Epilogue: Music Tech Must Go On
A recipe for slow solutions.
The world woke up yesterday to news that the Justice Department filed a major antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation - Ticketmaster. We’re not going to use this final edition of The Cadence to discuss the state of live concerts. Nor are we going to use this as an excuse to unpack the ongoing question of government regulation as it pertains to ticket fees, streaming rates, AI protections or any other myriad of issues. We’re simply flagging this big news to point out how difficult it’s been deciding when to stop publishing this newsletter.
The fact is, our area of exploration is forever frothy, and there will never be a time when there’s nothing new to address at the intersection of music, tech and brands. Hell, Suno AI just announced a $125M round of investment to turn (likely) stolen training data into songs about goldfish, or something.
$150 mil. is a whole lotta scrilla for a product that’s only six months old created by four co-founders without Wikipedia pages. For comparison, Spotify waited four years to take its first investor dollars, and five before it banked its first $100M in investment (money that it needed for its U.S. expansion). Bandcamp launched in 2007, took on an undisclosed amount to scale up operations in 2010, then ran as a profitable company for ten years before taking another $40M in 2020 and selling to Epic Games in 2022.
That sale was widely regarded as the beginning of the end for Bandcamp, even though the marketplace has continued to operate more or less as it did all along. Spotify, as we know, kept on taking investment to maintain its position as the world’s largest streaming platform, fending off tech giants like Apple and Amazon, and reaching IPO in 2018. Since then, the company has made some major moves into sectors like podcasting and audio books. It’s also had some megaflops (the company is going to brick Car Thing at the end of the year). But the only meaningful innovations in streaming music now revolve around business models and payout rates — not the service itself.
In a way, the current state of music — streaming, live and otherwise — reminds us of the mid-70s, an era of bloated arena rock, vapid suburban disco and watered down pop music. It was also a time of consolidation, with revolutionary sixties labels like Atlantic, Elektra, and Warner combining to form a fourth major label to compete against incumbents Columbia, EMI/Capitol, and MCA.
Fortunately, this stagnant stage created the conditions that eventually resulted in punk rock, hip-hop and house music — all things that shook up the status quo and redefined the mainstream for decades to come. And along with these exciting new sounds, an economy of small labels, independent record stores and underground media cropped up to support the new blast of creativity.
So is the music business about to have another late-70s-style renaissance? The DOJ insists that breaking up Live Nation will open up competition for promoters, venues and ticketing services.
As for music tech, we recently got wind of Chora, a new music marketplace being launched by longtime friend of The Cadence, Joshua Eustis (aka Telefon Tel Aviv).
Longtime readers may recall Josh’s contributions to our early thinking about music innovation during the heady days of music NFTs. The potential for artificial scarcity that we championed in 2021 turned out to be ultimately underwhelming. But the DIY spirit of that time still feels salient in 2024 —even if most of the big thinkers in the space have pivoted to music AI as the next panacea.
Chora doesn’t rely on Web3, AI or any other untested MacGuffin to create value. Josh and his co-founders Nigel Evan Dennis and Olive Kimoto have instead chosen to pick up where Bandcamp seems to have left off — creating an ecosystem for oblique musicians and serious fans that focuses on owning digital files (and playing them on your phone), while consolidating discovery, recommendation and music-only social into one app. It’s a better mousetrap, but one that still relies on cheese.
“I want the Twitter anon 20-year-old trans girls making IDM,” Josh told us earlier this week. “I want the noise kids from Duluth. I want everybody! Send me your sick, your needy, your poor, your weary.”
Chora plans to have a beta ready by fall and a full launch by next year (with a few angel investors picked up along the way). This pace may sound glacial compared to Suno and such, but not every innovation has to come from moving fast and breaking things. In fact, most probably shouldn’t.
TOOKAWAYS
Our individual takes on the past 3 1/2 years of The Cadence.
Chris Monaco
Curiosity and Interest are in everything we do. We learn. We teach. We share. We contribute. We evolve and curiosity leads to new interests, and we make new contributions.
The last 3.5 years of The Cadence is the exactly this process. I’m so fortunate to have been able to experience this from a project born out of necessity, during a specific time in my life, and in the world. What a ride it has been. To stand back and see this archived body of work as a result, is only one of the rewards I get to enjoy.
I offer a huge thank you to all our collaborators, guests, and readers that joined us on this magnificent journey. A special thank you to Josh Glazer for his words and wisdom.
And as this chapter comes to an end, I look for my Takeaways. There is a list, however the standout is a newfound appreciation for the practice of curiosity and focused interest.
The things we like (books, movies, music, art, food, innovation…) matter. These are the things that feed our soul and inform deeper levels of interest in ourselves and everything and everyone around us.
Take some time for yourself today. Explore the world. Be Curious and Be Interested. Take time to discover what someone else finds interesting. It will be worth your time.
As a result of my time with The Cadence. I believe more than ever in the power of curiosity and, that being interested makes us more interesting, in everything we do.
Joshua Glazer
One hundred thousand. That’s roughly the number of words I’ve written since we launched The Cadence 180 weeks ago.
When we first started, I told Chris that I could never maintain a weekly Substack on my own. That I needed someone to keep me accountable. And if he’d provide some expertise, I’d crank out the prose.
Some ideas came to us quickly, while others required long debates over what we wanted to say regarding a particular overall trend or exciting news item. Those convos were always enlightening and taught me a lot about how the business of culture is conducted from the c-suite (as opposed to the independent, underground, too-cool-by-half operations I’d always aligned myself with). So in a way, The Cadence was a long overdue mentorship. Thanks, Chris.
I started The Cadence able to rattle off the names of 100 indie labels, but having to Google the three majors. I leave it with an elevated understanding that it requires both mainstream and underground to make a meaningful cultural industry. I’ll always love the former, but have a new respect for the latter.
So catch me at the mainstage, or maybe at the warehouse rave. Hell, let’s hit up some basement shows. You help me discover the exciting new sounds and I’ll bore you with the minutia of how it functions within the current and historical context of cultural production and consumption. What could be more fun than that?
Bummed to see you leave this space but know you’re just out of sight tinkering away on something great. Oh, and thanks for featuring me for a shining moment in those 180 weeks.