Balancing Craft vs Character in Music and The Music Industry

The music industry is rewarding personality over talent, forcing artists to chase social media trends instead of focusing on their craft, writes Mark Mulligan. It’s time to reexamine the balance of craft vs character in music and the music business.

Balancing Craft vs Character in Music and The Music Industry

by Mark Mulligan from the Music Industry Blog

I recently wrote about the unflattening of music, how creativity, craft and fandom can – if done right – counter the growing commodification of music. Not surprisingly, I focused on the music side of the equation but in doing so I missed the other big flattening challenge music faces, not from music but from artists themselves, or rather what artists are having to become. 

Music, or at least popular music, has always been more than just about the music, it has been the artist too.  But if there was previously some kind of equilibrium, the balance between craft and character has tilted firmly to the latter. It has done so because the social ecosystems in which the music business operates, reward personality more than they do craft. The music business needs to find a way to extract itself from this culture meatgrinder.

A recent Rick Beato video critiqued a major label exec for his focus on the social prowess of artists. Social has done more than anything else to push the balance towards character. With its focus on the personal, social has inherently shifted the marketing burden onto the shoulders of the artist. They are the ones that most often build brand, audience and streams from their social activity. Social now accounts for 17% of all entertainment time, more than streaming music (13%) but its soft power is bigger than its share-of-time hard power. This is because social is often our discovery entry point for everything else. For example, TikTok is the number one place Gen Z discover new music. 

But music is just one sub-strand of social, which means that artists are competing with all other creators for attention. Which is complicated further by the fact that algorithms nichify everything, making cutting through harder still.

“artists end up, intentionally or otherwise, building a persona, a character”

Building fan relationships may be the ideal, but ultimately the algorithm rewards ‘buzzy’ behaviours and artists find themselves not only having to continually say something, but having to say something that cuts through. So, it is not even artists’ character that is being pushed, but an exaggerated, caricature. Artists end up, intentionally or otherwise, building a persona, a character. It is because of this double meaning (i.e. personality AND persona) that I use the word ‘character’ – that, and because it alliterates nicely with ‘craft’ .

When labels (obviously not all of them, but many of them) look for artists that have strong social followings, they see that as a reflection of the artist’s popularity and potential. It is, but more so, it is a reflection of the artist’s character and the suitability of that character to the social algorithm.

All of this might be a price worth paying, were it not for the side effects:

• Social is not actually that effective: Despite all the effort put into social, its conversion rate isn’t great. Only a minority of people stream music they discover on social. The music business thinks of social as a funnel but really it is more like panning for gold, with water streaming out of the bottom (pun intended) but what’s important being left behind – the gold nuggets of fandom, identity and community.
• We can’t see the ‘whys’: Music marketers can measure the effects of virality (the ‘whats’) but not the causes (the ‘whys’). They can’t tell whether it was the song or the creator that created the viral moment. They can observe correlation but not causality.
• Passive fandom: Viral moments are the result of passive fandom, but artist success depends on deeper, active fandom.
• Character can be an obstacle: Artist character is important but it is only part of why we like the music we do. We all like some music by artists we don’t particularly like as people. But the more we rely on the artist’s character as our route into their music, the more likely we are to not engage with music at all if we don’t like the artist. And with streaming flattening music, there is progressively less chance of us serendipitously discovering a ‘real’ artist’s music on streaming, sans character.
• Craft gets relegated: With the focus on doing and saying stuff that fires up the social algorithm, the craft of music loses ground. Either because artists find themselves with less time to make music, or because labels and management sign the artists who emphasise character over craft, content over composition.

In many respect, artists and labels can’t be criticized for playing to the system. If they don’t, they risk failure. They are caught up in a system that rewards character over craft. So, what is the solution? It is much easier said than done, but the music industry needs social places where either music alone lives, or at least it has a starring role. Apple tried and failed years ago with iTunes Ping! but it was the wrong execution and at the wrong time. It was basically TikTok 10 years before TikTok, but not done very well.

“emphasise music over personality”

To succeed, this new place (or places) will have to avoid making the same mistakes as today’s social apps. It will need to emphasise music over personality. It will need to be a place without trolling. Which will likely mean gated fan communities, where bad behaviour is not tolerated, perhaps leveraging the Twitch model of community-led moderation. Ideally, it will also be a slow internet, a place where virality, likes and follower counts take second place to community, culture and real conversation. 

Sounds ridiculously idealistic right? Perhaps it is, but these are the underlying values of human society. Technology has shifted us away from them and AI threatens to push us even further away. People are forced into behaviours that make sense to the machine more than they do to humans. Anyone who has seen the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown will have seen an artist that wanted it to be all about his music, who didn’t want to have to be a star. Things will never be like that again, and indeed there are many ways in which today’s world is immeasurably better. But over the intervening decades the pendulum has swung entirely in the opposite direction. Now the time is right for it to settle somewhere in the middle.