Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (1 of 3)

The following paper was written for my Fall Seminar on Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0. I have decided to share this particular paper here because of this blog’s ongoing interest in issues of fan labor and creator rights, because it is timely given the ongoing roll out of this particular platform, and because it does such a fine job combining legal and technical tools to understand what is at stake for participants at various levels.

—Henry Jenkins

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (1 of 3)

Edward B. Kang

Introduction

Hi Edward Kang, 

My name is Stephanie and I'm on the team here at Thematic. I wanted to reach out and personally welcome you and tell you that we're so excited to have you be a part of our community! We can't wait to see the videos you create.

If you have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to email me.

Best,
Stephanie

This was the welcome email I received from Stephanie Leyva, the community manager of Thematic, when I registered for the platform as “Content Creator”. I then signed up for the platform with a different email as “Music Artist”. I received nothing. 

Founded by YouTuber Michelle Phan along with Chief Executive Officer Marc Schrobilgen and Chief Operating Officer Aubrey Marshall, Thematic launched in 2018 as a “free peer-to-peer music marketplace that seeks to help content creators find music for their videos while concurrently promoting aspiring musicians” (Weiss, 2018, para. 3). It reads on their home page: 

Thematic is all about connecting creators and music artists. You need great songs to soundtrack your videos. Music artists need promotion. Thematic makes it happen. Simple. With songs curated by content type and theme, you’ll spend less time searching for that perfect song and more time creating. Safe. All of our songs are pre-cleared so you are able to fully monetize your videos without worrying about licenses, claims, or disputes. Collaborative. During our public beta, you’ll have access to Thematic for free – no membership fees, no licensing fees, no rev-shares. (Thematic) 

The site quite markedly mobilizes the democratic rhetoric of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006) to frame the platform as a “safe”, “simple” and “collaborative” space that serves both the interests of Content Creators and Music Artists alike. Content Creators have access to pre-cleared high-quality music for free, and Music Artists get exposure and promotion – it’s meant to be a win-win situation. The “you” in their promotional text (quoted above), however, which directly speaks to the content creator, perhaps hints otherwise. In fact, all of the resourceful things that “you” get, come at the expense of their– “Music Artists’” – labor. “Pre-cleared” songs with “no licensing fees” and “no rev-shares” (revenue shares) can only be achieved if Music Artists surrender significant portions of their rights and ownership of the music they create. Departing from Jenkins’ understanding of participatory culture, then, which explicitly emphasizes the generative potentials of collaboration made possible by the diverse skills and voices accessible through digital user networks, Thematic strategically seems to only mobilize the democratic rhetoricthat accompanies participatory culture without actually allowing for a bi-directionally generative and participatory community to manifest on its platform. It thus ultimately advocates for a digital marketplace in which the generative potentials of collaboration are vastly unequal for the participating members. 

There have been numerous studies since the advent of Web 2.0 that have interrogated these very questions and concerns of uneven participation and digital labor that lie at the intersections of digital technology and the creative industries (e.g. Andrejevic, 2009; Andrejevic et al., 2014; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Baym, 2018; Bruns, 2006; Hesmondalgh, 2010, 2011; Jenkins, 2006; McRobbie, 2016; Sinnreich, 2010, 2013, 2019; Terranova, 2012 etc.). Many of these works have rigorously tried to trace the exploitation-cooperation continuum of arguments that occupy these discussions, while also positioning themselves within it to better nuance and contribute to the complex conversations that are required to parse the entangled web of relationships found at this intersection. 

Jenkins’ (2006) canonical text, Convergence Culture, for instance, elaborates on the notion of participatory culture, further expanded in Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013), to describe the productive negotiations and increasingly collaborative and interactive relationships forged between media consumers and producers. It thus critically acknowledges the unequal power dynamics that inevitably emerge in these producer-consumer relations, but ultimately seeks to look beyond a solely economic model of profit, foregrounding the generative potentials of a community of participants, allowing us to focus on the diverse skills, motivations, and incentives of the various players that comprise the network of participants. Nancy Baym (2018) also contributes to this discussion as she explores the newfound intimacy between music artists and their fans afforded by the rise of digital communication platforms as well as the demands and resources of the gig economy that have come to increasingly define the creative industries. In so doing, she offers a nuanced account of the new forms of labor imposed on musicians today by the evolving conditions of the music industry. 

Other scholars like McRobbie and Andrejevic, for instance, contrastingly position themselves closer to the other end of the spectrum. McRobbie (2016) examines the increasing precarity of the gig-economy in correlation with the neoliberalist entrepreneurial ideology that has become part and parcel of working in the cultural industries (elaborated upon later on), while Andrejevic (2009) observes the expropriative data mining practices of digital platforms by pointing out that users’ “free participation is redoubled as a form of productive labor captured by capital” (p. 419), thus shifting the focus away from “user-created content [to] user-generated data” (p. 418). As more and more such studies in the fields of cultural studies, critical information studies, communication studies, and the digital humanities, among others, have come to take this intersection of digital technologies and the cultural industries as their focus, a spectrum comprised of numerous scholarly voices has formed to better nuance and understand both the generative and oppressive potentials of digital communities. In my examination of Thematic as a platform born out of these dynamic interactions between the digital and the cultural, I thus also seek to put myself in conversation with these various scholars. 

I begin by conducting a critical discourse analysis of the Thematic website to examine the way in which the platform is promoted to both Content Creator and Music Artist. In so doing, I specifically shed light on the necessary free labor and uneven terms of participation hidden behind Thematic’s strategic use of democratic rhetoric to frame the space as “safe”, “simple”, and “collaborative”. Once the discursive regime and theoretical frameworks within which Thematic operates are established, I dig deeper into the underlying agreements that range from its Terms of Use to the specific Music Artist and Content Creator Agreements to unearth the lack of protection and expropriative terms that Music Artists subscribe to in their choosing to join Thematic. Finally, I compare the distinct user interfaces of Artist and Creator through a platform analysis to further emphasize this inequality. Ultimately, I hope to shed light on the dependence of Thematic as a representative platform that strategically siphons the neoliberal ideology of the new cultural industries and the outmoded regime of current intellectual property law to mobilize the free labor of its users for its own sustenance, all the while masking these expropriative terms under a democratic and participatory rhetoric of community. 

 “Try Thematic”: Free Labor, Labor as Spectacle, and High-Quality Work

Tiziana Terranova (2012) was one of the first scholars (originally published in 2000) to apply a labor framework to the digital economy, presciently claiming that most of the value in digital spaces is generated by the “voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (p. 68) – i.e. free – labor of users. In what is perhaps her most referenced line, she writes that “free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (p. 74). Reductively put, voluntary user activity on a digital platform essentially redoubles as productive activity – labor – vital to the platform’s fundamental maintenance. She does not, however, limit her discussion of labor to that of only the users, and in a comparably less referenced segment of her seminal text, also points to the spectacle of labor that shines through the translucency of commodities in the update culture of the digital economy: 

It is not enough to produce a good website; you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence… It is the labor of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful website, and it is the spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labor that goes into it. (p. 93) 

By foregrounding both the labor of users in keeping a site alive through their consumptive labor –  “the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations” (p. 94) etc. – as well as the continuous labor of updating these sites required by designers, Terranova points to the digital space-commodity as inherently dependent on a spectacle of rigorously co-operative labor.

Thematic is not exempt from this dependence. Even before one decides to use Thematic as either a Music Artist or Content Creator, the landing home page – i.e. the “Try Thematic” (Thematic) promotional page – cleverly interweaves the different kinds of free labor at play along with the spectacle of labor that its own team provides to urge a potential user to literally tryThematic. Each type of user is enticed with the free labor of her counterpart: “You need great songs to soundtrack your videos. Music Artists need promotion. Thematic makes it happen” (Thematic). The promotion promised to the Music Artist is unavoidably dependent on her uploading of free music to Thematic that is then used by “you”, the Content Creator, in “your” video. Free music for free promotion. It seems here that there is a logical balance of cultural exchange, in which Thematic’s specific “moral economy” (Thompson, 1971) – i.e. “the social norms and mutual understandings that make it possible for two parties to conduct business” (Jenkins, 2013, p. 52) – appears undisrupted. If, however, we examine Terranova’s take on labor as spectacle, it becomes more apparent that Thematic does not position the two parties on equal, or even close-to-equal, terms.

Revisiting the idea of the translucent commodity, a labor as spectacle framework points to the idea that the designers of a platform are also compelled to package their labor to sell to potential users. It thus doubly intensifies the labor required to keep the site alive – the free labor of user activity and the constant updates the platform requires of designers. In the case of Thematic, other than the given labor of maintaining the basic functions of the site, its “spectacular” labor is essentially the continuous update, curation, organization, clearing, and display of songs for Content Creators to browse and download: “Simple. With songs curated by content type and theme, you’ll spend less time searching for that perfect song and more time creating. Safe. All of our songs are pre-cleared…” (Thematic). As is already apparent in its rhetorical use of “you”, Thematic’s spectacle of labor, cleverly repackaged with the democratic rhetoric of “simple” and “safe”, is meant to “keep the [Content Creators] coming back” (Terranova, 2012, p. 93). So where is the labor spectacle for Music Artists? They are, after all, offering up labor-intensive products in their music that serve as the material for the labor spectacle sold to Content Creators. What is meant to bring them, the Music Artists, back? To address this question, we must briefly depart from Terranova’s framework of labor and attend to Hesmondalgh (2010) in his efforts to direct us beyond “wages as the only meaningful form of reward” (p. 278). 

Hesmondhalgh challenges the frequent conflation of free labor and exploitation in extant academic critiques by pointing out that “most cultural production in history has been unpaid, and that continues to be the case today” (p. 277). In speaking directly to Terranova’s discussion of the unpaid labor necessary to functionally maintain the Internet, he writes: 

But it may be said in response that those who undertook such unpaid digital labour might have gained a set of rewards from such work, such as the satisfaction of contributing to a project which they believed would enhance communication between people and ultimately the common good; or in the form of finding solutions to problems and gaining new skills which they could apply later in other contexts. (p. 278) 

In this way he emphasizes the danger of reducing meaningful compensation for work to simply wages, emphasizing that “it would surely be wrong to imply that any work done on the basis of social contribution or deferred reward represents the activities of people duped by capitalism” (p. 278). Although Terranova also acknowledges that “free labor… is not necessarily exploited labor” (2012, p. 93), she explicitly contains it within her description of the construction of early virtual communities where the pleasures of communication and exchange were the fruits of that labor, thus eliding a more nuanced discussion of how such pleasures or non-financial motivations might be meaningful in other contexts. 

To further elaborate on such non-economic forms of compensation Hesmondhalgh moves away from discussions of free labor and shifts his focus to the precarity of the cultural industries: 

Many workers tolerate poor pay, long hours and difficult conditions in order merely to gain jobs with very poor levels of security and protection. In other words, to achieve the possibility of self-realization through creative work seems to require what some recent critics, as I pointed out earlier, have called self-exploitation. (2010, p. 281)

He evidently acknowledges, here, the appropriation by those who hold power in the cultural industries of the “self-realization” aspect of creative work to force workers into tolerating precarious working conditions. That being said, he also further highlights in his book with Sarah Baker, Creative Labour(2011), the importance of high-quality work in these industries as a potentially significant motivator for creative workers. Understood both in terms of Sennett’s (2008) craftsmanship as well as the “opportunities for workers to do work that they consider to be of social, cultural, and political significance” (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011, p. 21), high-quality work as such a form of meaningful wage-alternative compensation thus forces us to rethink and more rigorously define how exactly self-exploitation manifests in these contexts. In urging us to think about the actual lives of the workers and the meaning they attribute to their work, he reminds us that “to treat these positive components of creative work as mere sugar coatings for the bitter pill of precariousness is surely too dismissive of the genuinely positive experiences that some creative workers have in their jobs and careers” (2010, p. 282). 

At this point we can return to the question: what brings Music Artists back? When understood through Terranova’s framework of labor as spectacle, Music Artists were evidently sidelined in our discussion of Thematic’s promotional landing page, and even, unexplainable with regards to why they would “Try Thematic”. But if we re-examine their position under Hesmondhalgh’s lens of high-quality work, and thus foreground the particularities and diverse motivations of individual Music Artists, it allows us to bring them back into the conversation. This is not to say, in any way, that Hesmondhalgh urges us to see the Music Artist and the Content Creator as operating on equal terms within the Thematic community. Rather, the concept of high-quality work allows us to better frame and situate Music Artists’ participation on the platform beyond an exploitation framework, thus very much in line with Jenkins’ take on participatory culture, and at least speculate in similar fashion to Hesmondhalgh and Jenkins, as to what their incentives might be in the explicit absence of labor as spectacle. Perhaps, the mere satisfaction of receiving credit on well-made YouTube videos is enough, or perhaps they make music anyways as a pleasurable hobby and want to donate the products of their hobbies, similar to what Kücklich (2005) calls playbour, to the creative community accessible via Thematic. While it is difficult to pinpoint what individual Music Artists seek to gain from their participation in Thematic without actually speaking with each individual Artist, Hesmondhalgh reminds us that we should not be too quick to dismiss their activities as self-exploitation (which is, of course, not to say that we should rule it out altogether) and acknowledge the potentially other more meaningful forms of compensation that their participation might entail: “which political projects may best enhance human well-being and social justice with regard to work?” (2010, p. 282) To this end, by putting Hesmondhalgh’s framework of high-quality work and his consequential push to look beyond wage as meaningful compensation for labor in conversation with Terranova’s understandings of free labor and labor as spectacle, it becomes possible to sketch a comparably more coherent, albeit not complete, map of the imbricated relations between Thematic, Content Creator, and Music Artist laid out in Thematic’s promotional materials. 

Bio

Edward B. Kang is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Communication. His research engages the cultural and infrastructural dimensions of digital media and digital surveillance technologies with a specific focus on the relationship between sound/music, identity, platform logics, and platform anatomies. He is thus interested in navigating the socialities that emerge at these knotty intersections of technology and culture. Apart from his own research, he has served as a committee member for Annenberg’s annual Communication and Cultural Studies graduate student conference Critical Mediations, as well as led Music Production workshops for Annenberg’s Critical Media Project with California Humanities