Before the algorithm, someone had to believe in you

It is not true that talent alone used to be enough.

Even then, you needed a door, someone behind a desk, a producer willing to take a risk, a record company prepared to burn money on an intuition, a photographer, a stylist, a director, a press office and, often, a healthy dose of recklessness.

An artist never really emerged alone.

They were imagined.

Constructed.

Dressed.

Photographed.

Sent into battle with a single, a cover and a music video that could cost as much as a small start-up today, complete with minimalist logo and excessive self-esteem.

Today, by contrast, a talent can emerge in a bedroom.

A laptop.

A microphone.

An audio interface.

A phone.

A song uploaded somewhere while nobody outside knows you exist yet.

It is an enormous revolution.

More access.

Fewer gates.

Fewer men in smoky offices — real or metaphorical — deciding who deserves to be heard.

And yet something has shifted.

Before the algorithm, someone had to believe in you.

Today, you often have to prove to a machine that you are already worth believing in.

When pop cost money

The seventies, eighties and nineties were not a romantic paradise.

Best to say that straight away, before someone brings out nostalgia like the good Sunday tablecloth.

The music industry was tough.

It closed doors.

Imposed images.

Changed bodies, names, accents, desires.

Many voices never got in.

Many identities had to put on a disguise before they could even sing.

But there was something that now seems almost strange: risk.

An album cost money.

A studio cost money.

A promotional campaign cost money.

A music video was an event, not a piece of vertical content forgotten after three scrolls.

When a record company invested in someone, it was taking a gamble. Not always a clean one, not always enlightened, not always fair. But a gamble nevertheless.

Someone would look at an artist and say:

“I don’t know if it will sell. But there’s something there.”

That sentence now seems almost indecent.

Because “there’s something there” does not fit neatly into a report. It is not a metric. It has no conversion rate. It does not present well on a call with twelve people and an excessively tidy Zoom background.

And yet much of pop culture was born right there: in that ambiguous space between intuition, risk and industrial madness.

Artists were constructed

Let us not pretend otherwise.

Pop stars did not fall from the sky ready-made, lit by a spotlight and a good skincare routine.

They were constructed.

Sometimes intelligently.

Sometimes cruelly.

Sometimes with almost theatrical precision.

Some emerged from a powerful personal vision; others were tailored to a market concept. Some took the risks themselves, putting their bodies, image, desire and reputation on the line. Others were turned into products before they had even worked out what their own voice was.

It was not always art.

It was not always freedom.

It was not always soul.

But it was a human process, even when it was manipulative.

There were people behind it. Producers, directors, photographers, managers, stylists, journalists, radio, television, record shops. An enormous, expensive, imperfect and often arrogant machine.

A machine that could destroy you, certainly.

But one that could sometimes also protect you long enough to let you become something.

Today, many artists have to become something before anyone decides to protect them.

The bedroom as a global studio

The digital revolution did something wonderful: it took many keys out of the gatekeepers’ pockets.

Today you can record a song at home.

You can produce a beat on a laptop.

You can publish without asking permission.

You can find an audience without going through a radio station, a magazine, a talent scout with a know-it-all expression and the wrong shirt.

That is real freedom.

It would be foolish to miss a world in which so much talent was excluded simply for lacking the right contact, the right body, the right story, the right luck.

Today there is more access.

And access matters.

But access is not the same as being heard.

Publishing has become easier.

Being found has become harder.

Being remembered, meanwhile, is almost a miracle with an unstable connection.

The new artist does not just have to create. They also have to package themselves.

They have to be musician, producer, filmmaker, social media manager, brand strategist, press office, data analyst, their own psychologist and, on the worst days, community manager of their own nervous breakdown.

Before, you had to convince a record company.

Today, you have to convince attention.

And attention is far more fickle than any producer.

Talent before numbers

The point is not to say that yesterday was better.

Yesterday it was harder to get in.

Today it is harder to stay.

Yesterday someone could block you before the public even knew you existed.

Today you can reach the public, but you have to survive a system that measures you while you are still trying to work out who you are.

The problem is not the algorithm itself.

The algorithm has no bad taste.

It has no good taste either.

Which, in certain circles, already makes it surprisingly competitive.

The problem is when the metric arrives before the human eye.

When the number does not confirm a possibility, but decides it.

When nobody says any more:

“There’s something there.”

Because first we have to see whether that something has enough views, enough saves, enough retention, enough audience in the first three seconds.

Three seconds.

Careers used to be built on a mystery.

Today an artist can be judged before the mystery has even had time to take its coat off.

Who takes the risk today?

It is not true that nobody takes risks today.

People certainly do.

The risk has simply moved.

Before, record companies, producers, investors and industrial structures took substantial risks. The artist risked their body, reputation, public image, visible failure.

Today the risk is more solitary.

It is taken by those who publish without protection.

Who expose themselves before they are ready.

Who are seen by thousands of people before they have any context.

Who go viral for the wrong thing.

Who have to turn vulnerability into a language before someone else turns it into a comment.

Today many artists have more freedom, but less shelter.

They can do everything themselves.

Which is wonderful, until it really means having to do everything themselves.

Pop as a prediction

I do not write as a music critic.

I am not interested in ranking yesterday against today, putting one decade on a pedestal and sending another to stand behind the blackboard.

I write as someone who has seen two eras touch.

I saw pop when it was still television, covers, record shops, anticipation, music videos announced as events. And I see it now becoming a stream, content, fragments, strategy, algorithm, bedroom, self-production.

They are two different worlds.

And yet they speak to each other more than it seems.

The mask remains.

Reinvention remains.

The desire to be watched remains.

The construction of an image remains.

It is just that everything now happens faster, with less apparent friction and perhaps less time to become a myth.

The seventies, eighties and nineties opened doors we now walk through almost without remembering who pushed them first.

Fluid identities.

Constructed characters.

Bodies as messages.

Ambiguity as power.

Fame as performance.

The present often thinks it invented everything because it changed the interface.

But many things were already there. Just with more smoke, more risk, bigger budgets and, sometimes, more soul.

What we may have lost

Perhaps we have not lost music.

Music continues to emerge, often in surprising ways, from people who would never have found space in the old system. That deserves recognition. The past does not deserve sainthood simply because it had better lighting.

Perhaps we have lost a certain human way of waiting for music.

Waiting for a record.

Waiting for a video.

Waiting for a cover.

Waiting for someone to grow before our eyes without being forced to explain themselves every twenty-four hours.

Today everything can arrive immediately.

Too immediately, even.

A promise has to behave like a result.

An intuition has to look like a strategy already.

An artist has to prove they work before anyone even asks what they might become.

And perhaps that is where pop changed its skin: not when it became digital, but when it stopped being a gamble and began behaving like a prediction.

Before, someone took a risk on a promise.

Today a promise often has to perform like a result.

And somewhere in between, that slightly awkward question remains, the one no algorithm yet knows quite how to ask:

is there something there?