What if the industry isn’t broken, but hurling toward complete abstraction? A feedback loop of datafied culture, corrupted visuals, and synthetic relevance. Every platform, every playlist, every fake opportunity: pure noise injected into the bloodstream to keep us producing, posting, decaying in sync with the feed. Losing looks like progress. Winning means disappearing even faster. The mainstream music industry has been disintegrating and distorting along with the rest of our industries for some time now. That’s why we started TR. Not to play the game, but to build a different one from the ground up. And yet we’re still all caught up “building community,” “experimenting with formats,” trying to vibe our way out of late-capitalist despair. Playlists, streaming platforms, viral moments—none of it random. Just digital meat grinders for attention. I've seen countless friends get playlisted, spike overnight, then have it all dry up the next week. Confused. Exhausted. Back to zero.
This isn’t just music. It’s a game, and not a fun one. A system of finite plays, where artists scramble for short-term wins, and every platform move resets the rules. It’s everywhere. Twitch streamers burning out from content loops. YouTubers tweaking thumbnails like it's a job application for the algorithm's mood swings. Streetwear scenes cannibalized by fast fashion cycles. Indie devs wasting months on Steam thumbnail A/B tests instead of shipping. Finite, zero-sum games, everywhere. Fracturing culture. Flattening identity.
Time and time again, the vibe shifts and suddenly everyone is making ambient drill, adding fake vinyl crackle or making Fred again.. type beats and speed garage edits. Not because it means anything necessarily, but because it feels like the only move left. Feeds change, rules change, and the game resets again. Reinvention as survival cosplay. The algorithm doesn’t want innovation. It wants grief dressed as vibes.
We watch our friends blow rent money trying to pitch their EP to editors and curators, hoping for digital breadcrumbs of attention. You send the emails, tweak the subject lines, write a blurb that sounds like you believe it, and then wait. Ghosted. Or worse, strung along with vague feedback and no follow-through. This happens to all of us and it isn’t a bug. It’s a business model. Exhaust artists, gatekeep arbitrarily, and sell the illusion that the right pitch can change everything.
Even rebellion gets flipped. Bandcamp Fridays start as mutual aid and becomes a marketing calendar. Mailchimp turns newsletters into CRM bait. Every workaround hardens into another funnel. Playing the meta-game is the solution—but not a clean one. It’s staying unpredictable, resistant to capture. It’s playing sideways while they expect you to play straight, distrusting anything that starts to feel a little too legible.
Drain Gang found a way to go around the majors. They vanished into their own mythos. Aesthetic, sound, selfhood—all fused. Hyperdub employs similar tactics. Cryptic drops. No explanations. No clear entry point. Not mystery for mystery’s sake—just a firm refusal to be legible to a system that wants to tag and bag everything. Groups like the Asemics Research Institute take it even further—refusing genre, authorship, and narrative entirely, replacing them with symbols, rituals, and unreadable signals that feel more like a temptuous virus than a press release.
So how do you stay illegible? Think ghost protocols. Labels dropping tracks in Instagram stories that disappear in 24 hours. Online sets that vanish forever after the stream. No archives or SEO. Music as graffiti. Cloudcore playlists buried under fake account names. Stuff that sounds like a mood and moves like a rumor. Unmonetizable on purpose.
What if ephemerality isn’t just strategy, but an ethic? Maybe permanence is the real sellout move. Maybe archiving, optimizing, preserving—maybe all this just turns art into a museum piece the platform can own. Maybe the best thing you can do is make something that dies in the room.
And yet, rent is due. So maybe the move isn’t purity. Maybe it’s asymmetry. Take their tools, break them mid-use. Sell zines with QR codes that link to private listening parties. Charge for access to a telegram group where you drop project files at midnight. Treat scarcity like theater. Let the hustle feel like ritual.
Of course, practical tactics remain essential. We’ve tested this ourselves. Small runs, with real engagement and zero ads have, on occasion, worked better than big playlist placements. Control your distribution. Private email lists, limited-run physical media, direct-to-fan releases. Monetize through transient, intimate experiences. Burn a few CDs, hand-write the tracklist, charge $50 just for the audacity. Sell bootleg shirts with fake tour dates. Launch a drops-only Bandcamp where nothing stays up longer than a week. Make it a game, and then play a metagame on top of it. The goal isn’t scale—it’s pulling off the heist and making it feel like theater.
But mostly, make your own games with people you trust. Show the seams. Break down mid-process. Share your stems. Host gigs in warehouses and put on livestreams that disappear. Don’t explain the joke. Don’t chase legacy. Don’t even archive the set.
Maybe the future isn’t streaming or vinyl or AI tools. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, booking a gallery in Soho under a fake brand, projecting slow motion, grainy YouTube videos on loop, and selling merch that doesn’t exist yet through old iPhones taped to the wall. Mailing tapes to fake addresses and calling that distribution. Maybe it’s not even music. Just noise. With your friends. And that could be enough.
Embrace constant disruption. Build ephemeral worlds the algorithm can’t touch. Make money anyway. Grow without betraying yourself. Your art becomes the ouroboros—an eternal cycle of creation, destruction, and renewal. That’s not avoiding the dream. That is the dream.
Thank you for this- you put to words things I have been feeling deep inside about the state of the industry for a while. These regular essays have been awesome and paving the way to a wonderful manifesto of a clear vision forward. 🩶
yeah, thanks for writing these