop constellation” helps paint a picture: instead of a signle bloody big sun-star that burns and blinds everyone around, you get a collection of small lights to ride in-between.
This could just be a simple as “no exceptional artistic promotion” so as to stop the pop-star snow ball from getting bigger and bigger, or it could also translate into ideas like “music artist minimum wage”.
I’ve heard of music-rights collecting organizations who redistribute unclaimed rights… to the most heard artists on the radio. THAT is a bonafide “policy failure” that gets the pop-star system rolling !
Is that any true ? Can we do anything against that ?
Very appropriate to this conversation: this new song from Theo Katzman, “I Don’t Want to Be A Billionaire” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qEz1bxwnwA
I’ve certainly looked at a small country’s “rights-collecting” organization’s annual unclaimed report to see… pretty much all artists from that country who I listen to – or at least those of them who can be said to have rotation and be popular and at all. Except maybe the ones who went on to found the org.
But what can be done about that I’d like to hear as well, bc I find myself only being able to think up devious schemes 
Bc the ones on the list obviously didnt even care that that’s a thing, selling plays isn’t part of their business model, live + merch + occassional product placement + general being sketchasauruses. Case study right there.
Big blocker here is: can a legislative body, e.g. a government, have an aesthetic criterion? E.g. is paid rotation considered free/protected speech in a given jurisdiction?
Devious workaround someone tried
have the state give, nay, not to artists, to “rights-collecting” organizations of course, check this out: tax levied on every blank CD, or any other mass storage drive, for the probability for that megabyte to contain contraband artistic data (e.g. pirated MP3s).
Sorry but inbetween what. e.g.:
- Inbetween not being able to play tracks appropriate for occasions because the music player of choice has Spotify and artist doesn’t publish to there.
- Inbetween of the moments where you still have to know about the latest pop hits because you’re in a taxi or waiting for your friend at the cheesy joint.
Bleak, no…
Thesis: Music as means-of-empathy works only if you’re actually able to hear it. If someone paid for you to hear something, it’s an ad. Empathize with the ad? Bout wha? 
Ergo, industrial model of distribution of music is only needed to crowd out the thoughts of the workers 
For socially transformative potential of music to be more easily realized, it’s better to have no “inbetween”; ideally, the music should never stop. But that’s a little harder to accomplish. Technically.
Music is among other things a form of personal expression, and the world is already filled to the brim with at least as many people willing to express themselves as with potential listeners. Thus it ends up being the means of distribution which gives some people first dibs on deciding the default form in which the notion of empathy is even understood (at least as far as that’s determined by the music inundating a given space, anyway.)
Check it, it’s like a who’s who of the scene https://www.musicautor.org/images/dokumenti/repertoar/Neidentificiran_repertoar.pdf and it’s Pretty Fucken Odd that none of them claimed their dues from the Most Official faucet for the jurisdiction. Especially love how it starts with “we have no idea who these people are either”
Returning to this with another thought - there’s a sense in which we can ignore pop music. Some of this is about my context but I don’t get exposed to pop music much, except by choice - I don’t go to shops that play it, I’m lucky enough to not have a job in those shops (pubs / clubs etc). I do see a lot of local music. There are problems with the capitalism of pop, per se, but I’m happy to sideline that - what I’m less happy to sideline is paying musicians in those rare occasions when I put on gigs. I appreciate ‘everyone’s broke’ is the usual reason that small local gigs don’t come with money but there’s a bunch of things that could change - in-house promoters that take a cut of the bar for the bands, subsidies for local art (I think this is true in parts of Europe - not the UK), funding for hiring venues / sound engineers (which tend to take the largest chunk out of a promoter’s budget). I tend to point the problem of local music at landlordism.
What I mean really is that the problem doesn’t have to be ‘pop stars take the largest cut’ so much as ‘smaller musicians should take a cut from means other than record sales and merch (which are dead in the water)’. Leave the capitalism at the top and make it cheaper for people to see local music and make it less prohibitive for local musicians to make a living (or even just break even).
edit: Also - I tend to think ‘well no-one likes my music because it’s shit’. This may be the case but I imagine I’d have a more positive approach to it if it wasn’t such a persistent moneyhole to do music in front of people.
We’re not a legislative body here, we’re just a bunch of music nerds who talk and dream about music. Whatever policy we might want to enforce or veer towards we should only reasonably think that it’s gonna be upheld by ourselves, among our peers or in our respective organizations and projects.
The status quo is awful and i won’t argue on that. But we can’t change it by snapping our fingers, so we might as well try to find solutions ? That’s the way i see it. And part of the question Alex raised was also : how would we make a change, as a musician collective ? draw the public eyes towards the constellations instead of the sun ?
To your points i can answer :
- Music players are diversifying. That’s what Mirlo and Jam.coop and so many others are trying to do. The music industry is not helping, and we’re far from a perfect world but we’re slowly getting there. I’m sure you can Bluetooth your way out of many inextricable situations with your own device and quick search on cooperative-owned services
or even bandcamp and soundcloud. - If i hear the same song every day ten times a day and suddenly i get to hear a single fresh melody that pleases me, be sure i’ll remember that one. You can only force so much of the same music soup into someone’s ears until it becomes background noise, at which point you start to notice other stuff. As Hakarl said, “there is a sens in which we can ignore pop music”.
There is also something to be said about the public itself. I can see it with my own brother and father, who might want to listen to “some music” and just ask their favourite app/AI for “jazz” or “chill electronic music”. Was it the industry that incited people into behaving like that or was it a human motivation ? probably a little bit of both.
With that in mind, i can see the music landscape getting more and more polarized, with successful music (not be be mistaken with successful musicians) being either “idol” pop-stars with cross-media presence and a strong “brand” identity, or generic music that is not abrasive and does not annoy you in any way… with less and less in-betweens. Or at least, less opportunities to discover these rich in-betweens.
So, how can we do to counter that industry ?
What comes to my mind immediately is: curation. Good curation, human curation, the one that strikes you for its boldness or accuracy. Whether it’s in music venues with real-life musicians or in web playlists. That’s what sparked the recent discussion on GarageBand : the curation was so good that the industry’s big fiery-eye could not ignore it anymore.