When did making music get so lonely?
It used to be the case that if you wanted to make pop music, you needed other people.
Upon entering the studio, you’d likely need a producer, a team of engineers and maybe some session musicians. If you were in a band, you might need all of the above in addition to your constituent members.
Whatever your preferred configuration, you’d organise yourself into a collaborative unit to maximise your chances of achieving cultural and commercial success.
The social structure you put in place didn’t just influence your creative process - it shaped your musical output too.
Bands functioned as musical start-ups, where creative friction was viewed as necessary and desired. Band members challenged and supported one another to break new ground musically and sonically. A good producer would catalyse that dynamic further.
The Beatles, as an obvious example, didn’t just happen upon greatness – they developed it in one another, pushing to explore new sonic territory through both collaboration and conflict. Peter Jackson’s brilliant Let It Be captures the complexity of the social dynamics that drove their creative process.
The social nature of making records “the old way” offered clear advantages through challenge, compromise and support - dynamics that helped not just with execution, but with delivering musical innovation too. Working with others elevated everyone’s contribution.
These days, anyone can make a record from start to finish by themselves.
The recording process has been automated to the extent that musical and technical collaboration is no longer a necessity, making recording music an increasingly solitary endeavour. Generative AI will only exacerbate this trend.
Collaboration has been further disincentivised by the economics of production and streaming. Musicians and technical personnel all cost money that no longer needs to be spent.
Joining a band means splitting already meagre streaming revenue multiple ways.
As a result, solo acts proliferate, and artists make creative decisions alone, unchallenged by peers. They rely solely on their own skillsets, supplemented by technology.
The recording process has been de-socialised.
The upside is total creative freedom: the need to compromise with an opinionated band member, producer or A&R has been removed.
The downside is less challenge and support, which can lead to creative indulgence, lost perspective, poor mental health and a reduction in musical innovation.
From a commercial perspective, a reduction in innovation is particularly problematic. As the volume of music released increases, marketplace differentiation becomes critical to success.
To stand out, artists must differentiate – and to differentiate, they must innovate.
Automating human processes removes people from the production line, and with them the innovation-driving dynamics of collaboration.
This isn’t an isolated trend. Digital technologies in general promote isolation through their enabling of greater personal independence. The lone act of listening to music through headphones mirrors the increasingly solitary act of recording it.
Still, we don’t have to passively accept the consequences of new technologies. We can influence their design and application, assess their impact and plan to mitigate any negative consequences.
The music industry should reimagine A&R as a discipline that drives innovation, not just quality enforcement: simply being “better” is no longer good enough.
We should encourage a mindset in young talent to push at the boundaries, whilst valuing feedback and collaboration. Innovation should be instilled as a fundamental working practice, as it is in the world of tech start-ups.
Artists need to embrace challenge and compromise as positive forces on their musical output, not as inconvenient interventions best avoided.
More broadly, we need to consider how new technologies can catalyse creative social interactions. We should reimagine creative environments, building virtual and physical spaces that provide genuine social utility through technology.
As a society, we need to rethink the economics and dynamics of online collaboration, finding ways to reward collective effort.
Above all, we need to develop a cultural mindset that understands technology as a tool at our disposal to maximise tried and tested processes and interactions – not something that prescribes new, untested ways of behaviour upon us, with little awareness of the resulting implications.