Pseudonymous Creativity

In the early days of Facebook, there was a group where people created fake album covers based on fake artists, wherein you would create a title and all the song titles. I thought this was an interesting idea from a creativity standpoint, as very often songs start with titles. In the Tin Pan Alley days, this was one of the primary creativity tools, and typically the titles were the chorus lyric. So it's not a stretch that there are so many fake artists, or simply artists writing under a pseudonym.

Back in 2017, Spotify started to surreptitiously promote and feature these artists. Even then, it has precedence, both in the music world and it the art world where the idea of the anonymous artist began to take off. That precedence goes back hundreds of years when the typical practice was that artists signed their name in the name of the studio or not at all. It was "de-signed", and in the world of design and design thinking, the ranking of one individual is not a part of the process. That studio in this case is Epidemic Studios which has obviously gathered secondary meanings.

But in some cases, the products are simply knockoffs or re-brandings of pre-existing works. This is like buying the rights to paintings, and then signing them with your name. It creates an industry whereby the artists are artisans making "de-signed" works--so a form of design in some respects. It's like any other generic product that floods the market, like photography had become once cameras were in smartphones and could be posted on social media.

It's also interesting that it is a form of music democratization, or DIY, and is essentially a form of Muzak, a variation on "Kodak" based on the idea of democratized photography. This is a good example where democratic ideas of DIY put democracy at risk because no one questions them, or sets limits on them. It's anathema to the whole idea of freedom to do anything. But pseudonymity is a way to play in that space. In terms of creativity, it is creating something in the voice or persona of another, but if that work is sold as de-signed work, then there's another persona that is associated with the work, and on and on.

Now with AI or simply generative music which is de-signed from the get-go, the creative process involves characterizations or anthropomorphization, which is interesting in itself from a creative standpoint. Again, it's still a variation on fashion knockoffs, but almost a completely empty activity from a purely creative standpoint. After you've spent a few minutes generating (not creating) content, and thought of an artist name, what else is there to do except to make more fakery? One could spend all their time in fake mode as a way of working, but the imagination naturally runs on creating alternate worlds.