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

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

Edward B. Kang

User Interfaces: Interactive Library vs. Isolated Metrics

In this brief section before the conclusion, I navigate the user interfaces of Thematic afforded to both Music Artists and Content Creators to simply exhibit how this inequality between the two groups is embedded into the platform itself. Returning to Terranova’s idea of the translucent commodity, the labor that shines through the platform is truly spectacular for the Content Creator. The main page shows “Recent Pickups” to display songs that were recently used in influencer videos, “Selected for [Content Creator]” and “Top Projects for [Content Creator]” to direct the Content Creator to other songs and playlists based on their previous downloads, “Staff Picks” to let the Content Creator know what the Thematic team is currently backing, and “New Music”, which speaks for itself. Upon clicking the “Browse Music” tab, there is a seemingly endless list of songs, each with their own beautiful album cover provided by Music Artists, which can then be filtered according to genre, community, vocal, tempo, and mood. The “Projects” tab allows the Content Creator to create personal playlists, and the “Downloads” tab lists recent downloads. For the Content Creator, Thematic serves as an easy-to-use, beautiful, and interactive library and personal storage of free songs.

**Music catalogue for Content Creators (hellothematic.com)**

**Filters for searching music (hellothematic.com)**

The interface for the Music Artist is in comparison quite dry. Once logged in as Music Artist, the user no longer has access to any parts of the vast library of music, which even the general unregistered visitor can browse, and only has access to two pages: the submission portal through which the Music Artist submits music to be reviewed by Thematic’s A&R team, and the statistics page, which shows the specific metrics of the number of times their songs were used and the number of views of the videos their songs are featured on. In contrast to the democratic rhetoric of community that Thematic employs in its promotion, Music Artists have no real access to the broader community that their music and Content Creators operate in. They are closed off behind walls of numbers that don’t necessarily directly translate into other forms of valuable quantification like revenue or social media following. The labor that shines through here is anything but spectacular, with most of the services offered being relegated to algorithms. This is not to say that the maintenance and development of algorithms is not labor-intensive, but it pales in comparison to the coupling of both the human-intensive labor of curation, quality control, and organization with algorithmically derived personal picks for Content Creators. With these additional absences of avenues for engagement with the broader community shown through the design of the actual user interface, the uneven terms of participation between the Music Artist and Content Creator as well as the contradictions between promotion and actual user experience become ever more apparent.

Conclusion

“From the very beginning, I’ve always wanted to empower and give back to creators,” Michelle Phan told us. “Since uploading my first video 12 years ago, I’ve experienced lawsuits and seen first-hand what happens when big music labels come in and make copyright infringement claims.”

“I understand intimately the challenges facing creators today. Through Thematic, I hope to protect creators and artists and provide a platform where they can connect, safely and free.” (Resnikoff, 2019)

While I don’t intend this paper to be a direct challenge against Michelle Phan’s motives, I do think that in her efforts to empower Content Creators, such as herself, she overlooks some of the pressing ramifications that those efforts can entail for Music Artists. As I showed through my examination of the forward-facing promotional materials, to the underlying contractual agreements, and finally to the separate user interfaces themselves, the terms of participation on Thematic are not always communal and democratic nor are they mutually beneficial for both Music Artists and Content Creators. Although the broader social conditions in which the cultural industries operate that Terranova, Hesmondhalgh, and McRobbie, among others, have outlined, may have normalized such precarious work to a certain extent, as an influential figurehead of a rapidly growing platform like Thematic that stands to advocate for the democratic production of culture on digital platforms, Michelle Phan has the power to at least begin to veer us in a direction that resists or circumvents those oppressive social conditions.

Finally, even though I take in this present paper a critical stance towards Thematic, I acknowledge that at the time of writing, the platform is still in public beta testing, and there is thus ample opportunity for improvements to be made. Especially as the platform garners more serious investors, for which the recruitment process has just ended, and the platform inevitably moves from a free one to a paid, most likely subscription-based one, it will be imperative for the Thematic team led by Michelle Phan, CEO Marc Schrobilgen and COO Aubrey Marshall, to be adamant in their support for the increased protection of Music Artists on the platform. This may take the form of technical interventions I suggested earlier to more safely deliver the music content uploaded, a broader application of the approval feature that allows Music Artists to also have a say in which videos their music can be featured, easier access for Music Artists to engage with the broader community, and an overall re-evaluation of the separate Artist and Creator Agreements that more thoroughly hold Thematic responsible in protecting and crediting Music Artists. It may also take the form of introducing new services altogether such as the feature for Content Creators to also provide their video-making services to Music Artists who want content released under their name – i.e. lyric videos or music videos. There are indeed many practical ways for the Thematic team to truly better democratize the platform. To this end, I want to conclude on a more hopeful note and write that, moving forward, I trust Phan and her team will take these many possibilities into consideration, and truly use Thematic to build, in their own words, “a community for the community” (Thematic).

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