Bas Grasmayer

The future of music, inspired by a cheap Vietnamese restaurant in Berlin

Posted on May 1, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

I spent the last week living from an Airbnb while getting started with my new job at IDAGIO in Berlin. Down the street from my Airbnb was a cheap Vietnamese place, where I ate a couple of times. They always had Vietnamese pop music on, but one day they had a CD by a Vietnamese singer covering Western pop songs. In English. I thought about it for a little: why wouldn’t they just play the originals?

These cover releases are often financially motivated, but since the restaurant has to pay some collection society, and a Spotify subscription gives you all the music for just $10, I figured that the reason for this music playing was probably not something financial.

I then wondered: could it be that they simply have more of a connection to the Vietnamese performer, and prefer to hear these works from his mouth?

I’ve been getting into a new way of thinking about music by stepping into classical. Suddenly, there’s not 1 original and then some ‘lesser’ remixes and covers. There’s a composition, with the author of that work often having deceased before modern recording technology, and then there are countless recordings of performances of that work. Sometimes there’s an relatively undisputed ‘best’, but often it comes down to personal taste, preference, and opinion.

In the last century, music went through an enormous change. It went from ‘folk’ to ‘pop’. Here’s what I mean with each phrase:

Folk: music that’s not ‘owned’ by a single individual or corporation, but rather by the culture in which it was born. A song is not necessarily known for a particular performer, but instead is performed by many performers: ones that reach success far and wide, as well as local performers who just like to sing in front of a crowd in evenings or weekends.
Pop: music that’s controlled and owned. Songs are known for their original version and original performers. In this sense, the meaning extends beyond the charts, and into modern day underground rock, metal, and to a certain extent hiphop and dance music.

Recording technology in the 20th century brought about a transition: where once music was ‘folk’ by default, it became ‘pop’ instead. The rise of mass consumerism and cheap global distribution decreased the amount of time a song needed to spread geographically. These was now also a default version through which basically everyone became familiar with the work, rather than through their local performer or traveling bands.

While this system has generated a vast amount of money, and a huge music economy, I also think that music as an experience has lost a lot through this. People’s relationships with works are more superficial and performers are less incentivized to be the best performer of a certain work, since they can basically be the only one.

Back to the Vietnamese restaurant.

I got to thinking: what if we can ‘folk-ify’ modern pop music. It’s already being done to a certain extent. The remix culture on Soundcloud is a great example of it, and so is the cover culture on YouTube. What if the way we’re structuring the navigation in content on IDAGIO (such as: composers > works > recordings and performers) some day could become relevant for ‘pop’?

It would mean people would be able to browse based on songwriter, and then see all the pop songs related to that writer. They’d then be able to explore each song, and all the performances of it. They could sort by proximity: either offline (geographic), or online (based on your social graph and digital footprint). This could make the performance they listen to more personally relevant, just like the CD in the Vietnamese restaurant is to the owners of the restaurant.

It could make music more participative, and in a way it already is becoming so: YouTube, Soundcloud, remix apps, democratization of production tools, cheap hardware for recording (like our phones), Musical.ly, performances on livestream… The two most remix-heavy genres we know, dance and hiphop, are the ones most influential to the millennial demographic and younger. Both house and hiphop were born of affordable drum computers and samplers, of looping existing records, reinterpreting them, creating a new performance out of something that already existed.

The hard part has always been incentivizing the rights holders. Just look at the lawsuits.

We’re reaching an interesting time: we’re getting very good at interpreting really large datasets. Machine learning and AI are set to revolutionize our every day existence in just a few years. Then there’s blockchain, which is a good technology for tracking the complexity involved with a very nested type of ownership if we indeed ‘folk-ify’ pop music (without radically overhauling modern notions of intellectual property).

Music doesn’t have to become more participative, but it can. I think there’s a good economic case for it, but it still needs to be the product of deliberate choice of individuals. People in government can look at funding music education, and modernizing it, because the computer is the most important instrument for our generation (I know some of you will strongly disagree: find me at Midem, Sonár+D, or c/o pop and we can discuss over a beer). Musicians can think of how they can invite fans to contribute or interact with their music. People with entrepreneurial mindsets can think about solving some of the issues related to rights, or look at how musicians can monetize this type of interactivity.

And we all, as listeners, simply need to do one thing more often: sing.

Computers won’t have to be creative

Posted on April 23, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Every discussion about creative AI sooner or later invites the same objection: “computers will never be able to be creative.”

It’s interesting to think about. One has to define creativity. One has to understand the implications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Then you have to carefully construct an opinion, and prediction, on whether we’ll ever get to the point of computers being creative – without human involvement.

The problem is, you can think about it for weeks, but at its root it may be as philosophical a question to answer as “does free will truly exist?”

So whenever someone raises that objection I wave it away, because it’s not important whether computers can be creative.

Everyone will agree that human beings have the ability to be creative. We have our imagination. We use it to create: outside us, but also inside our heads. Our perception of the world is creative. It’s why some paintings are enjoyable to us. It’s why children can play with inanimate objects and imagine vast worlds in front of them.

That’s why I believe, no matter what happens, that computers are going to be making great music that can compete with human-created music. Imagine a type of computer-generated Soundcloud, where everything that’s not listened is instantly weeded out. Algorithms will be able to determine what sucks and what will never work, so 90% of the output can be filtered beforehand, or doesn’t even have to be generated.

But for you, as a listener, it’s actually not important whether a computer made the music or a human being… especially when you won’t be able to hear the difference.

Sure, putting on an album by your favourite singer is hard to replace… but there are also moments where you tune into a playlist for sports, for focus, or whatever. Five or ten years from now, can you be 100% sure that all the songs you hear in that playlist are made by humans? Will you think: “Oh, this song is an AI song, because it doesn’t sound creative”?

Of course not.

It’s not important whether AI can be creative, when the recipient is creative.

Online music is about to experience another MySpace moment

Posted on April 17, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

An emerging void signals new opportunity for innovation in digital music.

The benefit of writing thoughts down is that you get to revisit them. Six years ago, I penned a piece for Hypebot called The Next MySpace. At that time, people in the music business were desperate to for another MySpace to emerge: the site had been a ray of hope, but as it collapsed, online music was scattered across an immature ecosystem of rapidly growing startups like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, Spotify, and many others that were eventually acquired or perished and forgotten. I argued:

The closest we will ever get to a “next MySpace” will be either a music network or a social network that manages to gather, organise and integrate the fragments in spectacular fashion.

Defining the MySpace moment

What I call a MySpace moment is not when everything was going well for MySpace: it’s when decline set in. People started replacing MySpace’s music players, which sucked, with Soundcloud’s beautiful waveform players. People started moving much of their social lives to Facebook (for friends) and Twitter (to connect to strangers). Up until then, the dominant social network had been music-driven — people, especially teenagers, expressed their identities by making long lists of bands they liked.

From the ashes of MySpace, which never managed to recover, rose a new ecosystem of music startups. They’ve managed to make it easy for artists to connect to fans, get paid for online playback, let fans know about new shows, and be able to very specifically target people with ads.

That moment, that void, was a massive opportunity and many companies benefited from it.

That moment is here once again.

The new MySpace moment

There are two main factors contributing to a new emerging void for entrepreneurs to leap in. One has to do with product adoption life cycles, which I’ll explain below. The other has to do with the important position Soundcloud claimed in the online music ecosystem.

Soundcloud came closer to being the ‘next MySpace’ than any startup has. And let’s be blunt: the company is not doing well. After years of legal pressure to tackle the problem of works being uploaded to the service without rights holders’ permission, they were forced to adopt a service model that does not make sense for Soundcloud. The typical $10 a month subscription doesn’t make sense. People are on Soundcloud for the fresh content, the mixtapes, remixes, unreleased stuff: the things that will not be on Spotify for weeks or months (or ever!). Why inject the catalogue with music of long deceased people?

There have been reports that Soundcloud would consider any bids higher than the total amount of money invested into the company to date. That’s not a good sign. The road they’ve been forced into is a dead-end street, and the only end game is a quick acquisition.

I don’t think Soundcloud will die, but it is hard for the company to focus on what they’ve always been good at. Now that they’ve been forced into the Spotify model, those are the types of metrics that are going to matter. Subscriber numbers, conversion, retention. So it may struggle to do as good a job serving the audience they’ve traditionally serviced so well. (small note: I love Soundcloud, and the people there: prove me wrong!)

This leaves a vacuum.

Adding to that vacuum, is the fact that Spotify (and other streaming services) are looking beyond early adopters. To understand the phenomenon, have a look at the below graph:

The top part of the graph details the product life cycle. The bottom part explains the type of audience you address during the steps of that life cycle. As we’ve all noticed from the jubilant press reports on streaming’s expansion, we’re in the growth part of the cycle. This means services like Spotify and Apple Music have to get really good at targeting Early Majority and Late Majority type consumers.

If you’re reading this, you’re in the Innovator or Early Adopter segment. Startups typically start off by targeting those segments. So when Spotify moves on from Early Adopters (their de-emphasizing of user generated playlists is a big hint!), it leaves room for new startups to target and better serve those types of users.

Filling the new void

What happens then? Well, we’re going to get to the next phase of the digital music ecosystem – which is mobile-driven, and flirting with augmented reality, VR, and artificial intelligence. Early adopters are likely to keep paying for their Spotify subscriptions – it’s too big a convenience to give up… So entrepreneurs will have to figure out ways to monetize new behaviours.

Now is a great time to look at very specific problems in music. Don’t try to build the next Spotify or the next Soundcloud. For a while, everyone was trying to build the next MySpace — all those startups are dead now. Instead, take a specific problem, research it, build a solution for someone, test it, try it again for a broader group, and if it works: double down and scale up.

Personally, I’m very curious to see where startup accelerator Techstars Music’s current batch will be five years from now.

Why I’m joining IDAGIO — a classical music startup — and moving to Berlin

Posted on April 10, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Today I’m excited to announce that I’m joining IDAGIO, a streaming service for classical music lovers, as Director of Product. I’m already in the process of relocating to Berlin, where I’ll be joining the team later this month.

In this post, I want to explain why I so strongly believe in this niche focused music service and IDAGIO’s mission. I also want to shed light on the future of MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE as a newsletter, a type of media, and an agency. (tl;dr: the newsletter lives on!)

Two months ago, a friend whom I had worked with in Moscow, at music streaming service Zvooq, forwarded me a vacancy as a Twitter DM. By then, I had developed a kind of mental auto-ignore, because friends kept sending me junior level vacancies in music companies. I was never looking for a ‘job’ — I had a job (but thanks for thinking of me ❤️). However, I trusted that this friend knew me better as a professional, so I opened the link.

I was immediately intrigued. I hadn’t heard of IDAGIO before, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about niche services. At one point, the plan for Zvooq was to not build a typical one-size-fits-all app like all the other music streaming services are doing, but instead it would be to split different types of music-related behaviours into smaller apps. The goal would then become to monopolize those behaviours: like Google has monopolized search behaviour (now called Googling), and Shazam has monopolized Shazaming. Long term, it would allow us to expand that ecosystem of apps beyond streaming content, so we would be able to monetize behaviours with higher margins than behaviours related to music listening.

We ended up building just one, Fonoteka, before we had to switch strategies due to a mix of market reality, licensing terms, and burn rate. That was fine: it was what the business needed, and what Russia as a market needed.

Since then, there have been a number of niche music ideas, like services for indie rock, high quality streaming, etc. And while those are all commendable, I was never quite interested in them, because it just seemed like those services would not have a strong enough strategic competitive advantage in the face of tech giants with bulging coffers. Their offers were often also just marginally better, but getting people to install an app and build a habit around your service, unlearn their old solution, learn to do it your way… that’s a huge thing to ask of people, especially once you need to go beyond the super early adopters.

But niche works on a local level. You can see it with Yandex.Music and Zvooq in Russia, with Anghami in the Middle East, and Gaana in India.

Over the last decade, I’ve lived in Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and The Netherlands (where I’m from). Each country has unique ways of interacting with music. Music has a different place in each culture. I think local music services work, because they combine catalogues and local taste with a deep understanding of how their target audience connects to music. It allows them to build something catering exactly to those behaviours. It’s music and behaviour combined.

When I started talking to the IDAGIO team, I soon understood that they too combine these elements. Classical music, in all its shapes and forms, has many peculiarities, which will remain an object of study for me for the next years. The fact that the same work often has a multitude of recordings by different performers already sets it apart. One can map a lot of behaviours around navigation, exploring, and comparison to just this one fact.

An example of one way in which IDAGIO lets people explore various performances of the same work.

Despite being younger and having more modest funding, IDAGIO has already built a product that caters better to classical music fans than the other streaming services do (and also serves lossless streams). Understanding that, I was fast convinced that this was something I seriously needed to consider.

So I got on a plane and met the team. Over the course of three days, we ran a condensed design sprint, isolated a problem we wanted to tackle together, interviewed expert team members, explored options, drew up solutions, and prototyped a demo to test with the target audience. It’s an intense exercise, especially when you’re also being sized up as a potential team member, but the team did such a good job at making me feel welcome and at home (❤️). Through our conversations, lunches, and collaboration, I was impressed with the team’s intelligence, creativity, and general thoughtfulness.

Then I spent some extra time in Berlin — after all, I’d be moving there. Aforementioned friend took me to a medical museum with a room full of glass cabinets containing jars with contents which will give me nightmares for years to come. Besides that, I met a bunch of other friends, music tech professionals, and entrepreneurs, who collectively convinced me of the high caliber of talent and creative inspiration in the city.

Returning home, I made a decision I didn’t expect to make this year, nor in the years to come. A decision to make a radical switch in priorities.

Motivation, for me, comes from the capacity to grow and to do things with meaningful impact. MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE has exposed me to a lot of different people, a lot of different problems, and has allowed me to do what I find interesting, what I’m good at, but also what I grow and learn from. With IDAGIO I can do all of the latter, but with depth, and with a team.

Classical music online has been sidelined a bit. It makes a lot of sense when you place it in a historical perspective: a lot has changed in recent years. The web’s demographic skews older now. You can notice this by counting the number of family members on Facebook. The internet used to be something most adults would just use for work, so if you were building entertainment services, you target the young, early adopter demographic. That’s pop music, rock, electronic, hiphop, etc. Classical was there, sure, but Spotify wasn’t designed around it, iTunes wasn’t, YouTube wasn’t.

Now we’re actually reaching a new phase for music online. The streaming foundation has been built. Streaming is going mainstream. The platforms from the 2007–2009 wave are maturing and looking beyond their original early adopter audiences… So we’re going to see a lot of early adopters that are not properly served anymore. They’re going to migrate, look for new homes. A very important segment there, one that has always been underserved, are classical music fans. And now, this niche audience is sizeable enough to actually build a service around.

Why? Well, the internet has changed since the large last wave of music startups. Mobile is becoming the default way people connect to the web. For adults, this has made the web less of a thing for ‘work’, and has made entertainment more accessible. Connected environments make it easy to send your mobile audio to your home hifi set, or car speakers. The amount of people on the internet has more than doubled.

This makes the niche play so much more viable than just a few years ago. It has to be done with love, care, and a very good understanding of whose problem you’re trying to solve (and what that problem is). IDAGIO has exactly the right brilliant minds in place to pull this off and I’m flattered that in 2 weeks time, I’ll get to spend 2,000 hours a year with them.

What happens to the agency?

I’ll be winding down the agency side of MxTxF. This means I’m not taking on any more clients, but I’m happy to refer you to great people I know. Some longer term projects, that just take a couple of hours per week, I’ll keep on to bring to completion.

What happens to the newsletter?

The newsletter goes on! I get a lot of personal fulfilment out of it. The agency was born out of the newsletter, so who knows what more it will spawn. I’m actually figuring out a way to add audio and video content to the mix. I expect Midem and Sónar+D next June will be pilots for that. Berlin is a great place for music tech, so if anything, I hope the newsletter will only get more interesting as time goes on.

Besides the personal fulfilment, it allows me to be in touch with this wonderful community, to meet fascinating people, and occasionally to help organise a panel and bring some of my favourite minds into the same room at the same time.

If you’d like to support the newsletter, you can help me out on Patreon. You can become a patron of the newsletter — with your support, I can add extra resources to the newsletter, which will let me push the content to the next level (high on the list: a decent camera).

Elgar making an early recording of the work in 1920. Those pipes are acoustic recording horns, which were piped to a diaphragm which would vibrate a cutting stylus — directly turning sound waves into a material recording.

I leave you with Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85, which I discovered as a student, listening to the brilliant Szamár Madár by Venetian Snares in which it is sampled.

▶️ Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85

You can listen to the work, in full, on IDAGIO.

I’d love to hear about your favourite works and recordings. Feel free to email me on bg@idagio.com, with a link, and tell me what I should listen for.

Creatives as victims: are artists really screwed?

Posted on April 3, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

With the platformization of the web, creatives are set up to compete for attention while the platforms that host their content benefit from monetization at scale. It’s an important issue, but to say creatives have been screwed over by default helps nobody, mostly because it’s incorrect.

When reading Jon Westenberg‘s recent comments about creatives’ current challenges, I found myself disagreeing with the premise and much of what stemmed from it. I feel it’s important to walk through the presented thoughts and refute them or at least provide a different perspective. I normally don’t do these types of articles, but since it’s such a widely shared piece, I feel it’s important to do this, because it’s an unconstructive mindset to adopt.

Creatives, seeing yourself as a victim doesn’t help you. It disempowers you. It gives you an off-putting aura that communicates a sense of entitlement. That’s not to say that you’re not entitled to fair pay and treatment. Just compare it to the work floor: you’re entitled to salary, but if you give off a sense of entitlement it will annoy colleagues, superiors, and clients.

Jon starts off with his own experiences as a writer and speaker, explaining how requests come in:

…until you tell them you want them to pay for your expenses or even a fee. Then they disappear pretty damn fast.

Which is your own fault for violating the golden rule — bloggers and writers must never try to get paid.

I’ve encountered this. For a long time, this used to be my personal golden rule: I was afraid that paid writing would take the fun out of it, but instead paid writing makes me a lot more comfortable with spending big chunks of time on research and narrative. Now, I’m very strategic about when I write for free and when I don’t. Some sites help me reach new audiences that wouldn’t otherwise encounter my writing. Some don’t. Some benefit from the visibility I can give them, and for some that doesn’t matter. Sometimes I’m just really busy and can’t afford to spend my time on unpaid writing.

When writing’s unpaid, I try to make sure I convert the audience to my Twitter account and newsletter. When writing’s paid, I leave the question of credits up to the client.

When I first started charging for writing, I was nervous, but now I’m comfortable with it. I get occasional requests, and some I’ll answer with a cost estimate. Some requests then disappear, indeed, but that’s fine – it’s part of my strategy, and I don’t expect people to know beforehand that I expect payment. The free writing I do fits into a wider strategy: it helps me build my network through which I acquire clients for consultancy work.

I’ve never experienced any type of animosity when charging money. It’s about managing expectations, clearly explaining yourself, and simply getting comfortable with asking for something.

It’s also becoming increasingly difficult to look at publishing online or being an artist or recording music or starting a publication as a full time career.

I think we’ve gone through the hardest phase. People are used to mobile payments and subscriptions for digital content now. Many people are familiar with crowdfunding. Publications like The Correspondent are showing that membership models with fair payment for writers are viable. Blendle shows micropayments for articles are viable when properly designed and introduced to the end user.

If you’re an independent artist or writer, you could set up a Patreon, where fans of your work pledge to make a fixed contribution for every piece you publish (this is something I’m considering for my newsletter (EDIT: done!)).

It’s getting increasingly viable to look at creativity as a full time career.

The big problem is not the money. It’s the attention you have to compete for. We’re all creators of content – so what’s the role of creatives?

If you do want to get into creative work, you’re going to have to see it as a side hustle. Not your main gig. That’s just the way it is.

This is actually good advice. Take time to build up your audience. Take time to figure out your business models. The business models of earlier days are not set in stone anymore. You need to be innovative. Don’t rely on the old. Don’t do new things in an old way. Find new ways.

We’ve made it easier than ever to make stuff, and harder than ever to make enough money to live. And every day, there’s a new “disruptive” startup that does more damage.

What they “disrupt” is creator’s profits, most of the time. That’s what music streaming did.

Woah, woah, woah. Have we forgotten about piracy? Piracy disrupted creators’ profits. In part, because certain industries thought they could hold back certain developments and buy more time. They couldn’t. Piracy soared, and then… Music streaming disrupted piracy.

People don’t want to pay for content. They want to consume it for free, or monetise it for themselves.

Sure. People don’t want to pay for chocolate. Don’t want to pay for a new smartphone. Don’t want to pay for a Toastmaster 3000 in just five easy instalments. But all those companies have figured out ways to get people to pay. The ones that didn’t are dead. There’s nothing that stops creatives from finding business models, but they need to bear in mind two important points:

Optimize your business model so that you can compete for attention;
Don’t look at the past for how to monetize.

For example, I usually tell musical artists to look at YouTubers instead of the recording business. YouTubers and livestreamers make great use of crowdfunding, donations, subscriptions, and sponsorships. Make that which generates attention available for free, so it travels far and wide, then monetize the scarce and exclusive. It’s the same basic principle I’ve been repeating since 2011, when I published my thesis about marketing music through non-linear communication (networks).

If you tell people you’re an artist, they’ll tell you that’s not much of a career path and you should get a real job.

Was this ever not true? Westenberg’s next point is that people building tech startups for artists are celebrated. This may be true (though he’d be surprised how many obviously dead-on-arrival startups there are). I think startups being celebrated by default mostly stems from people not understanding tech startups. As the phenomenon of tech startups matures and becomes more mainstream, it’s drawing a lot more criticism. I hear people on radio comparing startups to “getting unemployment compensation paid for by investors.”

The article’s most interesting bit looks at the amount of followers Nicki Minaj has on Instagram (77 million) and compares it to the amount of albums sold (800k). He follows it up with the following question:

If a mega star like Nicki Minaj has a conversion rate that low for actual sales, what does that mean for indie creators?

Conversion rates are likely much higher. Artists like Minaj have a lot of followers who are not fans. Or a lot of people who like the music, but are not that into it. Artists at such scale are public figures – people follow them and know about them, not just for their music, but also for their personalities and fame. Indie artists are more likely to have more engaged fans, and if they devise a smart strategy they can monetize more than just 1% of them. They don’t have to depend on the type of ‘mass’ strategies employed for acts like Minaj, which inevitably lead to low conversion rates.

We’re giving money to tech platforms to become “Unicorns” off the backs of creatives, and driving creatives out of business.

This is a legitimate issue. Personally, I’m excited by the discussions in the blockchain-scene, where people are trying to figure out how to fairly distribute the value generated by platforms’ participants. Other than that, you have to strategize: know when and how to use a platform and know when to turn your back on a platform. Make sure you’re in direct touch with your audience, so you can bring them with you when you move away from a platform.

In a reply to a commenter, Westenberg added the following:

Also — it’s an awful lot harder for a writer or an artist to get paid for playing concerts. And even if they did, they’re still not being paid for their creative work, they’re being paid for their personal appearance and that’s not the same thing.

It’s competition. People are willing to do it for free: that makes it hard to charge money for the same thing. And the latter part of his statement is true, but it’s arguably not so different from before. Did people buy plastic discs with music on them in order to pay for the creative work, or did they just like how the music made them feel? Do people pay for music because of the pure creativity or also because of the personality behind it?

You need to be smart about these dynamics and not fall into the trap of feeling helpless. Develop a personal strategy that will help you to effectively build and monetize a fanbase.

Yes, there are real problems. The platformization of the web is an issue, and automation could kill a lot more jobs, so it may be important that in this late stage of capitalism we divorce income from work, at least partly through something like an unconditional basic income. But then we’ll have even more people creating content, more people competing for those same eyeballs, and that is where the root of the problem lies.

Why I’ve stopped posting on Medium

Posted on March 27, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

A recent change broke my trust and made me act on my pre-existing skepticism. That change is not the membership plan.

Okay, I haven’t completely stopped publishing on Medium, but I have stopped making Medium the go-to destination for my audience. Instead, I’ve placed focus on my own WordPress-based site again, and cross-post articles here after some time, without sharing to socials.

This article will be my last exception to that rule: the Medium is the message, after all.

The reason for my recent switch has to do with the limited access Medium gives me to data, combined with the lack of meaningful organic traffic, and a breach of trust, but before I dig into that I want to emphasize the other side of the coin.

Why I love Medium ❤️

Medium’s editor is slick. Sometimes I use it to write pieces I have no intention of publishing to Medium. Sure, there are desktop editors that do it, but Medium is free and available in any browser, so I can use it anywhere.

I started a weekly newsletter about innovation in the music business over a year ago with the intention of writing a new thought piece every week. At some point, the pieces started getting longer and it didn’t make sense to post the entire texts in emails anymore. I also wanted to make the content more shareable. So I started publishing to Medium and started the MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE publication, which now sits at well over 5,000 subscribers.

Medium also has a great community, and its highlighting feature that works across all its publications and authors’ pieces really adds a lot of value. In the obvious way, that it points out friends’ highlights that let you quickly see important information, or give you a perspective on what people you follow find important. But also in a less obvious way: if I share a Medium article to my newsletter followers, many of whom follow me on Medium, they’ll automatically see passages I’ve highlighted.

But that’s about it. I’ve always assumed there were more reasons to love Medium, but as an author who is skilled at driving his own audience to destinations, I think that’s kind of it.

Medium’s organic traffic problem

About a year ago, I built a site for my newsletter which had quickly turned into a consultancy agency after I started getting requests to share my expertise. I wanted to publish my articles on my own WordPress, but it was just too cumbersome. I didn’t feel the motivation to publish on my own site, because my articles looked so much nicer on Medium.

I realized I needed to build a personal site that I could be proud of. So I redesigned musicxtechxfuture.com, put the agency to the background, and the content front and center. From that point onwards, I started posting new articles to both platforms simultaneously. Sometimes it would look nicer on Medium, and sometimes it would look nicer on my own WordPress. Depending on aesthetics, I’d make decisions about which links to prioritize when sharing to my newsletter and socials.

This taught me something about organic traffic on Medium. It turned out that that 5,000 publication followers number is a bullshit vanity metric.

Medium article view count — I didn’t share any of these on social media.

The above data includes traffic from people who follow my personal account (not publication) on Medium, because they get push notifications from the app, or email updates from Medium.

Meanwhile, the limited data Medium gives you makes it very hard to understand from what context these people are finding my articles. Are they my personal audience, my publication audience, random people using the Medium app? I have no idea.

Which brings me to the next issue…

Medium does not give you enough data — and it controls your connection to your audience

The above is a typical issue when you publish on platforms, but I’d really love to know more about my audience. Instead, Medium basically doesn’t tell you where they come from, doesn’t tell you what links they’ve interacted with, it doesn’t tell you what keywords they used to find your content… It just gives you this:

Medium referral count with more sources — Pretty useless…

Usually this is okay — that’s the sacrifice you make for publishing to a platform where your content is exposed to a greater community. But how is it that I get less than 50 views on 2 pieces after multiple years of posting, including a year of consistently posting every week and building up over 2k followers on my personal profile, 5k followers on my niche publication, having multiple articles featured by Medium staff, and being featured as a top writer in music?

My WordPress has more organic traffic than that!

So basically: Medium offers a nice editor & easy way to publish. In exchange, you hand over the audience you build up, your content, and your data. Yet I still was giving Medium the benefit of the doubt.

Then I wanted to connect a domain name to my publication

Previously, you had to submit an application and then they’d send you instructions for the process of pointing your domain name to your publication, so that your Medium publication lives on your own domain, but is still linked into the wider Medium ecosystem.

They still do that. Except since last month, they’ve started charging publication owners $75 for that (way above cost price, since you still have to pay for your own domain name). So in all the noise about introducing membership programs to support authors, they’re also monetizing their creators. It’s like Soundcloud for articles. And we all know how things have been going for Soundcloud.

That’s when I lost hope. And trust.

It just doesn’t make sense. It shows a confused strategy. I’m not sure how they justify the registration fee, because as I’ve explained above, there’s very little you’re getting in return.

You’re really better off sinking a few weekends into setting up a WordPress installation and learning to tweak a theme. You will have more control and ownership over your audience, can engage with them more directly by integrating tools, and you’ll end up learning a thing or two about web development: a valuable skill to have.

Until I start seeing Medium’s bogus follower counts translate into meaningful traffic, I’m done.

I’ll keep publishing to here. Perhaps sometimes a week later. Perhaps a month. Just whenever I get around to it. It’s just that Medium simply doesn’t generate traffic to make it worthwhile to give up so much data, insight, and direct relations to my audience. Why give ownership of that to a platform?

In the last months, I’ve gotten notifications that articles of mine were “featured by the Medium staff” — this had no meaningful impact on traffic. I’m also featured as a “Top writer in Music” — this had no meaningful impact on traffic, either.

So, my Medium’s not a priority anymore, until the company figures out a way to make it a priority.

I’ll still occasionally use it for articles that don’t fit the scope of my own page. Medium remains the best way to quickly share some thoughts, but as a publication I’m out.

I really love your product and its elegancy, Ev, but until you map out a clear strategy that’s focused on creating more value for creators, and find a way to articulate that strategy thoughtfully, I’m out.

I just don’t trust Medium anymore as the home for my creativity.

Love,
Bas