Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

We’re officially three Fridays away from A2IM’s annual can’t-miss music conference Indie Week, and that’s a wild place to be as this year flies past! Are you coming? Tickets get more expensive after May 21, and you still have a shot at a Libera Awards table but they’re filling fast. I’m not just pushing this because A2IM is a client, by any means - historically, this is the most useful conference I go to annually for the work I do. Supporting it directly this year will be a delight.

Today, we’re getting into the perspective you want to see from any company working with musicians, especially as the platforms music projects get marketed on become more and more mysterious for customers and artists both. It comes down to whether or not they understand the surreal, yet important, nature of the work. Scroll through for that!

Ads From Businesses You Can Trust: 

Dream Surgery

It’s interesting to watch all the recommendation engines perform in ways that aren’t ideal, seemingly at once.

Is this the Slop Singularity? I don’t necessarily think so, yet. Because some of this is the old-fashioned kind of AI: algorithms. But all of it may lead you to feeling more confused on the Internet than ever.

Some examples of it from over the last week:

• Nearly every time I finish a new punk-adjacent record (or even playlist!) on Spotify, it pushes a song from the new Preoccupations album to me. I think this band is good, but I have heard them many times, and they aren’t one I personally go back to. So aside from them being a well-established post punk act and it being a new album, why do they keep getting pushed to me? And why so much more heavily than any band that’s been thrown into my autoplay-after Radio list in the past year? (No exaggeration, this has happened six separate times in the last week, including twice as I was writing this, and I haven’t saved the album. I started counting.)

• Reddit showed me a “thanks I hate it” post yesterday with a human mouth loaded with bottom teeth in all the wrong places, without any NSFW blur, from a sub-Reddit I don’t follow. I don’t look up posts like this on Reddit; I use my account more like a news aggregator, and I sometimes post on music-related forums and lurk stuff about sci-fi novels lately. Not the first weird push from an unfollowed account there, but…why toss me this, of all things?

• Instagram is so excessively prioritizing account discovery right now that it’s difficult to even see your friends’ posts in the feed. It hasn’t totally spilled over to Story posts yet, but it’s…a lot. You’ve seen this. I don’t really need to explain it much further. In fact, I’ve been seeing a couple of accounts get past it by creating alts to post about stuff the main account is doing, which is a pretty dark timeline even for a Meta property!

And so, when news broke a few days ago about SoundCloud having language in their terms of services about using uploads to train AI, the resulting furor was met with something I personally found reassuring: a statement from CEO Eliah Seton saying the legal language was “too broad” and would now be superseded by an opt-in to allow content for training. Normally, this is an opt-out on other platforms, which is a big win if you’re an artist. This is the kind of statement you want to read from a company like this:

Now, let’s get one thing straight: while I’m an optimistic realist, I’m not one to assume good intentions from corporate entities, less because they’re driven for profit by imperfect people and more because they’re driven for profit by enough people that it’s easy for their conscience to become a diffuse thing. But in this case, I have to believe what’s being said here because this is how the entire music industry is structured. It is a sector where the artist is catered to first and foremost, sometimes to an enabling fault, even if the underlying business is going to operate from a position of wealth extraction. So the company’s strategic advantage for why artists go to them has to be considered - and I don’t think SoundCloud, which was long known for having the best predictive “next in queue” algorithm in music tech before Spotify made deeper improvements, is doing anything other than trying to keep up with the times.

But without knowing or being in any kind of informed position to speculate beyond how this stuff tends to go, I have to think the overly-broad AI language was put here by legal that’s used to dealing with users in a tech context, rather than users in a music context. That’s important, for two reasons. For one, it’s easy to forget that in music, the artists are often both the customer and the product, which is part of why I work directly with creators on how to be a self-governing business within it - it’s a difficult thing to fully wrap your head around! The other reason is that, for as much reservation as creators have about AI right now, it’s downright mainstream in tech in a way where nearly every major network’s terms of service has seen a very public adjustment to this new normal.

I’ve written a great deal about AI here, and this is another point where I should be clear: I’m not against AI entirely. I mean, I was using Midjourney for my old band’s show flyers as an early adopter, and I switched to the non-AI parts of Canva for that once I realized it was better for my purposes. Today, I dislike it for original work because it’s often hallucinating a mashup of not-paid-for copyrighted source images according to your prompts, but I’ve seen it do cool things in the hands of someone who’s already a talented artist or designer and using it as a careful sweetener. Viewing new tech as a tool, and only trusting it so far but also doing what you can to understand it, is incredibly important. Ask any marketer in the SEO business how much time AI platforms save them with the most trivial portions of a campaign, and you’ll hear glowing stuff. It’s an unreliable therapist and has too-aggressive proponents, but it’s useful for plenty of things.

Ultimately, this is what comes down to: trust is earned. Lots of parts of the music industry, especially the independent side, do not operate from a perspective of wealth extraction first, creators second. But access is currency, people will pay for access, and that has meant there is a long history of businesses that will operate in that way within it. And there’s plenty of tech that will operate from a pure capitalist perspective. It pays to be on our collective guard with this.

But for me, SoundCloud’s response to being called out on this broad bit of legalese was fresh air in one specific way: how many companies come out and say they’re trying to make things better for the creators who use them, even on a lip-service basis? 

Plenty of people are indeed trying to do that as they catch up to a world in which creators don’t need to share rights in the same way they did 20 years ago. I think of the major labels who are increasingly willing to cut 50/50 deals with artists, or even distribution-only deals. I also think of those special indie labels who have done things in a very creator-forward way for a long time, like Ipecac who are famous for cutting one-album deals with anyone who makes the roster. And there are lots of higher-tier indie distributors who have invested heavily in their marketing arms, putting their weight behind artists in a way that stands right there with the traditional label role.

It’s sorely needed, that bit of reassurance. I’ve seen Spotify do similar things lately, like the “remove from playlist” feature they added after the recurring takedown issues last year with artists who hadn’t done anything to juice their streams. YouTube has had creator certifications for some time, which is also neat. I’d love to see more of that from tech in general, if only to say to creators, “We’re in dialogue with you, and we know this is part of your business now.” 

I’ve had moments along the way of noting to colleagues, “You know, what we do in any kind of work with artists is serious work, but it’s not brain surgery. Nobody is in a life-or-death position.” And in many ways, that can be true. 

But there is a different level of responsibility to also consider, which some have heard me say in recent years as well: creator-focused work isn’t brain surgery, but it can be dream surgery. It’s a good bit of responsibility to have. You have to maintain boundaries in every part of the chain, while also coming correct and respecting differences as you go along. It’s not easy work by any stretch, for anyone involved.

I like the moments when a large company seems to get this. With any luck, many more companies should have people who do.

And in the meantime, it’s a stark reminder that plenty of platform changes get made without you in mind. So you have to revise your own strategy as you go along, if you create anything online, once every two quarters at minimum but ideally at least once a quarter. And for every company that cares about how their terms of service represent them, know there will be plenty more that simply don’t. It never really hurts to read the fine print.

One Thing You Can Use Today

As social media finds new ways to make our feeds noisy, it can be challenging to stay focused on what you want to see on purpose. 

I’m seeing a significant uptick in people dusting off their RSS reader apps; I’ve been a Feedly fan for a long time, but I hadn’t signed into my account for a while until this week after three different instances of people reminding me it exists. (For the hardcore nerds out there who aren’t bashful towards AI, their AI feeds are a new paid feature and shockingly good for understanding what’s currently happening in very niche industries.)

I’ve also had people ask me more frequently lately if I’m signed up to Apple News, or if I use Flipboard, or any of the other popular news aggregator apps like Ground News. (I am on the euro|topics newsletter, which I find indispensable for a complete understanding of world topics.)

If you have access to any bulletin boards in the physical world, now is the time to have your stuff on them.

It’s about to get warmer in most parts of the Northern Hemisphere. People will want to be out, with their phones away, and that’s true every year. But this year, it’s going to be truer than it has been in a good while.

It’s your time to ask the friendly bar down the street if they’re willing to let you have flyers up about what you do. And if your work doesn’t make sense to have in the physical world like that, it does make sense to be growing newsletters right now because people will still need to be checking their email. You can give them a great reason to do this.

I don’t usually call out a specific change in season and collective mood quite this plainly, but I have a long-running track record with pattern recognition, and I recognize this one. With the state of current socials, news, and general restlessness, conditions are right for this to be the most intense “direct-to-person connection” summer since Covid restrictions lifted in 2021. Plan accordingly.

Track of the Week

Public Body - “Dimension”

If you go looking for egg punk playlists, you will inevitably hit a big swamp of the most popular bands in that microgenre that turns into a pitch-shifted soup of quick catchy tunes on lo-fi recording systems. Enter Public Body, a Brighton-based band that definitely draws from that self-deprecating Devo-inspired world but also remembers to be beefy. Naturally, their new album Finger Food sounds sort of like an egg punk band finding the other snacks at the party, with stronger delivery (but not chain punk delivery) and high-end production. “Dimension” is my current favorite from it, as it’s the moment where the album goes from feeling widescreen to feeling cosmic, even in its own little world.

Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Saturday, May 17 - Synth Library Gear Sale (free with RSVP)
Undisclosed East Williamsburg location, 2-4pm. I love the mission of Synth Library, and anything you get here is a fundraiser for them.

Saturday, May 17 - Brux @ House of Yes
Look, I’ll be frank: braving a Saturday night crowd at House of Yes requires opening yourself to chaos. But I’ve always been down with what Brux does, and it’s her EP release plus a debut headlining set. So, make your plans!

Sunday, May 18 - Academy Records & Friends Record Fair @ Union Pool
Here’s an open secret among music industry people: if you swing a stick at a New York record fair in the lead-up to summer, you’ll hit at least three of us. ‘Tis the season!

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

The Club List is a newsletter from MeInTheClub.com. All issues are available at TheClubList.net. To inquire about marketing services for your work, contact [email protected] and include "Services” in the subject line.