"My job is to be a conduit between the artist and the fan."
If Zane Lowe's life were a classic hip-hop record, this phrase would be his breakbeat. Speaking at SXSW yesterday to a packed audience, the world-renowned DJ and Creative Director of Apple Music's Beats 1 returned frequently to this idea of connecting artists and listeners, as he presented his vision of the music industry as unifying rather than divisive.
"Music tends to fall into camps: punk versus rock, rich versus poor, fans versus artists," he said. "In radio, my role is to keep standing strong with one foot on each side."
Exuding an infectious energy and charisma reserved only for the best DJs and radio hosts, Lowe walked the audience through his multifaceted journey with music—from "pirating the sh*t out of Nirvana," to landing his first jobs at Max TV in Auckland and secondhand record store Music & Video Exchange in London, to watching his weekly stacks of tapes and CDs at BBC Radio 1 slowly dwindle under the weight of an up-and-coming site called Myspace.
"Myspace often gets an also-ran badge in the internet space, alongside the ranks of Ask Jeeves," said Lowe, drawing laughter from the audience. "But Myspace was one of the most exciting centers of the music industry because the fans took control. That was where the conversation was really happening. If you didn’t have radio play as an artist, Myspace was where you could really develop an audience from scratch."
His stance on Napster is more ambivalent, and not just because of its negative financial repercussions. "Sure, Napster meant no more shiny, plastic, expensive albums, no more gatekeepers or politics—but there was also no more love, no more layers of thought," he said. "It was music made modern, but to me, as an avid owner of this"—he pulled out a vinyl record from behind the podium—"it felt like we were going back to the stone age."
On the other hand, Lowe suggested, the more positive legacy of free was that it "encouraged artists to think for themselves." He pointed to six records from the last decade that preached this paradigm by capitalising on the Napster revolution and its aftermath.
First up was Radiohead's 2007 album In Rainbows, which the band released without a record contract under a pay-what-you-want model on their website. From that point on, not only was the value of music itself thrown into question, but "artists began searching for ways to make record distribution itself into an event," said Lowe.
Jay Z would continue paving the path that Radiohead forged with his 2013 album Magna Carta Holy Grail, which was made available for free to Samsung customers through the rapper's Magna Carta app. In general, by providing almost infinitely more choice, technology allowed artists to "experiment more not just with distribution, but also with promotion—how and when to speak," said Lowe.
Another iconic output of this experimentation was Kanye West's Yeezus, which Lowe deemed "the modern punk record of our time." This was less about technology, and more about personality.
"Kanye's genius is in his transparency: his willingness to let us behind the curtain into his complicated world, the way he crafts every rant, every social message, every idea like a new hit," said Lowe. "He's absolutely fearless when it comes to his vision, which leads to his high-intensity relevance."
Despite West's mega-celebrity status, Lowe argued that the rapper's approach to fame could provide a blueprint for emerging artists as well. "If you ask any aspiring pop star on the edge of culture, they'll tell you that creativity is a business model and attention is a currency," he said. "Tomorrow’s artists know that there’s so much more to music than just music. Artists can no longer thrive on just one hit record; the emphasis is on great ideas that build alongside great music."
The importance of ideas in 2016 pinnacled with Beyoncé's album-cum-short film Lemonade, which "taught musicians that they could now mold themselves into TV, film and fashion," said Lowe. He added that multimedia, interdisciplinary projects at large offer fans even more layered, nuanced contexts that "could not be told through playlists alone."
Meanwhile, Migos' viral, meme-friendly single "Bad and Boujee" presented both a lesson and a warning about today's fragmented music audiences. While the record received hundreds of millions of streams and views online within weeks, it peaked only at around #40 on the U.S. radio charts.
"Are these audiences separate? I think so," said Lowe. "Terrestrial radio had been driving pop music for the last 50 years, but I'm not sure that’s still the case."
He fittingly closed his SXSW keynote with a listen to Frank Ocean's new single "Chanel," which premiered on Ocean's Beats 1 radio show blonded RADIO earlier this week. Ocean's recent clash with Def Jam Recordings over the independent release of his album Blonde went down in history as an iconic victory for indie artists. In Lowe's eyes, "Chanel" continues to carry the torch, pointing to the tectonic digital shifts happening under the music industry's feet at the hands of streaming services and any artists willing to venture over the edge.
"Music is restless, always searching," said Lowe. "If it's great, then move."
