It’s always the same come-on. We’re invited into their lounge, or maybe their bedroom. The vibe is casual, intimate: undone hair, no make-up and lots of eye contact. Then at some point, usually within the first 10 minutes, this fascinating creature will lean in close and, in a whisper, confide. Something like, “I am trying to sort out the wreckage of the past.” (Robbie Williams, 2023.)
Or: “Let me make you a promise: I’ll only tell you my darkest secrets.” (Selena Gomez, 2022.) Or: “As reliable as the rhythmic beating of my own heart is my need to talk to you.” (Bruce Springsteen, 2020.) And, from that point on, it’s done: you’re lost in the celebrity-documentary vortex.
It was in the spring of 2020 that I first realised I’d been sucked in. I’d become increasingly reliant on 1990s basketball analogies to communicate my every emotional state. Luckily, most of my nearest and dearest were also among the 23.8 million who’d recently binge-watched Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance docuseries on Netflix. So, as with the Chicago Bulls’ Big 3 line-up during the crucial 1993 Game 6 play-off against the Phoenix Suns, there was intuitive understanding.
Once upon a time, documentaries were admired as an oasis of integrity in showbiz’s ethical desert. In every other sector of film and television, star-power rules supreme, but the documentarian remained unbiddable and incorruptible, pointing their camera towards the human stories that really matter — war, climate change, injustice, art.
On the rare occasion celebrity was a subject for documentary, it was treated with scepticism, as in Geri, Molly Dineen’s 1999 study of the former Spice Girl, in which the Bafta-winning film-maker can be heard sharply correcting Halliwell’s mistaken belief that she would have “complete control and it will be edited if there’s anything bad”. As if! Even after 2004, when Michael Moore’s Iraq War doc Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d’Or, broke box-office records and ushered in the Golden Age of documentaries, the pay remained stubbornly low and the journalistic standards resolutely high.
Cut forward only a few years, however, and documentary is as enamoured with celebrity as the most scoop-hungry paparazzo. Sit down to select your evening’s entertainment and note that seemingly every athlete, actor and musician of note has a documentary streaming, or one in the works. “I can’t tell you the amount of calls I’ve gotten from celebrities wanting to make their films since Beckham,” says Fisher Stevens, the director of Netflix’s recent hit series about the sarong-sporting football icon.
Stevens has eclectic interests — previous docs have been about dolphin-hunting in Japan (The Cove), toxic relationships (Crazy Love) and anti-Trump politics (The Lincoln Project) — but it’s the celebrity films, he says with a soft chuckle, that slide most smoothly into production. “I think people are fascinated with celebrities, especially those who kind of had a moment and then are still relevant. You get to look back at those periods, the music and styles, and there’s a certain reminiscing and nostalgia… That seems to be what people are wanting.”
Stevens himself is also an actor and a recognisable face, well-known to Succession fans as Hugo, the slippery Waystar RoyCo comms exec. What’s less well-known is his real-life role in shaping the public images of high-profile figures. Prior to Beckham there was 2016’s Bright Lights, a touching portrait of the relationship between Star Wars’ Carrie Fisher and her equally stellar mother Debbie Reynolds, and Before the Flood, which helped rebrand Leonardo DiCaprio from modelising movie star to concerned environmental activist.
Though, in fairness to all parties, it’s clear that was never the film’s primary intention. DiCaprio is only about the sixth-most charismatic person featured in Before the Flood, after several courageous climate scientists and a strident Indian rice farmer. He exerted his star power in a different way, says Stevens. “That was my third or fourth climate-change film and my most seen, because it had Leo.”
Since the rise of the streaming platforms, with their insatiable hunger for new content, the commercial logic behind the celeb-doc boom has only grown more stark. Non-fiction entertainment is much cheaper and quicker to produce than the scripted stuff, requiring no expensive sets, costumes or FX — and certainly no screenwriters or actors with their stroppy union demands.
Yet this kind of programming can be just as popular and just as prestigious. It’s this latter attribute that gives documentary the edge over its reality-TV cousin. Selling Sunset is never going to be rewarded with an Oscar nomination, no matter how artfully Chrishell skirts the edge of a Hollywood Hills infinity pool in her six-inch Louboutins.
Still, there has to be more to it than just “here’s a famous person who has agreed to let us film”, right? Kate Townsend, Netflix’s VP for original feature documentaries and the woman responsible for green-lighting so many of these projects, hopes so. “The most important thing is that we are able to shine a light on issues beyond the individual themselves,” she says of her commissioning criteria. “We’re looking for people who have relatable challenges and complexities in their everyday lives, as well as those special qualities that make them unique […] People have been surprised by the insight these films have offered.”
For Stevens, the presence of these necessary qualities can only become apparent through forging a personal connection. “I want to make this clear about the way I make films: I don’t make them like a journalist. I’m a humanist and I’m a film-maker. I need to feel a connection or it’s just gonna suck.” And by this, he doesn’t mean hanging out and socialising — although there is a bit of that. “I mean, when I’m in a room and there are cameras on you, I need you to be just talking to me and not fucking acting and posing. I don’t want you performing.” This also allows him to ascertain the celebrity’s true reasons for wanting to open up on screen, he says. “It wasn’t until I went out to dinner with David [Beckham] and his wife that I knew… When people get to a certain point in their lives and start to be able to look back, I think it becomes therapeutic.”
There was a similar impulse behind another recent documentary series, Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, according to its director, Gotham Chopra. “Jon and I are both big fans of the New England Patriots, and he’d seen a series I’d done on [NFL quarterback] Tom Brady. He reached out and said, ‘Hey, you know Tom’s got 20 years of success? I’ve got 40.’ Of course I was interested.”
Chopra’s resulting four-part show makes liberal use of the “Interrotron”, a favourite technique of the celeb doc, first popularised by the esteemed documentary trailblazer Errol Morris when he used it to interview the former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara for his Oscar-winning 2003 feature The Fog of War. Despite the Interrotron’s intimidating name — a jokey coinage of Mrs Morris’s — it’s really just a mirror contraption devised to give the illusion of direct audience engagement. “You create eye contact, which makes a huge difference,” explains Chopra. “If you tell a subject, ‘Answer my question, but look at the camera,’ there’s a separation and it becomes performative, versus when they’re engaging, making eye contact and having a human conversation.”
So beware: what feels like a soul-bearing connection between you and the famous person may actually just be a soul-bearing connection between the famous person and a hired camera operator. But, either way, the therapy parallel is inescapable. “That’s what it feels like, a lot,” agrees Chopra. “Many years ago, I worked with [NBA player] Kobe Bryant, and one of the things he said was, ‘This is like therapy!’” And not just a one-off taster session, either: “With Jon [Bon Jovi], the series running time is four hours, but that’s based on hours upon hours upon hours of interviews.”
In addition to all the free therapy, documentaries provide famous folks with a great new way to sideline the frequently unreliable or hostile press. Social media had already opened up that direct line of communication with the public, but in a short-form medium liable to misinterpretation. Far better a 90-minute film — or a 490-minute series — in which to detail your grievances and showcase your talents, without risk of interruption or contradiction. Fine, but what’s in it for the audience? How many of these films would pass my (recently devised) “Last Dance Test For Documentary Impact”? That is, can they take me, the indifferent viewer, and transform her into an invested and passionate subject-area expert faster than Dennis Rodman snatched up rebounds against the Atlanta Hawks in 1997?
In a recent episode of the industry podcast Doc Talk, Lois Vossen, the executive producer of the PBS documentary series Independent Lens, argued for a re-affirmation of journalistic values via a tightening up of terminology. “I don’t want to point fingers, but we take the work seriously in terms of what is a documentary as opposed to what is entertainment,” she told her fellow esteemed panellists. “There is nothing wrong with non-fiction entertainment! It is fabulous! I’ve had some of my best Friday nights watching non-fiction entertainment! The Greatest Night in Pop on Netflix [about the recording of the 1985 charity single “We Are The World”] is so much fun to watch […] But everything is now labelled ‘a documentary’. Some of it is, in fact, non-fiction entertainment.”
Yet even within these less-exacting boundaries, some celebrities — or rather, their publicity teams — seem to fundamentally misunderstand the “entertainment” bit. Take that aforementioned piece of Netflix non-fic-ent. It’s Lionel Richie who has the most screen time and the producer credit, and he collaborated with the film-makers to bring together all the big names — just as he did back in 1985. But it’s not Lionel Richie who comes out of it looking the coolest. That would be ever-the-outlaw Waylon Jennings, who walks off mid-chorus. Nor is it Lionel Richie who makes for the most compelling viewing. That would be publicity-averse Bob Dylan, shifting around uncomfortably amid all the showbiz schmoozing as if he’d rather be somewhere — anywhere — else. And neither Dylan nor the late Jennings appears as an interviewee.
Documentary royalty Ken Burns, for one, intends to hold us all to a much higher standard than mere entertainment. Back in April 2020, the two-time-Oscar-nominated film-maker responsible for such exhaustive and authoritative works as The Civil War (1990) and Country Music (2019) publicly criticised the involvement of Michael Jordan’s Jump 23 company in The Last Dance — a series ostensibly about the Chicago Bulls’ 1997–1998 NBA season, but really about Michael Jordan and what a virile, sporting demigod he is. “If you are there influencing the very fact of it getting made, it means certain aspects that you don’t necessarily want in aren’t going to be in, period,” Burns told The Wall Street Journal. “And that’s not the way you do good journalism… and it’s certainly not the way you do good history.”
In The Last Dance’s defence, the director Jason Hehir cited the necessity for access. Clearly, without Jordan — who also held the rights to the 1997–98 season archive footage — there could be no docuseries.
But I know a man who disagrees. “It was never the plan to speak to Michael Jordan,” says Yemi Bamiro, the south-London-based director of eight documentaries, including the Chuck D-fronted Fight the Power and 2020’s One Man and His Shoes — the best film about basketball that isn’t actually about basketball. “When we were trying to get money for it, that’s all anyone would ever ask us: ‘Have you got Michael Jordan?’, ‘Have you spoken to Michael Jordan?’” Not only did Bamiro not seek out a meeting with the big man, he was actively avoiding him: “We were actually really scared that he might catch wind of the film and try to shut it down.”
Since Bamiro’s focus was not Jordan’s basketball career but his most-lucrative marketing deal — the Air Jordan trainers — he put his energy instead into securing interviews with people such as the Nike marketing exec Sonny Vaccaro and the bereaved mother of a young man murdered over a pair of Air Jordans. This meant One Man and His Shoes had to be entirely self-funded, but the indirect approach also resulted in a well-rounded, multi-faceted portrait of — if not the man himself — the wide-ranging impact of his fame and legacy. It worked so well, in fact, that a similar, Jordan-omitting story structure was later adopted by Air, the starry Hollywood drama featuring Matt Damon as Sonny Vaccaro, Viola Davis as Jordan’s mother and Damian Young as the back of Jordan’s head (because that’s as much of him as ever appears on screen). This time, though, the film was made with Jordan’s blessing, and several script revisions were done at his request.
Notably, Air director Ben Affleck is not afforded the same degree of privacy or autonomy in his wife Jennifer Lopez’s latest self-funded documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told. He appears on camera multiple times, including in one scene in which he wryly points out the otherwise unacknowledged irony of that title: “If you’re making a record about it… that seems kinda like telling it.” Yet even he of the “Depressed Ben Affleck Smoking” meme could not fail to be won over by J Lo’s exuberant self-belief eventually.
Her documentaries — for there are several — make an artistic virtue of their self-financed, self-produced status. Like many other sex symbols of the 1990s and 2000s, Lopez is engaged in wrestling back control of her own narrative from male-dominated media and entertainment industries. Docs like J Lo’s and Framing Britney Spears (2021), Beyoncé: Life Is But a Dream (2013) and Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana (2020) implicitly ask us to also reflect on the culture of sexism that may have gone unnoticed in the not-so-distant past.
Julia Nottingham, who has produced several films in this vein, including the timely Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story and the superlative Pamela: A Love Story, feels that trust-based collaboration is the only way to work with stars. She compares the films made by her Dorothy St Pictures company to the glossy, authorised autobiography that has pride of place in the bookshop window display. “And obviously, when you go to the autobiographies, there are ones that are ghost-written, there are ones that are actually written; there’s a whole host of them…”
But wouldn’t you rather read that than the trashy, unauthorised, likely part-fanfic biography, found on a lower shelf with a reduced sticker? “We always want the most authentic version,” says Nottingham. “I’m definitely not interested in the Pamela Anderson story that’s told by commentators and full of pundits, because you don’t get the truth.” And there is a feminist subtext here, too: “Like, not to get too personal, but my mum is a divorced woman in her seventies, and watching the Pamela film boosted her confidence. It gave her a spring in her step!”
In other cases, a rigorously independent film-maker is a necessary prerequisite for any genuine reckoning with the past. Kevin Macdonald bristles at the suggestion that his recent film High & Low: John Galliano might be mistaken for “a celebrity puff piece [or] part of a campaign to rehabilitate” the disgraced fashion designer. Indeed, the documentary opens with a replay of the now-notorious 2011 footage of Galliano spewing anti-semitic abuse at strangers in a Paris bar, which remains as shocking as ever. “I thought, did they [early critics of the film] ever actually watch it? Because that’s really not what this film is.”
High & Low was funded by an independent French financier with Macdonald’s final cut written into the contract, and he commends Galliano for being amenable to this arrangement: “It was quite a long flirtation, but once he’d decided, he never brought a PR to a meeting. He never said ‘This is off-limits’. [It was] ‘You can ask anything that you want.’ When he saw the cut — which, contractually, I had to show him for factual accuracy — he made a couple of points like, ‘That’s not a couture dress, it was actually prêt-à-porter — how dare you?’, but he didn’t say a thing about anything else. And I was really amazed by that, because it’s very personal, obviously, and really impacts his life.”
Macdonald admits there was likely some ego involved in Galliano’s decision to participate. “I think part of his agenda was, ‘Well, Alexander McQueen has a really great film about him [Ian Bonhôte’s “zero-access” 2018 documentary, though hardly surprising as McQueen died in 2010]. Why don’t I? Because I’m also a great designer.’”
Do I detect a haughty undertone to Macdonald’s well-bred Scottish accent? If so, it’s well-earned. As the director of Whitney (2018) and Marley (2012), Macdonald can be fairly considered a master of the form, alongside Asif Kapadia, the director of Amy (2015), Senna (2010) and an upcoming Roger Federer doc for Prime Video, reportedly in collaboration with the tennis champion himself. [This story was written before the release of 12 Final Days in June].
What will be the exact nature of Federer’s involvement? Will he have any say on the edit? No idea, because Kapadia did not reply to my request for an interview. Now, in the spirit of the tell-all, let me be transparent: there is an earlier draft of this feature in which I’ve used this paragraph to avenge that minor slight, by heavily and unfairly insinuating that the admired documentarian has sold out to Big Streaming, but wiser heads at Esquire prevailed. Take note, Robbie Williams, Michael Jordan and other score-settling celebs: this is how a truly empowered and independent editor can save you from your own pettiness and improve the final product.
Kevin Macdonald, on the other hand, is here to defend himself against such insinuations, and does so with vigour: “I look at the many films on Netflix and elsewhere, which are produced by the stars in question, and I think, ‘Hang on a minute, why are you attacking me?’” he continues. “When I’m raising really complicated, difficult issues, and where the star in question has no say over the film and there’s no financial connection… And yet you give David Beckham a completely free pass, because you want to see inside his garage!”
On that last count, we’re mostly guilty as charged. I know I wouldn’t mind a glimpse inside Beckham’s garage, not least to check whether Victoria’s dad’s old Rolls-Royce — the subject of Beckham’s most famous, British-class-system-dismantling scene — is now parked there. But Macdonald raises a more important point. When both the puff pieces and the serious documentaries look the same, stream on the same platforms and sometimes even have the same directors, how are we, the cultured consumers, supposed to tell the difference?
Macdonald says he knows where the all-important line is and — pardon the name-drop — it was Mick Jagger who showed him. Macdonald had just finished making One Day in September, his 1999 Oscar-winning documentary about the terrorist attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics, when he got the call: “‘Would you be interested making a film with Mick Jagger?’ And I’m like, ‘That sounds like the most frivolous, fun thing in the world!’” Hanging out on yachts with a rock legend was as fun as expected, but then came the time to put the film together. “He saw it and he didn’t like it, and basically got it re-edited.” The 60-minute film (or rather, “promotional tool to sell CDs”, according to one review) eventually aired on America’s ABC network to low ratings and a baffled Thanksgiving-night audience. “That was my wake-up call. I thought, ‘I don’t want that to happen again. It’s too painful.’ So from then on, I’ve always had final cut.”
Certainly what emerges from watching High & Low is a sense of mutual, artist-to-artist respect. Galliano would no more interfere in Macdonald’s film-making than he would abide interference in his own Maison Margiela autumn/winter 2024 collection. “I think John is smart. He said to me, right at the beginning, ‘I know some people are never going to forgive me, but I want people to understand me.’ And I think that is a subtle, but important difference.”
If it’s our understanding these celebrities want, then they’ve got it. Facilitating understanding, as opposed to judgement, also seems a noble enough goal for the documentarian. But after watching hours and hours of these films — after seeing Ricky Hatton crying into his cuppa, Taylor Swift reading aloud from her teenage diaries and Steve Martin taking his laundry to the dry-cleaners — I’m disturbed to realise that the feeling goes beyond mere “understanding”. I’m ready to take a bullet for these poor, misunderstood souls.
As both the director of numerous biographical docs and the son of the New Age thinker Deepak Chopra, Gotham Chopra has a theory: “You start to hear that music, like [Bon Jovi’s 1986 album] Slippery When Wet, and it does bring you back, but I think underneath there’s also a character story that’s mythic and archetypal. Because, at a certain level, everybody is talented. It’s actually the grit, the resilience, the work ethic that leads to the success. And I think there’s something relatable, but also aspirational, to that.”
So maybe the free therapy provided by these films isn’t only working for the celebrities. Maybe it’s working for us, too. This might mean, as Chopra suggests, treating these docs as audio-visual self-help manuals to live by. Or it might mean a chance to relive and reflect on our own pasts through the celebrity’s carefully curated archive. We’re watching Take That rolling around in jelly but, simultaneously, we’re remembering who we were when we first saw Take That rolling around in jelly. So when you think about it, Jon Bon Jovi really was looking deep into my eyes, speaking straight to my heart, after all. Interrotron, be damned.
Originally published on Esquire UK
The evolution of music consumption over the past three decades has been a wild ride from questionable downloads to unlimited playlists. Remember when downloading music and burning CDs felt like it took an eternity?
With internet speeds being what they were back then, patience was indeed a virtue. Today, it’s all about 24/7 access and listening. It’s incredible how fast things can change.
Amid the rapid rise of AI and the digital age, the tempo of music consumption shows no signs of slowing down. As physical album sales plummet and streaming services take over, where will this relentless progress take us next?
The ’90s was the era of physical albums, which stored about 700 MB worth of audio tracks. Then came MPEG and MP3 formats, where transferring music between devices became as common as burning CDs. MP3s—and the world’s open secret—digital music piracy in the 2000s were the unsung heroes of the time, allowing people to acquire and carry tunes wherever they were.
That was everyone’s reality before iTunes, where instead of buying a physical album, you can buy music from your computer. Last.fm, SoundCloud and Bandcamp entered the market and offered budding artists a place to share their music with the world.
But it was Spotify’s arrival on the scene in 2008 that created a seismic shift in music consumption. It’s as if the platform has everything—infinite music to listen to, free and premium account options and an algorithm that seems to know every person’s music taste. Spotify quickly became the go-to destination for music lovers everywhere
@tyla_ ♬ Water - Tyla
Fast forward to today, the dynamics are evolving yet again. Research has shown that Gen Z spends more time streaming music than every other generation, dedicating 40 minutes more than the rest of the population.
Their eclectic taste spans genres like hip-hop, R&B and alternative rock. Having grown up with the internet as an integral part of their lives, this demographic embraces genre diversity more than any other generation.
It’s not just the younger audience—older generations are jumping on the bandwagon. Have you ever gone to TikTok, found great music and added it to your Spotify playlist? TikTok has emerged as a place where viral hits can catapult artists to stardom even with just one hit.
One perfect example is “Driver’s License” by Olivia Rodrigo, which became a massive song on the platform before dominating streaming services and “Water” by Tyla, who is often called a one-hit wonder.
What’s truly exciting, though, is the rise of DIY music. With a rising preference for fresh beats produced outside established recording studios, aspiring musicians are embracing their creativity like never before. This democratisation of music creation is not just a trend, but a movement reshaping how music can empower and connect people with others on their own terms.
J.Cole waited two hours in the rain outside Jay Z’s studio to give him his mixtape, which the latter casually dismissed. Back in the day, aspiring artists needed to get through the O.Gs to reach the top.
Gone are the days when success in the music industry depended on securing deals with prestigious labels. That was the reality for many musicians, but the game has changed. Today, indie artists are rewriting the rules. For the first time in many years, a new breed of independent copyright owners is growing and making music from the comforts of their own homes.
Home studios are all the rage today—with the rise of independent artists, they’re not going anywhere soon. With the advancements in technology and the rising accessibility of tools, artists can craft professional-grade music from the comfort of their own space.
This newfound accessibility will continue to empower many artists to embrace their own creativity in the following years. Who knows, it might inspire casual listeners to create their own beats, too.
The rise of home studios isn’t just changing how music is made—it’s reigniting the interest in learning musical instruments. Thanks to the digital age, access to music education has never been more democratised.
From free tutorials on platforms like YouTube to hybrid instruments, anyone can be a musician. Studies may have shown that music-related ability is 50 per cent inherited from a family member. Still, the availability of free resources means anyone can hone their skills if they dedicate enough time and effort to learning.
Musical instruments have also continuously adapted to the technological advancements of artists. Case in point: virtual instruments—powered by artificial intelligence and advanced software—allow individuals to learn a specific instrument and experiment with unlimited possibilities.
It’s also hard to keep up with the recent otherworldly musical inventions, such as sitars made from golf clubs and miniature synthesisers. Recently, the world’s first Kovar guitar strings were produced. They’re more corrosion-resistant than your typical Titanium string. Kovar is a nickel-cobalt alloy commonly used in the construction industry and has now made its way into the music industry. Will these strings strike a chord with guitarists? Only time will tell.
Even if you’re not strumming a guitar yourself, the prospect of future instruments looks promising. Picture wearable instruments like bracelets embedded with sensors and hybrid instruments that seamlessly blend digital and acoustic elements. In an AI-dominated era, what better way to appreciate technological advancements than through music?
As streaming continues to dominate the musical landscape, expect to see even more tailored-fit experiences in the years to come. Much of people’s lives are accompanied by a soundtrack, whether at work, home or play—and it’s not going anywhere. Around 71% of people say music is essential to their mental wellness, and 78% say it helps them relax and cope with stress. Given that, what we can expect is a total blast on hyper-personalisation.
As streaming platforms use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve recommendations, you can expect more innovations like Spotify’s AI DJ and Daylist in the coming years. Soon enough, systems can analyse beyond your streaming activities, current weather, time of the day and location.
It’s a bit frightening knowing that AI can soon predict your desires long before you identify the need for it. That future is not impossible, given the rapid advances of AI. One thing’s for sure, though—personalised innovations will quickly rise as CD sales and digital downloads slowly go extinct.
With the rise of VR and AR technologies, music streaming will become a catalyst for more innovative live music experiences—exclusive live streaming of concerts, DJ sets and virtual series are possibilities of the future. Considering the future 6G, you can look forward to virtual visual streaming—imagine having your favourite artist performing in front of you as their only audience. It’s like having an intimate concert in the comfort of your own home.
With music playing 24/7, it’s easy to get tired of the same tunes. Talking about music is more than finding new songs to listen to—it’s a way for people to connect. That being said, you can expect to see the emergence of social music streaming, where users can follow friends’ listening activities, share playlists and collaborate on music creation.
Future music consumption tools would likely involve a mix of AI-generated and human-created instrumentals, songs and soundscapes. When the song “Heart on My Sleeve,” featuring Drake and the Weeknd’s AI-generated vocals dropped, it immediately went viral. The track was posted on TikTok and streaming services, which racked up 600,000 Spotify streams and 15 million TikTok views before it was removed from all platforms due to copyright violation claims. Despite the controversy, people love it, even going as far as telling AI is terrible, but not until this song dropped.
While some artists feel threatened by AI, others see it as an opportunity to make passive income from other creators producing songs that use their voices. Grimes is the living embodiment of this concept—she released Elf.tech, a platform that allows people to create new songs using her voice.
If you’ve ever created YouTube videos, you know the struggle of finding royalty-free music. Enter Beatoven and Boomy—platforms that let you generate music and royalty-free tracks with the help of AI. These tools will let you create music based on your chosen genre, energy level and mood. What a way to be your own DJ.
Looking back on the past, present and future of music consumption, one thing is certain—streaming will remain an unstoppable force. What’s exciting about the future is how people listen to music and the opportunities for music creation as home studios become more popular.
Whatever the future holds, remember that consuming music is more than just hitting that play button. It’s also about connecting people.
Not to be all doom and gloom, but it appears we (and by we, I mean the tech bros running YouTube) have finally nailed the coffin shut when it comes to keeping the human brain focused for more than a mere handful of seconds, if not less.
YouTube – which is not just the new competitor against Netflix, but basically every single platform striving for human engagement – is experimenting with a new feature called “jump ahead”, which will allow members to skip to the ‘best’ part of the video. As if YouTube reels, three minute videos, nevertheless TikTok, weren’t short enough, this new feature will allow time sensitive or simply attention lacking individuals to skip ahead to the juiciest seconds of a video, and then move on to the next one. This evokes an image of the downloading sequence in The Matrix where Neo is plugged in and ‘kung fu’ is downloaded into his brain in a matter of seconds and voila, suddenly, in the words of Neo himself, “I know Kung Fu.”
This “Jump Ahead” feature may just be a “small experiment” to the tech giant, which is owned by Google, but its potential reach is gargantuan. Last month, YouTube surpassed 100 million Premium and Music subscribers, a number which includes those participating in a free trial. YouTube Premium, which is basically just ad-free YouTube, costs SGD 11.98, and as a standalone, YouTube music costs SGD 9.98.
Although many still view Netflix to be the undefeated champ of online streaming, YouTube does have more usage, although not more paying members, as Netflix has 260 million worldwide. Still, YouTube made more than SGD 41 billion last year in ad revenue.
Based on a recent study from Nielsen, the global leader in audience insights, data and analytics, YouTube represents 9.3% of TV and streaming viewership as of February 2024. Netflix came in second at was 7.8%, and Hulu and Amazon Prime Video tied in third place. But what is perhaps most surprising of all, is that standard, TV is still the most popular place to watch shows and movies at home. Streaming “only” made up 37.7% of the viewership pie.
Considering the “jump ahead” feature, one must also bear in mind that many YouTube videos contain 90% fluff, especially the guaranteed inclusion of “and don’t forget to like and subscribe”, which can become repetitively annoying, so the intentions behind this feature may not be as mind zapping as they initially appeared. For example, amongst YouTube fitness channels, many videos can reach up to 30 minutes with a title Best Bicep Workout.
As any avid gym goer can tell you, training your biceps does not require thirty minutes of explanation, and for those who subscribe to such channels, in recent years, many fitness YouTubers are making contrasting, shortened videos that get to the point much quicker, which isn’t due to lack of attention, but rather a more succinct explanation. And if you read the comments section, you’ll see an influx of reactions like, “thank you for immediately getting to the point!”
Depending on how you view the “jump ahead” feature, it can be seen as a force for good when considering the type of content you are watching, i.e. informative fitness channels. And with Elon Musk’s Neuralink raising eyebrows and interest across the internet – will it expand the possibilities of human cognition or destroy the human mind? – one thing is for certain: attention spans are dropping faster than interest in a Robin Thicke concert.
