Ghastly is an American DJ based in Los Angeles. He is a resident DJ for the legendary Exchange LA venue and has produced music under OWSLA, Buygore, and Dim Mak. The dude has even collaborated with Lil Jon. Now he has some things to say about the current state of the music industry.
In the last several years there has been a shift in the way music gets out to the world. Marketers will release single songs on key dates over phone applications. Instead of the full album experience that we once had. Even more worrisome is the explosion of Tik-Tok viral songs. They take music and simplify it to its most basic hook and disseminate it with little to no regard to the artist who created it. To put it in Ghastly’s words:
“It feels as though artistry has been shifted from genuine expression and creating sounds that express what words cannot to hacking the algorithm.”
Music: but make it Tik-Toky
His words shed light on what a lot of us have been feeling around music. Which is a movement of the focus of music from a mysterious, beautiful thing that elicits feeling to ‘numbers and engagement’. Ghastly revealed in his facebook heart-to-heart that a producer recently asked him if he could make a song ‘more tik-toky’.
Ghastly discusses the real-world vs meta-world conundrum for creatives. Where if one chooses to participate less in social media “the automatic assumption is that you are depressed or ‘going through it’. Which the contrary is true because the less I focus on my phone the more creative and alive I feel.“
He touches on grind culture as well, mentioning the:
“anxiety of having daunting todo lists, hundreds of unread emails, deadlines, due dates, logistical issues, video/photo shoots, daily meetings, and an ever increasingly cutthroat flash in the pan media marketing bonanza can absolutely drain an artist to their lowest levels.”
And if you’ve made it this far into the article, Congratulations! You are superior to the modern attention span, which Ghastly claims is ‘less than a goldfish’. If you have the mental fortitude to read a complete article or have the patience to sit through a whole song, you might be the one who just might save this industry from itself.