Is Mid The Baseline?

When we’re talking about mid, we’re really just saying mediocre. But there is some added context to mid, sure, it covers the ‘not being impressive’, but it tends to have more meat to it. Unexciting, boring, disappointing, and even more so if other people are hyping something. Now, we always need to take personal taste into consideration; it makes a big difference to what we, or you, think is just... meh.

And, as we know, we’re not critics, we don’t have that finely tuned ear - though we are always all working on it.

Is the good stuff hiding? Are we too lazy to find it? Is there just too much slush-pile music that we don’t even care about waiting for the new stuff?

The rise in mediocrity hasn’t been slow. The cynic in us is yelling somewhere right now that we are drowning in competent art. And, we’ve been here before, we’ve been saying it for a while - there is simply too much of it. The only barriers between an idea and a release are a Wi-Fi connection and less than $100. But we don’t have to listen to the cynic. We can maybe pull from a personal reflection. Spending more than 20 minutes looking for something new (and good) to listen to, only to find that we’re going back to our ‘liked’ playlist.

Perhaps there was something good there, there isn’t a lack of music, there is just a surplus of lazy.

It’s not them, it’s you. Or is it? Here is where the ‘you just don’t get it’ can come into play. Our personal taste can significantly influence what we consider to be rubbish. So how do you begin to tell when something isn’t you, it is them? ‘Not my taste’ usually happens when you are listening to something totally outside of your genre(s). If the song’s identity and DNA just aren’t a fit, it's probably outside of your taste profile, and you’re not the best judge of whether it is good or not. It would be like asking a classic jazz enthusiast to judge death-metal-EDM with a rolling sub-bass. They might think it sounds interesting, but they can’t judge if it’s ‘good’ because they don’t know the genre.

So that bit aside, there are so many middle-of-the-road songs released. They aren’t deep into their own ‘genre’; they sit in a safe middle ground. It’s listenable to anyone and everyone. It’s like a person who has no hobbies, interests, isn’t funny, and just agrees with everything that is said. They just exist.

If you can’t find anything you hate or really enjoy in a song, that isn’t a taste thing; taste will give you a love-hate reaction, it’ll be polarizing. A meh response is usually a tell-tale sign for mediocrity. You shall not be moved.

We’re living in a big attention economy, everything is fast, songs are short, releases are high speed, for most artists. Scrolling Instagram or TikTok for a few minutes will give you so many songs, so much to hear. But for the most part, we’re not really listening. And then it’ll happen, in the sea of ‘same’, you’ll hear a vocal or bridge, and you’ll need to know what that song is. The sign of great art is that it grabs you and makes you pause or feel something. It makes you want to go and search the streaming services to find it. It makes you go the extra mile and tap more buttons in a world where you don’t really have to; if nothing moves you, you can move on with a single swipe.

Because how we interact with music has changed, and the rate at which it is available is so much faster, we’re more like users now and less like listeners.

We asked people what their mid tracks were. Here is a short playlist for you:

Believe it or not, we did some slush-pile math, all concept thought-experiment, no tech or rigor.

We’re calling it the Signal-to-Noise Ratio. In 2025, according to Luminate, there were approximately 253 million tracks on streaming services.

Here is some fun stuff for you:

Even if G increases, your A is fixed. This is the bottleneck. As N approaches infinity, the probability of you stumbling on something great reduces to almost zero. Nada.

Indie labels and independent releases account for 96.2% of uploads (Luminate 2025 report). The slush-pile size is increasing to the point that looking for a 10/10 becomes a futile use of time. When variance is high in the total population, but low in your filtered subset, your perception of quality flattens.

20 minutes looking at music doesn’t amount to looking through 253 million songs; it actually is closer to the 0.2% that hits the algorithms. In numbers, that’s about 541,000 tracks, accounting for 49.4% of all global streams. So we’re not developing a clear critical ear; we’re just learning to find the upper-mid.

Algos don’t give you N; you have access to N. And no matter how much N you have, your A is fixed. So even if your G grows proportionally, your window of greatness stays the same, but the room gets more crowded.

When it comes to taste, variance is required; if everything is 5/10, the standard deviation becomes nonexistent.

So, wait… is everything mid? Errrr… it would be difficult to say something different, when a song isn’t bad or good, it really is just somewhere in the middle. So what if taste becomes less about what we like and more about what we don’t? Maybe by employing a high level of song rejection, you're successfully removing the noise from your day and refining it down to songs that are actually good, and not just your own tastes.

When 106,000 tracks pop up daily, your "Yes" is cheap. The algorithm already knows what you'll tolerate. But it doesn't know what you’ll reject. Because most of us don’t bother to block, because well… it was an easy, effortless listen and totally inoffensive… and mid.

Passive listening, flattening the perception of greatness.

The update you have all been waiting for (or not) is our AI-generated and recently released track. Which means we'll share it with you now (you don’t have to play it if you're avoiding AI music).

Introducing our AI-generated track, LaziiBee, with SWAMPS. Here’s a smartlink listing places you can hear it. If you want.

Right now, we have 3 plays on Spotify. And… they were probably us. We have successfully thrown our own hat into the ring, competing with the other 106,000 tracks-per-day, and us with zero musical talent and no record label.

At 3 plays, we aren't just in the Deadzone; we are the statistical definition of it. We are currently part of the global releases that fail to hit double digits.

Some show don’t tell for the average release experience.

Missed the other AI-gen music posts? Check out the first posts here:

The next goal is to hit 1000 streams and see what that looks like. Will there be revenue? Which platform will give the highest plays/pay?

Who knows. What we do know is that thanks to the passive listeners, who make up the largest amount of streaming service users, we stand a chance of reaching millions of ears.

And that is a scary thought.

Until next time,