The attention economy defines and shapes today’s digital world. However, we have long since reached peak in the attention economy with all available free time now addressed. What this means is that previously, when digital entertainment propositions grew, they were often using up users’ free time. Now though, every minute gained is at someone else’s expense. The battle for attention is now both fierce and intense. What is more, it will get worse when much of the population finally returns to commuting and going out, as 2020 was defined by entertainment filling the extra 15% of free time people found in their weekly lives. But there is an ever bigger dynamic at play, one which gets to the very heart of entertainment: the attention economy is becoming a malign force for culture. Consumption is holding culture hostage.
The increasingly fierce competition for consumers’ attention is becoming corrosive, with clickbait, autoplay and content farms degrading both content and culture. What matters is acquiring audience and their time, the type of content and tactics that captures them is secondary. It is not just bottom feeder content farms that play this game, instead the wider digital entertainment landscape has allowed itself to become infected by their strategic worldview.
The attention dependency goes way beyond media
Do not for a minute think this is a media-only problem. The corrosive impact of the attention economy can be seen right across digital entertainment, from hastily churned out scripted dramas, through to music. Artists and labels are locked in a race to increase the volume and velocity of music they put out, spurred on by Spotify’s Daniel Ek clarion call to up the ante even further. In this volume and velocity game, algorithm-friendly A&R and playlist hits win out. Clickbait music comes out on top. And because music attention spans are shortening, no sooner has the listener’s attention been grabbed, then it is lost again due to the next new track. In the attention economy’s volume and velocity game, the streaming platform is a hungry beast that is perpetually hungry. Each new song is just another bit of calorific input to sate its appetite.
In this world, ‘streamability’ trumps musicality, but it is not just culture that suffers. Cutting through the clutter of 50,000 new songs every day also delivers diminishing returns for marketing spend. Labels have to spend more to get weaker results.
Music subscriptions accentuate the worst parts of the attention economy
Perhaps most importantly of all though, music subscriptions are the worst possible ecosystem in which to monetise the attention economy. In online media, more clicks means more ads, which means more ad revenue. In music subscriptions it is a fight to the death for a slice of a finite royalty pot. A royalty pot that is also impacted by slowing streaming growth and declining ARPU. The music industry has developed an attention dependency in the least healthy environment possible.
This is not one of those market dynamics that will eventually find a natural course correction. Instead, the music industry has to decide it wants to break its attention dependency and start doing things differently. Until then, consumption and content will continue to push culture to the side lines.
It is time to take hold of the wheel
Some years ago, Andrew Llyod Webber said this: “The fine wines of France are not merely content for the glass manufacturing business”. Although those words are of someone from the old world grappling with the new, the underlying premise remains. None of this is to suggest that streaming consumption is not the future. Nor is it to even suggest that all of the changes to the culture of music that streaming has brought about are negative. In fact, it may be that streaming-era music culture is simply what the future of music is going to be. But what is crucial is that artists, labels, songwriters and publishers take an active role in steering the ship to the future rather than simply getting pulled along by the streaming tide.
Music Industry Blog 
A great piece, I love music, but I for one am getting tired of this relentless push to consume everything all at once whether it be film, TV, music, or purchasing things. And it can be attributed to the policy makers who want people to consume things for consumption sake for the economy: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/a-brief-history-of-consumer-culture/
I have been a long time reader of this blog and have always appreciated your insight (bought and read your book too). And I just realized that this article is one of the rare (or perhaps, only) opinion pieces you have written here. Somehow this reads like you are writing this not from an ‘industry’ perspective, but instead from some deeper place within yourself. It is obvious you feel very strongly about this – you probably see this manifesting first hand in your day to day interactions with the folks in the industry.
But Very pleased to read this. (Agree with it 100% of course). And hope to read more such pieces in the future.
Perhaps, you should accompany this post with a link to Steven Wilson’s “Sound of Muzak”. Since you are from the UK, you probably know what I am talking about.
Yes, this is the end of the era of the wheel (streaming platforms) and the hamster (indie artist) in the cage (streaming statistics)!
When the free analyst and the free artist’s assessment of reality coincide, it is already a sign of the end of what has been measured and given a future price of ZERO.
Artists create a culture of the eternal soul, beauty, the meaning of life, not a corrupted track-hook for 5 seconds of attention for 0,00…
Marketing that is not for the artists’ creativity, but for business profit is the enemy of Love and the Creator – that is satanism.
Thank you. Unfortunately, even top artists who can afford not to stoop to “clickbait music” have done so. Consider Taylor Swift, perhaps once the most visible critic of streaming. Now she, too, has succumb to feeding the “hungry beast” that is streaming platforms by releasing two lengthy albums in one year. Whether this increase in creative output necessarily constitutes sacrificing quality for quantity is up for debate, but it certainly looks that way …
Cogent post, Mark with application to far more than music culture, as you rightfully pointed out. Thanks for the insight.
My dad graduated college in the U.S. in the 1950’s with a degree in Communications and spent his career in the exploding new culture-defining technology of television (advertising and selling commercial time for TV stations, specifically). His earnings provided a nice living for our family and put me through college. Yet even he called a television set “the idiot box.” So what you’ve pointed out isn’t a ‘new’ problem though it’s perhaps even more pervasive. As you’ve suggested and to borrow from Andrew Lloyd Weber, I guess it’s time the music industry (and other culture-defining enclaves) decide if they want fine wine or skanky beer.
Keep the insights coming.
Steve Lyon Cedar Park, Texas USA
On Fri, Jan 15, 2021 at 10:43 AM Music Industry Blog wrote:
> Mark Mulligan posted: ” The attention economy defines and shapes today’s > digital world. However, we have long since reached peak in the attention > economy with all available free time now addressed. What this means is that > previously, when digital entertainment propositions grew” >
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I don’t think we know yet what music will look like before the young people who never had expectations of getting rich overnight from record deal start to produce music. I would guess it will tilt away from some of the worst aspects of music stardom: death by drug overdose in your 20s slightly towards the other end of the spectrum church organist that can live comfortable throughout life and interacts with the mass attendees.