David Arditi, "Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok" (Anthem Press, 2026)

Summary

Podcast Summary: New Books Network Episode: David Arditi, "Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok"
Host: Dave (New Books Network)
Guest: David Arditi
Date: April 7, 2026

---

Overview

This episode features David Arditi, author of Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy: From Taping to Napster to TikTok. The conversation delves into the recurring moral and economic panics provoked by new music technologies and platforms, how the music industry crafts narratives of piracy and loss, the persistent inequities facing artists, and recent shifts driven by streaming and TikTok. The tone is thoughtful and occasionally irreverent, with personal asides and historical depth grounding a critical analysis of music's changing landscape.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The "Piracy Panic Narrative" Explained

[02:46]

• Arditi introduces the "piracy panic narrative":

  "File sharing is piracy. Piracy is stealing. And stealing hurts artists and their labels. Therefore, major record labels argue that music fans who file share are not listening to free music, but rather they're stealing income from their favorite artists."

• He notes "piracy" is a legally nebulous term—the only legal reference is to maritime piracy, not copyright.
• The industry frames copyright violations as piracy, using intense rhetoric, e.g. "Piracy is not a victimless crime" (FBI warning).
• Panic narratives are not new; John Philip Sousa in the early 20th century lamented "dead music" caused by recorded sound—an echo of later panics.

---

2. Industry vs. Artists: Where the Money Goes

[06:00 – 10:33]

• The industry conflates its interests with artists—shifting blame for lost revenue to fans, not industry practices.
• Arditi deconstructs artist-label economics:
  • Labels: everyone from security to executives gets a wage/salary, except artists.
  • Artists are "independent contractors" who sign for an advance, which must be recouped.

  "Everybody gets a salary or gets wage work except for the people who actually create the product that the recording industry sells, which is the musicians." ([08:17])

• Advances are used mostly to cover recording costs, not profit for artists.

---

3. From Vinyl to Tapes: The "Album Replacement Cycle" and Industry Response

[12:17]

• Arditi outlines the "album replacement cycle": every format shift (78s→45s→33⅓s→tape→CD) prompts industry income from fans repurchasing music.
• Vinyl and early playback formats limited copying; cassettes enabled it, undermining the cycle.
• Industry panic focused on the technology’s ability to support independent artists and noncommercial sharing.
• Example slogan: "Home taping is killing music" (UK, 1980s).

  "Tape cassettes really flip this on its head because if you owned music on vinyl, you could just record your music onto your tape cassettes." ([14:27])

• The root anxiety: tapes enabled independent music outside capitalist channels, thus shifting competition.

  "One of the greatest thing that tape cassettes did... was it allowed for tape trading... It was independent artists who were just putting their music out there and people were trading it." ([15:29])

---

4. Napster & File Sharing: Metallica, Lawsuits, and the "Folk Devil"

[18:23–24:53]

• The industry, backed by some prominent artists (notably Metallica’s Lars Ulrich), aggressively prosecuted file-sharers.

  "Metallica is absolutely the bad guy. 27 years later, I still cannot stand Metallica because of what they... did in trying to shut down Napster." ([19:48])

• Anecdote: Ulrich arrived with reams of paper, listing usernames of those who downloaded Metallica’s songs.
• Artists were cast as victims, fans as thieves. Paradoxically, Metallica and similar artists earned more suing fans than ever from albums.
• Same narrative appeared in full-page ads (Britney Spears, others) to promote iTunes as a "legitimate" source of music.
• Shift of the "piracy panic" to channel fan purchasing to specific corporate platforms.

---

5. Streaming Era: The New Panic & "Value Gap"

[24:53–31:23]

• Move from iTunes store to streaming (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) shifted the nature of industry concerns.
• New panic: Will a "next generation" of artists survive the streaming system?
• Labels publicly decry underpayment by platforms, while holding equity stakes and earning substantially.
• Grammy president Neil Portnow evoked the specter of "no new artists in the future" if payments don't improve.

  "Most people play and record music and never make a dime... there's tons of people who continue to make music." ([27:18])

• Arditi: This narrative obscures that the greatest inequity is still the artist-label relationship, not the streaming technology.
• Labels benefit from aggregating many artists’ streams—collecting revenue even where no individual artist makes enough for compensation.
• "Value gap" becomes the new buzzword: alleged underpayments by certain platforms, especially YouTube due to differing copyright frameworks.
• Emerging "folk devil" is now YouTube, not Spotify or Apple Music.

---

6. The TikTok Era: Promotion, Song Length, and Attention

[31:23–37:16]

• TikTok initially a lip-syncing platform; labels seized promotional opportunities early.

  "If they could get their music into different TikTokers feeds, then they could drive more album sales." ([32:27])

• Songs "going viral" on TikTok fuel streaming success elsewhere—music itself often secondary to meme-ability and shareability.
• Shift toward shorter songs, influenced by both cultural attention spans and platform monetization models (e.g., 30 seconds on Spotify = a stream).
• Reference to lasting influence of historical formats:

  "The standard pop song has for decades been about three minutes long... But now that we're getting into that TikTok shorter and shorter time frame... songs have actually gotten shorter." ([36:10])

• Anecdote: Arditi’s son baffled by a 20-minute jam-band song—a generational shift.

---

7. Looking Ahead: Precarity, the "Gig Trap," and Future Scholarship

[38:01]

• Arditi’s next project broadens his lens:

  "I'm actually working on a book where I extend this to society more generally and I call it the Gig Trap. So now I think you can look and see the way so many people are going into precarious work that is independent. They're considered independent contractors, whether they're uber drivers or the next entrepreneur... on the dream that they're going to make it big." ([39:10])

• The "ideology of getting signed" as aspiration, often to the detriment of actual earning potential, is mirrored in today's gig economy.

---

Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Piracy Panic Narrative: "File sharing is piracy. Piracy is stealing. And stealing hurts artists and their labels." — David Arditi [03:12]
• Commodification of Music: "Everybody gets a salary... except for the people who actually create the product that the recording industry sells, which is the musicians." — David Arditi [08:17]
• Tape Era Impact: "One of the greatest things that tape cassettes did... was it allowed for tape trading... It was independent artists who were just putting their music out there and people were trading it." — David Arditi [15:29]
• Metallica vs. Napster: "Metallica is absolutely the bad guy. 27 years later, I still cannot stand Metallica because of what they... did in trying to shut down Napster." — David Arditi [19:48]
• Industry Profits in Streaming: “Under the current system of streaming, labels are absolutely making bank.” — David Arditi [27:58]
• TikTok and Song Length: "TikTok, I think primarily works as a promotional tool... One effect has been what you mentioned, the shortening of songs... we're getting less and less attention spans." — David Arditi [33:35]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:46] — Defining the piracy panic narrative
• [07:53] — Deconstructing the artist-label relationship
• [12:17] — Format change economics & the album replacement cycle
• [14:27] — The rise of home taping and independent artist disruption
• [19:48] — Metallica, Napster, and moral panics
• [24:53] — Streaming, "value gap," and new folk devils (YouTube)
• [32:19] — TikTok, song length, and music's cultural moment
• [38:01] — Extending the argument: The "Gig Trap" and contemporary precarity

---

Memorable Moments

• Arditi’s ongoing disdain for Metallica’s anti-fan campaign.
• Personal anecdote about Virginia Tech playing Metallica’s "Enter Sandman"—contrasting public memory with his own.
• Discussion on song length: anecdote about Arditi’s son and jam-band Goose’s 20-minute track.

---

Conclusion

Arditi’s Music Technology Panic Narratives Beyond Piracy unpacks over a century of anxiety-fueled storytelling from the recording industry, examining how each technological shift is met with claims of crisis that often mask the ongoing exploitation of artists. The episode provides a brisk tour of the historical and contemporary mechanisms—from cassettes and Napster to TikTok and Spotify—while maintaining a critical yet conversational tone, offering both accessible history and trenchant critique for anyone interested in music, technology, or the future of creative labor.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

This episode is brought to you by TaxAct. Don't do your taxes alone. Join TaxAct's National Admin Night. Admin nights are social gatherings for getting through your to do list, so get ready for a night of fun, finding deductions and filing taxes with TaxAct, where you can file your federal and state return for just $49 through April 8th. Let's get together and get them over with. Visit taxact.comadminknight for details. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get [e-mail] own the dream this episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs so you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go [e-mail] like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to David Arditti about music technology panic narratives beyond privacy, from Taping to Napster to TikTok. So welcome to the podcast.

[David Arditti]

Thanks Dave. Thanks for having me.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

This is an incredibly well timed book. The almost kind of constant discussions of the future of the music industry, the impact of technology on the music industry and actually thinking about it. You know, similar narratives with like publishing, film, gaming are kind of constant. You know, if they're not daily, they're certainly kind of weekly. And this book I think, you know, directly speaks that and gives us really a sort of like, like a roadmap for thinking about how some of the big players in this space are talking and maybe what's really going on underneath their narratives. And I guess the place to start is with one of the terms that's in the title, which is this idea of a kind of privacy panic narrative. I'm sort of intrigued to know what that is, I guess, like why you needed to, to write a book about it as well.

[David Arditti]

So thank you again for having me. The piracy panic narrative is a concept that I developed in my first book, I Take over the recording industry in the digital era. And so I think the first thing to look at here is the idea of piracy. And I think piracy is an incredibly nebulous term. It is the word cultural industries used to describe copyright violations. But in the United States, there is no law that includes the word piracy related to copyright violations. The only time piracy comes up in any legal context is piracy of the seas. But this doesn't stop anybody from using it. In fact, the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States has an anti piracy logo that you always see before films. And it has a statement that warns against copyright infringement and that it's illegal. There was this whole period of time where they would say piracy is not a victimless crime. Well, who is the criminal here? And so that's where the piracy panic narrative comes in. And I describe the piracy panic narrative in the following way. File sharing is piracy. Piracy is stealing. And stealing hurts artists and their labels. Therefore, major record labels argue that music fans who file share are not listening to free music, but rather they're stealing income from their favorite artists. So that's the piracy panic narrative. And I've been playing with this for years. But of course, this is part of a much larger discussion that's been going on in the copyright or cultural industries for decades, even a century. So in this book I look more broadly at how this same narrative has been around and repurposed throughout recorded music. And what's interesting to me and what I discuss in the book is if you go back to the early 20th century, one of the biggest American composers who wrote marches was John Philip Sousa. And John Philip Sousa was saying much of the same kind of rhetoric that you see throughout the different music distribution panic narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries about how it was going to kill music. And we need to be careful of recorded music because it's dead music. So we see this narrative again and again. And while piracy as a thing really comes about for the file sharing music era, we still see that again and again.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

Yeah, I mean, we'll take the historical examples in turn and slightly depressingly, I'm old enough to have lived through almost all of them. And one of the things that really kind of chimed in the book was seeing some of the kind of slogans from the record industry and actually thinking about particular moments by specific favorite recording artists of mine when they were kind of talking about having their music stolen and stuff like this. But I just want to pick up on one of the Things you kind of mentioned, which I think is really central to the book's argument, to the book's point, which is this, I guess, kind of illusion of the record company or the record industry with the artists. So the panic, you know, narrative, the idea of, you know, what is being stolen here is that if you have these particular kinds of listening and engagement practices, artists are going to be hurt. And the key thing that comes through the book is actually artists get quite a raw deal from the industry pretty consistently, and yet the industry is using this kind of story. And I guess to understand that, you need to understand a bit about how the record industry works, really about, you know, the relationship between the kind of broad music industry and then artists and particularly, I think, the commodification of music. And one of the things the book does brilliantly, it gives this really kind of concise overview of that. And I'm sort of intrigued as to how you sort of tell that story, both in terms of how the industry works and in terms of the idea of kind of music being pretty much just a commodity for the industry.

[David Arditti]

So I. What's always struck me, I'm a musician, or at least I used to be a musician, I'm a drummer. And it always struck me the way that the industry discusses musicians as this. These people who are being harmed by their fans. And it's always, and this is, I think, one of the key elements to the piracy panic narrative. It's always the fans fault that their favorite artists can't feed themselves and never the label's fault. And if you actually look at the way the recording industry is structured, it's actually the label's fault that artists can't feed themselves. So one thing that I always try to bring up in my research around musicians is if you were to go to a record label and walk through the building, you're going to have security there. There's going to be people that work at the front desk, there's going to be people who are cleaning the building. Then you get into all the different aspects of the actual label, from A and R to marketing. A and R being artists and repertoire. They're the people that actually sign recording artists all the way up to the executives. Everybody gets a salary or gets wage work except for the people who actually create the product that the recording industry sells, which is the musicians. And the musicians fundamentally operate on a model where they remain independent from the record labels. And as soon as they sign a record contract, they say they're independent contractors. And what they get in exchange for Signing the record label is an advance on their record sales. Now that advance has to be recouped, which means repaid off of the sale of music. So at every moment, if artists don't sell more than they're actually given up front, then they actually make no money. And the money that they're given up front, they use to record the album. So they're not actually pocketing money from the recording and sale of their music.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

That system is, like, fundamental to the story. And as we kind of wrap up, actually, one of the things that's going to come through that you talk about right at the end of the book is just how, to me, kind of like crazy record company profits still are, even at a point where key executives are like, oh, we're very worried about the future of artists coming through because of Spotify and stuff like this. But before that, I mean, that's a bit of a sort of spoiler alert for the listener of where we're going to go. But before that, I want to take forward that kind of unequal relationship, particularly in terms of, like, how you as an artist have to, like, pay back the record company into thinking about formats and technology. So it'd be useful, I guess, to hear about kind of like what the era of vinyl was like in terms of it being quite difficult to, like, copy music. It was essentially, you know, a kind of a format that allowed you to listen to music at home, but not, you know, sort of move around with it particularly well and certainly not transfer it to other media. And then what happens when CDs and tapes come in? I was struck, you know, that kind of famous line that I can sort of just about remember. You know, home taping is killing, you know, sort of music and film and stuff like this. And, yeah, that kind of shift, I guess, from vinyl to more mobile forms of recording tech. What is that kind of story and I guess, kind of like, how does that impact the industry?

[David Arditti]

Yeah, so one of the. The key elements of the book is what I call the album replacement cycle. So ever since there has been vinyl records, every time a new recording device or playback devices developed, the recording industry's always been able to count on new record sales of people replacing their old albums. So you first see this as we went from 78 RPM records to the brief interlude of 45 RPM records, and. And then to 33 and a third records each at each moment. If you owned a record that you loved, that was 78 RPM and then you wanted to hear it on the LP format 33 and a third, you had to repurchase it because there was no way to re record it. Now some record players play different speed discs, but there was always this process and alongside that they would remaster it because 33 and a third records sound a lot better than 78 RPM records. There was the moment when stereo records were developed. So if you owned a record in mono and then you bought a new stereo record player, you would want to repurchase your music even if it was the same format. So you had a mono 33 and a third. Now you want to hear that in stereo because it sounds better. So you go and you purchase your recordings again. And so you have this process, you get it again. With the eight track, along comes tape cassettes. And tape cassettes really flip this on its head because if you owned music on vinyl, you could just record your music onto your tape cassettes. And there were tons of lawsuits where you really see what amounts to the record industry fighting itself. So one of the the biggest lawsuits in the US was the Sony Betham Max. And so at the same time, some of these record companies are also technology companies that are producing a competitive technology. And it's almost like one part of the industry or one part of a technology company is suing the other part. So there's all these elements going on. And so the British phonograph industry started this campaign in the UK and home taping is killing music. And what I really focus on in chapter two of the book is how this narrative, while it seems like it might be about how tapes themselves interfere with this album replacement cycle, what I argue is it's always independent artists that they're actually trying to push out. So one of the greatest thing that tape cassettes did, and this happened in both punk music and hip hop music, was it allowed for tape trading. And that was not necessarily tape trading of major record label artists. It was independent artists who were just putting their music out there and people were trading it. And it was this cultural practice that was completely outside of the capitalist economy. And that actually ends up hurting record labels because record labels count on people to purchase music, but they can't really ever stop independent artists from distributing music, even though that becomes their competition. So the way they try to do that because they don't want to compete with free, is they try to shut down the technological formation. So that's where you get home taping is killing music. And what I actually wanted to name the book was you're killing music.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

This episode is Brought to you by Fandango. People say fans are too distracted these days.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

But.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

But the truth is, when a great movie hits the screen, you show up. You stay glued, invested, part of the story. And without fans like you, there'd be no cinema magic, no shared moments. So head to fandango.com to get tickets, stream or rent or buy top movies and series. Fandango loves fans. You tell yourself no one wants your college era band tees.

[David Arditti]

But on Depop, people are searching for

[Interviewer (Dave)]

exactly what you've got. You once paid a small fortune for

[David Arditti]

them at merch stands.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

Now a teenager who calls them vintage

[David Arditti]

will offer that same small fortune back.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

Sell them easily on Depop.

[David Arditti]

Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. Who knew your questionable music taste would be a money making machine?

[Interviewer (Dave)]

Your style can make you cash start

[David Arditti]

selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Trick's Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, roomie? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

It is an honor to share.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

No, it's our honor.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

It is our larger honor.

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side

[Interviewer (Dave)]

and participate in McDonald's while supplies last. That would have been quite quiet. It's a cool um, that sense of like shutting down the technology really like immediately picks up the, the story of, of sharing of, of file sharing, which on the one hand, you know, is a particular kind of tech that enables peer to peer sharing of information, data, some of which is things like MP3 piles. But within that story you've got on the one hand, you know, the sort of really obvious intervention by record labels. A bit like you know, the Betamax case you just mentioned, but actually really prominent artist voices and I mean we could just have a go at Metallica now which even like I do love them and I'm off to see them this summer is kind of bad. But they were maybe the most prominent ones. You know, like literally starring in an advert saying if you're sharing our music, you're stealing it, this kind of stuff. But I'm intrigued I guess for the sharing example. Less so the technology, but more so how these prominent artists reacted to this technological development that seemed to be a threat to their, their profits.

[David Arditti]

So Metallica is absolutely the bad guy. 27 years later, I still cannot stand Metallica because of what they, and especially drummer Lars Ulrich did in trying to shut down Napster. It's funny, I just recently I have an 11 year old son and he's kind of discovered Metallica and I'm, I'm trying to explain to him how kind of evil they were at that moment, but he just fundamentally doesn't get it. So. And the way this comes up is in kind of an ironic way. I did my undergraduate studies at Virginia Tech and Virginia Tech, when the American football team comes out, they do this big thing where they play Enter Metallica's Enter Sandman and everybody in the stadium jumps up and down and rhythm to it. And then the football team comes running in and they cut off the sound and everybody's screaming. And over the past three decades now, the somehow a very close relationship between Virginia and Metallica has formed. The irony being that when I was at Virginia Tech, it was in this moment when Lars Ulrich was going out there and suing his fans. So for me it's this very strange identity that they're, they're, they're trying to make Metallica the Virginia Tech music group. And that wasn't my memory of that at all. But so what happened in that moment? And I can't recall the exact numbers, but essentially Napster happened. You could get free music from it. And a lot of people were downloading Metallica and Lars Ulrich showed up with reams of paper. It was the old school paper with the tracking holes on the sides. And he had single column on each page listing the usernames that had downloaded Metallica's music in the past 24 hours. And essentially it was what they, they sued people for was more money in 24 hours than Metallica had ever made from recorded music. And they've made a lot of money from recorded music. They're one of the few artists that actually gets any money from their recordings. So I forget the numbers, but it was, it was massive. And essentially what they were saying in that moment was their fans were causing them economic harm and they needed to stop. So here you have this edgy heavy metal group that's supposed to be against the man and they're telling their fans that they need to get in line. So you had that. I remember there were full page ads taken out throughout the file sharing era by people like Britney Spears saying that the fans are harming them and they should purchase music. And a big when that big campaign. So there was the Metallica moment, but the big campaign by Britney Spears and other people happened right when they created itunes, the itunes store. So when Apple created the itunes store, all of a sudden the Recording Industry association of America, the British Phonographic industry, the International Federation of Phonographic Industries, all the different nation state based organizations that represented the recording industry, they made a huge push to try and force fans to buy music from itunes. So it stopped being or they started looking at what they called, quote unquote, legitimate places to get music online. And it was through this piracy panic narrative that they took out full page ads with people like Britney Spears saying, you're hurting us.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

That I guess is like the starting point for the streaming era. And there's a sort of shift, I guess from the itunes store into like what's now Apple Music and we've got Spotify, other platforms as well. Things like these are for people outside of of the US and there's also I guess kind of how music crops up in other sort of streaming contexts. And what's really interesting here, and you know, I sort of mentioned we were going to get into this earlier, is the way that you've got this story now that shifted I think away from hey, you know, Jay Z or Taylor Swift aren't making enough money from this system to supposedly kind of stories that the next generation aren't going to come through. This, you know, might be a bit of a problem with the way something like Spotify works, but in the book you analyze in quite kind of compelling detail the way that actually the record labels have quite clear equity stakes in some of these platforms. There are, you know, sort of quite close relationships. And really the story of like the next generation not coming through isn't a story of streaming being the issue. It's a story of again, how the record industry functions. And I guess that kind of moment is really crucial because the panic narrative is there maybe in a kind of slightly more subtle and you know, reconstructed form about we're worried about Spotify coming from the record industry, but at the same time they're still making loads of money. So how does that work?

[David Arditti]

Yeah, so the moment you're pointing to was at the American Grammy Awards, the president of the Recording Industry association of America went out on to the Grammy Awards. I'm sorry, not the president of the Recording Industry association of America, the president of Grammys, Neil Portnow, goes out and he says essentially we're celebrating this year's best new artist, but what if in 10 years or so we can't have this award anymore because there is no new artist and he makes this whole argument that people will not want to record music in the future if they can't make money from it. Now, this is a huge irony because most people play and record music and never make a dime. I mean, for years I played in bars, in small venues. Sometimes there would be nobody there, sometimes we'd have packed houses. I rarely made more than, say, $200 from a performance, but I kept doing it. And I was a drummer. But, you know, there's tons of people who continue to make music. One woman I played with, Drew, she is still performing music, and I don't think she's made all that much, but she keeps doing it. So this idea that somehow people will not continue to produce music if they can't make money from it is just a strange, ironic statement to make. And the problem, they say is, is the way people are paying for music or not paying for it. But what I argue is the problem is the actual labels themselves and the way they pay artists. So under the current system of streaming, labels are absolutely making bank. You mentioned, mentioned the, the. The way they have equity in the streaming companies. And that's absolutely one element to it. But if, let's say you need to get a thousand streams to be able to make any money as an artist. Well, if you're a label and you have hundreds of artists at any given moment producing new music, well, they're still working on the same thousand. So if you have one artist that's getting 500 streams, another one's getting 30 streams, and another one's getting a thousand streams, well, they're actually getting revenue from all of those streams, while the individual artists might not be getting any money. So there's that kind of irony in it. At the same time, the way that I think that the piracy narrative comes in here is what Neil Portnow was really trying to do is he was trying to say there's this thing that they labeled the value gap. And the value gap is the amount that they said particular platforms underpay artists. So by that point, they didn't really have any kind of problem with Spotify or Apple Music. Their folk devil, as I refer to the bad guy in the piracy panic narratives, their folk devil was actually YouTube, who, because YouTube is a video streaming platform, they operate under slightly different copyright laws that has to do with

[Interviewer (Dave)]

what's

[David Arditti]

called synchronization licenses instead of the typical kind of publishing and recording rights that the industry predominantly uses. So at that moment, they were, the recording industry was trying to tell fans not to listen to music or on YouTube.

[Interviewer (Dave)]

One thing the book does, picking up on that YouTube point is kind of wraps up by thinking about like music itself. And obviously like TikTok is mentioned in the title of the book as well. And as a kind of like, I guess, concluding point for the book, you try and grapple with things like songs getting shorter, the way that particular things kind of work on TikTok and others don't, the, you know, sort of options we have as listeners, but then you know, kind of problems of discoverability and yeah, as a kind of concluding point to bring in the sort of current moment and the current set of platforms, what's actually happened to music in the. Yeah, the kind of TikTok era.

[David Arditti]

What I find interesting about the TikTok era is TikTok started as a lip syncing platform and early on record labels figured out that if they could get their music into different TikTokers feeds, then they could drive more album sales. So they very early on realized, well, we can actually use this as a promotional tool. And I'm not sure if or how much record labels earn from TikTok, but it works fairly effectively to popularize different songs. And then people go and they, they stream it. But what I, what I think's important there, and I think what you're seeing with a lot of music is, and maybe to some extent this has always been the case, the music doesn't really matter, it's the moment and how people feel about a particular song. So if they can get people to connect with a song through TikTok, they might be able to get somebody to stream it on Spotify or Apple Music, which then can be monetized. So TikTok, I think primarily works as a promotional tool, but it also has people. I mean music is always part of the cultural process and it conditions us to how we think about what standard music would be. And one effect has been what you mentioned, the shortening of songs. So this is really a product of something that's happening to our attention spans from social media, scrolling through feeds, trying to find something that you like. So we're getting less and less attention spans. I mean the irony of that is I don't know if you've heard of them yet. There's this new jam band called Goose and I'm going to see Goose next month in April with my son and a friend and his son. And they have their jam bands so they have really long songs. You know, most of their songs on an album are five to seven minutes, but there's a live version of a song called 2021, which is about the year 2021. And they made the song 20 minutes and 21 seconds. This, to my son, is just an affront. Why would you make a song 20 minutes and 21 seconds? No one wants to listen to something that long, which I do. But we get shorter and shorter music. And one of the ironies about the length of the average length of a song is it's still determined by or over determined by the length of a side of a 78 RPM record, which was 2 and a half to 3 minutes of time on each side. So the standard pop song has for decades been about three minutes long. But now we're beginning to see songs instead of getting longer. Because with MP3s and online streaming, there's really no limit to how long a song can be. We're not limited by the recording device, but we're culturally limited to what we're used to. So people generally don't like to hear songs longer than three minutes. But now that we're getting into that TikTok shorter and shorter time frame. You also see the demands on Spotify of what counts as a stream. So I think you need to listen to a song for, I think it's 30 seconds for it to count as a stream. But if you're a record label after you hit 30 seconds, there's no real benefit for listeners to keep listening after 30 seconds. In fact, it would be better if they went to the next song at that point because then you can get another stream on the. Maybe the same artist or somebody else on. On your label. So songs have actually gotten shorter as a result of our. Our. Both our attention span and the way streaming services renumerate for listens that like

[Interviewer (Dave)]

cultural impact sort of strikes me as the kind of thing you could do a whole other book about, you know, kind of building on. On this book. But at the same time, you know, if you sort of mentioned earlier having kind of played around with some of the ideas and the framing in this book for quite a long time, and I guess there is this kind of moment where you think about like, you know, the kind of next project, the next agenda, and it'd be interesting to hear kind of where you're going now next. Are you kind of doing more music stuff? Are you jumping off in a similar kind of direction from the end of this book, or are you working on something kind of a bit different?

[David Arditti]

Yeah, I'm actually working on something that extends the previous project that I spoke to you about. So back in 2020, I published a book called Getting Signed, Record Contracts, Power and Society. And in that I developed this, what I call the ideology of getting signed, which I really see as a model that, that touches on a lot of things. The ideology of getting signed is this idea that people are going to get massive success from signing a record contract when in actuality the worst thing they can do for their career, or at least their, maybe not their career, but their, their, their wallets, is sign a record contract. So in that book, I was trying to understand why people would do that, but for me, it was always this thing that existed far beyond just record contracts and musicians. So I'm actually working on a book where I extend this to society more generally and I call it the Gig Trap. So now I think you can look and see the way so many people are going into precarious work that is independent. They're considered independent contractors, whether they're uber drivers or the next entrepreneur. Or they're, they're working internships for no little to no pay. And they're doing all these things on the dream that they're going to make it big at whatever they're doing one day. So not just record contracts. And I call that the gig trap because what you see is people willing to do these different temporary gigs that make their labor much more expendable, but also make the labor of other people more expendable in the process. Foreign. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day, on the couch, in the crowd, or

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

manning the snack table, Athletic Brewing fits

[David Arditti]

right in with a full lineup of

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

non alcoholic beer styles you can enjoy.

[David Arditti]

Bold flavors all game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second second half. Stock the fridge for tip off with a variety of non alcoholic craft styles. Available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com near Beer Fit for all times.