The Priceless Lessons of a "Worthless" Album
Music has a funny way of showing its age. A doo-wop song with multiple vocalists singing into the same microphone? Definitely from the '50s. A pop song with a gated reverb on a drum machine's snare hit? Totally '80s. But what artifacts showcase the age of today's music? What gives away an album of the current decade? To answer this, we may just have to stop listening to the music altogether and turn our attention to something less noticed—something almost trivial. We may have to count the number of seconds in a song.
On July 29, 2021, Berlin-based electronic musician Valentin Hansen released "Crisis (The Worthless Album)," a debut LP containing a total of thirty 29-second songs. Now, you're probably asking yourself two questions: (1) why would someone ever refer to their own art as "worthless," and (2) why would someone ever make so many 29-second songs? The amusing part here—as you'll soon discover—is that each question answers the other.
For many streaming platforms (most notably Spotify, in Hansen's case), 30 seconds is the minimum threshold for (1) counting the number of times a song has been played, (2) counting the number of monthly listeners attributed to the artist, and (3) paying the artist from a streamed song. Despite how many people listen to Hansen's work and how much of it they consume, he has exactly zero streams, zero monthly listeners, and zero dollars of earned revenue.
But Hansen's output was more than music; it was a social commentary on how the commoditization and distribution of art often pervert, miscommunicate, and even devalue the art itself. Putting aside money and emotional appeal, the "value" of art has taken on a new meaning since the advent of social media. Internet clout has grown as a form of social currency which, although glorified by many, is often superficial and decidedly disposable (hence, interpretively worthless). Contrarily, the quiet but genuine appreciation of and admiration for Hansen's work by fans should be more valuable even though it does not equate to metrics or revenue. But does any of that matter if Spotify calculates it as "worthless?"
From Hansen's album, I take away three lessons about art, its resulting value, and our collective outlook on it:
The best way to preserve the sanctity of art is disintermediation.
Art's value should be determined by the experience presented to the experiencer. (Note: I did not use the word "consumer.") The middlemen of art dissemination—including music labels, galleries, and streaming platforms, to name a few—should have no say in how valuable art is; their only function should be distribution. Nevertheless, as long as they are part of the artist-to-experiencer equation, they will inevitably insinuate themselves as arbiters in qualifying the art.
To circumvent this, direct-to-experiencer (note: not direct-to-consumer) relationships will allow both artists to represent their work and fans to experience their work more purely. A fitting example is the band Fugazi, whom I wrote about here. Fugazi was able to release their own records, book their own venues, and charge their own prices. As their mission was never radio-play or MTV fame, they were never at the behest of "the suits." Had their objective been mainstream commercial success, the middlemen would have been a necessary evil, and those middlemen would have had an imperative to transmogrify or filter Fugazi's art or ethics for their own perceived notions of what would be necessary to generate mass appeal. Understanding that their art and ethics were paramount, Fugazi stuck to their guns, and both they and their fans were better off because of it.
Placing a technical limitation on how art is produced or shared will tarnish the authenticity of the artist's creative impulse.
Although artistic limitations (like restricting the number of colors used in a painting) can stimulate creativity, technical limitations typically pervert it. Take Ernest Vincent Wright's "Gadsby," a 50,000-word novel that doesn't contain the letter "e." For whatever reason, Wright wanted to explore that technical limitation, and as of this writing, the Goodreads rating of that book is 2.78 out of 5. Ouch. (For context, "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler has a 3.17 Goodreads rating.) To be fair, Wright may have just been a poor writer. That is, even if he allowed himself to use words with the letter "e," he would've produced a book that readers found unfavorable. However, as his other works don't have this technical limitation and those works have higher ratings, I feel comfortable concluding that the technical limitation was a major contributing factor towards the lackluster result. (Of course, correlation doesn't imply causation, but tell me: if you had to write a 50,000-word novel without the letter "e," do you think it'd be any good?) All in all, placing a technical limitation on producing and/or sharing art often distorts the artist's pure vision and typically results in unfortunate and/or inauthentic outcomes.
Focusing purely on popularity is a distraction.
Popularity is a breadth game that can only be sustained by depth, but those who emphasize depth often leave indelible marks. On one side of that spectrum, you have James Jamerson, whose impact on Motown, R&B, and soul music is legendary. Although his name may not be a household name, the records he worked on—spanning LPs like "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye to singles like "I Want You Back" or "ABC" by The Jackson 5—certainly became household names.
On the other side of that spectrum, you have a band like The Velvet Underground, which maintained a cult following before eventually captivating the masses. Famed musician and producer Brian Eno articulated this observation from a different angle: "the first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." The genealogy of creative inspiration here was driven not by immediate commercial success but by the music itself. It's for this reason that measurements like "number of plays" and "monthly listeners" will never truly represent the impact of an artist and why incessantly highlighting qualifiers as one-dimensional as said metrics will invariably leave more germane points (albeit seemingly nebulous ones) like creative motivation and originality overshadowed and underrepresented.
Should we be concerned about the value of art being defined by mere consumption statistics sold to us by monolithic corporations like Spotify? Should we change how we approach our art to accommodate the algorithms? Should we focus more on popularity statistics than the respective art? I think Hansen had it right all along—this sure sounds like a "Crisis." 👊
