“Build on up, don't break the chain”, sings Grace Jones in ‘Slave to the Rhythm’. A song generally interpreted to be commenting on the treatment of musicians by record companies at the time, particularly African Americans. Co-written by the dudes who also wrote ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’, which was the first video played on MTV in August 1981. I grew up with MTV. Kind-of loved some of it’s culture-influencing forays into content beyond music videos. Like ‘The Osbournes’ and ‘Jackass’.

‘The Osbournes’ premiered on MTV in 2002, it’s highest rating show ever (at the time), pointing us towards the hot mess of family-based reality TV shows now on air. Ozzy only stumbled wide-eyed around his mansion to the empathetic joy of millions for 52 episodes, but now 300 plus new reality shows are produced in the US every year, almost all of them disappearing with a whimper, along with their ‘test subjects’, after a season. ‘The Osbournes’ was sandwiched between two classic prank/stunt shows - ‘Jackass’ and ‘Punk’d’ - both of which bumped off pop culture and gave plenty of kids ideas above their station.

MTV and reality TV experiments set things up nicely for shorter, sharper, shabbier viewing, so when YouTube flickered on in 2005, then started paying people to show ads in 2007, even though most of us only had dial-up internet, there was exponential growth in the desire for online (viral) fame. To be like Justin Bieber (who posted his first video in 2007), or ‘HellAshes’, one of the first YouTube gaming stars, an expert at ‘Guitar Hero’. HellAshes has dropped to 8 thousand subscribers, while the biggest YouTube gamer in 2019, ‘PewDiePie’, has 102 million. There are now over 11,000 YouTube channels with 1 million subscribers or more, and 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. The most popular type of video on YouTube today is ‘unboxing’, often with hyped-up kids opening the packaging of new toys. Sponsored by?

PewDiePie also has 1.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify (his most popular track? ‘Bitch Lasagna’), which launched in Sweden a year after YouTube. He doesn’t need to supplement his US$6 million a month YouTube/related income, but most musicians need Spotify reach, more than YouTube, to have a chance at success. Success, not cash - 1 million plays on Spotify delivers US$7,000 to be shared between label, artist, managers, songwriters. Of the 35 million songs on Spotify, over 5 million have never been played, or payed for, by anyone.

Phew. Lots of segues and numbers.

Our lives are completely entwined with segues and numbers these days, 50 years since the birth of the internet. Segues to ‘you might also like’ or ‘recommended just for you’. Unquenchable desires for larger numbers of followers, likes, subscribers, new and more ridiculous stunts, more true crime podcasts.

We are slaves to a rhythm that started with MTV, to a beat that has been genetically modified and sped-up by technology companies. It’s not all bad for us, but the treatment of musicians, or any talented creators of art or content, is no better now than when Grace Jones’s writers came up with the idea for that song. Thanks to a ubiquity and commoditisation of creation, distribution and consumption, the value of each moment of art can be reduced hugely, as it is lost in the morass.

The ability to find quality amongst quantity ourselves, to trust individual human curators who just love things without looking at data, or the magic of random discovery, have sometimes been made harder intentionally by a few conglomerates. There are signs of positive experimentation by Spotify and Apple at least, although they still need to pay artists more. In video streaming, the numbers are much smaller than audio (excluding amateur YouTube content), but the amount of original video being produced is accelerating rapidly in order to fill funnels that need hundreds of hours of new stuff every week. At least US$60 billion will be spent on original content in 2019/20 by Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Disney alone.

There is a wonderful opportunity, as we look forward to the second 50 years of the internet, to find a new rhythm that prioritises the art as much as the science. Reward true artists more than data scientists, and consider the importance of small as much as big. Time to block or break the chain?