It’s 2014 and you are waiting for the remix. You liked the original but you couldn’t dance to it. It’s more of a driving song, you think. You want to hear it again, but with a drop. Familiar, but more exciting, more current. Like when you run into Ben from accounting at the after-hours club and he’s wearing a Supreme hat and doing the thing with his arm that people do when they dance to trap music. As a member of the modern youth, you want to feel understood.
It’s 2014 and you need to find a remix. You’re the A&R at a major label and you just signed the next Coldplay. The single is out and it’s doing decently at radio, but press is hesitant, and the expensive video ads you ran during takeoff on the Jet Blue In-Flight Personal Entertainment Systems are starting to seem like a bad idea. The single has been out for two months and you need to get people’s attention again. Your budget is gone. You shouldn’t have bought the ads on the airplane. You shouldn’t have given the band a $20,000 budget for the music video. The industry is changing. People are getting laid off. You need something. You need it yesterday and you need it for free. You need a remix, a co-sign from the tastemaker world, someone with buzz (but not too much, there’s no budget). So you scan Hype Machine. You send emails. You link the music video with the 800,000 views. No one knows you paid for half of them. You don’t mention the budget. You pledge to put the full weight of your major label engine behind it. That’s better than money. You’re offering exposure, new fans, "A really great look", a chance to be associated with the band from the billboard in Echo Park. You’re doing this kid a favor.
It’s 2014 and I’m sitting in my living room trying to avoid thinking about the handful of songs I am supposed to remix. Songs that I don’t particularly enjoy by bands I’ve never voluntarily listened to, for exclusive premieres that I won’t care about. Until you’re a familiar name, if you’re tapped by a major label (or bigger indie), you are doing spec work—meaning there’s no conversation about being compensated until you turn in the remix and it is approved by everyone on the other end. It’s in the nature of those arrangements to do your best work. If you turn in something sub-par, it gets rejected and you’ve successfully wasted your own time. In my experience, many times a remix gets approved, things will start moving on their own without you knowing. You might get an email a few weeks later saying, "Hey! Remix is being premiered on _________ tomorrow morning! Please be ready to post to all of your socials." And you sit there confused for a moment because you haven’t been paid for your work. You might then be given the option of a remix trade, where the band then remixes one of your songs, a concept that gets tossed around quite a bit but is rarely ever seen to fruition. You might simply be told that there’s no money available, but that this will "for sure be a really big look for you." And of course, there are the times when you are paid fairly and everyone is happy. None of this is news. It happens every day, spanning the entire spectrum of creative work. The problem I see is not so much in the compensation or lack thereof. It’s the backbone of capitalism, the lifeblood of big business, the price of entry. The problem I see lies in the commoditization of authenticity. The strive to create the illusion of symbiosis. You’re being shown an endorsement where one might not actually exist.
The act of one artist co-signing another is a beautiful thing. I’ve found some of my favorite bands through the endorsements of other musicians I was idolizing at the moment. A good endorsement says just as much about the co-signer as it does about the signee. Richard D. James showed me Pierre Bastien when I was 13, the Mountain Goats turned me onto John Vanderslice at 16, Jamie Stewart gave me Swans at 18, Diplo decided to take me under his wing at 23, and now I do my best to make sure people know about kids like Ricky Eat Acid and Metome and Estesombelo. Look, I just did it! Modern culture is so crutched upon endorsements and co-signs that its only natural we’re running into epidemic levels of appropriation. It’s become it’s own art form, spiraling out of Tumblr/Pinterest realm and into the mainstream: a method of expressing yourself without actually being tasked with producing real output. Curation is valued over creation. We’re desensitized to it now.
It’s 2014 and the music industry is looking for a co-sign. A chance to be connected to the buzzing white heat of the underground without taking the risk. To be able to steal a shard of light from a young fire and toss it into their smoldering green wood, hoping that just for a second, it appears to catch.
Dexter Tortoriello is an electronic musician who releases music as HOUSES and Dawn Golden. He is signed to Mad Decent.