✘ The audience the industry can't see

Nadia Asparouhova’s Antimemetics introduced the notion that there are ideas that resist spreading. The transmission mechanisms that carry most ideas simply can’t carry antimemetic ones. Current dominant infrastructures for propagating ideas are built for virality. Antimemetic ideas inherently resist this and simply don’t travel through those same channels.

If we take this idea to audiences, we see a large, economically significant, culturally active audience for music that the industry consistently fails to measure directly. The infrastructure the industry uses to see things was not built to project their particular kind of engagement. Their instruments can’t read their reality, their love, their spend, or their transmission.

We’re not alone in making this observation. Tatiana Cirisano at MIDiA has been making versions of it for years. Shawn Reynaldo on First Floor has written about it in the context of electronic music. Carlo Kiksen has pointed at the structural reasons why some audiences are visible to algorithmic platforms and others aren’t.

What we want to do here is build a vocabulary to turn the observation into something more actionable. Calling this audience “older” or “casual” or “underserved” is probably not inaccurate but too vague to be useful. It’s hard to build for something that doesn’t have a proper name.

So this piece is an attempt at naming. We present three concepts, with each one doing different work. Together, we hope they form something closer to a framework for thinking about a set of people who love music and why so much of that love goes unregistered.

There are points in many people’s relationship with music at which the love stops being legible, at least to the systems designed to measure it. Think about what the industry means when it uses the word fan. We mean in the operational sense: someone whose relationship with music expresses itself as platform-readable behaviour.

These are people who stream in volume, follow artists, post, share, and engage in ways that generate data. When a new release drops, they respond quickly and visibly. They are the people the metrics move with and for. They are usually young, or living the way young people tend to live: time-rich, socially networked through digital platforms, motivated to perform identity through what they consume.

What happens when that person gets older? They don’t stop listening to music. Often, their listening habits even deepen. But the behavioural patterns change. They have less time for consistent platform engagement. Recommendations might migrate to private channels: a message to a close friend, a dinner conversation, a link dropped into a WhatsApp group that one specific person will appreciate. The motivation to perform their tastes publicly diminishes.

They go to the show and don’t post about it. They buy the record and it sits on the shelf looking beautiful and occasionally being played. They might make music after the kids are in bed, not for anyone in particular, just because the relationship with the work is the thing.

This person doesn’t completely disappear from the data. They can show up as a vinyl buyer, a ticket purchaser, or a festival attendee. But they stop generating the kind of ongoing signal that would tell the industry something meaningful about who they are or what they want. The metrics conclude, effectively, that their engagement has declined. What has actually happened is that the engagement has changed shape.

This is what we mean by dissolved fandom. A love that is still capable of driving cultural and economic activity, but which is no longer detectable as a continuous metric.

Dissolved fandom describes a process. Ambient fandom describes the condition that follows. Brian Eno’s definition of ambient music is that it can be actively listened to or allowed to blend into the environment retaining its value in either mode.

Ambient fandom works analogously. These are people for whom music is genuinely important, woven into their daily life across a wide range of contexts. In many cases they are more knowledgeable about music, more willing to spend on it, and more capable of bringing other people into genuine contact with it than some of the superfans the industry has spent the last two years romanticizing. Ambient fandom’s relationship with music expresses itself as atmosphere rather than direct signal.

Atmosphere means these people don’t live in Discord servers or Whatsapp fan communities, and don’t follow artists in any platform-legible sense. Their groups are their friends. Some of those friends care about music and some don’t. There is no tidy community shape to point at, no category that contains them neatly. This lack of a category is, in fact, partly what makes them invisible: the industry doesn’t know where to look for people who don’t cluster.

Nemesis’s recent piece on culture after youth culture traces an adjacent shift: as birth rates fall and youth culture’s distinctiveness declines, older generations are extending their cultural influence in ways the measurement infrastructure wasn’t built to track. The median age of genuine cultural engagement, across multiple domains, is significantly older than the people responsible for measuring it tend to assume. The ambient fan audience is, increasingly, the centre of gravity.

If dissolved fandom explains how this audience came to be invisible, and ambient fandom names what they actually are, then off-protocol behaviour names the specific mechanism by which the industry’s infrastructure fails to see them.

The music industry built a protocol. In its current form it runs roughly like this: an artist releases music to streaming platforms, where data informs algorithmic recommendations, which in turn drive discovery. At the same time social activity on TikTok and Instagram generates further engagement signals. Those signals inform playlist placements and press attention. Finally, outcomes eventually convert into tickets and merchandise, which are the economic events that make the whole system financially legible. Every stage of this protocol is instrumented and accumulates data.

What this protocol cannot read is everything that happens off it.

A band called Lavender played at Jamie’s (Sound of Fractures) wedding. Nobody is there because an algorithm sent them. Several become genuine long-term listeners, buy records, go to shows, bring other people into contact with the work. The transmission mechanism is personal trust operating inside an emotionally significant moment. The protocol doesn’t have a box to tick for that.

A track lands in a Signal group. Two of them buy the vinyl the following week. A third mentions it at a dinner a month later and two more people buy the record. The whole chain is invisible to any system the industry uses to evaluate momentum, because none of it happened on a platform designed to generate signals.

We argue that for a large group of ambient fans this is the primary mechanism by which music embeds itself deeply and durably into their lives. We can turn it into a simple dichotomy. The protocol optimises for reach. Off-protocol behaviour is where depth happens.

Maarten has argued in previous MUSIC x pieces that artists should build their own dark forests. Deep communities of people who actually care. That remains a useful frame for some fandoms. But there’s a lot of folks not yet inside anyone’s dark forest. People who are present, engaged, and willing to lean in, but who don’t have time to do any leaning into. They just don’t experience their music life as belonging to a scene. They experience life, with music woven through it.

The vocabulary we have been devising here - dissolved fandom, ambient fandom, off-protocol behaviour - is not a solution. It is an attempt at the step that has to come before solutions. Naming the thing clearly enough that it becomes possible to think about what to build. The industry, of course, already knows this audience exists. What has been missing is a way of seeing it as a creative population that deserves something to be made for them.

We don’t have a tidy conclusion, and we’re wary of forcing one. The move the industry usually makes with complicated things is to flatten them into a sellable claim, and that flattening is exactly what produces the blindness we’ve been describing.

So we’ll end with the question Jamie put at the end of the notes this piece grew from. If you’re reading this and you recognise yourself in it: who are you? How do you find music now? What does it take for an artist to earn your attention, and what do you actually want from one whose work you care about? You don’t show up in the metrics. But you are, increasingly, who this conversation needs to be about.

“The Official UK Singles Chart functions as a record of that singular, often fleeting window when an electronic artist crosses over into the mainstream. It says almost nothing about whether the career underneath was healthy, growing, or worth backing. Most of what builds an electronic music career happens somewhere the chart cannot see.”

✘ This is the best companion piece to read for today’s newsletter. Rufy and Ethan take a similar vibe as Jamie and I did above. There’s stuff that’s hard to measure, but which does matter and is context dependent.

“So yeah, I love all the different things that people have figured out how to make money — they monetize music, performances, live, or merch, and even food. You see food coming together with music; you see sports coming together with music. Those are great things. Those things make me excited because of my passion for music and music people.” Harvey Mason Jr., Recording Academy CEO

✘ This is a podcast and it’s worth a listen. There’s great bits in there around AI. This part is great, though, it encapsulates how monetization for music is diversifying and blending with other verticals.

“What follows in this series of articles are some of the thoughts and personal discoveries I’ve had while immersing myself in this rich and seminal body of work. Before addressing the landmark albums from Miles’s electric era, it’s worth exploring the transitional period that began with the augmentation of his ‘60s quintet.”

✘ Alex is an awesome musician and composer and this writing on Miles’ electric period is a dream for anyone looking for a way into this vast body of work.

“We discuss how art and architecture exist together, and how Grime has shaped that, his work for V&A East, the differences between New York and London and how he is drawn to performance as a vessel to showcase new ideas.”

✘ Another podcast! Elijah discusses the relationships between architecture and music and the use of physical space with architect Jayden Ali.

“People are inherently drawn to instant gratification. Why spend years mastering the bass when you can simply type a prompt? Suno gives people who want to see themselves as musicians — and don’t want to spend time learning an instrument — a shortcut.”

✘ Of course, Suno just had another big funding raise. Instead of another piece on that, the Suno subreddit is indeed a great place to gauge how people use the platform. They are evangelists. Not sure if Terrence’s conclusion is one I (Maarten) support, but that’s for another discussion.

I watched a move called Urchin that had some really amazing score / sound design moments. It’s goes from 90/2000s nostalgic pop to these really abstract cinematic moments that are scored by Ital Tek (Alan Myson). I couldn’t find the film score but he just released a new record called Mind Abandon and there’s a couple of cool tracks on there.