Most artists in the music industry (and a lot of producers, too) would be very surprised to find out how weirdly people interact with music in the 2020s. It's only vaguely reminiscent of the traditional consumption patterns for musical content from the vinyl record era on up through the CD era.
Today's music economy is largely a "playlist economy," where anyone can create and distribute playlists on streaming platforms and YouTube. And what people who aren't part of the music industry—your everyday consumers without any formal music education—are creating can leave musicians and producers scratching their heads.
Let’s start by pointing out that over the past few years, a lot of listeners have come to love tracks that would have been unquestionably considered as having manufacturing defects just ten years ago among professionals. This is especially true for genres like phonk, hyperpop, and modern rap. Interestingly, unlike dirty punk, tracks in these genres are primarily produced in the sterile sound conditions of digital studios without the use of live instruments. Nevertheless, today’s young artists exceed punks in terms of the amount of dirt they introduce into music recordings.
It would be naive to think that this constant sonic escalation was invented by modern artists themselves. Many young artists are simply following listeners’ preferences and trying to please them.
For example, some end-users may not be satisfied with the amount of bass in normal industrial mixes. They apply equalizers to already released recordings, boosting the bass. Then they upload the modified tracks to YouTube and create playlists from them, which they’ll call something like, say, "EDM music for listening in a car."
For purely financial reasons, the copyright holders of these recordings aren’t going to object too much to these modifications because YouTube ensures recognition of modified music and organizes royalty payments to rights holders. From a creative standpoint, though? It's unlikely that musicians are thrilled about what modern music lovers have been doing with their mixes.
New generations of artists are generally less picky about this, though. They’ve noticed that listeners enjoy things getting hotter and hotter. So, they started pumping their arrangements and mixes with some completely primal bass. And then listeners started to perceive distorted mixes as more "cool." Where tape saturation and soft clipping were previously used sparingly by engineers on music recordings, today all taboos are lifted, and new generations of music producers, mix, and mastering engineers don't hesitate to make recordings rasping and roaring like Godzilla.
Another example of abnormal music consumption is the phenomenon of speeding up recordings. This trend originated within TikTok sometime around 2023 or earlier. Users of the social network began independently accelerating the tempo of published artist records by 20-30%, and filming 15-second videos to those speeds.
Some pretty strange things are happening in "quiet" music, too – namely, in the ambient genre, which unexpectedly became quite popular among many industry professionals. It's hard to believe, but some individuals and even companies release so-called "Music for Plants." They claim it helps houseplants root better, grow faster, and become fuller. Plant-friendly playlists are popular on music streaming platforms and YouTube.
Some plant enthusiasts genuinely believe that these simple ambient sounds help their green friends and use them as such. But in reality, it's mostly people, not plants, who listen to "music written for plants." You can tell by the comments on playlists. Many musically inclined people wondering aloud about the value of "plant" tracks, which essentially consist of endless slow chord changes created by one or two synth patches belonging to the "pad" and "sound scape" types.
Millions of people spend countless hours each day sitting at work computers performing routine tasks. Neural networks haven't yet saved them from being forced to perform monotonous and boring labor, contrary to the expectations of tech optimists. People still have to press tens of thousands of keyboard and mouse buttons every day. And, truthfully, a lot of people simply don’t feel they're doing something important and in demand. And a lot of people don’t get adequately compensated for their tedious grind.
It's no surprise, then, that so many office and remote workers take any opportunity to put on headphones and turn on ambient playlists, which don't distract focus from work tasks but still create a somewhat calming individual atmosphere at their workplace.
Music producers should understand and accept that listeners who may have no idea how music works still have access to fairly simple software tools that allow them to unofficially modify any published tracks and distribute those modifications in unexpected ways.
Sadly, a significant portion of modern music consumers (potentially because of the relatively cheap subscription cost for streaming services) views music as a service. Or as any other consumer product you’d get from a big box store – something people can do almost anything to after purchasing it.
Many listeners don't care about what the authors of a track intended creatively. Listeners will adapt all available music to their immediate needs, sometimes in the wildest ways possible.
Some music producers have caught onto the game and, somewhat cynically, started to produce hundreds and thousands of ambient tracks - aiming to profit from the wave of "functional" music consumption.
Functional music genres emerged in Western musical tradition long before the modern understanding of the genre "ambient" came into existence. In 1893, one eccentric and unrecognized (and impoverished) French composer wrote a minimalist piano piece called "Vexations." Its score included a strict requirement for performers: "play 840 times consecutively, but no more."
This composer was named Erik Satie. Initially, his ideas were considered quixotic. "Vexations" was seriously played 840 times only in 1963, organized by musician, philosopher, and artist John Cage, one of the pioneers of electronic music. The same person who composed the controversial piece 4'33'' for arbitrary instrumentation. If you recall, during its performance, musicians are not supposed to produce any sounds.
Earlier, in 1888, Satie wrote the now-famous piano piece "Three Gymnopédies." A fragment of it recently appeared in several models of Nokia phones as an official ringtone.
Only in the 1960s did Satie's music resurface from obscurity, and leading musicians spoke more about the genre "minimalism." Around this time, the commercial idea of creating "elevator music" arose. These were simple instrumental pieces played in offices to increase worker productivity and in retail spaces to boost sales.
One of the pioneers in publishing "elevator" recordings was the American company Muzak, and its success was so significant that “Muzak” essentially became a generic term referring to all music in the genre.
Almost simultaneously, in the 1970s, British electronic musician and composer Brian Eno began creating monotonous, enveloping music with unobtrusive background sounds, which he dubbed "ambient."
This genre remained niche and didn't gain widespread popularity for decades. (Eno is considered a recognized master of sound design, though – he wrote the theme "Prophecy" for David Lynch's film Dune, and worked on sound effects for U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Elvis Costello, Genesis, Coldplay, and many other well-known musicians, and created sound sets for several versions of the Windows OS.)
The first mass penetration of ambient music began in the 1990s, driven by acts like The Orb and Aphex Twin. (It did appear sparingly in films before then – for example, in Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, and Solaris).
In the early 2000s, music critics expanded the concept of "ambient" so much that it became a sort of umbrella genre. Even some jazz works by Miles Davis and progressive rock from Tangerine Dream fell under its vague definition. (By the way, Erik Satie now falls under this category too, with his pieces receiving millions of streams. This eccentric, misunderstood composer would be a wealthy man these days.)
At one point, ambient was considered more "geek music." These days, Spotify creates editorial playlists like Deep Focus, and now there's a special category "Focus" dedicated to the genre. Apple Music and, essentially, all streaming music delivery services have similar categories. These playlists feature background tracks in various subgenres of ambient, and, it turns out, they are really sought after by listeners.
As we established earlier, people often do work to ambient music. They also try to fall asleep to it when dealing with insomnia, use it to calm down after stress, meditate with it, and engage in various trendy body practices to it.
This consumer model led to unexpected results for some music producers. Once, American avant-garde composer William Basinski, one of the continuators of the "ambient" legacy, discovered that his old and semi-forgotten composition "Melancholia II" from 2003 suddenly began receiving more and more plays on streaming platforms. And substantial monetary royalties started coming his way as the author.
It turns out that 'Melancholia II' landed at number 80 on Spotify's editorial playlist 'Music For Sleeping.' From there, it spread to user playlists across other platforms. By 2022, the track had been streamed more than 10 million times on Spotify alone, and its numbers have only grown since.
Basinski himself was somewhat puzzled by the phenomenon
Jeremy deVine, founder of the experimental label Temporary Residence Ltd., which releases Basinski's music, noted that the revenue generated from ambient tracks in 'mood playlists' sometimes surpasses earnings from any other source.
He cited the 2005 instrumental post-rock track 'Open Letter to Hummingbirds' by the band Tarentel as an example. The song was included in a Focus-style playlist, garnered millions of streams, and this 'accidental' income exceeded the band's lifetime earnings by hundreds of percent points.
In 2019, Japanese musician Michiru Aoyama came up with the idea of releasing one album per day. This audacious project began on December 31, 2021.
Over the course of two years, he released a staggering 700 albums. Each consisted of eight tracks and averaged 20 minutes and 27 seconds in length. Stylistically, the music is ambient, produced in a relatively simple manner.
Yet by December 2023, Aoyama was earning around $3,000 a month from streaming. It’s unclear whether he’s still adhering to his grueling schedule, but whether he is or isn’t, in 2024, streaming platforms remain flooded with his music.
Recently, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter uncovered a little-known composer whose works, published under numerous pseudonyms, has amassed over 15 billion streams on various platforms.
That’s more than ABBA, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Metallica, and many other globally renowned artists from Spotify’s top 100. So, who is this genius? And what did he compose? It turns out the 'genius' is conductor and composer Johan Rör, residing in Stockholm.
Using roughly 650 pseudonyms, over the course of a few years, Rör released around 2,700 instrumental compositions, the vast majority of which are very simple piano pieces, each lasting just over two minutes.
You can explore Rör's 'masterpieces' by searching for tracks under 'artists' such as Maya Åström, Minik Knudsen, Mingmei Hsueh, or Csizmazia Etel.
The Swedish composer is not involved in any wrongdoing—he is indeed the author of all these tracks, and they are legally in the clear. Real people, not bots, have listened to them an astonishing number of times.
Niklas Brantberg, director of Rör’s label Overtone Studios, told the press:
Brantberg also noted that it’s normal for a musician to have multiple pseudonyms and that his label helps many artists earn a living by offering a favorable 50/50 revenue split. Rör himself declined to comment.
No one knows how much money Johan Rör has made, but Swedish journalists hint that it's in the millions.
Analyzing the work of the aforementioned musicians, an experienced music producer could rightly assume that such tracks could be created at a rate of about one every 1.5 to 2 hours. However, to release as many tracks as Michiru Aoyama or Johan Rör, one would need to do more than just work hard—it would require grueling, almost relentless effort.
Alternatively, one could hire contractors under agreements that transfer all rights to the recordings to a single entity—a kind of umbrella composer.
We don’t know how many quiet, behind-the-scenes composers and music producers are currently farming the benefits of ambient music's growing popularity. One can assume that this peculiar form of legal 'cheating' may be more widespread than the music industry realizes.
There is currently a small window of opportunity to jump on this departing train and ride it for a while. It likely won’t last long, though. AI-powered services like Udio and Suno are already capable of generating simple ambient tracks in large quantities.
What’s holding back the expansion of AI into the traditional music business is the legal uncertainty surrounding music created by AI. Neither major labels nor production music publishers are eager to engage with it just yet, as the legal consequences of such an experiment could be devastating for their business.
As a result, the 2020s may see the rise of completely wild musical and commercial ideas. This may be somewhat disheartening for musicians who pursue their work sincerely rather than solely for profit. The situation, though, is neither inherently good nor bad. It is simply DIFFERENT compared to the entire history of popular music. And we all must learn to live with it.
