2025-08-03 ・・・ exposure-maxxing, and the one person amphitheatre
here i am once again to rant about the internet. you'd think i would've waited until i was, you know, like 40 or something...
however, i think now's a good time, too! given the current... unprecedented... circumstances...
right, right.....
anyways, this whole blog post came about because one person found my song on soundcloud, and has played it nearly 300 times since.
298 times to be exact....
in short, that's rather fucking nuts. someone actually liked something i created enough to not only play it, but return to it again multiple times. genuinely never thought this would happen when i first started making shitty sounds in my room. when i first saw it happening, i immediately thought someone was bot-spamming me. but they're a real person, with whom i have actually had a conversation now! wow.
in fact, upon giving this fact more than a surface-level thought one time, it actually made me kind of honored and emotional. something i created in my bedroom alone and depressed has become a piece of someone's life.
despite all of this occurring to me, it's relatively easy to think this is not much. compared to the number of streams people are getting on spotify, yes, it's definitively not.
but that is the phenomenon i am talking about. because if you think about it, 300 plays is actually a lot of time out of one person's life. not only that, but distilling a song down into a play count does the actual human value of it a great disservice.
the problem i sense in all of this, is how warped our sense of accomplishment and exposure has become; more precisely, i want to focus on two main issues.
the first, how we are being pushed to trade satisfaction with human connection and our emotional impact on each other, with black-and-white calculation and analysis of listeners, or likes, or impressions, etc.
the second, how we have been forfeiting (or being coerced into, rather) any sense of personal pride and enjoyment of our activities simply because they do not pick up an audience that reaches a virality whose scale has previously never known to mankind.
let's see how coherent i can be.....
i'll start from the first. to put it bluntly, we are in a dire circumstance. we have become hellbent on juicing things for their maximum numerical value, especially in murica. i especially realized this in japan, when i was quite literally min-maxxing a 5-tiered set of tradeoffs and concessions for a fucking 0.75 mile walk to school. i would talk to people from other countries, and their thought processes were no where near as neurotic or frantic or plagued by optimization. and they felt happier for it. and i just felt gross and exhausted.
a thought occurred: what did i even gain from crunching numbers and expanding decision trees??? nothing! literally, nothing!!!
i realized that my gripe with numbers applied to music, also pertains to practically everything. education, art, technology, leisure, sport, walking to class... you name it and it probably has been afflicted by it in some way or another. this discussion could go in a multitude of different, valid directions, but i primarily want to focus on the implications of trading a human focus away from music and art in favor of numbers.
an excerpt from a relevant reading penned by melos han-tani - https://melodicambient.substack.com/p/honor-studentism-educational-underpinnings
at its core, art is about challenging, relating, speaking (a non-exhaustive list), to the experiences, struggles, and the emotions of the human condition. but not only that, it was and is (no matter how much threat this principle is under) inherently social. this is factually just how society worked before phone went brrrrrr..... you did things together directly with other people to survive and move forward.
a weird, magical process called creation emerged from these shared experiences that allowed us to abstract them into alternative manifestations. cultural values came about through creative reactions to shared experiences and struggles. dance, rhythms, language, rituals, clothing, religion, tools, cave paintings, pottery, sculpture, interior design, architecture... humans carved the first instruments almost 40,000 years ago!
it's not hard to connect a few dots and propose that art evolved as a (possibly necessary) response to the exhausting focus needed to deliberately channel our survival instincts into solving life-or-death problems every single day. art can act as a deeply personal and social means of reapproaching these experiences, a reprieve from hardship while also simultaneously exorcising their damages out of the body.
but despite art emerging as a very healing and human process, possibly one acting in oppositional relief to the struggle of survival, we somehow are being pushed to turn it back into a calculated game that feels eerily like survival of the fittest. in this case, the optimization of streaming numbers and profit.
by considering the number 300 a bit more intently, i finally personally realized how disgusting this all is. what does it matter whether that number is 300 or 300,000? or 1 for that matter? what good is it to have numbers on a screen if they're designed to remove me from the purpose of my craft and the joy it can give to others? distilling all things down to numbers is not just misguided, it's outright dangerous.
one single person liked my song enough to return to it. that alone feels like something that any person concerned with making art, rather than juicing numbers and marketing content, would be proud and emotional about.
credit: time out tokyo
on the second point, i prefer to keep this simple. making concessions in one's craft, expression, and process for numbers (money, plays, views, comments, etc.) is a trap, and it's being sold to people now as an excuse to rob us of our souls, our happiness, and our time.
a ton of people post their own music online every day, and most of it will never receive more than a few plays. does that make it any lesser? on its own, no!
when i consider some of my favorite music, the sounds that fundamentally shaped and reformed me, a lot of it was made by some people having fun together in their basement or their room or their car, hitting on some magic for a moment and deciding to share it with us. if i have to assign numerical significance, for the sake of proving a point, they oftentimes had an infinitesimally small fraction of plays compared to say taylor swift or charli xcx or whatever pop star is being pushed now.
enough about making it, enough about virality, enough about content. it's just a trap. not only that, it's a lose-lose for everyone involved, except the same sociopaths who have repeated this process time and time again.
making it, by the intrinsic nature of what has been built (AHEM: for profit) by the industry to platform musicians for maximum virality, fundamentally involves playing to their rules. by gradually being morphed into an optimization problem for astro-giga-blasting streaming numbers through the stratosphere "solved" by analysis of marketing surveys, sales numbers, and now machine learning, music as a personal form of expression is approaching a cross-roads.
in order to reach virality and achievement, surrendering the joy and the circumstance from which music was born is necessary and basically encouraged. the less we understand music as an art form and more as viral content, the more expression and humanity will being exchanged for algorithmic pessimism and hedging its bets.
once this gets rolling, it only gets easier to make money off of the collective lack of artistic understanding and pride left in people. a smash hit will be as easy as a set of instructions and an ai prompt, and people will lap it up like its liquid gold. becuase if no one knows any better, who are they to question the slop served by the hand that offers them their silver platter?
by reaching the end point of this trajectory, what is even left?
nothing, really. there's little joy on the artist's part. art doesn't serve to change or challenge the listener either. it only serves to produce more sludge money. and this is a problem, because art and music in their purest form fulfill a greater psychological purpose than being content, in one ear and out the other. our creations should serve us, each other.
if the structures built to proliferate music do not inherently see any value in the art form they are profiting off of besides mmmmm yummy line go up mmmmm, then it's up to us. in other words, get the fuck off spotify and engage with music as an art form. learn how to think critically about music, what about it gets you going, why it hits your emotions so hard, and how to effectively and organically source new music to investigate. dig out that old ipod or walkman and dump some albums on it to play on a nice walk in the park. go to a local show, support a friend making songs, play an instrument or, hell, just bang some shit together. truly feel the sound in your body.
the most fun i ever had with music was by simply playing with knobs and losing myself. if i got lucky, something truly affecting came out. i can share that moment with the people who i think would also enjoy it. we create touch points between each other that give us a lasting joy, strength, peace, you name it. in an ideal world, that's all music needs to be.