In the early 2010s, "production value" was the primary gatekeeper of the music industry. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you needed a six-figure studio, a 4K music video, and a team of retouchers to sand down the edges of your personality. To be professional was to be perfect.
By 2026, that paradigm has flipped entirely. We're witnessing a "human premium" take hold. As our feeds become saturated with hyper-polished, AI-generated slop, our internal marketing alarms have grown highly sensitive to anything that looks too clean. The result is a massive economic migration toward the unpolished, the grainy, the real.
