I just read a brilliant piece by Mark Mulligan that talks about the attention economy, consumption and culture.

When you’re promoting a new song, trying to find listeners along the way, you’re competing against a machine that is fed constantly with useless content just to steal your attention.

He notes, “The increasingly fierce competition for consumers’ attention is becoming corrosive, with clickbait, autoplay and content farms degrading both content and culture. What matters is acquiring audience and their time, the type of content and tactics that captures them is secondary. It is not just bottom feeder content farms that play this game, instead the wider digital entertainment landscape has allowed itself to become infected by their strategic worldview.

The algorithmic machine is designed to consume content. It has nothing to do with quality or the type of content. It’s calories in and calorie out. Artists, entertainers, influencers, and laymen feed the machine minute by minute and with each calorie consumed, it becomes bigger. The machine is like Pac-Man eating everything in its path.”

“Do not for a minute think this is a media-only problem. The corrosive impact of the attention economy can be seen right across digital entertainment, from hastily churned out scripted dramas, through to music. Artists and labels are locked in a race to increase the volume and velocity of music they put out, spurred on by Spotify’s Daniel Ek clarion call to up the ante even further. In this volume and velocity game, algorithm-friendly A&R and playlist hits win out. Clickbait music comes out on top. And because music attention spans are shortening, no sooner has the listener’s attention been grabbed, then it is lost again due to the next new track. In the attention economy’s volume and velocity game, the streaming platform is a hungry beast that is perpetually hungry. Each new song is just another bit of calorific input to sate its appetite.”

“In this world, ‘streamability’ trumps musicality, but it is not just culture that suffers. Cutting through the clutter of 50,000 new songs every day also delivers diminishing returns for marketing spend. Labels have to spend more to get weaker results.”

The only way to break free from the machine is to stop feeding it. It will eventually starve itself. It will still exist but it won’t be an overpowering force and content and culture will have value and meaning again.

“The music industry has developed an attention dependency in the least healthy environment possible.

“This is not one of those market dynamics that will eventually find a natural course correction. Instead, the music industry has to decide it wants to break its attention dependency and start doing things differently. Until then, consumption and content will continue to push culture to the side lines.”

In his final hours, Trump pardoned Roc Nation CEO Desiree Perez, rapper Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, and Death Row Records Michael “Harry O” Harris.
Let’s give a warm to welcome President Joe Biden and VP Kamala Harris. President Joe Biden just tweeted, “I am heading to the Oval Office to get right to work delivering bold action and immediate relief for American families.”
What are we facing down the road? The threat of Covid, the climate, and the economy. How do we play a part? Mask up, buy a Tesla, and support your local business. Seriously, we have a lot of work ahead of us folks, but we can do this.

They say getting a driver’s license is an exciting milestone for any teen. Well, the 17-year-old actress Olivia Rodrigo has a smash hit with her song Driver License. It’s been a while since Disney broke an artist. The song is supercharged with top 40 radio play, Tiktok presence and a shoutout from Taylor Swift. The song has clocked more than 100 million streams on Spotify, making it the “fastest song on Spotify to hit this milestone.

The 21 year old rapper Flo Milli has become Spotify’s US RADAR artist. Her new song Roaring 20s dropped today.

“The Roaring Twenties was a period in history of dramatic social and political change. Last year I was able to break through during a very difficult time for not only our country but, the world. Born in 2000, and having my breakout year in 2020, I feel like I’m living in the new age of the Roaring Twenties, shared Flo”
The Alabama based artist will have full support from Spotify from playlists to a Spotify Singles recording in conjunction with marketing & promo.
Flo began writing and recording in high school altering finding inspiration by R&B TV show 106 & Park and Nicki Minaj. Prior to her debut mixtape in 2020, her first two songs, “Beef FloMix” and “In the Party,” went viral.

Canada’s Tate McRae tops the Billboard Emerging Artists chart. Forever known as the pandemic artist, meaning her song You Broke Me First was released during lockdowns while gaining traction. Before signing with RCA she was dancing competitively. Moving into the artist world, she began posting songs she wrote on her YouTube channel. As destiny would have it, the songs went viral.
Tate says, “I was like, really mad, wrote this random song in 20 minutes and I was like, ‘Here we’re putting it online. My family hated it. I hated it. We were just like, ‘O.K., put it out there. But then something unexpected happened. It ended up going viral overnight and it was super weird,” says Tate. “So after it hit, like, 30 million views, I was like, ‘I should do this again!'”She laughs, “So I kept on writing songs every week and signed with RCA [Records] and the transition slowly started to happen.”