Jack Conte's Content

When he first announced Patreon, co-founder and CEO Jack Conte pitched it as a way to increase artists’ creative freedom. If musicians were funded by their audiences, the reasoning went, they would no longer be under the thumb of publishers, record label executives, and other so-called “gatekeepers.”

One problem—so obvious that it nearly forgoes saying—is that audiences can be as fickle and tyrannical as gatekeepers, and in deciding to unsubscribe or simply not engage with an artist, they can exert just as much control over that artist’s creative output as a meddling record producer. In fact, I imagine that if one has access to a real-time dashboard of statistics (“engagement metrics,” as YouTube charmingly calls them), whereby one may measure precisely which aspects of one’s output are most “engaging” and therefore worth replicating and preserving, one is under an even tighter regime of artistic surveillance and discipline, all the more insidious because it is not imposed by a person, who can be wheedled or convinced or fought with or fooled, but an impersonal mass—or, worse, an algorithm that responds, with robotic precision, to the collective id of that impersonal mass. (Of course, this regime is replicated in basically all arenas of online content-creation, especially fields like opinion journalism.)

The first few years of college, I loved Jack Conte’s music—I listened to his album VS4 over and over. The album is a labor of love and a demonstration of sheer DIY determination. Conte wrote everything, played most of the instruments, recorded it in his house, and mixed it using relatively inexpensive tools. And it is often beautiful, from the delicate dissonance of the opening track “Make the Grade” and the bobbing odd-time rhythm of “Time of Your Life” to the haunting Chopinesque harmonies of “Away.” Even the parts of the album that I dislike—e.g. Conte’s penchant for polka-like accordion and creepy carnival vibes on tracks like “The Time Has Come”—come from Conte’s own particular taste. I might not like it, but he likes it, and he made what he likes, and he made it exactly the way he wanted to, the algorithm be damned. (And the algorithm damned Conte in return—in terms of metrics like YouTube views, the album was a disappointment.)

I wasn’t just a fan of his music—Conte inspired me. His early videos—clearly made in a bedroom, with mattresses propped up against the wall as sound treatment—inspired me to make my own. The songs I wrote back then were deeply embarrassing, clumsy, silly, and formulaic, but I don’t regret writing them. Conte inspired me to just start—to make art without worrying whether I was ready or whether I was good. I posted my music on YouTube (it’s gone now), in videos just like Conte’s; I treated my college bedroom with blankets to deaden the sound and sung my heart out into a $100 Blue Snowball microphone. The music never caught on; I never made money on it; it never won a contest or got many YouTube views. It was bad art that accomplished nothing. But it was not a waste of time. Art—even and especially bad art—is just what humans make, and it’s good for the soul.

But many artists would like to make a living from their art—would like to turn it into money. So, a few years after VS4, Conte released the video for “Pedals,” which also served as his announcement for his new venture, Patreon. In the video, which is set in some sort of spaceship cockpit, a rather disturbing robot head sings lyrics (a list of technological products) over a thunderous electronic beat. Then Conte rises out of the floor, steam billowing around him, and plays his guitar, gasping and grimacing, alone, surrounded by blinking lights and switches. It seems significant that, when Conte announced Patreon, he portrayed himself as playing accompaniment to a computer, and not the other way around.

And Conte’s next project, although it uses an aesthetic of improvisation and authenticity, is a way of playing accompaniment to a computer, too. After the successful launch of Patreon, Conte began Scary Pockets, a loose collective of studio musicians and singers who put out one video per week. Scary Pockets is stunningly productive—since 2017, they have posted nearly 400 videos to their channel (and 29 albums to Spotify). The musicians that play in these videos are excellent. (I will never be as good at anything as Tal Wilkenfeld is at playing the bass guitar.) They all seem to be wonderful people who are having a good time. But they’re putting all of their extraordinary talent and skill and craftsmanship into the service of making content—a constant IV-drip of of numb and numbing stuff, optimized for pickup by an algorithm—rather than anything I can honestly recognize as art.

The figure of Conte that so captured my imagination—the tinkerer who carefully and painstakingly put together these neat little videos—has now transformed fully into a content mill, à la Postmodern Jukebox. In every Scary Pockets video, the shtick is identical: a song that was once not “funky” is made “funky.” It is a musical equivalent of “Ordinary Sausage,” the semiweekly YouTube show where a man with a distinctive tenor films himself transforming a food product (a Big Mac, Funyuns, an entire fish) into a sausage. In both cases, something recognizable (a nationally-available fast-food item, a hit song from the ‘90s) is ground up and piped into a new container. Each channel is a consistent source of content; each channel is also deeply predictable, formulaic, and uninteresting.

In terms of YouTube views, Patron subscribers, and other monetizable metrics, Scary Pockets is quite successful. But it’s muzak. Is this what “content creators” are now free to do, loosed from the tyrannical hold of record labels? Is this the new vision of artistic independence—one video, essentially the same video, once per week, forever? Hours of work per day producing content, while in the off hours and the evenings the furtive production of the real art takes place? In the age of content-consumption and endless scrolling, how can a musician develop an audience without producing this kind of stuff, given that both touring and streaming don’t pay? With the workload and financial resources required to put out that much content, how can artists in this content economy have the independence, solitude, and time to produce something that, even if it isn’t “good art,” whatever that means, at least expresses or reveals something about life—that is an expression of some kind of taste or mood or thought? (Am I not setting the bar pretty low, here?) If every artist is a small business owner, they must learn to be a rational actor in the marketplace of the Internet—but rational action has never been the source of art that feels interesting and alive. There is no place for the wild strangeness of the human in this relentlessly optimized landscape.

The shortcomings of the creative ecosystem that Jack Conte has built is reflected in his music—which transformed from the expression of a creative vision into a replicable brand pumping out reliable content. And, look—as long as Conte is having fun making music with his friends, there is nothing really wrong with Scary Pockets itself. (I feel already like what Kurt Vonnegut called, in a different context, a man putting on a full suit of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae.) The world is full of fast-casual restaurants that need background music, and someone’s got to do it. The problem is the economic system that convinced a talented and determined musician who really seemed to have something to say that Scary Pockets was more worth doing than hunkering down in a studio, working hard and irrationally and inefficiently on something that felt bigger, more expressive.

I’m currently participating in this very content system by writing on Substack, hypocrite that I am. I imagine that essays are different—primarily because I want to produce a new idea per essay rather than an episodic restatement of the same idea over and over, and because I don’t plan to make a living from writing essays. (This may well be a rationalization.) And of course there are many wonderful forms of, ugh, content—journalism, podcasts, televised football games, improv comedy, and so on—that are quickly, cheaply, and episodically produced. Surely there is a place for this kind of content. I listen to and read plenty of it myself. The problem is that monthly subscription services like Patreon incentivize only, or at least primarily, the production of short-lived, tossed-off stuff, which becomes an obligation and, I imagine, a burden for artists. For what patron is going to pay an artist $5 a month for two years while they finish their novel or movie or album, revealing nothing until the project is complete?

As institutions that used to give creative people the time, resources and space to produce a labor of love—record labels, publishers, newspapers, universities—shrink and struggle, the only way to live a creative life (without being independently wealthy or very famous) will probably be to work a day job. If the online content industry stays the way it is today, the question for artists will be whether that day job is the factory-like production of algorithmically-optimized “content.” But it’s not at all clear to me that a day job as a “content creator” is any more liberated than work as a pizza cook or a project manager.

I think Conte recognizes these problems and sees them as problems. Patreon is now in the process of a major rebrand. In the frenetic video announcing this change, Conte criticizes what he calls “algorithmic curation,” even admitting: “[Creators] end up making content instead of making art…I want creators to feel like we can make from our hearts, instead of algorithms…I feel myself bending my work to fit the web, and honestly, I’m embarrassed about that.” These points are well taken. But I am not convinced that the algorithm is the only problem; as long as people who publish stuff online are subject to the whim of an audience, they will be subject to that audience. Perhaps art has always been this way—there are plenty of examples of artists changing their compositions for the sake of their patrons. And perhaps Conte will find a way to turn around his own artistic output: Scary Pockets just announced that they will stop producing cover songs, instead focusing on original music. I can only assume that this decision was made knowing that it will shrink the audience for the band but that it will be, ultimately, more satisfying and free and worthwhile for the people involved. I hope that—as writers and artists become increasingly unsatisfied with the hamster-wheel of content creation—more people find a way to make this choice.