»If you don’t fully understand music, you end up working for the technology instead of the technology working for you.«
— Quincy Jones, musicradar 2020

Published shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic wrestled our over-expanding global village to a halt, I wrote an article titled »How Platform Capitalism Devalued the Music Industry« that set out to mark time1 at the end of the decade and meditate on the major shifts in the standards of music consumption and criticism in the 2010s.

To briefly recap, album sales, as well as music retailers as a whole, have been in sharp decline since 2001, with streaming services such as Spotify capitalising on the untapped wealth of music catalogues in an increasingly oversaturated digital market. In August of 2020, my statistical analyst partner Ting Ding 丁汀 and I wrote a music revenue report called »Edging the Glass Cliff,« in anticipation of a new age of aspirational, or delusional, greed and financialisation initiated by content producers and amateur tycoons, pontificating amid diminishing expectations from the general consumer population and multiple waves of mass death. After a decade of failed and failing ventures in paid media advertising, global PR campaigns, and an industry-wide pivot from text to image to video-oriented content – which was proven to be inflated and manipulated by hosting platforms like Facebook as far back as 2016 – the music industry has found itself in a place in which we can’t seem to remember why we even listen to, let alone, pay for music. Empty promises of saving a dying – now dead – music industry with a shift in focus away from the current long term contractual scam to multiple work-in-progress »alternatives« have occupied the misguided thoughts of majority white male analysts who neither consume nor produce nor listen to music, but feel the need to monopolise the remaining scraps of music value in order to revitalise, repurpose, and repackage what is essentially leftover dead stock from a music industry of yesteryear towards a flaccid and unsustainable future of culture.

A 2020 end of year report on vinyl sales by Discogs showed a seeming rise in music purchases, misleading readers into imagining that the industrialisation of music and culture is both natural and worth saving. »Growth in global physical sales through the Discogs Marketplace is up 35.78% to 8,845,534 orders over the prior year,« the article states, adding that »in total, 16,290,197 pieces of physical music were sold around the world, bringing an overall 40.12% increase year-over-year.« To paraphrase a previous assertion written in »Edging the Glass Cliff« in comparison with Discog’s trend report: »[t]he music industry as a whole grossed $20.2 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2019, but its revenue for physical units has shrunk from 97.9%, or $22.9 billion, of all global music industry revenue in 2001 to 21.8%, or $4.4 billion. Simultaneously, downloads and other digital formats began experiencing modest levels of success, peaking in 2012 at 30%, or $4.4 billion, of all global revenues, only to lose their footing again.« At the same rate, music synchronisation – a music licence granted by the holder of a song’s copyright to allow a song to be synchronised for film, television shows, advertisements, video games, movie trailers, etc. – appears for the first time in 2010 grossing only 0.3% of the overall revenue of the music industry. This small sliver of profit will be important in the coming years as major label artists within the Recording Industry Association of America, such as Dolly Parton, Bob Dylan, Lil Wayne (and by proxy Nicki Minaj and Drake) have begun to make the decision to sell their masters and copyrights to the largest music company in the world, Universal Music Group, who recently signed a multi-year licensing agreement with Spotify – despite synchronisation only growing to be approximately 0.5% of all music revenue in 2019.

At present, artists and copyrights are indentured and intertwined assets in a music industrial complex that no one has any intention of fixing. On February 19th, Bloomberg published a video that peered into how investors are »using music as a new asset class« to make money that the artists in the current contractual agreements haven’t received (and perhaps never will), noting that »many musicians are giving up rights to their own music.« As a result of wayward speculations on how to sell music without designing a proper backbone for rational production and distribution, an inevitable industry-wide cash out is due to occur in the following months and years by musicians who are fed up, and have given up on the idea that the music industry has, or had, any intentions on systemically paying artists and providing music to its consumers fairly. In response, the Make Techno Black Again campaign, powered by HECHA / 做, was started in 2016 as an attempt to assert sustainable and equitable payment and donation models within our immediate community, donating 50 percent of its revenue to Teen HYPE (Helping Youth by Providing Education), a Detroit-based youth arts nonprofit.