From politics to tech to leisure, the previous few years can greatest be described as unprecedented. In 2023, every day life felt particularly futuristic and surreal, with synthetic intelligence dominating the discourse. But the nearer you take a look at the 12 months’s guiding traits, the extra they start to resemble the previous — not a decade in the past, however the early days of the web and even pre-digital life, too.

Final 12 months, MIDiA launched the idea of scenes because the guiding pressure behind future advertising and marketing and A&R. The thought is that if leisure consumption is fragmenting, and leisure drives identification and tradition, then identification and tradition are fragmenting, too. The pattern has solely accelerated since, with the proliferation of on-line scenes that really feel more and more troublesome to elucidate to outsiders, like coquette core and the revival of indie sleaze. Whereas the social media setting of the late 2010s was characterised by one-to-many posts beneath the umbrella of Massive Tech, shoppers are actually more and more segmented into semi-private digital areas, whether or not unintentionally (through an algorithmic bubble) or deliberately (i.e., Discord, Shut Mates Tales, BeReal, and so on.). 

Does any of this sound acquainted? It ought to. Of their widely-shared article earlier this 12 months, “The Balkanization & Babelification of the Web”, artists and cultural critics Rue Yi and Ruby Justice Thelot defined how we’re returning to the earliest days of the web, the place digital communities have been largely decentralised, present in hid “separate islands” like chats, electronic mail lists, and bulletin boards. Trying again at historical past, people have been additionally as soon as solely in a position to commerce data inside their native communities and people instantly adjoining, resulting in the event of assorted sub-cultures and languages.

The deepening of creator tradition has been the opposite guiding pattern of 2023. For youthful generations, consuming leisure — whether or not that be music, movie, TV, trend — more and more entails some type of creation. This occurs largely through social media, however there are additionally IRL examples, like fan-made merchandise. Every part is a remix. But in music, even the blurring of the boundary between client and creator harkens again to the pre-recorded music period, when every music efficiency was distinctive and formed by viewers interplay. This sense of deja vu exists in different industries, too. Take Angelina Jolie’s new trend enterprise, Atelier Jolie — the place clients can have their outdated clothes upcycled by native artisans. It’s the precise reverse of the mainstream, Shein-ified, quick trend period, and a return to the previous, when native artisans have been the solely strategy to get clothes, rendering each bit distinctive by definition.

MIDiA largely credit fragmentation to the pure results of dwelling in a world the place all content material is on the market on-demand for reasonable. Algorithms additionally play a robust position — first, by naturally segmenting shoppers into niches, and secondly, by main shoppers to count on hyper-personalised content material. (Complicating that is MIDiA’s headline 2024 prediction that “the algorithm just isn’t listening anymore”: as an alternative of supporting consumer priorities, algorithms more and more push customers to content material that advantages the platform). However Yi and Thelot cite security as the primary motivation, with shoppers migrating to gated communities to flee web trolling and toxicity. Equally, one other one in every of MIDiA’s 2024 predictions is the rise of the threataverse — the rising pattern of social platforms changing into poisonous environments wherein variety of opinion is remodeling into intolerance, divisiveness, and hate speech.

Regardless of the driving components, the result’s that subcultures are creating their very own languages, and it’s changing into tougher for shoppers to really feel a way of shared actuality and perceive one another in any respect. This can be a contributor to the “loneliness epidemic” that’s most pronounced in younger folks. This dissolution of a shared actuality has far-reaching implications, however for music it implies that it’s getting tougher to create “mainstream” hits and even outline a “mainstream” in any respect. In some ways, it is a good factor. Not solely does it promote variety in artwork, however the ensuing area of interest communities are sometimes extra engaged with their topics than the passive plenty of the mainstream media period. But it surely additionally implies that music’s connective tissue is getting thinner. Music is meant to convey folks collectively. How can we let music do what it does greatest?

As a lot as expertise has helped join artists and audiences in new methods — from social media to livestreaming — it’s equally necessary to contemplate the place tech falls quick. Even Yi and Thelot conclude that the world wants extra “bodily contact” — overcoming these subcultural “language” limitations by “circumvent[ing] phrases altogether”. Whereas this may increasingly sound a bit trite, dwell music is one path in the direction of connection, to not point out being arguably the one scarce leisure experiences we now have left. Festivals like Glastonbury are among the solely pathways to shared world (or at the very least regional) leisure experiences. Different artists are forging connections by reinventing the dwell expertise completely. UK collective SAULT performed their first-ever dwell present in London final week, the place concert-goers headed to a secret venue to listen to a brand new, unreleased album for the primary and solely time. Critics and followers alike are hailing the present as “jaw-dropping”, “magical”, and the perfect dwell expertise of the 12 months. 

For all of its hyper-futurism, 2023 might have introduced shoppers nearer to a pre-internet actuality than ever. Perhaps this implies our technique ought to return to fundamentals, too — emphasising music as a strategy to convey folks collectively, because it all the time has finished.