SoundCloud, “digicore” and the observer effect in emerging music scenes

Last time we checked in with the “hyperpop” music community at Water & Music, some of the scene’s foremost artists were frustrated with SoundCloud.

Since the mid-2010s, underground artists in hyperpop and elsewhere had noticed SoundCloud shifting its priorities from serving niche music communities to trying to compete with major DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music, leaving behind arguably its most valuable customers in the process. With hyperpop in particular, copyright trolls were hitting songs by some of the scene’s most recognizable names — like glaive, ericdoa and osquinn — with automated DMCA takedown notices all throughout 2020, which added to the general annoyance with the quality of SoundCloud’s customer service.

After a particularly intense week of takedowns in October 2020, the standoff reached its breaking point. That month, several hyperpop artists announced they were pivoting to a new platform called Matter, where they were promised an artist-first experience by co-founder Paul Meed. This experience included a direct subscription model known as “artist clubs,” a virtual marketplace for audio and visual assets and, at least for now, real people monitoring copyright strikes.

At the time, I remember feeling inspired by it all, and being impressed by the diversity of Matter’s user interface. Most of all, I felt that even if this new service didn’t work out, its early buzz could still wake up SoundCloud and major DSPs to the importance of catering to emerging music communities in their products, experiences and curation strategies, instead of merely serving the lowest common denominator in pursuit of dollars and cents.

Fast-forward to 2021, and that’s exactly what has happened: Despite the initial hype around Matter, the hyperpop scene is largely back on SoundCloud — for now.

This reverse pendulum swing happened in part because it’s hard to convert an entire audience to a new platform, no matter what industry you’re in. But it’s also because SoundCloud saw what was happening with the mass hyperpop exodus away from their site — and actually enlisted one of Matter’s key ambassadors, Billy Bugara, to try to bring those artists back.

Bugara is one of hyperpop’s most important voices: He’s an editor at the scene’s online hub Underground Vampire Club, and has written about hyperpop artists at sites like Lyrical Lemonade and Pigeons & Planes. This is entrenched, community-oriented journalism — the artists trust him, and he’s friends with a lot of them. Coincidentally, he was also one of the most vocal critics of SoundCloud’s DMCA takedown procedure, right around when hyperpop artists began shifting their focus towards Matter.

But during this time, Matter’s co-founder Meed also told SoundCloud representatives about Bugara. “He told SoundCloud, ‘If you want to invest in the scene, you should bring Bill on,’” Bugara tells me. “And then [SoundCloud] just reached out to me. They said … ‘We know that you’re connected with all these artists. We want you to be on the team so that we make the right decisions and shift toward an artist-first approach.’”

On January 27, 2021, with Bugara’s curatorial help, SoundCloud launched a new official playlist brand called “Pop’s Next Evolution: Digicore,” highlighting several emerging artists in and around hyperpop. The playlist’s accompanying video, which features interviews with three of the scene’s rising artists (midwxst, d0llywood1 and angelus), has racked up over 400,000 views within a month, already making it one of the most-viewed videos on SoundCloud’s YouTube channel. It’s evident that SoundCloud is funneling some serious marketing money into the video as well, with paid ads on social media and even on subscription video streaming platforms like Hulu.

“Digicore” comes as part of a new editorial initiative at SoundCloud called Scenes, which, in the company’s words, is dedicated to uncovering “the stories behind the communities that are setting the pace of music culture tomorrow.” Importantly, this isn’t the first time SoundCloud has used curation to attempt to improve its relationship with underground music communities. In July 2017 — right around when the company laid off 40% of their staff due to financial struggles — they launched a docuseries called SoundCloud Next Wave, which was co-curated with The FADER and featured regional scenes like UK afrobeats and artist collectives like Berlin’s Room 4 Resistance.

One can’t help but feel that Scenes is more of a reactive curation decision, though. After all, its inaugural episode is aimed at the very community that threatened to boycott the platform in 2020. And it starts with a genre reclamation of sorts with “digicore,” a term that carries historical weight within the scene itself.

What is “digicore,” anyway?

Let’s back up a bit and clarify what digicore even is, and why it strategically makes sense for SoundCloud to plant its own stake in this scene.

If Bugara had his way, he wouldn’t give the scene known as “digicore” or “hyperpop” any official name at all. In fact, that’s been his approach in covering this music editorially — referring to it in his writing simply as “the scene” and “the community” first and foremost, rather than by any specific genre. Sonically, the artists who self-identify as “digicore” are all over the place; what ties them together is less a set of musical parameters than a sort of “feel” or ethos brought on by a scrum of underground collectives and collaborations across SoundCloud, Twitter, Discord and other social platforms.

Bugara says that when SoundCloud brought him on as a freelancer for the launch of the Digicore playlist and video, they asked him to give the music a name because “it’s just a necessity.” That said, the term “digicore” didn’t come out of the blue. Unlike “hyperpop” — which many agree was coined by Spotify via their own top-down playlist — digicore as a term originated directly in underground music communities themselves, as part of a “holy trinity” of tags (with glitchcore and robloxcore) that have emerged over the past few years. Of these “cores,” digicore is the oldest in use; it was coined back in late 2019 by lonelee, founder of the underground label teardrop digital, which was a lodestar of the community at the time.

lonelee initially came up with the name as a more reactive measure; they noticed that artists in the scene who were ironically using the tag “draincore” were being written off as imitators of the Swedish collective Drain Gang, and were seeking a different genre descriptor to avoid confusion. After lonelee tweeted out “digicore” for the first time in 2019 with a description (the tweet has since been deleted), the artist osquinn started using that tag for all of her music on SoundCloud, and the term grew in popularity from there.

“The thing about digicore as a name that appealed [to me] is that it was an umbrella term that could potentially apply to almost anything. It didn’t have a definite meaning,” lonelee tells me via DM. “In some ways, I intended it to be a genre for post-genre or genre-mashing music that was difficult to categorize, but I also never imagined that it would be taken seriously more than a year later. It was almost a joke at the time.”

SoundCloud’s official Digicore video echoes the nebulousness of the term. As the artist angelus shares in the video: “Our genre is known for being experimental. We don’t have any boundaries in what type of music we make.”

In fact, it might make more sense to think of SoundCloud’s Digicore playlist as one would conceive of, say, a Michigan rap playlist. The boundaries are less musical than they are regional — in this case, a “region” of the internet.

Earlier this month, Jameson Orvis created a remarkable visual map of the SoundCloud underground that illustrates this concept well, scraping the activity of nearly 5,000 artists across likes, comments, follows and reposts on the platform. The “seed” accounts from which Orvis launched his analysis represented different sectors of the SoundCloud underground, namely kuru, Axxturel and Clear. Distinct pockets of online communities then emerged, from the dark trap music collective Jewelxxet and scenes like slayworld/Pluggnb to the “overlapping mishmash of collectives” that define digicore, in Orvis’ words (screenshot with annotations below).

The main takeaway from this diagram is that social behavior is the primary driving factor behind the formation of SoundCloud’s music communities, with any sonic differences among scenes only coming afterwards as a side effect. “It is a mistake to pigeonhole any artist, especially on SoundCloud, into any particular scene or subgenre,” Orvis wrote for Passion of the Weiss in January 2021. “SoundCloud is an infinite interconnected web of overlapping subgenres and scenes. Musical ideas diffuse easily between communities.”

The observer effect and genre as power

If Orvis is correct — if it is a mistake to label an artist as part of just one particular scene or subgenre on SoundCloud — then why is SoundCloud making this exact mistake with digicore?

In physics, biology and many other academic fields, there’s a concept known as the observer effect, whereby the very act of observing a system changes the nature of that system. This effect was behind the rapid rise and fall of several early internet-native music genres like vaporwave, in which nearly all the artists initially associated with the genre abandoned the term once it got mainstream attention in 2012.

The observer effect also illustrates the impact that major streaming services like SoundCloud and Spotify have on the up-and-coming communities on their respective platforms. As mainstream services “observe” and then amplify emerging music scenes, they are fundamentally changing the nature of those scenes and how artists associate with them, for better or for worse.

SoundCloud’s investment in digicore is a prime example of the observer effect in practice. Based on the above discussion, it seems like “digicore” should be complementary, not competitive, to adjacent terms like hyperpop, glitchcore and robloxcore, with artists traveling fluidly among these different tags depending on their creative whims at any given time.

But SoundCloud begs to differ. If you look at the descriptions in both their Digicore playlist and the accompanying YouTube video, they explicitly declare that they’re “not hyperpop and not glitchcore,” drawing a clear line in the sand. This is likely in part an underhanded jab at how Spotify and even Amazon Music both have their own hyperpop playlists now — illustrating just how corporatized, top-down and vague the term “hyperpop” has become, to the point of being a meme unto itself. (Case in point: the artist glaive recently added the rapper NAV to his own iteration of a hyperpop playlist. When a user on Twitter asked him why, he replied, “its a good song i like nav.”)

Against this backdrop, “digicore” might sound like an edgier respite for the underground, a more open sandbox for creative experimentation without the need for validation from mainstream gatekeepers. Indeed, Bugara argues that the more “detached” sound of SoundCloud’s digicore playlist serves as a site for an “anything-goes” mentality. “If I’m a young artist and I’m listening to that playlist with no cohesive theme, just that sense of community about it, why wouldn’t I try my hand, why wouldn’t I upload my own type of music, my own type of sound?” he suggests.

But the way that SoundCloud seems to be wielding “digicore” in a more reactive manner — and essentially willed the term into canonical use after several months of being under the radar, without any mention of the original artist who coined the term, lonelee — also speaks to their power as a streaming platform. It means that streaming services influence genre taxonomy more than arguably any individual artist or label right now. It also means that, as an artist, if you want to make “successful” digicore (whatever that means), you can’t just think about who is part of that nebulous community; you need to think about what SoundCloud is seeking out for its own digicore playlist.

As the artist jedwill points out in his video “Hyperpop Doesn’t Exist,” just because a playlist is “genreless” doesn’t mean it removes any sense of anxiety for artists. “I can make anything!” is the intended reaction, sure. But these playlists also have real commercial stakes attached to them: The Spotify hyperpop playlist has over 160,000 followers, while the SoundCloud digicore playlist has nearly 5,000 likes so far and sits front-and-center on the SoundCloud homepage. I can imagine an artist from the scene looking at the rise of these playlists and asking themselves, “Wait, what do I make?”

Yes, the work behind something like Scenes can be valuable. SoundCloud is spotlighting organic activity happening at the intersection of genre and community and outfitting it with a relevant tag — something Spotify arguably failed to do with its top-down designation of “hyperpop.” It’s good that, as part of the launch, SoundCloud enlisted a real community advocate like Bugara who cares about getting the “digicore” story right. The platform was always an archive by nature, and now it has a media outlet to contextualize that archive for an outside audience.

But in amplifying digicore, SoundCloud changes the scene’s very meaning in a way that makes the underlying messaging mixed at best. In response to a vague and nebulous term like “hyperpop” gaining ground among its competitors, SoundCloud has tried to establish its own solid territory with the term “digicore,” which carries more meaning and history but still feels … vague and nebulous.

Musicians are always influenced by genre labels, whether they choose to operate intentionally within those parameters or to go against the grain. But there are serious implications in DSPs wielding this labeling power. DSP playlists are meant to serve an audience; consequently, the lines they draw around genre either loosen to the point of no return (Spotify’s hyperpop playlist), or tighten until they sound like mush. “Digicore” right now feels like a nice catch-all for a young scene — but as it enters the mainstream, I could see SoundCloud shaping the term into something much narrower for a specific sound. And just like what happened with vaporwave, “digicore” may lose its clout in the underground as a genre label the more cemented it becomes in mainstream music curation, as genre-bending artists try to avoid being tied down to any one specific category.

Moreover, even if surface-level playlists and videos may serve artists and fans in a meaningful way, they do not get at the heart of the fundamental issue that has plagued SoundCloud for so long. As a streaming service, you don’t serve emerging communities merely by ossifying them in your promotional materials. You serve them by listening, being transparent and building the best platform for them to connect, experiment creatively and grow their fan bases on their own terms.

There are certain signals that point to SoundCloud becoming a genuinely “artist-first” platform in this way, such as their rumored feature for direct artist payments later this year. In this context, initiatives like SoundCloud’s Scenes can be a nice gloss, but they’re far from the cure that artists really need in the long term.