The Label Making 2020s Totalism
NYC label Dots Per Inch helped launch the careers of Grace Ives and LUCY. Today, they're testing the limits of sonics in an era of streaming malaise.
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In March, I threw an idea out there. It was sort of a haphazard and partial, but I figured I’d see if it would stick. And it did, at least in my little orbit. Space Case, a podcast hosted by the band Space Kidettes, even made a whole podcast episode riffing on my theory. Half-baked as it was, I think I was articulating something.
My idea was such: since the advent of streaming, I have noticed two aesthetic movements that seemed to directly emanate from the strange dynamics of the streaming economy. One was bedroom pop, which developed because it aligned well with Spotify’s preference for vibey, background listening. And the other was hyperpop, which was in direct opposition to that preference. If things were becoming too floaty and forgettable, Hyperpop was there to demand your attention.
For many reasons, least of all the natural flow of culture, both of these genres feel dated, stale and tired today. Much of hyperpop sounds like a simple series of honks and booms and bedroom pop, akin to the soundtrack of a pleasant Kia commercial.
That being said: I think the cultural and economic lessons of both genres were learned in some crucial ways. And some difference was split between bedroom pop’s background vibes and hyperpop’s foreground demand for attention. That difference, that median, is what I’m calling 2020s Totalism™
As I’ve written about previously, “[2020s Totalism] splits the middle between complexity and straightforwardness, as filtered through the taste of the Zoomer generation’s technological hive mind.” Artists like Pinkpantheress, MGNA Crrrta, even Ethel Cain are all new acts who are striking some balance between streaming’s imperative for music to work as background aura and the artistic desire to engage the listener.
I guess I was mulling over all of this when I found myself in conversation with Tom Moore, fellow Bard college alum (go raptors) and founder of Dots Per Inch Music, at a packed sushi dinner with mutual friends. Moore, it turns out, has been directly involved with many artists who are, to me, making 2020s Totalism.
Dots Per Inch is a small NYC-based label that was part of the early careers of a good crop of today’s indie darlings, releasing early records for Grace Ives, whose delicious, melancholy dance-pop, has become a cornerstone of whatever “indie” constitutes today and Lucy (Cooper B. Handy), who is akin to an even more mysterious Alex G for north-east music nerds.
Today, Moore is working with, among others, May Rio, an NYC pop act who’s earning deserved recognition for her dreamy, tender, strange pop music and NYC-based duo Amiture, whose haunting catalog combines the allure of the southern gothic with the rush of NYC grit.
All of these artists, to me, represent 2020s Totalism in that they too split some difference: the difference between easy streamability and strange engagement. They don’t sacrifice their music for the incentives of the platform because they don’t need to.
I wanted to talk to Moore about the place where aesthetics and incentives collide, and get some answers for myself about why the sound of 2020s Totalism may emerge through some of the artists he works with.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
Tobias Hess: I'd be curious to hear the context of the industry writ large when you started Dots Per Inch [in 2016]. What was the landscape like then?
Tom Moore: I can't speak much to the landscape of when I started it, primarily because I didn't really have access to it at the time. Maybe you had a similar experience coming from a place like Bard. It's not like there is a clear, pre-cut path from turning a music degree or experience in music generally into a job in recorded music.
I was very determined to work at XL or Merlin. I think part of the will to start the label came from me being 22, naive, and not believing in myself enough to get those jobs at established companies. But another part of it was that ultimately these are pretty small companies. Some of them make lots of money, some of them really don't. They all have a pretty limited ability to hire in the first place and many of them were started in the ‘90s and had an entire management structure that was impenetrable to a 22 year old with little idea of what he was talking about at the time. So the label started because I couldn't get the access I wanted in order to learn about the business.
I started it because I knew good music and I knew musicians that weren't really being properly handled as recorded projects. So the first 3 years were really just pretending I knew what I was doing: fucking up, fixing it, doing it again. All the pretending came from translating what I’d read in books, newsletters, and Music Business Worldwide. In the beginning, I was learning exactly how I could be useful to talent—as opposed to how talent could be useful to me, which maybe contradicts stereotypes about artist/label dynamics..
Back then, the M.O. was, can I provide value to this artist? If so, how? And I think that kind of open mindedness is what allowed me to work with talent in the early days that were willing to trust me—which is something I am still so grateful for considering how little experience I had back then.
For example, when it came to working with LUCY, my central role was in improving his SEO and introducing back catalog to my small list of contacts. That was what really started our entire relationship. Is that the bulk of what a record label does? Absolutely not. But that was the beginning of our relationship almost entirely. It was like, Hey, it's really hard to find your stuff online, can I help? It wasn't really a label in the beginning. I just kept calling it a label because I knew what it would become.
Tobias Hess: So you were thinking of it as, “I'm a fan of these artists. They're super underground, DIY, and I want to help them get to the next step?”
Tom Moore: It was more that I recognized that these underground DIY artists were actually really interesting pop projects. I think that was my angle in the beginning. Like most folks cherished their inaccessibility, and I thought that that was problematic. I think that music should be listened to. Should you sacrifice your art for commercial gain? Obviously not. But there's a lot of area between those two fundamentals that I think is under-explored. So no, it wasn't about how I can get them to the next step? It was more about how I can get these artists listened to? Maybe do some “dirty work” such as marketing, which is not that dirty, but in some circles it might be considered so. It boiled down to, how can I do this so as to keep the artist able to focus on their work, make them some money, finance the project, and help them with other things beyond the label as they come up?
“Most folks cherished their inaccessibility and I thought that that was problematic. I think that music should be listened to.”
Tobias Hess: I'm curious to hear more about the idea of these DIY projects having “pop potential.” It's not clear to me what the economic model for that is when streaming is an industry of scale. Where do DIY and pop meet? And how does that make sense? Wouldn't it just make sense for an artist to go all in on Bandcamp, for example, if you know the dividends that minor Spotify success would pay is almost nothing.
Tom Moore: Some bands can do Bandcamp. Model/Actriz could probably do Bandcamp. Grace Ives could never make the money that she makes everywhere if it weren't for streaming, partnerships, & tours.
So the problem has been that there's this assumption that if you're coming from SUNY Purchase, Bard or Vassar [Editor's note: these were all colleges in the same music scene as Bard — where we both went to college], or whatever the hell, you can't do these commercial things without sacrificing integrity. I think the approach should be more case by case. I think that every time you have an opportunity, it should be asked: does this undervalue or undercut my work or my vision as an artist? Most often it doesn't. Most often, seeing more exploitation on the marketplace does not interfere with a vision for a project. If there is a world in which your music could be its own thing, and then also exist in the context of a mood playlist, then a mood playlists doesn't devalue the work and should not be avoided.
That's where the name of the label comes from. “Dots per inch” is a measure of image quality. The label has always considered itself in the business of image production and presentation, which is the more superficial side of music. To say it is superficial is not to detract—packaging is very important in show business. The label makes this packaging, be it SEO, marketing blurbs, or sync pitches. The artists create the music.
Tobias Hess: I've been exploring the idea of a new aesthetic that emerges from streaming — it’s an aesthetic that emerges from this dynamic where music can work on its own, as an engaging piece of work, but then also work in a background context, like in a mood, emotion or context playlist, which I’ve been calling 2020s Totalism.
Tom Moore: I fear that you might be overvaluing the importance of the mood playlist. I think that mattered a lot more four years ago. When May Rio, who I'm working with right now and is in the middle of a campaign, puts out a song, it gets on Fresh Finds or Lorem. Lorem has a massive impact. But you're on Lorem for one month and then it's over. Songs with editorial playlist coverage have only caught on roughly 1 in 10 times for DPI.
But if you get onto the algorithmic playlists, these can have lasting positive impacts for an artist’s career. On these playlists, people save at higher rates and they engage (eventually) at higher rates. I've seen artists get on an algorithmic playlist, such as Discover Weekly or Spotify Radio. When artists that I've worked with get on Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Spotify Radio, people click through and listen multiple times. They listen on the artist's profile page, which often means that they're physically typing in the artist's name into the search bar, which is a very high quality level of interest.
And I think that's part of working with the artists that I do: they don't really make “mood music," which is maybe a competitive edge in the algorithmic ecosystem. But the general strategy is get on as many playlists as you can in the front line period, spend all the marketing money you can, get the song everywhere. Never assume that you know the audience before the audience knows you. What happens is you get this spike of low quality interest, and then it goes down, and then sincere fandom emerges from the ashes of the playlist shotgun. That's what happened with both Amiture and Grace Ives—to different scales.
Similarly, that happened to Lucy (Cooper B. Handy) to a large extent. We had a big splash around the Music Industry is Poisonous. Then it was like a year of no one really fucking around with it. And then we put up the EP, Devoted. That kind of triggered interest again, and now Cooper’s gone from being someone with 300 monthly listeners before Poisonous to 30,000 today. Now is that money? Not really. But he now has a fan base that will get notified every time he puts something out. And that's a significant change, really. And those are high quality listeners. Cooper didn't get any mood playlists. That's why I think it took a year instead of 6 months to build that fan base. But those playlists, as much as the industry at large likes to talk about them, they matter only insofar as they matter when you're on them, and then they don’t. It's not like everything I've done is really dependent on those playlists.
Tobias Hess: When I’m saying “mood playlists,” I’m including algorithmic playlists, even though they’re not curatorial because they function on some element of backgroundness. They’re not a curated set of 10 crazy songs that are gonna blow your mind and be totally distracting.
Tom Moore: There is an advantage to blending in now, 100%. I don't think that that makes or breaks an artist. But I do think that if you can blend in, you can maybe make a lot more money.
It wasn’t like Amiture was producing music to match an algorithm, but Amiture was early on the Discovery Mode product that Spotify launched a year and a half ago. That really changed everything. I use it a lot, but not long-term. Every time I've used it the artists have netted more than they would have otherwise. With it, Spotify takes an increased revenue share and the artist gets a reduced one. The amount of exposure given in exchange for that rate always, so far, has outweighed the cost incurred by the less friendly royalty rate—by a significant margin.
“There is an advantage to blending in now, 100%.I don't think that that makes or breaks an artist. But I do think that if you can blend in, you can maybe make a lot more money.”
Tobias Hess: Even with these success stories, part of my worry or critique is that Spotify and streaming is so decontextualized that these discovery platforms do not lend themselves towards fandom.
Tom Moore: Generally they do not. For a label like mine it's worked quite well. Do I think that Spotify has had a chilling effect on musical craft? I think it does on a large scale. I don't think that if you're an artist and you want to make music, you can't because of Spotify. I don't think there's any validity to that argument. Really, I think that what Spotify has done is that it's taken the incentives away from originality and creativity, and put them more towards entertainment.
In the record store days, the objective was to stand out among thousands of titles. In the streaming day, the objective is to blend in. And blending in can mean a lot of different things, you know. It doesn't mean that you're writing in order to blend in, or you're writing in order to erase one's identity. And I know this because I've worked with 6 extremely talented, extremely unusual artists that have seen success, albeit small. There has never been a moment where I thought, “If only May had been less creative, we would have made money.” It was always more like, “this is what we're doing. This is good music. These are talented people who work extremely hard. How do we find their money?”
Maybe the overall climate of music is less healthy today than it was in the ‘90s in the indie sector. Music overall is doing better than it's ever done, but that leaves a lot of very important people out. If you had a thousand fans in the nineties, that was a thousand people spending 10 bucks on your record, and that was $10,000. That's very straightforward. You could make money. Today, that $10,000 is spread out over the course of 40 years, and maybe it's 3 times as much money over those 40 years. But instead of seeing $10,000 in your hand at one point in time shortly after you put out an album, you're seeing $50 a month. That's when the economics don't work. It's like, Yeah, sure, this artist might be making more money in the long run, but you know, having a bird in the hand, beats two in the bush, and that's exactly what's going on in the indie sector. The label can afford to kind of wait it out and build catalog and build repertoire, and eventually increase its monthly revenue to such a point that it can have revenue that's worthwhile. But no small musician can really keep up. And that is a very serious problem.
“In the record store days, the objective was to stand out among thousands of titles. In the streaming day, the objective is to blend in.”
Tobias Hess: Now everything is decontextualized to the extent that catalog [songs that are at least two years old] stream better than new releases, so that's the model for labels. But of course, artists don't exist in catalog, they exist on what they're working on now.
Tom Moore: Yeah, let’s say there is an indie musician that has a small fan base of 10,000 monthly listeners. And they get like some pittance every month. Maybe by the time they retire it's a nice little addition to their retirement plan. But that's not good enough. That's the kind of time scale we're talking about for a small act. Like Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead.” The current structure doesn't give an artist enough money to market a tour and rent a van and drive around and promote their music, which is what the $10,000 in your hand did 20 years ago—you could spend it and grow. And you might not ever make money from that music ever again. And in all chances you didn't. But the fact you had the cash in a relatively short amount of time meant that you could act with it and use it. And artists don't have that ability anymore.
Tobias Hess: Right? So I guess one of the big shifts that happened is that music has shifted from a very concrete cultural product to a really vague commodity of intellectual property.
Tom Moore: Yeah, it's always been in intellectual property, but the interesting thing is that the existing media before streaming hid that. The idea of an album really didn't even exist that much in the sixties. It really came into being in the late sixties, and then it became dogmatic through the seventies with prog rock and jam bands. Those were the bands that really were about the album as an art-object, as opposed to a collection of songs. But even the Beatles’ early albums were just very simple commercial exploitations of intellectual property law. They would release everything as a single. and then they would re-release it all together as an album, and they'd sell everything 2 or 3 times, and that was the model for the beginning of their career. This all only changed with Rubber Soul, well more than halfway through their career.
It's easy to forget that the album didn't exist, but generally all of the effort before the album was to turn this vague intellectual property, this nebulous thing into these iterative products that people could spend money on repeatedly. So in that sense, streaming is the logical conclusion of the project that was started in the 60s. The album was this grand idea in adolescence.
Music has always had to respond to the media in which it's contained. We've just had one media for so long that we began to think that that is how music exists. But it's not. The album, or music-as-object, was a very brief moment in music history.