The Attention Economy Is Ruining Music Discovery

Kristin Snyder

Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.

The Attention Economy Is Ruining Music Discovery
Photo by C D-X on Unsplash

AI has infiltrated just about every creative field. Poets have complained about the tech’s shoddy imitations of famous writers, anime fans can watch an unending AI-generated show and artists are suing an AI company over copyright usage. The music industry is no exception.

Though there are plenty of examples of people using ChatGPT to write songs, AI has been most successfully implemented as a way for music platforms to recommend music.


Yesterday, SoundCloud announced an AI-driven, TikTok-esque recommendation feed. Based on tech from Musiio, which SoundCloud acquired in 2022, the feed shares 30-second clips of songs inspired by users’ listening history and music taste. This comes not long after Spotify launched its own vertical AI feed that users can scroll through to discover new music. In addition, Spotify has gotten into the AI game with its new DJ—a personalized music feed accompanied by an AI-generated voice reading facts curated by Spotify’s experts.

For SoundCloud, this move is likely an attempt to revamp a struggling business. Last August, SoundCloud cited "the challenging economic and financial environment" when it laid off 20% of its workforce. Its business model has been questionable for quite some time, with reports going back to 2014 noting that its large user base doesn’t offset the cost of running the platform. However, the company has seen a steady revenue increase since 2017. Still, apps like Spotify and TikTok have cracked the code of music recommendations. SoundCloud’s TikTok imitation, complete with 30-second song clips, shows that the company is vying for attention.

But the message coming from these companies is a fairly obvious one: users can’t be bothered to choose the music they want to listen to for themselves.

On the surface, the release of these recommendation features make sense. We’re currently seeing more music being released than ever before. In 2022, 100,000 songs were uploaded across the various digital service providers every day. People are clearly looking for ways to parse through the wide offering. Spotify’s Discover Weekly, which suggests new music to users, was streamed for over 2.3 billion hours between 2015 and 2022.

While AI can be helpful for some listeners, it doesn’t bode well for music creation. Just look at what’s happened to the music industry as artists chase TikTok’s algorithm. Music executives have admitted to encouraging producers to shorten songs in order to better prime them to go viral on TikTok. This strategy has worked for some artists, like Gayle, who turned TikTok vitality into a Grammy nomination. But artists have been lambasted for valuing TikTok virality over quality. When Meghan Trainor released a preview of her upcoming single “Mother” last week, people were quick to label it “TikTok vomit.”

But it's one thing for a social media platform to boost a certain type of short, quippy song. It’s another thing entirely for the very platforms that these songs live on to do so. Even artists who currently look down on this songwriting style might be encouraged to produce similar music if it’s the only way to reach new audiences.

Every tech company is chasing the AI craze, so it's no surprise that SoundCloud and Spotify are doing so as well. The recent announcement from Soundcloud also serves as an indictment of how the attention economy has upended the music industry. One researcher found that people only pay attention to one screen for about 47 seconds. That presents a problem for music platforms when pop songs, for example, average around three minutes and 30 seconds. Hence Soundcloud’s decision to serve up songs in 30-second sound bites.

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How Token and Tixr Plan To Take on Ticketmaster in L.A.

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How Token and Tixr Plan To Take on Ticketmaster in L.A.
Evan Xie

When Taylor Swift announced her ‘Eras’ tour back in November, all hell broke loose.

Hundreds of thousands of dedicated Swifties — many of whom were verified for the presale — were disappointed when Ticketmaster failed to secure them tickets, or even allow them to peruse ticketing options.

But the Taylor Swift fiasco is just one of the latest in a long line of complaints against the ticketing behemoth. Ticketmaster has dominated the event and concert space since its merger with Live Nation in 2010 with very few challengers — until now.

Adam Jones, founder and CEO of Token, a fan-first commerce platform for events, said he has the platform and the tech ready to take it on. With Token, Jones is creating a system where there are no queues. In other words, fans know immediately which events are sold out and where.

“We come in very fortunate to have a modern, scalable tech stack that's not going to have all these outages or things being down,” Jones said. “That's step one. The other thing is we’re being aggressively transparent about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. So with the Taylor Swift thing…you would know in real time if you actually have a chance of getting the tickets.”

Here’s how it works: Users register for Token’s app and then purchase tickets to either an in-person event, or an event in the metaverse through Animal Concerts. The purchased ticket automatically shows up in the form of a mintable NFT, which can then be used toward merchandise purchases, other ticketed events or, Adams’s hope for the future — external rewards like airline travel. The more active a user is on the site, the more valuable their NFT becomes.

Ticketmaster has dominated the music industry for so long because of its association with big name artists. To compete, Token is working on gaining access to their own slew of popular artists. They recently entered into a partnership with Animal Concerts, a live and non-live event experiences platform that houses artists like Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg and Robin Thicke.

“You'll see they do all the metaverse side of the house,” Jones said. “And we're going to be the [real-life] web3 sides of the house.”

In addition, Token prides itself on working with the artists selling on their platform to set up the best system for their fanbase, devoid of hefty prices and additional fees — something Ticketmaster users have often complained about. Jones believes where Ticketmaster fails, Token thrives. The app incentivizes users to share more data about their interests, venues and artists by operating on a kind of points system in the form of mintable NFTs.

“We can actually take the dataset and say there’s 100 million people in the globe that love Taylor Swift, so imagine she’s going on tour and we ask [the user], ‘Would you go to see her in Detroit?’ And imagine this place has 30,000 seats, but 100,000 people clicked ‘yes,’” he explained. “So you can actually inform the user before anything even happens, right? About what their options are and where to get it.”

Tixr, a Santa-Monica based ticketing app, was founded on the idea that modern ticketing platforms were “living in the legacy of the past.” They plan to attract users by offering them exclusive access to ticketed events that aren’t in Ticketmaster’s registry.

“It melts commerce that's beyond ticketing…to allow fans to experience and purchase things that don't necessarily have to do with tickets,” said Tixr CEO and Founder Robert Davari. “So merchandise, and experiences, and hospitality and stuff like that are all elegantly melded into this one, content driven interface.”

Tixr sells tickets to exclusive concerts like a Tyga performance at a night club in Arizona, general in-person festivals like ComplexCon, and partners with local vendors like The Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach to sell tickets to the races. Plus, Davari said it’s equipped to handle high-demand, so customers aren’t spending hours waiting in digital queues.

Like Token, Tixr has also found success with a rewards program — in the form of fan marketing.

“There's nothing more powerful in the core of any event, brand, any live entertainment, [than] the community behind it,” Davari said. “So we build technology to empower those fans and to reward them for bringing their friends and spreading the word.”

Basically, if a user gets a friend to purchase tickets to an event, then the original user gets rewarded in the form of discounts or upgrades.

Coupled with their platforms’ ability to handle high-demand events, both Jones and Davari believe their platforms have what it takes to take on Ticketmaster. Expansion into the metaverse, they think, will also help even the playing field.

“So imagine you can't go to Taylor Swift,” Jones said. “What if you could purchase an exclusive to actually go to that exact same show over the metaverse? An artist’s whole world can expand past the stage itself.”

With the way ticketing for events works now, obviously not everyone always gets the exact price, venue or date they want. There are “winners and losers.” Jones’s hope is that by expanding beyond in-person events, there can be more winners.

“If there’s 100,000 people who want to go to one show and there's 37,000 seats, 70,000 are out,” he said. “You can't fight that. But what we can do is start to give them other opportunities to do things in a different way and actually still participate.”

Jones and Davari both teased that their platforms have some exciting developments in the works, but for now both Token and Tixr are set on making their own space within the industry.

“We simply want to advance this industry and make it more efficient and more pleasurable for fans to buy,” Davari said. “That's it.”

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