6 analogies between the world of music and the world of porn
Data di pubblicazione 03/04/2019
Good morning to all the fans of music, art and marketing in Italy and elsewhere! This is the blog of Miraloop, an Italian multimedia company, owner of the labels with the four symbols of playing cards and many of you reading the title started already thinking about which could be, if they really exist, the analogies between the world of music and the world of porn.
While we wish that the world of music gets always closer to the world of the cinematics, remaining disappointed, we decided to write this article when we found more than 5 correspondences, but if you find others... contact us!
1) The business mode: a form of vital entertainment between samples, subscriptions and platforms for free.
Monthly subscriptions for the users and sale of advertising at the producers, it works like that. The first analogy, the most banal, between the world of porn and the world of music, is the business model which stands behind. Once, didn't they sale the discs that arrived with the truck that brought the material in the shops of the city centers? Right, they did. The world of the fruition of music today based on online subscriptions, in this case for listening to music, is born with the porn. The first websites that adopted the system of subscriptions were the erotic sites because they could afford to give a sample of a video, making it circulate with peer-to-peer mechanisms and then request the subscription. The subscription allowed to the client to stay on the site and to enjoy the entire films. Today it doesn't take the peer-to-peer anymore, it's called streaming: the music services renounced the downloads of songs because they only want that you "stay on the platform". And the people apply this concept happily. They don't want to pay, but they accept the suggestion of Despacito while listening to Genesis: a post on the socials where they let off steam and all's well, but no costs. It's the same mechanism with the "suggested video", divided genre by genre: they are all inventions of the porn! Exactly like in the world of porn, the music is a vital / necessary item, it's available everywhere for free with a bad quality and with lots of advertisements, it's a promotional motor. If you want to increase the level, you have to spend something, even though few, very few, but you have to subscribe.
2) The methods of use
The users are in a hurry, they want to be attracted by known things that work, because they have a few time and thirst of something that satisfies them immediately. The research of a song should be long, they should dedicate time to it through quality listening. Today the major part of music is used through the loudspeakers of a smartphone for a time close to 10 seconds. For Facebook the view of a video is counted from the first to the third second. What the hell can you understand in 2 seconds of a song? On the other hand there aren't many alternative proposals. Until 2008 / 2012 many producers lashed out at this world. It was the part generally recognized as left on the political spectrum, or at least recognized by researching the artistic instead of the commercial. We remember the attachment of many producers in the first years of Miraloop (in the late 2000s): once they were "anticapitalists", today they are the most enthusiasts of the multinational platforms of music collection which mix the professional with the amateurish: from Soundcloud to YouTube to Bandcamp. They want the total control, being in millions in a competition for the highest investments, giving the total control of the listening to the platforms. Interesting, isn't it?
3) The mixture of the amateurish with the professional and... who stands to gain.
Is there a non-professional cinematic art? No. There are directors who do different works to make a living, but also their short films have a professional appearance because for being distributed they have to move in professional circuits. And even if low-budget they are always ready to take off, thanks to the audience, to the great world of cinematics. Maybe thanks to a small, local and passionate producer. De Laurentiis, as an Italian example. In the world of music this doesn't exist: the amateurish and the professional world are totally indistinguishable. And which is the first area of entertainment (art?!?) where we find a similar situation? Only in the world of porn. There was a time when the porn made part of the world of cinematics (see Alice in Wonderland porn musical) but it was a limited period, the period of the cultural liberation of women, '68 to be clear. In all the other historical moments since the existence of the cinematics, the porn followed a very different way and with precise characteristics of distinction.
The most attentive will wonder now: yes, okay, there is an analogy, but what are the reasons? Let's see them together:
The streaming industry lives on amateurish musicians because they bring the audience "at high numbers"
This is the first reason why there's mixture between amateurish and professional. The streaming, that someone is flaunting like the future of professionalism, is actually connected at a vision completely amateurish. The world of music today exploits the streaming and the streaming system, and these made the music become an amateurish fact (the streaming doesn't pay enough, with 100k streams you gain 150 euro, but scoring them isn't a little thing) and they even need the amateurs to be sustained!
Take Spotify as an example. Spotify exploits the users (who can be "followed" exactly like the artists) and most of all the amateurish artists: the small artists, who convince in groups of 10, 20, 30 or 40 persons all their friends to subscribe, build the advertising base. Through them Spotify guides the listener towards the ones that made more investments, and in the same way it profiles a price always more important for the advertisements and spots. The high school band that makes subscribe 20 girls is the real power of groups like Maneskin, then they are the real beneficiaries of this audience.
The importance of the amateurish world regarding choices on which lie the great investments
Anyone who thinks logically can guess that there is no agency in the porn industry that invents the genre "interracial" or "wife" from scratch for attempting a big investment haphazardly. They have to stay on the safe side: these are all ideas of amateurs, uploaded online and subsequently become famous. In the world of porn, every "idea" is realized by a specific and dedicated website, that deepens this or that topic. In the world of music happens more or less the same. Anyone who invests, does so always on an idea born accidentally that is taking hold, because he has to stay on the safe side. And this because like in the porn, the world of music today experiences a fast and distracted use.
Exactly like in the porn, today the amateurish music situation is like a free motor for the projects that they are investing in. And the less intermediations there are, the better it is: see the idea of Spotify.
Spotify sends mails at artists proposing to upload the music straightaway. Why? Because for every amateur that brings 50 followers (convincing these 50 to listen to the own disc) it gets 50 subscriptions for an audience "non-mainstream", which is very precious. Precious because then it can be reselled like publishing capital when they need to sell inserts to projects which invest millions. The audience of Ed Sheeran, or Maneskin, or any other project with high investments, needs your neighbor, and the best way to convince him is when you do it. While the world of cinematics still has to work its butt off to bring around a film, the world of porn is completely structured on the free word of mouth, and the investments come after that.
4) The categories. Who has seen the world before 1999 knows that today the music is divided, sold and assimilated in categories, genres and number of views. In that time, this kind of logic was only known by the world of porn.
The porn market was the first to determine the number of views of a video. The first porn sites had the ingenious idea well before YouTube: it was used for the simple aim to reduce the times and avoid the scams for clients: if the video has more views it works, guaranteed. Before 2006, it was not imaginable that music could be organized according to these rules. MySpace was the first platform that had a hit counter, but attention, this wasn't decisive for the success of the band or music project, because the counter wasn't connected to other bands, every page had its own counter. The platform that applied the method of counting on an algorithm that knows what to suggest at the users was YouTube, then Facebook and the last shot came from Spotify. Spotify is a social network for all intents, both amateurish artists and professionals, built with an algorithmic logic of a porn site in the early 2000s. And attention: the counter that is currently dominating every multinational platform doesn't merely tell you that the song X has 10.000 hits, it's also the basis of algorithms for guiding the similarities.
Did you ever see a friend of yours on Spotify who makes music equal to the music of Bluvertigo associated to Bluvertigo? No, it will never happen, and you know why? Because on Spotify one of the most important principles of similarity between artists is the counter. If your friend has 1000 hits and Bluvertigo 2 millions, Bluvertigo probably will be associated to an artist or a project that has a similar hit number (for example Baustelle) instead of your friend. The association is not musical.
5) The numbers
In this time the need of entertainment has increased at a speed difficult to imagine. Today on Soundcloud there are 100 million of users. 100 million of profiles that upload music. An entire nation of big dimensions. And we're only talking about Soundcloud. All of them are searching for visibility. Between them there are artists and no. Distinguishing the ones from the others presumes study and knowledge of music: the category and the hype are not enough. Getting out of the pile is impossible without professionals at your service and investments. Nevertheless the numbers are so high that you can make a disc that circulates without noticing it, maybe in an unknown country that you have never visited.
Those who think now that the number of porn is lower than the number of generic entertainment, should take a look at some free sites. The numbers are absolutely similar. According to the IFPI Global Music Report, it's about billions and billions of hits: the music has become a primary asset, but there are a few willing to pay. So who pays is who wants a higher quality. Do you find analogies?
6) The total absence of criticism and the absolute domain of numbers in predetermined categories which, sometimes, update. The differences between porn and cinematics? They are the same between mainstream music and cinematics.
You know, in cinematics there are categories. But attention, these aren't categories of merit, the less exclusive, and most of all they're not considered artistically. For example "science fiction" doesn't provide that a director who is known for a crime fiction or a comedy is denied. In his career a director can, if he's creative, experiment with science fiction, crime stories and comedy, look for example Kubryk. Because in cinematics the categories don't come before the creation. And the one who analyses and talks about a film, regardless of genre, is the criticism. And take heed, he has no "fixed genre". A good cinematic critic reviews the Avengers as well as the last film of Eastwood as well as the Cannes Film Festival.
And in fact, in cinematics you can't fail: if you make a nice film you make a nice film, if it's bad it's bad, regardless of budget, and if you make a porn you make a porn.
You don't pass the selection procedure at the Cannes Film Festival, or in Venice, with a porn. In the world of music it's the opposite. If we transplanted the world of music in the world of cinema, we would find porn realized with a budget of a million euros competing at the Venice Film Festival with applauding critics.
Why isn't the world of cinema like this?
Like we said, in the world of cinematics there's a criticism, a cultural asset. There are mediators, those who want to be skipped by the aspirant music artists because ALL of them are convinced that a mediation is an obstacle for their immense art. In the world of music it's all left to chance because also the intellectuals want to have visibility through the musicians, and in second place because they follow cultural ideologies which are reflected in the music they're following. Tendentially the music criticism doesn't applaud a job done right or a breach if not after the glorification by the market. And anyway they aren't capable of recognizing it. We would have to write an entire book about this, the major part of the music criticism has the same ideological vision and is not capable of recognizing a work of art from a scam coated with care (or "dirtied" to seem authentic). Search for reviews pre-1994 of Prodigy Experience: you won't find anything. But if you search for critics and reviews of "the Fat of the Land", which is the landing of Prodigy on the major world on global scale, you will find everything imaginable, from the international to the provincial. "No Good" is more innovative than "Firestarter" but "No Good" doesn't have the praise of the criticism because XL, the label of Prodigy, at the time of No Good it was just a small English independent label, while Firestarter was released by the label of Madonna with the circulation of millions of CDs. So it's clear why Firestarter for the intellectuals is a "masterpiece post-punk": because it was released by the label of Madonna.
