Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V
Microplagiarism, Charli XCX-ification of pop, and Busy Corner soft launch
A few days ago, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO of Klarna, the “buy now, pay later” company that enabled my irresponsible purchase of a $1500 mattress at the age of twenty three, bragged about firing half of their marketing team and saving $6M by producing brand imagery using AI. The response, even from the tech crowd, was largely negative — from pointing out how wacky Klarna’s AI imagery looks like to how scummy it is to celebrate layoffs, people were upset.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t choke me up a little, but not because I think my marketing job is at risk. Why did a micro loan company need more than $6M a year worth of cute brand visuals to begin with? How much of the day-to-day creative work is just churning out an inhumane amount of brand content at an inhumane pace? And isn’t blatant microplagiarism that everyone is dreading as part of the dystopian future, already happening at an alarming scale?
“If you want to be a social media star, and gain a bunch of followers quickly, you do it by being addicted to social media and regularly repackaging whatever content wanders into your waving filopodia, particularly whatever has viral potential that hasn’t already gone viral. It starts innocently but almost never ends so. There’s no other real path to success in gaining followers or readers other than an incredibly long grind across literal decades and even then you will always have less followers than the people who use this tactic.”
A literal example of this are pop culture news aggregators, like Pop Crave and Discussing Film, that pluck out catchy quotes and striking photos of celebrities from magazines, newspapers, and artists’ pages and distribute them in quick, social-first bites on Twitter and IG. It’s tempting to justify what they do as putting distribution behind the work of artists and journalists, but at the end of the day, they profit off expensive assets they didn’t create, taking away clicks and revenue from the people who did.
Aside from the literal copy-paste, there also these more ambiguous, yet painfully obvious cases of creative thievery that are so large that they make you hesitate calling them out — it’s hard to imagine someone having the guts to commit such robbery right in front of everyone.
Pop music is going through a Charli XCX-fication, with some of the biggest pop starts of the past decade clearing their whole creative identities in favor of wraparound sunglasses, the hot scary face, and electronic sounds that are slightly abrasive in a good way. Katy Perry, the queen of camp and costumes, refreshed her logo to a sporty holographic, and the Cuban Miami princess Camilla Cabello is now an LA rave babe.
Charli didn't invent electronic music of course, but she’s the only one in this group who’s been DJing raves since she was 14. She isn’t the sole reason electronic music made its way into pop, but she did her part by releasing the Vroom Vroom EP all the way back in 2016 and getting a 4.5 from Pitchfork because of how “ahead of her time” she was:
“Where I once thought those asinine themes reduced her to a “vapid cypher”, now their commanding hauteur connected directly to Charli’s vulcanised stage presence. And by 2019, the general collapse of society brought a new appeal to a record that sounds like a pep rally on the edge of a black hole. I was relieved to boot some of my old self-seriousness into that void. And as ever, Charli was ahead of her time, leaving me gratefully eating her dust. Beep beep!”
What was ahead of its time in 2016 is ripe for mainstream approval and explosion in 2024. Charli’s latest album brat got an 8.6 from Pitchfork and 92 on Metacritic, and the girls and the gays all over social media were posting in brat-inspired t-shirts ahead of the release. In a sense, that Vroom Vroom EP for Charli was what sexy holographics and ironic low-effort fonts supposed to be for Camila Cabello and Katy Perry - a rebrand from the family-safe Boom Clap pop darling into a hot pop star. The only difference is that as most young female artists grew out of their Hollywood sweetheart phase and rebelled against the industry, Charli grew more into herself. You can copy the visuals, production, and choreography but you can’t copy someone’s real identity. Unfortunately though, that’s not necessarily for people who see art and creative work as a means to an end.
Creatives and artists love to stand out, but does anyone really want to be the first or even worse, be “ahead of their time”? It’s disorienting to have creative intuition whisper one thing into one ear, while the popular majority is loudly screaming something completely different into the other. And if you have the guts and confidence to persevere through internal doubts and confused reviews from others, when you finally make it and everyone suddenly starts copying you, you enter a weird gray area with no right way to escape. If you call people out for copying you, you are delusional and self-centered, because all new work, including yours, is built off its predecessors. And if you choose to ignore it, you are just sitting there, watching people rip the benefits of all the slow foundational work you’ve done and wondering if you could and should have better protected your art.
In the world where everything is up for grabs, some people are hard at work figuring out how to run the marketing treadmill cheaper and faster while others are in the lab, tinkering on something that scales but doesn’t easily replicate.
These are the kind of people I want to help and be in the lab with through my new project Busy Corner.
The original premise behind this newsletter was to recreate the vibe of having lunch with a friend at a corner table of a place, like Fanelli in Soho — the perfect spot for people watching and chatting about every little detail and overacting trends you pick up on.
Busy Corner is about taking those lunch observations back to the lab and putting them to work. We are starting with a detailed research guide with contact lists, reference banks, and actionable resources about something that’s been on my mind a lot in the past couple of months: should creatives and brands start newsletters? how can well-meaning brands support and work with creatives who write? and how can creatives and writers get compensated in a way that doesn’t cannibalize their work?
More to come! From a thoughtful reference bank designed to get your out of groupthink and creative funk to crowdsourced talent rates and vendor lists. I feel like the casual lunch chatter has been going on for way too long, so I am excited to start sharing more resources, deep research, and work.
If this sounds interesting to you or someone you know, you can use code ILY at checkout for the rest of the month as a thank you for joining early <3
IN THE MARGINS:
A couple more great pieces about fringe music and copying in the creative industry that didn’t fit the main story:
Why AI Art will always kind of suck by :
“You know what I realized about AI images in your marketing? It sends out the message that you've got no budget. It's the digital equivalent of wearing an obviously fake Chanel bag. Your whole brand immediately appears feeble and impoverished,” wrote artist Del Walker on X.”
a deep dive w/ Dj's on the state of creativity, nightlife, social media, + YouTube virality by of :
"The scenesters are hotter and cooler and certainly dance better but they spend no money. The normies are generally more annoying and less respectful of dance culture but are willing to pay what it costs to keep the scene alive."
"Without the normies we have no way of paying the rent, DJs and staff. Without the scenesters the culture devolves into Señor Frog's. We need both for the ecosystem to survive and it's not an easy balance to strike."
Rude crime or act of protest? by :
“Today, copyright is more of an instrument for controlling markets than for protecting good and innovative ideas.”
also re charli- i really hope we don’t get sick of the charli aesthetic, tone and vibe from people like katy watering it down… charli is such a good example of sticking to her own even when it wasn’t popular
this is so interesting! i’m not technically working in marketing but i’m a copywriter, and my work has sooo many discussions about ai and how it can be used in our business (one time i got a copy amend that was ai generated, and it was completely nonsensical!!)