The Hum: Issue #1
Beginnings
👋 Hello reader! This is The Hum, a newsletter offering insights into the intersection of music, sustainability, technology, and innovation. We started this newsletter to understand the social, cultural, and environmental impact of the music industry and its ongoing evolution. The Hum is edited by Fernando de Buen and Roxanne Hoffman, strategic designers who care about the planet and value the warm sound of a vinyl record.
Each issue presents quick insights, short essays, and serialized stories tracing the evolution of music, its lasting influence, and future trajectories. The scope of 'music' encompasses everything from the historic wax cylinder to cutting-edge generative AI algorithms. We try to draw from diverse news sources and industry perspectives, striving to acknowledge and mitigate bias where possible. Lastly, The Hum is a prototype and continuous work-in-progress, we encourage feedback and sharing as we continue to iterate!
Tracing the history of portable audio
Today, music is universally available at our fingertips, but it wasn’t always that way. Portable audio changed the way we listen to music enabling it to become ubiquitous, intimate, and easily shareable. For our first serialized story, we will be looking into the history of how this came to be, and how different innovations have changed how we make, release, and listen to music.
Why Portable Audio?
Innovations in portable audio formats have impacted music culture and societal norms around music consumption. Each step along the way—from the cassette to Spotify—has also driven technological development and had significant effects on the planet. We hope that by exploring the history of these formats and listening habits, we can gain clarity into how future music listening will need to meet the needs of an evolving audience and planet.
Over the next issues of The Hum, we will explore:
How listening became decentralized. With the creation of products like the pocket radio, the Walkman, and the iPod, music lovers could exercise greater control over when and what they listened to, without having to rely on static or centralized sources.
How music distribution changed, and how the ability to easily replicate music changed both personal habits and the industry’s approach to piracy, authorship, copyrights.
The influence that each music format has had on listening, culture, and industry.
The role of music in driving new waves of human-computer interaction and creating community.
The impact of different music formats on the environment.
If you look past the nostalgia of the ‘80s mixtape, the impact of portable audio is wide and everlasting. Let’s look into it!
In the next entry to this series we’ll talk about when portable audio started and what set it in motion.
New streaming payout model on the horizon
Traditional streaming models typically compensate rights holders based on the number of streams a track generates. For instance, Spotify's model pays royalties estimated from $0.003 to $0.005 to any track played for at least 30 seconds. While generally fair, this model also incentivizes bad actors to exploit the system—by uploading 31-second white noise tracks or utilizing bots to artificially boost stream counts.
Recently, Spotify announced they are changing their payout model to a two-tier system. Under this new structure, tracks will need a minimum of 1,000 streams per year to qualify for a payout. The rationale behind this change is to combat streaming abuses on the platform, with Spotify claiming that it could in the long run free up to $1 billion in revenue to be distributed among "working musicians." However, according to Music Radar and United Musicians and Allied Workers, roughly 2/3 of songs on Spotify have less than 1,000 plays, meaning that many emerging artists whose songs have have not yet surpassed the 1,000 stream threshold will have their track revenues redirected to bigger acts (which is kind of a bummer).
This model will also likely impact DIY distributors like CD Baby and Tunecore, whose business is to help independent artists upload their tracks to DSPs. Given that many of these distribution companies themselves have minimum royalty payouts, they benefit from the thousands of tracks that only get a few hundred plays annually, falling below their own payout thresholds. For them, the unallocated funds accumulating interest in their bank account will likely disappear or be diminished.
Sustainability from the top-down
On November 29th, in advance of the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference (COP28), three music industry giants, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, and Warner Music Group, announced the establishment of the Music Industry Climate Collective. The purpose of the collective is broadly to address the music industry’s impact on climate change. Their first initiative is to determine guidance for measuring scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, which are indirect emissions from the value chain.
This is not the first time these three companies come together to discuss their impact. In 2021 in response to COP26, the same three corporations were high profile signatories of the Music Climate Pact, initiated by the UK’s Alliance for Independent Music (AIM). The pact set out to define commitments for all music industry signers to measure their emissions direct from the company and indirect emissions pertaining to power.
Sony is featured in an SBTi case study about their progress, although little information is shared about advances for their overall music group. On the other end of the spectrum, Secretly Group, a family of independent US-based labels which also signed the pact, has stated the difficulty of making progress toward sustainable goals, concluding that a “coherent approach remained elusive.” It begs the question, does committing to measuring emissions equate to tangible actions to ensure business operations are sustainable?
AI in music: Tech in the driving seat
It feels like nowadays AI is everywhere, and music is no exception. Some of you may have noticed some exciting news in the space, like YouTube’s recent AI and music incubator, Google’s TextFX collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, and their announcement of DeepMind’s Lyria AI music generation model.
However, most of the excitement about these tools and capabilities seems to be coming from the tech side of the equation—tech is leading the way, after all. While some (already successful, mind you) artists have jumped on the bandwagon with these tech companies to participate in the development of these systems, the seeming lack of emerging artists participating in these conversations is worrisome.
Some sensible voices in the space, like the former VP of Audio at Stability AI, are sounding the alarm about the impact that AI may have on music creation as a whole, but it seems that bigger, more powerful voices are intent on pushing forward without fully considering the needs of and impact on all types of musicians.