Transcript for How streaming affects musicians, and what they can do about it Transcript 00:00:03 Veena McCoole Hello and welcome to The Human Interface, brought to you by the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. 00:00:10 Veena McCoole This is a podcast about how developments in technology impact our work and life as told through the research and insights of a brilliant roster of experts and industry practitioners from the university and beyond. 00:00:22 Veena McCoole I'm your host, Veena McCoole. 00:00:24 Veena McCoole This episode explores the future of cultural labour under platform capitalism. 00:00:28 Veena McCoole While it's never been easier for musicians to release music, the economics of the music industry and online streaming mean earning a living has become even more challenging. 00:00:38 Veena McCoole Dr. 00:00:38 Veena McCoole Sun-ok Lee is a sociologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. 00:00:43 Veena McCoole She's currently working on a project that examines digital platform workers and the gig economy in South Korea and the Netherlands. 00:00:51 Veena McCoole Dr. 00:00:52 Veena McCoole Robert Pray is an Associate Professor of Digital Culture at the OII. 00:00:56 Veena McCoole At the University of Groningen, he is principal investigator of a European Research Council-funded project that investigates how streaming and social media platforms influence the creative practices, identities, and working conditions of musicians around the world. 00:01:12 Veena McCoole Sun Oak and Rob, welcome to the show. 00:01:13 Veena McCoole Thank you very much for inviting us. 00:01:16 Veena McCoole I would love to start with kind of an understanding of what it even means to be a musician today and how this might have changed over time. 00:01:24 Robert Prey First of all, there are many different types of musicians, right? 00:01:26 Robert Prey There are hobbyists who just play guitar in the evening. 00:01:29 Robert Prey There are musicians who belong to the London Symphony Orchestra, right? 00:01:33 Robert Prey In our research, we mainly focus on music artists who are trying to make a living in popular music genres. 00:01:40 Robert Prey So for much of the 20th century, this meant you had to try to get a record deal, right? 00:01:46 Robert Prey You would be discovered playing in a 00:01:49 Robert Prey little cellar somewhere or in a garage and then you'd get signed and they would, the record company would get you into a studio to record an album and then hopefully one of your singles would be played on the radio. 00:02:00 Robert Prey So this was a really industrial system with all kinds of gates and filters. 00:02:05 Robert Prey This system has been disrupted for good and for bad over the past 20 years or so. 00:02:10 Robert Prey And technology plays a big role in this disruption. 00:02:13 Robert Prey What we had like peer-to-peer file sharing, 00:02:15 Robert Prey Some of you might remember Napster. 00:02:17 Robert Prey And we have, over the last 30 or so odd years, cheaper versions of digital audio workstations, which allow musicians to produce outside of studios. 00:02:28 Robert Prey But I would say that music streaming really opened the floodgates. 00:02:33 Seonok Lee Yeah, it's never been easy to find music and listen to music from around the world or from different periods of history. 00:02:41 Seonok Lee So when I think back to how I listened to music growing up in South Korea in the 90s, it doesn't really feel like a different world. 00:02:49 Seonok Lee Now we just tap a screen and any song appears. 00:02:53 Seonok Lee But back then, music took effort and a kind of a small ritual. 00:02:58 Seonok Lee In the 90s, the main way to listen to music was buying physical albums, mostly at that time, CDs and before that, cassette tapes. 00:03:08 Seonok Lee So I remember saving my pocket money just to buy a new album from my favorite artists, like Sataeji and Boys in South Korea. 00:03:17 Seonok Lee It was really huge. 00:03:19 Seonok Lee Going into the music shop or stopping by street vendors who sold illegal cassette tapes that were very common at the time in South Korea. 00:03:30 Seonok Lee And when I got home, 00:03:31 Seonok Lee I'd put the disc into my Discman or the tape in my Walkman, so small little cassette tape player. 00:03:40 Seonok Lee And then somehow listening felt more personal that way. 00:03:44 Seonok Lee So cassette tapes were everywhere before CD took over, right? 00:03:48 Seonok Lee Maybe nowadays people don't remember anymore though. 00:03:52 Seonok Lee So I used to record songs from the radio and waiting with my finger on the record button, hoping the DJ wouldn't talk over the intro as well. 00:04:02 Seonok Lee So I made mixtapes, you know, quite a lot of work. 00:04:07 Seonok Lee And so I put whatever songs I like onto one tape. 00:04:10 Seonok Lee So sometimes I even make copies of mixtapes as a birthday gift for my friends as well. 00:04:16 Seonok Lee In Korea, actually, the TV was also a huge part of how people discovered music, at least for me. 00:04:24 Seonok Lee So we can do music shows. 00:04:26 Seonok Lee were basically requiring viewing. 00:04:30 Seonok Lee And strangely, I learned a lot of Western pop songs from TV commercials. 00:04:36 Seonok Lee I still remember the first time I heard Radiohead's ****. 00:04:41 Seonok Lee It wasn't from the radio or an album, but from a TV commercial. 00:04:46 Seonok Lee A lot of pop songs entered my life like that. 00:04:49 Seonok Lee So I just suddenly up appearing on TV. 00:04:53 Seonok Lee I remember in the early 2000s, 00:04:56 Seonok Lee everything changed with P2P sites like Soribada in South Korea, literal meaning is the sea of sounds. 00:05:04 Seonok Lee So people certainly downloaded MP3s, mostly again illegal, but though no one around me really thought about it is illegal or illegal because that time we didn't have the concept. 00:05:18 Seonok Lee So it felt like some kind of revolution, by the way. 00:05:23 Seonok Lee So and then MP3 players came along, and the music became portable in completely new way. 00:05:30 Seonok Lee So it was quite big changes. 00:05:32 Seonok Lee But I want to say, interesting fact, many people think that Spotify was the first subscription streaming service, but it was actually South Korean streaming service, Melon. 00:05:45 Seonok Lee So they introduced their subscription service way back in 2004. 00:05:50 Seonok Lee So South Korea became the first country where revenue from digital music surpassed physical music. 00:05:58 Seonok Lee So it's been over 20 years already? 00:06:00 Veena McCoole Yeah, I think back to when I had to ask my mom to pay 99 cents for a song on iTunes or whatever, and thinking about the way that streaming is such a normal part of how we all consume music and podcasts. 00:06:13 Veena McCoole Has streaming ruined music? 00:06:15 Veena McCoole Is that a fair thing to say? 00:06:17 Robert Prey Well, I think it's pretty impossible, luckily, to ruin music, and it's certainly not possible for one technology like streaming to do it on its own. 00:06:27 Robert Prey But I think it's highly plausible that streaming has changed music, just like other technologies of distribution before it have, like radio changed music, or video, which apparently killed the radio star. 00:06:40 Robert Prey So that's one of the arguments 00:06:42 Robert Prey made by Liz Pelley in our recent book called Mood Music. 00:06:46 Robert Prey That's gotten a lot of attention. 00:06:48 Robert Prey But I would say that one thing that is, I think, indisputable, that it's becoming increasingly hard for musicians to earn a living from the sales of recorded music. 00:06:58 Robert Prey Now it's always been hard. 00:06:59 Robert Prey The music industry was always... 00:07:01 Robert Prey a very exploitative and difficult industry to make a career out of. 00:07:05 Robert Prey But nowadays, most artists see very little revenue from their recordings. 00:07:09 Robert Prey And one of the reasons for this is because of how streaming services pay royalties. 00:07:14 Robert Prey We tend to think that they pay a certain fixed rate per stream, you know, maybe half a penny or so. 00:07:19 Robert Prey But actually, it's called the pro-rata model, which is a somewhat confusing 00:07:25 Robert Prey model to explain. 00:07:27 Robert Prey So I'll do it very briefly. 00:07:28 Robert Prey It's like the share of a pie, right? 00:07:31 Robert Prey Your piece of the pie. 00:07:31 Robert Prey So if you as an artist, if your songs make up about 1% of all the songs streamed on a service, like Spotify, in a given month, then you receive 1% of all the revenue or the royalties. 00:07:50 Robert Prey But then, of course, when the number of songs uploaded to a streaming service increase, 00:07:55 Robert Prey the per stream payout for an individual artist decreases because the total revenue pool is divided by a larger number of streams, right? 00:08:02 Robert Prey And the number of songs have really exploded in the past 5, 10 years. 00:08:10 Robert Prey A few years ago, I remember being shocked to read that there were 50,000 new tracks being uploaded to Spotify every day. 00:08:17 Robert Prey Well, that number has tripled since then. 00:08:19 Robert Prey There are at least 150,000 00:08:23 Robert Prey tracks uploaded a day to Spotify and other streaming services. 00:08:27 Robert Prey Just last week, I read that the French streaming service Deezer announced that fully 50,000 AI-generated tracks are uploaded to its service every day. 00:08:40 Robert Prey So AI-generated tracks now make up one-third of all the songs uploaded to Deezer daily. 00:08:49 Robert Prey So musicians have always struggled to, stay visible or be heard over the, all the new music that's released every day. 00:08:57 Robert Prey And they've always struggled to compete against all the old music that's available because people still love listening to old music. 00:09:05 Robert Prey And actually something like 70% of all the music that's listened on streaming services is called catalog, like it's older music. 00:09:12 Robert Prey Because of course we still go back to the music from the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. 00:09:17 Robert Prey And so 00:09:18 Robert Prey They've always had to compete against not only other contemporaries, but also the entire history of recorded music. 00:09:24 Robert Prey But now they're also competing against this growing tide of AI music that's out there. 00:09:32 Veena McCoole I'm curious how this links to your research. 00:09:34 Veena McCoole I mean, that sounds super recent. 00:09:36 Veena McCoole The fact that the platforms are being flooded with AI-generated music seems like a relatively recent phenomenon. 00:09:42 Veena McCoole I'd love to hear more about the ways in which your research delves into that or other topics. 00:09:47 Seonok Lee Let me tell you a bit about this study that we did on Korean indie musicians and how they're dealing with today's platform world. 00:09:56 Seonok Lee So we published the article called Platform Closure and Creator Creep in the International Journal of Communication. 00:10:04 Seonok Lee And South Korea is a really interesting place to look at because like I said earlier, music platformization hit there earlier and harder than in many Western countries. 00:10:16 Seonok Lee So big music entertainment and the tech companies in South Korea are vertically integrated. 00:10:22 Seonok Lee So they're involved in production, distribution, and promotion. 00:10:27 Seonok Lee And they have a lot of control over who gets seen and heard on the main Korean music streaming platforms. 00:10:34 Seonok Lee So what we found is that this has led to what we called platform closure. 00:10:40 Seonok Lee So that means the big music and tech companies increasingly decide which artists get visibility on streaming services. 00:10:49 Seonok Lee So if you are a small indie act, it's very hard to break through on those closed platforms because the bigger artists that are signed to big entertainment companies get more or most of the visibility. 00:11:07 Seonok Lee What do Korean indie musicians do then? 00:11:10 Seonok Lee So we found that they are shifting their focus away from streaming services and actually toward more social media like YouTube, TikTok, and the South Korean live streaming platform they call Africa TV. 00:11:28 Seonok Lee But just last year, they changed the name to Soup. 00:11:32 Seonok Lee So a lot of indie artists have basically decided, hey, we don't actually need the big Korean streaming platforms anymore. 00:11:41 Seonok Lee So they instead, they are pouring their energy into YouTube and other social media platforms where they feel that at least they have a chance to build an audience without going through gatekeepers. 00:11:57 Seonok Lee But this is important actually. 00:11:59 Seonok Lee In order to succeed on these social media platforms, they have to think about their music differently. 00:12:07 Seonok Lee So they treat their music not as an albums or songs, but as a content that they can be sliced up and fed into algorithms. 00:12:18 Seonok Lee So they have to break their songs into different parts designed for particular platforms. 00:12:24 Seonok Lee So maybe a hook that works as a TikTok or a little part of a chorus that fits a short YouTube video clip. 00:12:34 Seonok Lee And then they need to complement their music by uploading non-musical content on a regular basis, like short videos of their everyday lives and routines or something like that. 00:12:46 Robert Prey Right, yeah, and this is where I think things get really interesting. 00:12:49 Robert Prey A lot of these musicians now feel like they have to act like YouTubers or content creators. 00:12:54 Robert Prey creators, right? 00:12:55 Robert Prey They record vlogs, they share cooking videos. 00:12:58 Robert Prey I just talked to a musician yesterday who, started releasing content on TikTok and then he found that his audience is actually really like it when he shares food with them that he likes to eat or likes to make. 00:13:11 Robert Prey So he started doing this as well. 00:13:13 Robert Prey So they stream themselves doing this. 00:13:16 Robert Prey They stream themselves making their music, like behind the scenes videos or opening up their everyday lives to fans. 00:13:23 Robert Prey So some of the artists we talked to for this article that Sanok just mentioned, they really lean into this and they see this as a way of expanding what it means to be a musician or an artist. 00:13:34 Robert Prey They like this sort of two-way real-time interaction with audiences that they can get on Twitch and YouTube and that they can't get on traditional streaming platforms. 00:13:44 Robert Prey But others that we talked to find this really exhausting and intrusive 00:13:48 Robert Prey They don't want to turn their entire lives into content. 00:13:51 Robert Prey They don't want to invite fans into the creative process. 00:13:55 Robert Prey And for some of them, this feels just like extra work piled on top of the work they really want to do, which is making music. 00:14:02 Robert Prey So we call this broader process creator creep. 00:14:06 Robert Prey And this idea comes from the work of Sophie Bishop, who wrote about influencer creep. 00:14:12 Robert Prey She talks about the tactics of how the tactics of influencers 00:14:17 Robert Prey creep into all different types of work, right? 00:14:20 Robert Prey And in Korea, we really see something similar happening. 00:14:24 Robert Prey The practices of YouTube content creators creep into the working lives of the indie musicians that we researched. 00:14:31 Robert Prey So if you want visibility as an indie musician, you can't just be a musician. 00:14:35 Robert Prey You have to be a creator, you have to be an editor, a streamer, or a personality. 00:14:40 Robert Prey And like I said, the shift doesn't benefit everybody equally. 00:14:44 Robert Prey It tends to benefit musicians who are already comfortable on the camera, who may have skills in video production, or who are plugged into broader creative scenes where they can collaborate with filmmakers, designers, and other artists. 00:14:59 Robert Prey The other ones, the ones who don't fit into this category, tend to get left behind or they simply burn out. 00:15:08 Robert Prey While South Korea is its own specific context, I think it's a glimpse of where things are heading everywhere, and one of the questions I'm really curious. 00:15:17 Robert Prey about is what happens to creativity when musicians are expected to also become content creators or influencers, right? 00:15:24 Robert Prey And I think Korean musicians, and particularly Korean indie musicians, are at the front line of platformization. 00:15:30 Robert Prey They're moving away from music streaming platforms, reshaping their music and their daily routines to fit social media and live streaming platforms. 00:15:39 Robert Prey and increasingly living like content creators with all the opportunities and the pressures that this brings. 00:15:46 Veena McCoole Yeah, I know some of your research has kind of focused on how this experience of being a musician actually even differs across cultures and economy. 00:15:54 Veena McCoole So it's not just having to wear different hats and be a musician, but welcome people into their creative process, maybe as an influencer or posting TikTok videos. 00:16:03 Veena McCoole But like the fact that practice even varies depending on where you are and how the music 00:16:09 Veena McCoole industry and infrastructure looks, what does that look like? 00:16:12 Veena McCoole And what have you discovered through your research comparing this across cultures? 00:16:16 Robert Prey Right, so part of my ERC project involves a survey. 00:16:21 Robert Prey And we did a survey in the past year of almost 1,200 musicians across five countries. 00:16:28 Robert Prey So we looked at musicians in Brazil, in the Netherlands, in Nigeria, in South Korea, and in Chile. 00:16:36 Robert Prey And we really wanted to understand how different national contexts affect the everyday working lives of musicians. 00:16:44 Robert Prey Overall, we found some similarities. 00:16:46 Robert Prey In general, satisfaction with streaming and the royalties they received from streaming is very rare. 00:16:52 Robert Prey It's hard to find musicians who were happy with it. 00:16:55 Robert Prey But Brazilian musicians and musicians in Nigeria were generally a little bit more positive about streaming. 00:17:01 Robert Prey musicians in the other three countries, Chile, the Netherlands, and South Korea, were generally more dissatisfied. 00:17:08 Robert Prey One of the several paradoxes we found is that Afrobeats musicians in Nigeria reported some of the lowest incomes, but they also showed some of the highest levels of income satisfaction amongst our surveys. 00:17:21 Robert Prey So we were trying to figure out why this is so. 00:17:24 Robert Prey We did some follow-up interviews, and it seems like 00:17:27 Robert Prey The Nigerian music industry before streaming had some extreme barriers for musicians. 00:17:31 Robert Prey It was really difficult to get your music out there unless you really knew someone or you had connections. 00:17:37 Robert Prey So streaming on social media, despite the very low payments from these platforms, at least allowed these Nigerian Afrobeats musicians to get their music out and be heard. 00:17:48 Robert Prey There weren't many gender differences, but we did find some gender differences amongst Brazilian musicians. 00:17:55 Robert Prey female musicians there were more likely to say that streaming had made things better or stayed about the same, while Brazilian male musicians were more likely to say that streaming had made things worse. 00:18:06 Robert Prey And follow-up interviews there, it seems to some extent streaming has disrupted the quote-unquote old boys network in Brazil, where you had to really know someone in order to get your music heard at a label or a radio station to get played. 00:18:24 Robert Prey We also found, what you could call streaming's paradox of importance. 00:18:28 Robert Prey Lower income artists, musicians who were receiving less money from streaming, generally tended to say that streaming was more important in their careers than musicians that were earning more money. 00:18:41 Robert Prey And I think this is because we found that musicians who were successful, at least financially successful, had learned how to diversify. 00:18:51 Robert Prey They weren't as reliant on streaming. 00:18:54 Robert Prey these tended to be musicians that their careers started before streaming, really became mainstream, so generally before 2015, and a smaller share of their overall income was generated from streaming, while musicians who were newer, younger, and maybe relied on streaming more, they, you know, had demonstrated lower incomes. 00:19:16 Robert Prey There's also something we call the DIY ceiling, although 00:19:21 Robert Prey The general folk wisdom is that you can do everything on your own nowadays, which is partly true. 00:19:27 Robert Prey You can record an album at home and you can have it uploaded to all the major streaming services by the afternoon. 00:19:33 Robert Prey It still really benefits you to be signed to a label. 00:19:37 Robert Prey Musicians who were signed to a label generally had a higher income. 00:19:42 Robert Prey We also looked at, you know, how the artists we talked to across these different countries, how they felt about promotion, how they felt about communicating with their fans. 00:19:51 Robert Prey Nigerian artists tend to communicate the most with their fans. 00:19:55 Robert Prey They spend the most, the bigger part of their day communicating with fans. 00:19:59 Robert Prey They automate fan communication more than other countries where they would use certain services to automate communication with fans. 00:20:07 Robert Prey And they had the most positive attitudes towards promotional work and relating to their fans. 00:20:13 Robert Prey Well, musicians in the Netherlands and South Korea tend to spend less time communicating with their fans and tended to have 00:20:20 Robert Prey less of an enthusiastic sort of response to the question of, how they felt about communicating with fans. 00:20:28 Robert Prey And this goes with genres as well, because I really see genres as different worlds, right? 00:20:33 Robert Prey Whether you're a pop musician or an indie art musician, you have different values, you have different ideas about how you should relate to your fans. 00:20:43 Robert Prey And we could really see that Afrobeats artists, for example, 00:20:47 Robert Prey R&B, pop, hip-hop artists tend to spend more time communicating with fans, while jazz, rock, indie, or folk musicians tend to spend less time. 00:20:58 Robert Prey So different genres really demonstrate different ways of relating to fans. 00:21:04 Robert Prey But in general, the biggest difference I think we could say, see in these five countries is that Nigerian artists really stood out. 00:21:10 Robert Prey They checked their metrics most often. 00:21:14 Robert Prey They spent most time doing promo. 00:21:16 Robert Prey They were more optimistic about income or that they could receive from streaming, even though they tended to receive far less income from streaming than other artists. 00:21:27 Robert Prey And they were more likely to see communication with fans as a creative practice, part of their overall sort of role of being an artist. 00:21:35 Robert Prey So the big picture across these five countries is that there isn't just one single story about streaming. 00:21:42 Robert Prey different national contexts, different genres, different generations of musicians have different experiences. 00:21:48 Robert Prey So all of these artists are trying to make sense of platforms that they depend on. 00:21:52 Robert Prey They sometimes resent these platforms and occasionally they manage to find a way to bend these platforms to their own purposes. 00:21:59 Veena McCoole The thing that I'm thinking about here is creativity and 00:22:04 Veena McCoole backpedaling to what you shared earlier, when a musician is expected to do promo and make TikTok videos and engage with fans and track their metrics and basically do all the things that maybe they didn't kind of like sign up to do as a traditional musician, what happens to their creativity? 00:22:19 Robert Prey Yeah, it's a really difficult question to answer and something we're looking into increasingly as we go and in our interviews. 00:22:28 Robert Prey Some of the musicians say that 00:22:31 Robert Prey It enhances creativity. 00:22:32 Robert Prey They have to think very creatively about what it means to be a musician in this contemporary era. 00:22:39 Robert Prey And they try new strategies. 00:22:41 Robert Prey They collaborate, as I said, with filmmakers. 00:22:43 Robert Prey They collaborate with other content producers. 00:22:46 Robert Prey But this is often genre specific. 00:22:50 Robert Prey Some hip-hop artists that we talk to in Korea were like this. 00:22:54 Robert Prey But most of the artists we talk to, they still prefer their creativity to be expended upon the actual music themselves. 00:23:02 Robert Prey And they feel like it's a drain to their creativity. 00:23:05 Seonok Lee I found that, you know, when we did the research on Korean indie musicians, actually I saw the generational differences as well. 00:23:13 Seonok Lee So a little bit older generation, you know, 00:23:16 Seonok Lee more used to the traditional concept of making music, they think that their creativity got violated or that kind of feeling. 00:23:26 Seonok Lee But I see that the younger generation, like early, let's just say early 20s or something until like early 30s or something like that, 00:23:36 Seonok Lee They feel, although it's a little bit extra work, but I think that they have a little bit different approach, I guess. 00:23:44 Seonok Lee They kind of accept. 00:23:45 Seonok Lee They think that is a part of the music making. 00:23:49 Seonok Lee So I think what? 00:23:51 Robert Prey We're really noticing is that the definition of what it means to be a music artist or an artist in general is changing alongside the rise of 00:24:00 Robert Prey these platforms and what is expected of you? 00:24:02 Veena McCoole So if we kind of zoom out here, I mean, why is all of this important for us to understand as we commute every day and put our headphones in and listen to Spotify or what have you? 00:24:12 Seonok Lee I would say music is not a side issue. 00:24:16 Seonok Lee It shapes, you know, culture, memory, identity, and how people relate to each other. 00:24:21 Seonok Lee So music is everywhere and then you grow with us all the time, right? 00:24:26 Seonok Lee So it is the part of our culture, part of our life. 00:24:30 Seonok Lee So in this sense, if the people who make music are forced into more precarious and exploitive arrangement with the platforms, that actually tells us something about how we value cultural work, and by extension, other form of care and knowledge work as well. 00:24:48 Robert Prey Yeah, and I also study musicians because they're kind of an extreme example 00:24:53 Robert Prey of what platforms are doing to work more broadly. 00:24:55 Robert Prey So music was the first sector to suffer the effects of digitalization and the internet 25 years ago. 00:25:02 Robert Prey It's also one of the first sectors to be fully reorganized around streaming, social media, and now AI. 00:25:09 Robert Prey So I think musicians experience the kinds of pressures that other creative producers and maybe other workers in general are feeling, but they experience it earlier on. 00:25:18 Robert Prey So this type of massive overproduction, collapsing pay, dependence on opaque algorithms, and the sort of expectation of constant self-promotion. 00:25:28 Robert Prey To answer your question, musicians matter here not just because we care about music, although we should, but because they make visible a set of dynamics that are spreading across many different types of work. 00:25:40 Robert Prey They need to be constantly online, to pay attention to your performance metrics, 00:25:44 Robert Prey or to treat every interaction as content. 00:25:48 Robert Prey So I think if we can understand what platforms are doing to musicians, we can get a much clearer picture of what they're doing to labor more generally. 00:25:56 Veena McCoole And I wonder if there are any kind of budding musicians who are listening to this episode, what can they learn from what you've researched and discovered about what it means to be a musician in 2025 and beyond? 00:26:09 Robert Prey I would say there are a number of lessons. 00:26:11 Robert Prey Maybe, first of all, don't build your house on streaming, right? 00:26:15 Robert Prey Treat streaming as infrastructure. 00:26:17 Robert Prey You know, maybe you can see it as a shop window where you can display your work, but don't treat it as your main business model. 00:26:25 Robert Prey Get your music out there, but don't assume that more streams are going to solve all of your problems. 00:26:31 Robert Prey As I said earlier, the musicians who are doing it best are the ones who diversify, the ones who are doing live shows, who are teaching, who are composing for others. 00:26:39 Robert Prey And learn to diversify earlier. 00:26:41 Robert Prey The earlier you build multiple ways to earn from music, the less trapped you'll feel when one platform changes its rules, as they always do. 00:26:49 Robert Prey Another thing that comes out of our surveys is really understand the limits of DIY. 00:26:55 Robert Prey Being fully independent is great, but it often means that you have to take on more work. 00:27:01 Robert Prey So try to get some support from either a label or a strong manager or join a collective or a scene that can 00:27:09 Robert Prey and share infrastructure with you. 00:27:12 Robert Prey Another lesson I would say is like treat platforms as tools, not as your boss. 00:27:16 Robert Prey Learn how they work, but don't let them tell you who you are. 00:27:21 Robert Prey So things like fan communication, it's hard work. 00:27:25 Robert Prey You're going to be required to do it, but you need to decide consciously how far you want to go and what feels sustainable and authentic for you. 00:27:32 Robert Prey For some musicians, 00:27:34 Robert Prey as I said, this is part of the creative practice, but for other musicians, this is just a drain. 00:27:38 Robert Prey So you really want to know and be honest with yourself of, you know, what type of musician you are. 00:27:44 Robert Prey Guard against content creep, right? 00:27:47 Robert Prey Like our concept that we developed in that paper, the job of a musician, as we say, can quietly expand into being an editor, an influencer, a streamer, and always-on personality. 00:28:00 Robert Prey So set your boundaries early. 00:28:01 Robert Prey You know, what parts of your life are 00:28:03 Robert Prey are public and what parts of your life should remain private, right? 00:28:07 Robert Prey What feels like art, what feels like self-extraction? 00:28:12 Robert Prey And I think a really important lesson for musicians in the UK is like learn from global differences. 00:28:18 Robert Prey Don't just focus on the UK or US models. 00:28:22 Robert Prey There are musicians all around the world that are surviving in different contexts and different scenes. 00:28:28 Robert Prey Some of them are sidestepping platforms entirely. 00:28:31 Robert Prey There's more than one way to build a career. 00:28:33 Robert Prey And I think this is really important in an age of AI, and this is something I've really learned from musicians, is really lean into what can't be automated. 00:28:44 Robert Prey So put serious care into things that are the hardest to automate. 00:28:48 Robert Prey So your live presence, your relationship with listeners, your local scene, your voice, or your particular aesthetic that isn't just chasing trends. 00:29:00 Robert Prey So if AI and platforms turn 00:29:03 Robert Prey recordings into cheap, abundant content, the scarce things become important. 00:29:08 Robert Prey And that's time, attention, trust, and genuine connection. 00:29:13 Seonok Lee Last thing I want to say is don't forget, many of the biggest problems musicians face are structural. 00:29:21 Seonok Lee So join collectives and musicians unions. 00:29:26 Seonok Lee think collectively, just not individually. 00:29:29 Veena McCoole And I guess my last question is, for the person who's listening to this podcast on a streaming platform or their music, that way, what would you like them to remember every time they open that app or play their favorite song? 00:29:43 Robert Prey Yeah, think consciously about what you're listening to, who made this, who is behind this music. 00:29:50 Robert Prey Look into the artist you're listening to. 00:29:52 Robert Prey Don't just put on a playlist in the background and have no clue who actually made that music. 00:29:58 Robert Prey And try to figure out a way how you can support the artists that you love in other ways. 00:30:03 Robert Prey Go to live shows, buy physical recordings, support them on Patreon. 00:30:08 Seonok Lee Yep, agree. 00:30:09 Veena McCoole Amazing. 00:30:10 Veena McCoole Thank you so much, Rob and Sunok, for joining us on this episode of The Human Interface. 00:30:15 Veena McCoole Make sure to subscribe to be alerted when new episodes drop on Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. 00:30:21 Veena McCoole And follow the Oxford Internet Institute on LinkedIn and Instagram to stay abreast of our latest research and updates. 00:30:28 Veena McCoole Until next time.