The great process squeeze: How efficiency bias is choking the music industry

Music creation, much like music consumption, is increasingly shaped by tech's fixation on productivity and the frictionless experience.

Last month, AI tech entrepreneur Mikey Shulman managed to attract the outrage of quite possibly every musician on the internet. Appearing as a guest on the popular YouTube channel 20VC with Harry Stebbings, Shulman made the following claim about music production:

It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

Shulman is the CEO of Suno, a company whose eponymous product generates full songs of up to four minutes in length based on descriptive text input by the user. Since launching the first public version of Suno, the company has been valued at $500 billion, but it has faced no shortage of controversy. Both Suno and their primary competitor Udio were sued by major record companies last year for allegedly training their AI models on copyright-protected music without the rights to do so. Needless to say, the sentiment among musicians with regards to generative AI has been mixed.

Shulman’s comments are characteristic of the kind of thinking that can stoke further tension between music tech and musicians today. They bring to mind Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s now infamous tweet from May of last year, which claimed that the cost of making “content” (a term including music by implication) is “close to zero.” As countless commenters were quick to point out, this is not only untrue but severely out of touch with the reality of being any kind of artist today, let alone a musician. The same is true of Mikey Shulman’s claim.

It is unclear whether Shulman genuinely believes something so absurd on its face, or, as many tech entrepreneurs tend to do, is simply fabricating an imaginary problem out of thin air to inflate the value of his product. What is clear, however, is that his words are built on a troubling false premise that has developed in the relationship between tech capital and music technology in recent years — that the music-making process just isn’t fast, easy, or efficient enough.

This directly mirrors the technical and philosophical premises of music streaming platforms, which aim to provide the listener with an entirely frictionless experience. While appearing on the podcast The Culture Journalist to discuss her recent book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, journalist Liz Pelly noted, “it seems like the streaming services believe that there is this listener for whom making decisions about what to listen to is excruciating [...] Does that listener exist?” To this, co-host of the podcast Andrea Domanick added, “or are they kind of cultivating that listener into existence?”

The same question has preoccupied me with regards to music software companies and music creation. My own experience has suggested that an attitude like the one asserted by Mikey Shulman is not one arising from musicians through an inevitable process. It is one projected onto them through tech’s own obsession with frictionlessness and efficiency.

This obsession has, for some time, been essential to the broader worldview of tech and its neoliberal underpinnings. In his essay for the New York Times, “The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence”, Evgeny Morozov offers a trinity of systemic biases that characterize neoliberalism — “market bias (private actors outperform public ones), adaptation bias (adapting to reality beats changing it), and efficiency bias (efficiency trumps social concerns).”

Morozov leverages these terms to pinpoint a “digital neoliberalism” at the heart of tech’s aspirations for artificial intelligence, while also iterating on his long-standing critique of “tech solutionism” — the belief that just about any social, economic, or infrastructural problem can be remedied with a pat technological solution. In the context of both music consumption and music production, it is efficiency bias in particular that seems to have planted itself most firmly into the culture.

The idea that the music-making process is in dire need of streamlining is a convenient one for anyone who stands to gain from a quantity-driven music economy. Given the paltry sums that the average musician earns from their work today, the incentive to be as efficient as possible is strong, but it is ultimately people like Mikey Shulman and Daniel Ek who extract the most capital from an environment where creative process is minimized and creative product is maximized.

This seems to be leading us toward what I have lately been calling a “process squeeze” — tech solutionism is leveraging the existing pressures of musician life to incentivize time-efficiency, chipping away at the creative process as a result. While AI song generators are perhaps the strongest expression of this, it has trickled throughout the domain of music technology, tempting musicians into a value system that is neither organically their own nor in their best interests.

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This subject is quite personal to me. I’ve produced music since 2004, and have over the past two decades witnessed in detail the overwhelming growth of the music tech industry (one can get a sense of its dizzying economic scale by consulting the Music Tech Ownership Ouroboros). Across those decades, music software in particular has developed from a relatively niche area of developer and musician culture into a behemoth that encompasses virtually all genres and music scenes.

Presently, this makes for a crowded and competitive market, with a vast number of brands scrambling for a piece of the action in this particular part of the creator economy, vying for the loyalty of musicians like myself. I’ve been exposed to a great deal of advertising and cultural discourse about music technology throughout my life as a musician, but I’ve never seen quite so much emphasis on notions of speed and convenience as I do now.

Several times in the past year, I’ve been served an ad on YouTube from the music software company Output, whose flagship product is a sampling plugin called Arcade. The ad highlights Arcade’s “Kit Generator” feature, which auto-generates personalized virtual instruments using sounds provided by the user. As is common with music production ads of late, it delivers a supercut of reactions to the product — often disproportionately or implausibly enthusiastic ones — from artists and influencers who have most likely been paid or otherwise incentivized to do so. A remark by one of the artists has been echoing in my mind ever since I first saw the ad:

“Being able to actually take your own stuff, and bring it in and instantly have it be a vibe, without you having to do any processing — that’s pretty sweet.”

These words quite perfectly summarize the value system that musicians have been led to adopt in recent years. Whether it’s in the marketing language used by brands within the space of music production technology, or tutorial videos made by content creators, themes of time-efficiency, productivity, and workflow optimization have become pervasive.

BandLab offers a comprehensive music production suite that is “fast, unlimited, and social”. Ads for music plugins will emphasize phrases from reviews and testimonials such as “Requires very little knob turning”. YouTube is replete with music tutorial and advice videos that offer solutions and strategies for faster production. And, of course, musicians are faced with a growing number of AI music production tools whose central appeal is their ability to truncate the creative process.

AI song generators like Suno and Udio are the most extreme example of this; their strategy for optimizing the music production process is simply to eliminate it entirely. As can be detected in the sentiment of Mikey Shulman’s comments, song generators also capitalize on the temptation to offload the sense of vulnerability and emotional stakes that make music and its creation meaningful. Instead of having to deal with the inefficient emotional difficulties of being bad at something as you’re learning it, you can simply attribute what is good about the output to yourself and what is bad about the output to the machine.

Because we so often think about technology in terms of its ability to make things faster and easier for us, it may seem like music technology has always been heavily informed by desires for optimization. But as someone who has either participated in or witnessed countless discussions about music production for the better part of two decades, I can say that the degree to which time-efficiency is emphasized in the current ecosystem is a fairly recent development.

In the past, the desire among musicians and music workers to be more productive has primarily manifested as a need to perform high volumes of engineering and production work for commercial clients. It has also been quite natural for musicians to seek out tools that don’t require endless agonizing over parameters to achieve the results they want.

But even in these cases, the sentiment has been more akin to “I want this piece of technology to stay out of my way” than “I want this piece of technology to take over or minimize my process.” In fact, musicians have historically been more than willing to adopt a piece of technology that is difficult to learn and time-consuming to use, provided that its particular sound or nostalgic value possesses adequate allure. It wasn’t until the later stages of the COVID-19 pandemic that I began to notice a shift in language among music technology brands, content creators, and subsequently, everyday musicians themselves.

The pandemic put countless music professionals out of work due to its disruptive effects on the live music economy, presenting many with uncertain futures and unusually large chunks of free time. Stimulus checks and other forms of government financial relief, however inadequate, made for a crude but eye-opening simulation of what UBI or even a functioning welfare state might look like. It also provided those in more secure economic circumstances with some extra disposable income.

This situation opened a window of opportunity for music tech companies to market and sell their products with extra rigour. The language in communications from these brands became saturated with phrases like “Keep making music!” in order to ensure that gains could continue to be made in a volatile economic situation. Meanwhile, Bandcamp Fridays were introduced in March of 2020, an attempt to offset the economic impact of the pandemic for musicians and motivate them to remain active. Despite the program’s benefits, however, its associated quantity-fatigue would later inspire mixed sentiment among artists, not to mention fans and music critics.

Musicians at this time found ourselves in a somewhat ironic scenario. Despite many of us having more time to let our processes breathe, we were suddenly compelled from all possible angles to be more productive than ever, adding up to an increased sense of overall creative urgency. This was probably not helped by the more implicit sense that the mock-resurrection of the welfare state would not last forever, and indeed it didn’t.

In the pivot back to a status quo of little to no COVID restrictions and far less social assistance, it’s easy to imagine that the same musicians felt quite disoriented as they were struck once again (or for the first time, in the case of those who came of age during the pandemic) with the realities of time poverty and financial precarity, not to mention a greater-than-ever sense of alienation in working life. As a result, the experience of the pandemic seems to have raised the threshold against which musicians measure both our sense of fulfillment and our sense of productivity.

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There is, to be sure, much about modern music production that can stand to be simplified and streamlined. The many repetitive tasks involved in setting up and configuring projects in a computer-based production environment are typically cumbersome and uncreative in nature, and particularly in electronic music, one often wrestles with a dizzying amount of file management. There is also, meanwhile, something to be said of the potential for AI voice control and other tools of this kind to make production more accessible to musicians with disabilities.

But these are not the primary motivations behind most of the emerging tech that aims make music production more time-efficient, and accessibility is not the core value at work in ads like the above example from Output. Perhaps most telling in that particular case is the musician’s use of the word “processing”. The audience is meant to be enticed by the idea that the Kit Generator gives the user something that feels authentically like their own, but without the need to carry out what has in electronic music always been the entire point — processing.

This is something that has come to mind frequently as I’ve thought about how platforms have shaped music production. There has, for example, been a fair amount of discussion regarding how the algorithmic nature of Spotify and other streaming platforms has contributed to shrinking song lengths and particular biases in song style. But what about the relationship that musicians have with their creative process and the labor it involves?

Within the domain of music consumption, Spotify is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of efficiency bias and tech solutionism. It has positioned itself as a tech-first-society-last solution, not to the problem of how musicians can be compensated fairly for their creative labor, but how we as a society can create an experience of consuming music that values quantity and efficiency above all else. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that if Spotify can emit a kind of soft power that shaves minutes off of average track times, that same power can chip away at the time a musician puts into the creative process behind each piece of music.

I say “soft power” because this is, of course, not the result of a deliberate conspiracy among music technology brands and content creators to force musicians to hyper-optimize their practices. The issue is perhaps better thought of as an outgrowth of the relationship that exists between musicians and streaming.

Being a phenomenon of the attention economy, streaming platforms rely both on vast quantities of content and a competitive, almost gambling-like environment to attract artists who hope to go viral in the playlist ecosystem, particularly on Spotify. This leaves an opening for various commercial parties to double down on the incentives that are floating in the air, ultimately engendering a music production culture wherein efficiency takes on outsized importance.

This value system also offers an effortless go-to for the uncreative corporate mind to contend with the highly crowded and competitive market of music software. The perceived value of a given piece of software must urgently be communicated, and many brands are either unwilling or unable to invest the creative and material resources required to create music-making tools that are truly unique and intrinsically valuable. The most efficient approach, then, is to simply build a value proposition on efficiency itself, and it often seems as though corporate anxieties about efficiency and returns on investment are projected onto the musician as a result.

If this sounds familiar to, well, any worker who has done any kind of labor, that’s because it is. In an employer-employee relationship, technology might be leveraged to automate some or all of the employee’s labor, thereby either devaluing that labor or replacing it entirely. But in a gig economy, and in true neoliberal fashion, there needn’t be a managerial figure to make this automation happen. Instead, artists are coerced into doing it themselves and thinking of it as their own decision.

This is why I think we slightly miss the mark when we say that streaming has “devalued music”. If the amount of capital flowing to the sites of consolidated power in the industry is any indication, music is perhaps more valuable than it’s ever been. What has been devalued is the labor that creates it. Left unchecked, a process squeeze is ultimately a kind of self-automation regime, one that generates capital by cultivating a desire among artists to incrementally offload their creative labor onto creative technologies.

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Process itself is one of the great sources of angst in our current economic order. It necessarily entails uncertainty, risk, and the use of time, all things of which neoliberalism is at best skeptical and at worst entirely avoidant. In a neoliberal utopia, those in power endure no process, suffer no losses, and gain only product and profit. As this bias trickles into creative economies, both the institutions of music technology and music streaming are faced with a conundrum: everyone wants to make art, and that desire is ripe for extraction, but art is a slippery, fickle thing that takes time to make.

This is a key feature of the creator economy, as countless ancillary industries have emerged to provide creative people with autonomous tools, ready-made templates, pre-curated assets, and other material for the streamlining of creativity. What it tells us is that process is only truly valuable in a creative economy to the extent that it can be packaged and sold as a product. This goes some way toward explaining the discrepancy between the sheer amount of music-making tools available to musicians and the low feasibility of actually earning a living as a musician, a phenomenon explored in depth by Shawn Reynaldo last year in his essay “A Music Industry That Doesn’t Sell Music”.

Music producers often comment on the vast quantity of music production plugins available on the market and the intoxicating, seemingly endless process of acquiring, trying, using, and forgetting about them. It’s not difficult to see this as a response to the sense of process squeeze that I imagine many musicians are feeling today. Our relationship to music-making is so heavily mediated by a consumptive system that consumption has become the very language through which we engage with it.

In other words, as your creative process feels the squeeze, you desire a stronger connection to it, and that desire is increasingly sublimated into the consumption of process-as-a-product. AI song generators also present us with a variation on this phenomenon — they far more closely resemble an experience of highly personalized music consumption than one of music creation.

In material published in 2023, media and entrepreneurial research firm MIDiA declared the rise of the “consumer-creator” in music. As the report makes evident, the figure of the consumer-creator has its history in social media platforms — in fact, the term often seems to be a synonym for “content creator” used from the perspective of those who view content creators as potential customers. Visual content platforms like Instagram and YouTube have been instrumental in consolidating what is now an enormously profitable advertising regime, and it is the content creator that attracts a major portion of the user attention upon which ad tech depends.

This has surely demonstrated to tech figures like Daniel Ek and Mikey Shulman that creative urges make people highly vulnerable to extraction, both as creators performing undervalued labor and as consumers looking for the fastest means to do so. It is unsurprising, then, that a system of consumption-creation has come to reshape musical creativity. Rather than advertising, the emergent income stream of choice for music production software has been the subscription model, which has proliferated despite frequent disapproval among musicians.

While a concept like “consumer-creator” might make the average artist wince, it’s nonetheless viewed as an exciting opportunity for anyone hoping to make commercial gains in the music technology industry. Not everyone sees themselves as artists, but everyone is a consumer. What could be a more efficient way to expand your total addressable market than to collapse the slippery phenomenon of creation into the more concrete and measurable phenomenon of consumption?

This dynamic is not exclusive to music, but music offers us perhaps the best illustrations of how artists are incentivized to skip from creative process to creative capital. The DJ, for instance, may be the perfect consumer-creator; a DJ’s art and image as an artist are both constituted by their particular way of consuming and amalgamating both music and its aesthetics. I point this out not to denigrate DJs as artists (I am one myself), but to account for why electronic music has become a milieu so overwhelmingly dominated by DJs. Their role in music culture has not always taken this form, but the market has reshaped them as such for its own purposes.

The music revenue-sharing platform Aslice (and particularly the news of its closure) brought increased attention to the fact that highly-paid DJs collect enormous fees, while disproportionately little revenue is directed to the artists whose music they use. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the more notable and in-demand a DJ is, the more easily they can absorb free music to play in their sets as their inboxes overflow with the promos and demos of both aspiring and established producers.

For lesser-known and up-and-coming DJs, particularly in an environment so desirous of quantity and novelty, it’s quite likely that the need to play gigs and release mixes frequently (while expressing adequate variety in material) leads most of them to pirate a significant portion of what they play.

Certainly not all DJs earn high fees, but the market overwhelmingly favors those who lean into the role of the DJ as a self-optimizing consumer-creator. A DJ can facilitate valuable musical experiences for audiences without having to make any music themselves, without having to pay much or anything for the music they play, and without the cumbersome technological and logistical demands of live instrumentation.

Many DJs are, of course, also music producers (and developing a craft as a DJ can require a great deal of creative labor), but the heavily time- and cost-optimized ratio of creative input to commercial output in DJing gives it an unparalleled compatibility with an efficiency-biased environment. It’s no wonder, then, that DJs reign supreme in the current electronic music landscape.

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It is not my intention to blame musicians for wanting to make their practices more time-efficient. For a full-time music worker, one’s consistency of income depends very much on quantity of output. For a musician whose practice is pushed to the margins of their life by their day job, the amount of time available to nurture that practice is frustratingly limited.

The desire to expedite the creative process is then an entirely natural response to coercive and precarious economic circumstances. I also am not opposed to automated or intelligent music technologies outright, provided that they focus on the “laundry and dishes” of music production and do not devastate the environment in the process.

My intention is only to point toward a subtly corrosive value system that I expect many musicians routinely experience the effects of, but may not question as often or as explicitly as they should. The pressure to be as efficient and productive as possible has a way of sneaking into one’s mind and body, reconfiguring one’s priorities, and directing one’s creative decisions without being detected and called out for what it is.

Musicians (and every other kind of artist for that matter) should revel in our inefficiencies. An overly-optimized creative process is at risk of forfeiting precisely what is most precious to it — idiosyncrasies, mistakes, accidents, spiritual urges, and other crucial intangibles.

These elements are very often what imbue an artist’s work with the distinctive quality that allows it to hold up over time, not to mention distinguish it from that thing we often call “content”. They’re what we refer to when we describe a particularly compelling work as “greater than the sum of its parts”. At least in my experience, these elements only have the necessary space to emerge when one achieves the kind of time-ignorance that defines a flow state, a state wherein the artist is happily lost in their process and efficiency has become the absolute least of their concerns.

It would be easy to argue that being protective of one’s deeper creative desires and tendencies is “individualistic”, but conversations on the nature of individualism in our current economic regime often end up in muddy waters. Like many other of neoliberalism’s traits and tricks, emphasis on the individual is a kind of sleight-of-hand maneuver. In the case of artists, the market doesn’t want us to express a genuinely individual or unique creative voice so much as it wants us to express just enough novelty and competition to generate product and profit.

This is why artists tend to get mixed messages about creative individuality from the various forces at work in marketing, advertising, and content culture. On one hand, the market will superficially advocate for “authenticity” and making things “your own”. On the other hand, any hope of housing and feeding yourself with your creative labor necessarily comes with pressure to calibrate both the quality and quantity of your output to broaden its appeal and “maximize your audience”. More than ever, it seems, artists are wrestling with two contradictory imperatives — to be unique and to be accessible.

When one is faced with the ever-rising cost of simply existing and being healthy, it is the latter imperative that eclipses the former. Broader systemic problems and the projection of market value systems onto creative processes have locked most artists into an “if you’re not growing, you’re dying” paradigm. Those who are not independently wealthy are presented with an economically-manufactured dichotomy: you either languish in relative obscurity and hold down a day job, or you blow up and hopefully manage to earn a living through your work.

It is no coincidence that in an economic environment whose middle class has dwindled, the middle option between these two seems unattainable. It is also no coincidence that, in an environment of wage stagnation despite all-time highs in productivity, artists have self-released unprecedented amounts of music while making very little money from it.

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Most artists will not, and should not have to, “blow up”. Music that has the time and space to become genuinely personal is not so much individualistic as it is specific. Art that is specific attracts a community that is equally specific, a dynamic that is far more meaningful, sustainable, and mutually affectionate than the kind that develops on a growth-driven, efficiency-biased model.

But because the threshold at which one needs to earn income to maintain a decent standard of living has been lifted so high, and because the prospect of viral fame is constantly dangled in front of our faces to keep us productive, this mid-level success feels strangely less attainable than the jackpot goal of becoming some kind of overnight star.

Despite this, we should neither let it be stigmatized nor pushed off the horizon of possibility. Meaningful, sustainable success with a moderate but deeply devoted fanbase can only arise and flourish when we nurture the very things that make the creative process seem, within an efficiency-biased culture, too inefficient. Far more than technology, this requires time.

Ultimately, these are systemic problems with solutions that are neither technological nor individual. Creative workers are in this situation for the same reasons that every other kind of worker is — a heavily liberalized economy and widespread devaluation of labor. And given that all of the most powerful politicians in the world work in lockstep with corporate power, the “democratization of music” will only get us so far without the democratization of, say, labor itself.

But in the meantime, being subject to these forces inevitably means having to unlearn the values and habits they naturalize. Musicians, and all other kinds of artists, owe it to ourselves to be conscious of the squeeze that tech solutionism can exert on our creative processes, and push back against it whenever and however we can.

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Devon Hansen is a writer and musician based in Montreal. You can reach them by email or follow their music on SoundCloud and Bandcamp. They are also inconsistently active on Instagram and X.