Vice Media Report Downplays Music
Vice Guide To Culture 2023 barely mentions music in it's 135 pages.
This week, Vice Media dropped its now annual Guide to Culture, a hefty report intended to examine “key trends, cultural movements, and consumer data that will help readers understand the forces of change in young people’s lives.” Inside the free report, readers — presumably made up of brand marketers who might be interested in the services of Vice Insights — get an analysis of ten “Culture Codes” impacting Gen Z consumers that include things like Insourcing, Hyper Pragmatism and Neo-Hedonism.
We’ve not yet had time to fully consume the report’s 135 pages, but since simplification is kinda our jam, we immediately conduct a CTRL-F search for the word “music.” To our surprise, the term showed up a paltry six times — thrice in the section on Reclaiming Heritage, once in the semi-overlapping Sovereignty of Self conversation, once in the mental health-centered Feel Me chapter (subsection: “Basking in Performative Empowerment vs. Fragility”) and finally in the Open Beta pages that champion all aspects of creativity.
Similar searches for specific genres like hip-hop and EDM turned up zero results (shout out to “indie sleaze” for meriting a mention), as did queries for “Spotify,” “YouTube,” etc. In contrast, “TikTok” makes 17 appearances in the report, but all in the context of trends found on the platform, none of which relate to music despite the musical note in the app’s icon.
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The overall takeaway is not exactly breaking news, but it’s clear that music has lost its most-favored status as a driver of the broader cultural conversation. Much of this is due to the fact that platforms have flattened all content into one endless scroll. It could also have to do with the fact that many of the subjects that were once coded in music are now being frankly discussed on their own terms. Gen Z possesses the language to be conversant in subjects like “constructs of self” and “cathartic rituals of practice” at a level Millenials could only aspire to (and which Gen X and Boomers could never dream of). When the discourse openly includes sex and drugs, do you need rock & roll?
None of this is to say that music is at a nadir in terms of its ability to move needles, both socially and economically. Pearl Jam was on the cover of the monoculture bible Time Magazine in 1993, but their campaign against Ticketmaster two years later couldn’t get Congressional attention the way angry Taylor Swift fans can in 2023.
Music can still sell units (soooo muuuuch viiinnyyyllll), tickets and products. But looking towards music and musicians in search of deeper social insights on young people is no longer viable the way it was in, say, the heyday of psychedelia, or hip-hop, or punk, or rave or whatever. If music has any broader meaning today, it is filtering up from the larger discourse instead of down from the artists.
This new polarity is good in the sense that it has spared us from some serious cultural contamination recently. Imagine if Kanye’s 2022 Nazi offensive had the same ability to tangibly affect young people’s perceptions of the world in the same way as David Bowie’s androgyny did in the 70s.
Then again, Bowie’s vision (if not sound) seemed more manifest in 2022 than it did in 1972. Who knows what the future “Culture Codes” might look like if artists aren’t able to plant seeds decades earlier?
TAKEAWAYS
Salient statements from this week’s music news.
1. Biden Calls for Limits on Ticket Fees for Concerts and Sporting Events
The president called out Ticketmaster by name in part of a wider campaign to combat fees across industries like airline tickets and banking.
Takeaway: Mr. Biden’s call for congressional action comes shortly after senators took turns pillorying Live Nation Entertainment, the concert industry giant that owns Ticketmaster, over the botched sale of tickets to Taylor Swift’s latest tour and what some lawmakers called the company’s monopolistic hold on ticketing and live events.
2. What Will the Future of Streaming Royalties Look Like? Tidal and UMG Want to Find Out
The two companies have committed to testing various models, but its unclear how much can change without more money coming in.
Takeaway: One study found that for 99.4% of artists, the switch would equate to less than a 5% bump in royalties — for many, effectively just a few euros per year — which could be offset by the administrative costs of the switch itself for the platform.
3. Google Created an AI That Can Generate Music From Text Descriptions, but Won’t Release It
Google revealed impressive results in fidelity and musicality via an academic paper but has no plans to release the technology while questions about AI ethics remain.
Takeaway: Google researchers note the many ethical challenges posed by a system like MusicLM, including a tendency to incorporate copyrighted material from training data into the generated songs.
