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.”

Dylan Dunlap shares his new single My Echo. It’s another well crafted mid tempo song from the Los Angeles native.

“I didn’t want to write about COVID, so I decided to write about Finding Nemo” shared Dylan.
The singer songwriter cites Coldplay and Mumford & Sons as influences. He supported OneRepublic at the sold-out Stadium of Fire event in Provo, UT while releasing his first-ever original “Microphones & Lights,” and toured across the US and the UK. Dylan released the single “If That’s Alright’ that clocked over 20 million streams. He’s landed on Spotify’s Chill Hits among others.

Fresh on the scene, check out Alma Page by Soleil Bleu.  You’ll love if you’re fond of shoegaze, dream pop, psychedelic, and indie pop. The video is trippy and eerie  which was shot during the second lockdown in Paris and directed by Leo Schrepel.
They met in a late in the night, trough smoky clouds according to the duo made up of Arthur Jacquin (musician, actor) and Lou Lesage (singer actress). They also noted iit was love at first sight, the first burst of a sun in the horizon. From this love and complicity was born a musical project.

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.

Look out for Essy and the new track Cry For Me. If you love 80’s, you’ll like this uptempo pop track. It’s the female version of The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Light’s with an added sax at the end of the song.  Yes, people are still obsessed with the 80’s. Before moving to Nashville, Rachel Braig aka Essy, studied at Berklee College of Music and collaborated with songwriters before writing with electronic duo Ship Wrek. Give it a listen.