Welcome to 2025, where the music industry has achieved something genuinely unprecedented in the annals of human cultural production: it has successfully replaced its primary product with its own publicity apparatus. This is not hyperbole. This is not metaphor. This is the actual material condition of our present moment, and it’s magnificent in its sheer audacious dysfunction.
You’ve noticed it, haven’t you? The algorithmic feeds hemorrhaging artist interviews while new albums arrive like rare earth elements—precious, scarce, and requiring extensive mining operations to extract anything worthwhile. This isn’t market failure. This is market evolution, and like all evolution, it’s utterly indifferent to our aesthetic preferences.
What we’re witnessing is a textbook case of what I’ll call “content displacement syndrome”—a condition where an industry’s metabolic processes become so disrupted that it begins consuming its own documentary apparatus. The music business has become a ouroboros of metadata, endlessly generating commentary about the music it’s no longer economically viable to produce.
Consider the thermodynamics: A major-label album requires approximately $500,000 in production costs, plus marketing campaigns that can exceed that figure by orders of magnitude. The return on investment? Catastrophically uncertain in an attention economy where a TikTok clip can eclipse years of careful A&R development.
Picture the alpine summit meeting on a need to know basis where the bargain was struck. Somewhere in the Obersalzberg of the Bavarian Alps smelling of venture capital and despair, a spreadsheet whispered:
“Vhy gamble vun-point-five million nurturing fragile genius across tree years for a chance at a heet album, ven you can monetize existing genius for pennies, ja?
Meanwhile, Artist Interview Content Unit fourty-seven t’ousand, eight-hundred tirty-two costs roughly five t’ousand to produce — vun journalist, vun camera operator, vun afternoon — und it generates predictable engagement metrics, und can be atomized across seventeen different platforms simultaneously, you know?
De economic logic, it is crystalline: vhy fund risky creative endeavors ven you can harvest de cultural surplus of past creative endeavors indefinitely, mhm?”
The math was irrefutable:
Album Thermodynamics:
· Energy Input: $500k (studio alchemy) + $1M (marketing particle accelerator)
· Energy Output: Catastrophic entropy (98% failure rate). A black hole where ROI goes to die.
Interview Alchemy:
· Energy Input: $5k (one journalist, a camera, stale conference room croissants)
· Energy Output: Infinite Content Fractals!
→ 1 long-form podcast (ads sold)
→ 17 viral TikTok nuggets (“Artist Explains ONE WEIRD LYRIC!”)
→ 5 listicles (“7 Times They Almost Quit Music!”)
→ 3 reaction videos (“Producer Reacts to Their Own Song From 2012!”)
The Ouroboros Economy
The devil, as always, was in the depreciation schedule. Albums expire. Artist personality? An evergreen asset. Why birth new art when you can infinitely reheat the idea of art? And so the serpent bit its tail. The music business metastasized into a self-devouring engine of meta-friction:
· Labels stopped mining for gold. Now they pan the runoff of past gold rushes.
· Artists aren’t composers—they’re full-time archivists of their own mythology, endlessly annotating work they created before the collapse.
· Fans aren’t listeners—they’re forensic accountants auditing emotional residuals from songs released when vinyl still spun.
“But ze engagement metrics, dey are alvays so reliable, you see? Zey give you ze nice steady numbers, ja, like a cuckoo clock ticking avay. No surprise, no drama — just tick-tock, tick-tock returns.” cackles the young executive, pointing to dashboards glowing with the cold light of a thousand meaningless interactions.
“A four-hour podcast dissecting ze influence of Icelandic post-rock on a musician who hasn’t released an album since t’wo-thousand-seventeen? Ah, zis is peak C-D-S, mhm. It is not sustenance — nein, it is sawdust, carefully packed into ze shape of a meal.”
The fatal flaw? Thermodynamics always wins. You cannot indefinitely extract cultural heat from a system producing no new energy. Interviews about music nobody made are the industry equivalent of burning the furniture to keep warm. Eventually, you’re left shivering in an empty room, huddled over the ashes of a back catalog.
The Paratext Singularity
We’ve achieved what literary theorist Gérard Genette could never have imagined: a complete inversion of the text-to-paratext ratio. The paratext—all that supplementary material surrounding a work—has metastasized beyond the work itself. We now inhabit a cultural ecosystem where the liner notes have eaten the album.
This is paratext without text, metadata without data, criticism without objects to criticize. It’s a remarkable achievement in informational entropy: we’ve created a self-sustaining discourse machine that operates independently of its ostensible subject matter.
Artists have become involuntary performance artists, their primary medium the carefully curated revelation of their creative process. The work of art has been displaced by the documentation of artistic labor. We’re not consuming music; we’re consuming the idea of music-making, packaged as lifestyle content.
Here’s where it gets interesting from a systems perspective: the music industry has stumbled into a classic economic substitution problem, but at the level of cultural production itself. When your core product becomes economically unviable, you substitute with whatever’s available that can approximate the same consumer satisfaction.
“Ze substitute goot, it is not odder musik — nein, nein, nein! — it is artist interiority, ja, served up in carefully portioned dozes across multiple content verticals. Instagram Stories about ze shtudio sessions, mhm. Podcast deep-dives into ze creative philosophee, ya ya. Und ze YouTube documentaries about ze making-of albums zat cost more to document zan to record, hah! Can you imagine?!”
This substitution creates its own feedback loops. As the cultural conversation increasingly focuses on process rather than product, audiences become trained to consume process-content as the primary aesthetic experience. We’re raising a generation that’s more fluent in the language of artistic struggle than in the actual artistic output that struggle theoretically produces.
The Financialization of Artistic Persona
What we’re really observing is the complete financialization of artistic identity. The artist’s persona, creative process, and biographical narrative have been disaggregated from their actual creative output and independently monetized. This isn’t evil—it’s just capitalism discovering new territories to colonize.
“Ze artist, he becomes, you know, a kind of cultural futures market, mhm! You are not investing in ze next album — ah, too risky, too uncertain, nein nein nein — you are investing in ze ongoing performance of being-an-artist, ya! Ze interview itself, it becomes ze art form! Ze social media presence, zis is now ze medium! Und ze creative process, hah! zis becomes ze product! It is like ve are selling ze sausage machine, not ze sausage, mhm-hm!”
This creates a perverse incentive structure where artists are rewarded not for creating compelling work, but for creating compelling narratives about the process of creating work. The more articulate you are about your creative struggles, the more valuable you become as content. The more mysterious and reclusive you are, the more your interviews appreciate in value.
Meanwhile, the industry feeds vampirically on its own past. When generating new cultural capital becomes too expensive, you simply mine existing cultural capital more intensively. Hence: the endless parade of anniversary reissues, retrospective documentaries, and “where are they now” content.
We’re witnessing the emergence of what I call “cultural strip-mining”—extracting every possible unit of value from past creative moments while systematically under-investing in future creative moments. It’s sustainable in the short term and catastrophic in the long term, which makes it perfect for quarterly earnings reports.
Here’s the beautiful contradiction at the heart of this whole mess: we live in an era when the technical barriers to music creation have essentially vanished. Anyone with a smartphone can record, edit, and distribute music globally. The democratization of the means of musical production is essentially complete.
Yet somehow, at the exact historical moment when making music became easier than ever, the economics of the music industry have made financing music increasingly impossible. We’ve democratized the tools while simultaneously oligopolizing the attention and capital flows necessary to make cultural impact.
The result? A massive increase in musical production that somehow coincides with a massive decrease in culturally significant musical releases. We have infinite music and no music simultaneously—a quantum superposition of cultural abundance and cultural poverty.
The Network Effects of Nothing
What makes this particularly fascinating is how network effects amplify the substitution process. Once the cultural conversation shifts toward process-content, that conversation becomes self-reinforcing. Artists who don’t participate in the interview economy become invisible. Labels that don’t invest in personality-driven marketing campaigns find their releases culturally irrelevant.
The ecosystem reorganizes itself around its own secondary characteristics. Music becomes the excuse for the personality content, rather than personality content being an adjunct to the music. The tail wags the dog, then eats the dog, then becomes the dog.
And in the final, perfect substitution, the artist’s own voice—the very thing being monetized—is itself replaced. The interview you are reading, the podcast you are hearing, the confessional you are watching? It is not the artist. It is a highly polished, media-trained, sentiment-analyzed corporate construct. The artist’s unique perspective, their idiosyncratic way of speaking, their potentially dangerous or un-monetizable opinions, have all been carefully edited out and replaced with the bland, globally palatable, brand-safe vernacular of the industry itself. The artist’s mouth moves, but the words are those of the young executive from the alpine summit, their personality seamlessly overdubbed by the marketing department. The final product is not an artist explaining their work; it is the Great Substitution Engine speaking in the first person.
So here we are in 2025, inhabitants of a cultural moment defined by its own publicity apparatus. We’re living off the fumes of the culture while simultaneously generating more fumes. It’s a closed-loop system of aesthetic exhaust.
The great irony is that this substitution process has become so complete that pointing it out feels almost reactionary. Of course we get more interviews than albums—interviews are the product now. Of course artists spend more time explaining their creative process than executing it—the explanation is the execution in the attention economy.
This isn’t a crisis. It’s just a phase transition. The music industry isn’t dying—it’s transforming into something else entirely. What that something else might be is still being determined by market forces that are, as always, magnificently indifferent to our aesthetic preferences.
Culture Enclosure
The Core Mechanics of The Substitution Engine
Of course. The music industry’s “Great Substitution” isn’t an anomaly; it’s a prototype. It’s the first complex, emotion-based creative industry to be fully subjected to the brutal logic of platform capitalism and attention economics. Its current state is a detailed blueprint for the future of other creative fields.
First, we must identify the replicable conditions that made music so vulnerable:
1. High Production Cost/Risk: Creating a culturally significant “hit” is expensive and has a catastrophic failure rate.
2. Low-Cost Derivative Content: The “content” about the thing (interviews, behind-the-scenes, lore) is orders of magnitude cheaper to produce and has more predictable engagement metrics.
3. Disaggregation of the Product: The artist’s persona, process, and community can be separated from the actual art and monetized independently.
4. Platform Dependence: The industry is utterly reliant on a handful of algorithmic platforms (Spotify, TikTok, Instagram) for discovery, which prioritize consistent, digestible, platform-friendly content over sporadic, high-value releases.
Any industry that shares these traits is already on the conveyor belt into the Engine.
Listen. The canary didn’t just die. It pivoted. It’s now running a premium podcast on the acoustic textures of suffocation, a TikTok series of its most melancholic chirps, and its management is auctioning NFT fragments of the cage. The mine is a heritage site. We’re just curating the experience.
This is the Great Substitution. The primary text is a loss-leader, a cheap spark for the real inferno: the paratextual industrial complex.
Look at gaming. It’s a perfect specimen. Why play the 60-hour grind? A grotesque inefficiency. Instead, you subscribe to the livestream of a charismatic grind-lord. The game is merely the software environment, the engine idling to generate the real product: a performative spectacle of community and skill. The economic activity—subscriptions, donations, ads—flows to the content feudal lord, not the original developers. The artifact is a ghost in the machine.
Publishers caught the virus. They realized a 20-minute “Developer Direct”—earnest humans in black turtlenecks explaining the drama of creation over curated slivers of gameplay—generates more hype, more controllable affect, than a risky, playable demo. The promise of the thing, expertly marketed, is a more valuable asset than the unstable, critic-prone thing itself. We have entered the era of the pre-game, infinitely extended. The lore-industrial complex—the YouTube essays, the wikis, the forensic fan analysis of worlds like Destiny or Warhammer—now dwarfs the actual narrative content in the games. The community’s autopsy becomes the content.
The logical terminus is a soft, permanent world of platform games—Fortnite, Roblox, League of Legends—sustained not by sequels but by a constant intravenous drip of lore, cosmetics, and community events. The new, the singular, the risky? They become the “prestige albums.” Critically adored, awarded, and economically non-viable without massive corporate subsidy. Artisanal novelties.
Substack is the intellectual’s bespoke trap. The substitution is so seamless it’s almost elegant. Your subscription isn’t to the finished, polished essay. It’s to the writer’s brain, a front-row seat to the cognitive loom. The paywalled content is the raw feed: the half-baked take, the insider glimpse, the thinking-out-loud. The public essay is merely the tip of the iceberg—the marketing brochure for the deeper, more “authentic” performance behind the velvet rope. These platforms are ouroboros loops where the medium constantly consumes itself—endless meta-debate about Substack vs. Ghost, the ethics of paywalls, the growth-hacking of a personal brand. You don’t subscribe for “analysis”; you subscribe for @[EconomistName]’s unique performance of analysis. Their quirks, their enemies, their curated persona are the product. The successful writer is a content CEO, a one-person neo-feudal estate, constantly engaged in strip-mining every thought into a dozen monetizable units across Twitter, LinkedIn, and podcast apps. The work is not the product. The process is the product.
The ultimate prediction is that all culture will reorganize itself into a fandom model. A fandom doesn’t primarily consume the text. It consumes:
Theory (ending explanations, lore deep dives)
Fan Fiction (remixes, AUs)
Shipping (relationship analytics)
Behind-the-Scenes (the drama of creation)
Meme Culture (atomized, shareable jokes)
The music industry is now the Taylor Swift fandom, applied to everything. The art is just the canonical spark that ignites the endless, self-sustaining fire of fan-generated and corporate-generated paratext.
But this is no accident. It’s not chaos. It’s a controlled demolition. A Cultural Enclosure.
The monoliths—the Disneys, the Embracer Groups, the Tencent’s—aren’t just allowing this; they are the chief architects. They have weaponized IP law and platform dominance to execute a digital feudalism. The goal isn’t to create new cultural land. The goal is to acquire existing fertile land, build a legal wall around it, and charge rent on everything inside it.
Why fund a new band when you can buy a 10,000-song back catalog from the 70s? You now own a cultural estate. You license it, you algorithmically generate playlists from it, you commission biopics about it. The music is the initial land grab; the real money is in taxing all future activity on that land. These corporations are not game developers; they are game landlords. They acquire studios not for their ideas, but for their IP libraries—Doom, Tomb Raider, The Elder Scrolls. These are fiefdoms. New games are just harvesting crops from an owned field. New, independent IP is a threat—a competing kingdom.
The structure enforces itself with passive brutality:
The Platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Steam) are the company-town squares. To be seen, you must come to their square, play by their algorithmic rules, which are designed to keep eyes on known, monetizable properties. Discoverability for the truly new is near zero.
The Serfs: The creators. Choice: 1) Indentured Servitude within a walled garden (well-paid, but you own nothing), or 2) Subsistence Farming on the barren, rocky land the monoliths don’t want, always one algorithm change from ruin.
The Lords: The platform and IP owners. They own the land and the town square. They collect the rent—the attention, the data.
The Great Substitution is a smokescreen for the greatest power grab in cultural history. It’s not that culture is dying; it’s being systematically corralled, owned, and financialized. All those developer documentaries, those lore videos? They aren’t a substitute for culture. They are the culture of the enclosure. The pageantry and propaganda of the feudal court, designed to make us marvel at the king’s existing treasures so we never ask why the forges are cold and we are forbidden from lighting our own.
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Bravo Johnson is a design theorist and science fiction writer. This was adapted from remarks for the 2025 SXSW Conference on Future Music, which was cancelled due to a lack of music to conference about.
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