Author: Bas Grasmayer

Hi, welcome to the internet. 🐬

While you were on stage, millions of people were online playing video games or stuck in small towns without a scene for the music they love. Communities and online-only subcultures have emerged, and with that a template for how things work.

Here is some practical advice to get you started as you figure out How To Make Money Online™ over the next weeks:

1. Don’t replicate what you do offline. It does not work. You can’t do it. DJing for a sweaty club is different from playing music for people spread out over the world in their rooms. The goal is not to replicate the activity, but to recreate the emotions people feel when they go out.
2. Don’t just stream your stuff: interact. Last weekend hundreds, if not thousands, of musicians / DJs went online to stream a set to their fans. Over the next weekends, that number will rise. What are you doing to make your stream interesting when Netflix and YouTube are in the next tab, when there is a PlayStation in the same room, when Instagram is burning in people’s pockets screaming for their attention? If you’re doing something that you could do offline also, you’re doing it wrong. Interact with your audience.
3. You know all those people you’re in touch with that help you get gigs? Bookers, promoters, other bands and DJs, people in cities around the country or the world? You need to build an online version of that, pronto. After one or two livestreamed sets, your existing fans will get bored – you need to keep reaching new audiences. The internet is composed of loosely connected communities: PARTICIPATE. Watch other people’s streams, interact, comment on Soundcloud tracks, Instagram stories, share other people’s work.
4. When you connect to online subcultures, figure out how they work, what their rules and norms are. They have their own memes, sentiments, in-crowd jokes, personalities, and styles. Be aware and respectful. Hang back if you have to.
5. Repeat after Wacka Flock Flame on It G Ma: “It’s about us, never ’bout I”. Start supporting other people. Elevate them. People are into you because of your creative work: curate for your fans and help them understand what inspires that work. Always be giving more than you’re taking.
6. I understand people struggle with the new context in which they’re now having to place their art. See it like this: there are millions of people who spend many hours each week in these virtual contexts, be they Minecraft, Fortnite, a Facebook group, a Discord community, or a Twitch stream. You are bringing your art to people into a dimension where a significant portion of their life already takes place. That’s meaningful. Identify contexts and communities that excite you personally and find a way to express yourself in them.
7. We are in this for the long haul. If you are thinking “well, I’ll just ride this out and wait for things to get back to normal”, I have some bad news. It’s going to take months to get over the first peak of the coronavirus and its fallout. For things to come close to ‘normal’, it may take a year. But this is also a 9/11 moment: this is happening right now and it’s just the beginning, but the world will not be the same afterwards (there are a lot of reasons for it, but the simplest one is that many venues will be out of business and we’re entering a recession). Do not hold out, start investing your time into resilience, because whatever there was before this is not guaranteed to ever come back.
8. Start finding ways to generate Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). Streaming is part of that, but I have not met many (any? lol 😢) artists who can actually make a living from their streaming income. Start considering what you can create for your community of fans on a regular basis. Whether that’s doing playlists through currents.fm (like bod [包家巷]’s diary), connecting your community on Discord through Patreon memberships, exclusive livestreams with lessons on whatever you’re good at, start looking into these things now. Asking people for donations may work short term, but you will want to come up with a new strategy soon: start planning for monthly recurring revenue.
9. Many places in the world are still to hit and cross their virus peaks – in the weeks and months after that, life will get some semblance of normalcy to it again. You can start selling your time in those days. Sell vouchers for performances, try to get bookings without a fixed date and ask for a 50% deposit. Not everyone will be up for it (especially venues that will struggle to pay rent next month), but it may work for some. Just remember: if you sell future time, you get the money now, but you’ll still have to commit your time then. Make sure you’ll be able to make enough money in those months. We all want to think about when we can go outside again: help people paint pictures of that dream by selling them something in that future.
10. Shameless self-promotion: I’ve been writing about these topics for years, so if you want to do some further reading, here are two pieces that come to mind: 1) what music can learn from gaming for a look into the business and social dynamics, and 2) hidden in plain sight: a global underground dance music scene with millions of fans.

The global pandemic is about to hit the music business hard. With a lack of live shows, what can artists and their teams do to maintain a living?

Before I dive into the nitty-gritty of what the coronavirus means for music, I want to add some explanations of what it means for all of us. A good place to start is Liz Specht’s thread on the exponential nature of the outbreak and its effect on our healthcare systems.

She starts off with an assumption of cases doubling every 6 days. Starting from a conservative estimate of 2,000 cases in the US today, that means 1 million by the end of April, 2 million around May 5, 4 million by May 11, etc. If ~10% of these cases need hospitalization, then all open hospital beds in the US will be filled by May 8. If only 5% of these cases need it, then that date changes to May 14.

There are lessons we’ve learned from past outbreaks, like the Spanish flu.

There is a reason for canceling public gatherings. In a pandemic, don't be Philadelphia (held a parade in 1918 when cases started to come up, downplayed cases), be St. Louis (canceled gatherings). More here: https://t.co/KE7RYbxDGM @mlipsitch pic.twitter.com/wyrHx0nOLA

— Florian Krammer (@florian_krammer) March 6, 2020

With containment and cancelations of gatherings, we can make the crisis more manageable for the healthcare system. The goal would be to keep the number of infections, somehow, below the healthcare system’s maximum capacity, as this image by Thomas Splettstösser indicates:

SXSW is just the beginning

What I am trying to highlight is that it’s just a matter of time until governments decide to prohibit more forms of public gatherings (Italy’s government is preparing a decree to ban public events with high concentration of people across the entire country, France has banned gatherings of more than 1,000, etc.).

With the most effective strategy to reduce the spread being isolation, including self-isolation, how many people will still be able to even come out to gigs once July hits (est. 20-70% of global population infected)? So we have to consider the possibility of full cancelations of tours, shows, etc.

Luckily the infrastructure for a more resilient music business is here. It has been here for many years, but it’s underutilized.

Resilience is in the networks

Years ago, as I was completing my Bachelor’s degree in Communication, I tried to figure out what had gone so wrong for music and what strategies artists & teams could employ to maintain revenue. I studied piracy, but it seemed like a pointless ‘problem’ to focus on, because no individual artist can ‘solve’ that in a way that would meaningfully bring them significant revenues. So I dug deeper.

The problem definition focused around the networked nature of our current media landscape. It has been the enabler of piracy, but also more broadly speaking of networked communication. It has enabled a shift from channels to less linear models of communication through communities that intersect and share nodes.

In the solution section of my thesis, I took those principles and explored how they can be utilized by artists in order to make a new type of living that depends less on the record sale. In short: make yourself part of your fan base, understand who these people are, and develop exciting things that people want (or as I framed it: get people to thank you for the opportunity to spend their money on something you’re selling).

In those late-MySpace days and early days of Facebook and Spotify, I imagined a new music business emerging. Just… it didn’t really come about. At least not in the way and scale I imagined.

In part, crowdfunding is hard and so is developing products or services besides your music (whether merch or something less common). It’s a different type of operation. So it’s been optional. Let alone membership-type crowdfunding models of which Patreon is a good example. In an interview with Cherie Hu last year, Patreon’s SVP of Product Wyatt Jenkins had this to say about musicians and why music isn’t a top-2 category on the platform yet:

“All of their other revenue streams look, sound and act really differently from a membership. They’re coming from gigs, they’re coming from sales of music, touring — you know, all these other lines of revenue for musicians are these spiky, hustle-based lines of business”

Now, I believe we’ve reached a point where for many people it’s not optional. How do we cover lost live revenue?

What life looks like, locked inside our homes

So here’s the good news paragraph. I know for anyone except perhaps the most introverted the above heading doesn’t sound like good news, but hear me out.

For the creative sectors, right now, there is a big emerging opportunity in people sitting at home, being bored out of their minds. Expect usage of streaming media to go up in the next months. It’s hard to say whether that will translate into more subscriptions due to economic anxiety, though perhaps initially we’ll see a spike there too (thanks for raising the topic, LIAS). Previous research by MIDiA warned of streaming subscriptions’ vulnerability in a recession due to it being so easy to cancel.

In China, this has meant that its biggest promoter, Modern Sky, has been streaming live performances from past Strawberry Music Festival editions.

Here’s some expectations for coming months:

• Channels with visible music experiences on Twitch and YouTube, e.g. Boiler Room and COLORS, are going to see a jump in viewers;
• We’ll see musicians recording more video content, and a mix of Patreon-style membership models and livestreams (you can use membership models to paywall communities to livestream to, see: Ben Folds, Pentatonix);
• I imagine some festivals will try to generate digital revenue in some similar form;
• We might see younger startups manage to make significant strides forward, such as Patreon-style playlist service Currents.fm, and who knows, maybe social music experiences such as Endlesss when they launch.

It’s going to be a rough year nevertheless. Support each other.

Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face.

Stay calm. Stay informed.

Last week I announced the launch of Hard Dance Berlin. Since then, I have been spending a few minutes each day building up the community around it by leveraging Instagram stories (@harddanceberlin).

I hope by highlighting some of the activities, you’ll find some inspiration for how to grow your own projects.

Goal & tools

The Instagram account is very much an extension of the project’s main site. The goal being to highlight performers and events in Berlin’s harder and faster styles of electronic music.

Instagram is a place where people interested in this already spend their time – as opposed to a random new site – and a tool many of them use to discover events and music.

Stories’ ephemeral nature make it easy to drip interesting content for this community every day.

Key principle: support, support, support

In general, whenever you create something, make sure it solves problems whether they’re your own or other people’s. This should be your primary goal and activity. This is how you shape something valuable. Look for problems; solve them.

Give more than you take. If you ask for anything in the beginning, then ask people to help you help them. In my case that means soliciting promo material, images, etc. so I can better promote other people’s events to the community.

The ethos is: support, support, support – the music, the people, the parties and the scenes. Double down on your ethos early on, because things can get muddy later on and there’s always a risk of believing in your own hype once things take off.

This also makes it easier for people to join and help the community: if there is growth potential in an area, the goal should be to grow everything. If one part of the community grows stronger, we all grow stronger.

Method & content

Here are the types of content I currently post to serve the community. I’ll highlight for each one how they help to grow the Instagram:

• Short-term highlights (“check out this party tonight”)
• Longer-term highlights (“next week xyz”, “just announced next month: x”)
• Music highlights (“check out the new mix by xyz”)

Short-term highlights

When focusing on events, I try to do the following things:

• Share a picture from the promoter or venue’s Instagram timeline. This helps connect the community to people active in the scene, and it also sends a notification to the account holder and allows them to repost the story to their own stories (in turn giving @harddanceberlin more exposure).
• Tag as many (relevant) people as possible (the event’s performers, promoter, venue, etc). This again provides value for fans to understand what’s going on and helps them check stuff out, but it also means your story can now be shared by anyone who was tagged.
• Location tags. Tagging to a location increases your discoverability for people checking out stories around that area. To be honest, I consider this optional as it usually just gives 1 or 2 more views per story and I’m not sure if it has lead to follows. Sometimes you can get lucky and get hundreds of views though.
• Add the MUSIC one might expect at the event to the story. It’s an important service to the community using the stories to determine whether to investigate an event, but if it’s music by one of the performers, it also makes it more likely they’ll repost your story.

The ‘growth hacking’ term is leveraging “other people’s audience” (OPA).

Longer-term highlights

Longer term highlights focus on events from about a week or so out. It follows a very similar approach as the shorter term highlights, incl. tagging the performers. This allows people from out of town to repost your story to announce to their fans that they’re going to be in town. It also means you can build up some extra hype for particularly interesting events and line-ups.

The above screenshots also indicate how it only takes me a few minutes per day: for story 1, the artwork was sent to me by the promoter. For story 2, I just reposted one of the promoters’ announcements. For story 3, I made a screenshot of the Resident Advisor calendar I maintain and cropped out irrelevant stuff.

Music highlights

On weekdays with zero events (Berlin can be wild and last week actually had a relevant event every night of the week), I’ll highlight music of local producers, DJs, labels, collectives, etc.

Currently about 50% of all followers see the account’s stories. That’s a high engagement rate and I want to keep it there, so ideally I have something for people daily. It’s also important to keep the growth momentum up. I’ll explain why next.

Instagram account discovery

Alright. So, someone I tagged reposted a story. What now?

I tend to go for really clear names when naming projects. MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE is exactly the scope of the content; it’s what I want to talk and think about. MUSIC x GREEN was actually going to be called MUSIC x SUSTAINABILITY, but the latter word was annoying to type out in a URL. So this is called Hard Dance Berlin – a bit tricky SEO-wise since a big YouTube music channel has done an event in this city by that name once, but it explains exactly what the project is about.

So when somebody sees the account name when content is reposted, it’s pretty self-explanatory that if you tap on the story and go to the profile, you’re going to get more of hard dance in the context of Berlin.

So here’s what you’ll see:

And that’s it. Within two weeks, I should have it organically at 100 highly relevant and engaged followers. By summer, I think I can hit 1k. Should I do some paid promotion, that can go a lot faster. The upside of something as niche as this, is that it is easy to know where to find your audience when targeting ads.

Maybe it seems highly tactical, or whatever, but the reason why I spend my spare time on it is because of the love for the music.

Not everything can be done online! I’m too old now to visit all of the events, but I try to make sure to go to a decent portion of them, speak to some people, etc. and also play sometimes. This has helped me get some early visibility with friends following and resharing some of the content.

I hope the above has been helpful and insightful, and not just blowing my own horn.

If there’s just one takeaway, let it be this: always give more than you take.

Settling in Berlin to work in classical music at IDAGIO (from which I have since moved on), I was pleased to find out that the city’s nightlife is also host to a great variety of harder styles of dance music.

Having been born in The Netherlands, I was practically spoon-fed gabber music. Maybe not by my parents, but by friends and their older siblings, music television, and the last 20-30 minutes of practically every school dance (click here for an example of one of the tracks popular among young & old back then). Hardcore, as it’s also called, was everywhere.

After moving to Berlin, I’d go out and explore different scenes every now and then. I read books about the history of the city’s subcultures, their music, their styles, and how they came together after the Wall fell (if there’s one book I can recommend, it’s Paul Hockenos’ Berlin Calling – unrelated to the film by the same title). When you read about things like this, it can feel like you have arrived too late. I felt it again when I read the book, just like how I felt when I first started researching the origins of house music and the free party culture. Back then I wished I’d been an adult when all that happened, so I could have participated.

In the case of Berlin however, that feeling turned into something else. And here’s what you should know if you’ve ever shared that feeling I just described: you ARE participating. You CAN make something that people are going to miss in the future. Starting may be the hardest part.

Oops. Where was I?

Ah yes, as I became more of a participant in Berlin’s music cultures, I started noticing something. Hard dance was surging once more. People are extremely excited about these sounds. Hardcore, hardstyle, hardtechno, breakcore, donk… Throw in a tune like that in your house or techno set and people go wild – a temporary voyage. But some scenes, particularly parts of the techno scene, started taking a more long-term journey into hard dance. Yet the scenes aren’t mixing. I don’t see the techno people at hardstyle parties, and if the techno crowds throw a hardstyle night, I don’t see any of the people from those scenes.* They’re vaguely aware of each other’s existence, but that’s about it.

So I figured: let’s map this out. Let’s list all the performers. Link their Soundclouds. Try to identify all the parties. Let’s get people listening to each other. Remove the boundaries of genres and scenes, so we can just focus on the textures, tempos, and energies of each other’s music.

That directory is now live, and lives on harddanceberlin.com. 💥

There is also a calendar on Resident Advisor and an Instagram (@harddanceberlin) which I use to highlight events through the stories feature (by far the most important platform for music, IMO – it’s really attaining Myspace levels – I’m not on boomerbook though, so my perspective may be skewed).

Local resistance: dealing with austerity, gentrification, and climate change

I hope to see more local projects. They’re so important.

Music is under pressure globally. To keep things local in context: over the past 10 years around a 100 clubs have had to close in Berlin. This is why Berlin’s Clubcommission is fighting to give nightlife venues the same status as opera houses. Austerity and gentrification are threats to the scenes, so if you care about what’s going on where you are: invest. Help promote and build audiences. Support local artists. And if you can afford it, then use guest lists to skip the queue, but still pay an entrance fee to support the venue & artists.

Another reason why it’s important to support local artists: more local gigs means they’ll have to travel less to make a living and more local talent means it becomes easier to put events together without having to fly someone over.

Air travel is bound to become more expensive through ‘Green Deals’ being discussed in Europe and the US. Further austerity might hit our music scenes still. So better start building.

All we need is some space. And this we can create for each other.

(small disclaimer: Hard Dance Berlin has no relation to the brand that’s known for filming DJ sets and putting them on YouTube, who threw a one-off event by the same name. The term has been around for a long time, and I like straightforward names for my projects.)

*big respect to some parties who actually have managed to attain some scene crossover.

Alternative title: if you can sell a Dutch guy a bicycle helmet, music can make giving a damn about the environment a lot cooler.

I made a major step last week.

After 30ish years of cycling, I finally bought a bike helmet.

I had always considered helmets inconvenient and geeky. In The Netherlands, where I grew up, nobody wears bike helmets. Well, maybe people on race bikes, but most people cycle on what is affectionally referred to as “omafietsen” (old lady bikes).

Sure, I have lived in places where I wouldn’t consider cycling without a helmet, like Moscow, Sofia, and Istanbul. In those situations I would choose not to cycle at all.

Now I live in Berlin – much more bike-friendly than those other places. I’d say about a third of all cyclists wear helmets here, although personally I didn’t. Having friends with helmets made me decide to learn more about the likeliness of getting into accidents as a cyclist and how a helmet reduces your chances of serious damage. The numbers tell a clear story, but didn’t convince me. They made me more vocal about traffic safety and creating more room for cyclists, but it didn’t throw the geeky stigma off of bike helmets that had been attached to them for all my life.

One day I cycled to a large climate protest – helmet-free (go on… let’s say my hair was flowing in the wind). I parked my bike near the protest and walked to the rally point. It was huge. Thousands of people. Scientists, game developers, feminists, antifascists, christians, communists, fashion designers, teachers, refugees, environmentalists, school children. They carried banners identifying who they are and why they’re protesting.

As I walked around to explore the groups and causes, mixed in was a small percentage of people were carrying bike helmets. Like me, they had also come to the protest by bike. They were cyclists, too.

In this context, cycling seemed like an activity of defiance. A personal act of reducing one’s climate impact in a system and city that still has a long way to go before it can truly be considered cycling-friendly. I saw them. I knew we that we found some of the same things important. Safer streets, more room for bikes, less cars in the inner city, more room for everyone on the streets – whether they own a car or not.

The bike helmet transformed.

From a geeky safety object, to an object that communicates identity. Having to carry it around when you’re not cycling transformed from a burden and inconvenience to a way to parade something you find important. A way to “be” a cyclist, even when you’re not cycling.

Suddenly I got it: helmets are cool.

A few weeks later I bought a helmet.

Creating narratives & holding each other to account

We are facing a climate emergency. It manifests in many ways and seems overwhelmingly difficult to address. It’s a struggle of energy, waste, pollution, economy, ecology. It’s also a struggle of culture.

This is where music has a unique role to play, alongside other expressions of culture.

Climate change and the environmental struggle have many helmets.

Planting trees is considered as something for ‘hippies’. Recycling is something for soy yoghurt yoga moms. Picking up waste from streets or nature is considered dirty, because “eww trash”.

Addressing the climate emergency will require lifestyle change. We need to normalize the above things and many more. What better force than creativity and personality.

There is a lot of concern about artists and brands jumping on sustainability, because it’s trending. Even if so, it’s a trend that won’t go away, and will only intensify as the symptoms of our changing climate do the same. One musician to recently draw such a response was Peggy Gou, who posted a video of her taking some trash from a beach in Bali on her Instagram.

People rightfully suggested she consider her carbon footprint – which as a popular DJ is considerable. Some people even wondered whether it’s genuine care or just jumping on a popular topic. With regards to the last part: it doesn’t matter right now.

• Let’s normalize picking up trash. Let’s remove the stigma that it’s dirty. You can use gloves and wash your hands afterwords. We need to see way more celebrities doing this. Change the narrative.
• When companies or individuals get vocal about these topics, it’s easier to hold them to account. Not doing enough can hurt your reputation and your business. So let people speak out, let them pose… but then let’s not forget what they said – we should hold them to it.

Later this year, I intend to check in on some of the artists, individuals and companies that signed the Music Declares Emergency pledge. We need to celebrate the ones that do well, and embarrass the ones that don’t take their pledge seriously, so that they get into action.

Maybe let that be a warning: if you have said you “commit to taking urgent action” and “work towards making our businesses ecologically sustainable and regenerative” I’m going to check in on that (and hopefully I am not alone). There is nothing ambiguous about urgent.

If you’re thinking: “oh my.. that’s right.. It’s been months. We need to spring into action.. Where to start?” go to the Actions section of the pledge you’ve signed. It has guides for all aspects of the business. You can also reach out to me and I see if I can do anything to help, as long as you pay it forward.

Just don’t lose sight of the two aspects where we can do something that matters: 1) within the industry by making our operations more sustainable and regenerative, and 2) beyond the industry by inspiring narratives that turn helmets into items of rebellion, that turn something people considered as “not me” into “cool”.

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