Author: Bas Grasmayer

Streaming services: it’s time for Two-Factor Authentication

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Scams, fraud, bots and theft: the ugly side of streaming provides a stark contrast to that beautiful feeling of having the world’s recorded music at your fingertips.

What is Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

You are already using 2FA. Certain accounts, like Google, Facebook, or Apple, require multiple forms of authentication in order to sign in from a new device. This often works by verifying it’s you from another device, or by entering a code sent to your phone number, email address, or generated in an authenticator app.

It adds a layer of security to accounts that makes it hard to get in with just the username and password.

Why don’t streaming services use 2FA?

Popular streaming services like Spotify and Netflix famously don’t use 2FA, although the latter has recently started running tests with it, presumably to tackle account sharing. The reason for not implementing 2FA? Likely because it doesn’t help growth and in fact may hamper conversion rates.

Jorge Castro on developer community dev.to sums it up well through this fictional conversation:

  • Developers: We want to implement 2FA in our platform.
  • Netflix executes: Ok, and how much will it cost us?
  • Developers: Around two months.
  • Netflix executives: Ok, and it will increase the number of viewers?
  • Developers: Well, not really. It is about security.
  • Netflix executives: So, it will not increase the number of viewers but it could be a burden for some customers and it could decrease the number of viewers.
  • Developers: Yes, but it could be optional.
  • Netflix executives: So optional, an option that it plays against the number of viewers and it will cost us time (and money). Sorry but no.
  • Developers: But the security.
  • Netflix executives: We already invested in our security. If our customers have trouble then we could reset its password. It’s their responsibility, not ours.

However building in a little more friction could be beneficial to all… and tackle certain types of fraud more efficiently than a switch to user-centric streaming payments might.

Black market for streaming service accounts

For years, there has been a thriving market for streaming service accounts, with Spotify accounts selling for under a dollar. Many though not all of these are hacked. It’s so common that people commenting on their hackers’ music tastes has become somewhat of a meme and a quick search on Twitter pulls up countless examples.

Vietnamese blogs speculate that black market accounts are what led to Spotify and Netflix halting their free trial offers in the country last year.

This is not an issue that is exclusive to Spotify and Netflix, but there’s a high availability of examples since they are two of the most popular entertainment services without 2FA.

Fake plays, scams, and fraud

Just like it’s possible to buy ‘fake followers’ on social media, it’s possible to buy fake plays for streaming services. Jacking up the numbers can help to game the recommendation algorithm and build fake legitimacy for those looking closely at big numbers (but perhaps not closely enough).

Who cares if that is what someone wants to do? Well, everyone should, because it eats away at the pool of money distributed to all artists. Hackers have been gaming this system openly since at least 2013 in order to generate revenue.

An article by William Bedell from 2015 explains how he was able to do the same. At the time, not only did Spotify not use 2FA:

“There wasn’t even a CAPTCHA or email verification when creating accounts.”

Image by William Bedell.

The lack of better security leads to these types of fraud having to be traced & fixed retroactively, which often leads to streaming services taking music with fake plays down. That sounds good, but there are two issues: 1) we don’t know what percentage of fraud goes undetected, and 2) this opens up an attack vector (want your competitor’s music taken down? Just boost it with fake streams).

Audius (primer article), a new streaming platform and protocol that awards people tokens (called $AUDIO) based on their participation, is also running into this issue. Bots are used on the platform to game the system and get music into the charts. This messes with the platform’s weekly reward system, as WeirdCityRecords on Reddit points out:

“Curators have been robbed by bot users almost every week since the rewards inception (not only in terms of $audio but engagement being buried below bots), and now with a song being clearly botted to #1, it seems like this week 1 artist or possibly more will be deprived as well.”

The track accused of being ‘botted’ to the top outperforms the #2 by over 14 times, despite the artist and account being new to the platform and seemingly not having a significant presence on other music platforms.

Two-factor authentication would make it a lot harder to create loads of accounts like in the examples above, especially if you limit to 1 account per phone number.

Report fraud

Recently, I became familiar with another scam. Unfortunately that was due to falling victim to it on Spotify, though it may also exist on other platforms.

Botnets get employed to report people’s playlists for inappropriate content. This results in the playlist title and description being taken down. Bada-bing bada-boom: it is now easier to be the #1 search result for those same terms on Spotify.

As soon as I reported the erroneous report to Spotify and had them restore the playlist title and description, the botnet took it down again. This repeated half a dozen times over 2 weeks with my playlist existing without a title or description for the majority of the time.

I’m not alone in this and have found various playlists that also seem to be suffering from this issue (click here for an example if you’re curious about Romanian Manele music and here for GTA’s excellent soundtrack). This thread in Spotify’s support forums has other users reporting the issue.

The attack seems to have ended, but I almost gave up restoring my playlist every time it got taken down (I did consider writing a script that would auto-reply to Spotify’s takedown emails, though).

Since playlists are user-generated content, Spotify needs some type of system to deal with reports and make sure content that goes against the terms & conditions is taken down. After the 5th time my playlist got taken down and I asked if they could protect my playlist from the next auto-takedown, I got this answer:

“All user-created content can be reported, and while it may be possible that a report is invalid, all such reports need to go through our official report channel so we can handle them properly.”

So that’s a no. This means that anyone building playlists on Spotify with an unverified account can fall victim to this. Sure, the reporting account may get banned, but if it’s a botnet targeting you that doesn’t matter. That’s problematic, because unlike my hobbyist playlist with 100 followers, there are curation brands and artists with playlists that depend heavily on Spotify. They’re all exposed to this type of attack that seems to rely on either hacked accounts or easily-created free accounts.

Investment without security

People around the world are putting hours of effort into their streaming accounts: building playlists, followings, brands and in some cases companies using their presence. They’re exposed to insecurity.

Even accounts on platforms with better security get hacked, e.g. to misuse the trust someone has built up and run a cryptocurrency scam on followers (as fellow music-tech writer Cherie Hu recently became a victim of on Twitter, which besides Audius and the report fraud above was my third prompt for writing this piece).

Even if a streaming service can reinstate an account after a hack: the hack can damage your brand, e.g. if the hacker changes playlist titles and imagery to something offensive or scams, or just makes it impossible for you to keep running your playlist brand due to repeated reporting. If you enjoy services’ algorithmic recommendations, a hacker’s temporary account takeover can mess that up for you also.

Two-factor authentication is a basic standard for security. Maybe it’s time for streaming services to give it some priority and prevent fraud, scams, and theft.

Thinking small: a meditation on scale vs success for artists

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 4, pause for 4… Repeat.

When we think success, we tend to think big numbers. Most familiar examples of success have big numbers in common, especially those examples discussed around the world in newsletters and blogs like this one. The logical conclusion: success = big numbers.

Yet, when discussing success with musicians, I’ve found most would just be happy to make a difference to some people & be able to make a living off of it. If the goal is to make a living, then why does success necessarily involve racking up small amounts of royalties through thousands of plays until you finally have enough to make a living when combined with live gigs?

Our success maps are lousy. They’re based on highly visible examples of success which leads to a biased map. It also models strategy after something that worked in the past, but may not work as well now. If an artist achieved scale by cleverly playing the game of early-SoundCloud & the iTunes charts (Yellow Claw comes to mind) it’s impossible to copy that exact foundation since the context for the methodology has changed.

Breathe in, breathe out, think small

If the goal is to make a living, why bother playing the game of big numbers? Pitching playlists, building various social media profiles, gaming algorithms and spending countless hours on all that in the hope that the thousands of followers will translate into sufficient streams and bookings. It’s considered ‘the way’ to do it, but what if the goal can be achieved more efficiently on your own terms?

  • What does making a living mean for you? How much would you need monthly?
  • What do you enjoy doing? What would you like to have more time for?
  • How much time do you want to spend on your craft?
  • What do you dislike doing?

Take a moment (actually, take a week, or a month: this is your life we’re talking about). Breathe. Reflect. Define your goals by what you want, not by what you think is needed. Is having hundreds of thousands of fans a fun goal or is it actually methodology masquerading as as a goal? Achieving massive scale as an artist may look like success, but it’s often just a symptom of the methodology to achieve goals and not the goal itself.

Question your goals. Carefully & deliberately choose the game you play.

Why scale matters / mattered

Scale is a game. For companies that make money exploiting catalogues, scale is required in order to turn low margins into a big business. The same is true for ad-funded business: each individual ad serving isn’t worth much, but if you manage to get lots of people to constantly pay attention to your platform and your ads, you have a business. These dynamics underpin a lot of the modern music landscape: labels, social networks, music services – they generally all play a game of scale.

In the past, the range of available business models for musicians was quite limited, so musicians often opted to play the game of scale in order to sell lots of low margin products to make a living.

Thinking small(er)

Imagine you could only ever have 1,000 fans (not necessarily ‘1,000 true fans‘). How would you turn that into a business? Your livelihood would depend on the patronage of these people: how would you win that patronage?

But a fanbase is not actually the starting point of either your strategy or the ‘user journey’ to becoming a paid fan. Thinking small requires you to question how people discover you and your music. What do you need to convey in order for people to understand that being a fan of your music is different?

Inhale, hold, exhale, wait, repeat.

Ask: What are you leading your fans towards? What can you ‘sell’ to them and at what price? Remember: the higher the price, the smaller you can keep your numbers. Small scale has considerable advantages: the communication overhead is smaller, signal to noise ratio is better, you personally feel much more connected to your fans and so will they, plus it will be easier to reach them. A common trap is that people focus on ‘how to get heard’ by new people without thinking carefully about ‘how will they hear me again?’ In the case of small scale, you could potentially drop everyone a personal note or even a call.

Be brave in imagining scenarios. What if 90% of your art was only available to your Patreon, Substack or OnlyFans subscribers?

Create scarcity early

Figure out what’s the smallest number of fans you could monetize in order to make a living. Making abundant what’s easy to replicate is typically a good idea, as it helps with word of mouth & leverages the network effect of platforms & organisations that play the game of scale. But pause there.

Hold your breathe for 4 seconds, breathe out for 4 seconds, wait, and breathe again.

Now consider the fan journey: if people discover you through word of mouth or a playlist, what do you want their first impressions to be? What type of relation do you want them to have with you & your music? Through what tools and platforms? How do you bring them there when they’re first introduced to you? What does this introduction look like?

Reward fans with scarcity and do so early on. Scarcity is everything that can’t be easily made abundant: a one-on-one call, limited edition items, an NFT, playing a video game with you online, etc. Align it with what you like & what your fans like. Consider how you reward: perhaps you reward everyone who completes certain steps in the fan journey with something scarce, which can be as simple as a personalized message or a public shout-out. Of course, in order to build a business model, you will also reward people with scarce items in exchange for currency.

You can’t start early enough. Set your goals. Think about scarcity. Think about your fan experience, even if nobody has heard your music yet. Build it out together with your community.

(And if you decide you want scale: that’s fine)

Exhale.

Deplatform yourself: how to leave Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Social media is designed to be addictive. By monopolizing aspects of your social life, it also locks you in. Here’s how to break the cycle.

Concentration of power

My reasons for not being on Facebook and soon deleting WhatsApp and Instagram are manifold. I won’t go into them here, but I will highlight the deciding factor and hopefully pre-empt common whataboutisms. Facebook Inc., which runs FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and other social brands, is too powerful.

If all of the above were separate apps, there’s a good chance I’d be using all of them actively. They’re not, so one company controls nearly all of my digital social footprint and that of billions of others around the world.

Do I trust them? Not really. For many of the reasons you can read on DeleteFacebook.com. Meanwhile I, together with billions of other users, am building the value Facebook extracts through its advertising business. One day, I decided to stop rewarding the company and deactivated my Facebook account, before eventually deleting it. In the next weeks, I’m finally deleting Instagram and WhatsApp too.

For simplicity, I’ll be referring to Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and other brands of the social media giant as Facebook Inc. throughout this article.

Delete, deplatform

The first thing you should know about leaving Facebook Inc. is that you’re not just deleting. Instead, you’re switching platforms. You’re still going to get your news from somewhere, have digital social interactions with friends, need info about events, etc. This is the value you’re getting out of the platform. So, your first step is:

Step 1: start building value in places other than Facebook Inc.

A good example of this are events. Bonus: this example also allows me to address the local underground scenes here in Berlin (and around the world) who have many issues with Facebook policies ranging from female nudity, sex work, to human rights more broadly. Too often, the only place where one can find information about a rave doubling as a fundraising event for marginalized people is on Facebook. If we know and acknowledge that Facebook is problematic, why are we giving Facebook the information monopoly?

Giving Facebook Inc. an information monopoly accomplishes two things:

  1. It makes it harder for you to ever leave the platform, since all your audience & connections are on Facebook Inc.
  2. It makes it harder for other people to leave the platform.

Whether it’s for solidarity or for yourself, it’s time to build audience outside of Facebook. I recommend a mix of channels owned by various companies, plus something owned just by you: phone numbers and email addresses. For the former category, depending on your purpose, think LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Reddit, etc.

Start deplatforming yourself.

Build value elsewhere.

Free yourself and others.

Limit the data

Everything you do on Facebook Inc.’s apps is tracked. Everything you type (even if you delete it & never post it), scrolling, tapping, zooming, pausing on stories, everything you see, share, like, geolocation, photo metadata, contacts in your phone, etc.

Step 2: limit the data you give to Facebook Inc.

This is basically as simple as interacting with the apps less. There are a bunch of ways to do that. You can limit the screen time of specific apps, you can set your phone display to black & white to make apps less interesting, you can just delete the mobile apps and go mobile web / desktop only.

For me, this meant I stopped posting to professional communities on Facebook Groups years ago. They’d been really valuable for me, since I moved between countries a lot and groups were a great way to network with music professionals wherever I was. Due to step 1, I already had many of these people on my newsletter & other social media platforms and figured I would just have to write so well, that this group would make sure my reach would extend to the group I was leaving behind.

Take a vacation

Before I even considered deleting, I would occasionally deactivate my Facebook account (and recently did the same with Instagram). This allowed me to disappear from the site temporarily and see:

  1. How the social media designed to be addictive was nested into my daily habits and thinking patterns.
  2. Whether I would feel better without it.
  3. What information I would miss.
  4. What social connections I would miss.
  5. Which accounts I created using Facebook (e.g. Spotify).

Step 3: deactivate your Facebook Inc. accounts for short periods of time

To most of us, it feels daunting to delete these accounts, so go experience what it’s like. Deactivate your account and remove the app. If after a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks you feel like you want to return, you can reactivate your account.

During one of my first breaks a friend asked me a question I hadn’t considered: wouldn’t I miss the ability to visit a deceased family member’s profile? It held me back from deleting, but after months of going without Facebook I realized I didn’t care, made a digital backup just in case, and decided that I needed to deplatform myself asap if I was seriously considering giving Facebook a role in how I remember a dead relative.

Backup

I’ve posted thousands of bits of information to Facebook Inc.’s services. This includes photos from all the places I’ve lived in, videos, chats with friends, etc. This is how I got the most value out of this social media: as a place to collect, share and create memories. Now it’s time to take that data back.

Step 4: download your data from Facebook Inc.

Facebook’s various services have functionality that let you download all your data. Do this. Review your data. Consider what’s important to you and check if it’s in there: photos, likes, private messages, etc.

Make sure to have more than one copy of this data. I have mine on multiple hard drives & a copy securely in the cloud (basically: a digital hard drive).

You will want to follow this step multiple times: once to review all the data, so that you know if anything needs to be backed up more manually and once before you finally delete your account.

Contact

If you’ve been deplatforming yourself for a while (see step 1), you’ll probably have something like 10-40% of your contacts on platforms outside of Facebook’s realm. Through experimenting with deactivation, you should have a good grasp of who you care to stay in touch with (probably not that person who you haven’t seen for 15 years, only post a yearly ‘happy birthday’ to, and then enjoy the photos of their dog the rest of the year).

Step #5: make sure you stay in touch with the people you value

This step is probably the most work. It involves sharing & requesting contact info from people. Whereas on Instagram & Facebook, it’s easy to post updates in your feed so that people know what you’re doing, on WhatsApp you’ll need a more one-on-one approach. When direct messaging people, you’ll probably get questions about why you’re leaving. While your decision to simply not do business with Facebook Inc. anymore is simple and straightforward, people might challenge you. So make it easy for yourself and have a brief explanation or account deletion epitaph you can link to (preferably hosted somewhere outside of the Facebook Inc. realm).

Be firm: not wanting this company to dominate and monopolize your online social life is perfectly reasonable. If people want to chat about it, you can always say you’d be happy to do so on Telegram, Signal, or Zoom.

Delete yourself

Then comes the moment of liberation. Whereas a deactivation means Facebook Inc. can keep your data and use it for their extractive business model, a deletion in many countries requires Facebook to actually remove your data permanently.

Step #6: delete your Facebook Inc. accounts

There are a few important details you should not miss here and hopefully deactivating your accounts have prepared you for this: make sure to unlink your Facebook account from other accounts. If you created accounts using Facebook, make sure to have an alternative login method for them.

Here’s a guide to help with the rest, including the need to manually delete things shared in social contexts, that might not get removed when you delete your account.

A note for those who want to, but can’t

Unfortunately, deleting social media profiles can be a privilege. It makes certain things a lot harder, especially if you depend on social media for your business, as so many in music do. In my case, it means saying no to freelance jobs I was previously able to say yes to.

The most important step in this whole piece is step #1. Build value elsewhere. Instead of Facebook Groups use Discord communities. Instead of Facebook Events use Resident Advisor or your genre’s equivalent. Use both whenever necessary.

If you can’t afford to leave the platform yourself, at least make it easier for others to do so. This will eventually also decrease your own reliance on Facebook. Every little bit helps.

For marketing professionals reading this: consider being explicit about setting up campaigns that happen outside of the Facebook realm. It’s a great differentiator. A lot is possible with a mix of Twitch, YouTube, Clubhouse, Discord, Twitter, Telegram, WordPress, Shopify, Patreon, Medium, Substack, Bandcamp, etc.

All of this may take time

I first started deactivating my Facebook in 2015. Now, 6 years later, I feel confident enough to pull the trigger on Instagram and WhatsApp too, despite needing the former for professional reasons and the latter for family groups.

Start now. Take back power step by step. You can do each of the above steps without having to follow through with any subsequent step. They all have standalone benefits.

Resources

Web3, the internet of value, and concerning barriers to participation

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The current NFT furor is partially fueled by early crypto buyers converting virtual money into something that might retain value better: art. This has been the case pre-Bitcoin, as this BBC article from 2017 about traditional art investments points out well:

“As art has no correlation to the stock market, it means paintings can go up in value even when the market crashes, making it a good diversification for an investment portfolio.”

One of the reasons why people are excited about blockchain is the fact that it allows for further decentralization of the web. Whereas the ‘web 2.0’ focused on feeds, social data, APIs and ultimately led to the creation of mega-platforms, discussions around the current ‘Web3’ tend to focus more on protocols, not platforms. That’s exciting, because we’re discussing the building blocks of the next generation of connected applications and their infrastructure.

One of the concepts the Web3 enables is the ‘internet of value‘: an internet where anything of value, from money to intellectual property, can travel as fast as information itself. Currently, transactions of money often flow slowly since they move through centralized bodies (hello, last year’s royalties) and that’s exactly where technologists hope to reduce friction.

This is also why there’s so much talk about trust. Systems, and the networks that support them, need to carry a certain legitimacy for people to adopt them.

One of the most exciting developments in the internet of value, and one that may shape fan culture for the next generation, is that of social tokens. Oversimplifcation: a creator of music sells ‘tokens’ to a community of fans, in order for those fans to unlock perks. These tokens become more valuable as the creator becomes more successful. If you thought BTS fans were everywhere already: just imagine a scenario where they’re holding tokens and the more popular BTS get, the more valuable their tokens get.1

Here’s my concern, though:

Many of these communities (and economies) are currently designed in a way that you have to buy yourself in by converting cryptocurrency into tokens or earn your way in by creating value for the wider network. The latter phenomenon can be seen in ad-free free-to-play games like those of Supercell, where the majority of users create valuable context for a small minority of users to spend their money. After decades of creating value on other people’s platforms and then having to pay to reach your own audience (e.g. Facebook), the token model is a very welcome change – but how do we make it inclusive?

Not everyone is able to buy themselves in early. While it’s true that you don’t always have to buy yourself in, e.g. in the case of Audius airdropping tokens to its users, the amount of effort required to earn your way in later on may increase with the value of tokens. Yet it’s not exactly about effort.

The goal is typically to make sure that those that provide an adequate amount of value to the network or platform get a token, so they can share in the overall value of the network. Kind of like getting a share in Facebook for posting cat pictures that get tons of likes (or your own music). However it’s not just a share: tokens often represent access. Access to communities, access to voting on the future of the network, access to features or perks, etc.

Tracking value

For the sake of inclusivity, it’s crucial that such systems accurately track and compensate value creation. But value is abstract, as anyone familiar with discussions about the value and price of music will know. Unfortunately, many systems are set up with the assumption that all value will be fairly compensated. While I admire the idealism and drive behind them, it does mean that people will be left out – either because they can’t afford to buy themselves in, or because they don’t get awarded a token for the value they create. For example, the person posting cat photos in the above example might get a token, but the people who took those photos don’t get anything.

The NFT market currently also has this problem, with minting fees being a barrier to entry to many artists who can’t afford it. This is an issue that’s being addressed, but for the time being it can be prohibitively expensive to mint NFTs on some of the more popular blockchains like Ethereum. Meanwhile, the Mint Fund is a great example of an initiative that helps artists fund their NFTs, placing emphasis on the underrepresented.

Without taking these exclusionary issues into consideration when designing systems, we risk the next generation of internet culture to be one of currency and speculation. An internet where people with less money (fiat or crypto) get locked out or have less power over the platforms they use, despite perhaps creating more value that can’t be translated into currency.

That’s possibly still a step up from the internet of extractive megaplatforms like Facebook. Plus, if a platform or community decides that’s actually the way they want to work, that’s fine. However, there are a lot of instances where this is not an explicit decision, but rather something that’s believed will be resolved in the future through improvements in technology.

We messed this up with the web 2.0, where the promise was an interoperable internet, but we ended up with an internet where a few platforms extract value from everyone at the cost of privacy and the value of content. 20 years later, we have another shot at this. Let’s get it right this time. From the start.

Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash.

1 It’s not always a good idea to create extrinsic motivators for behaviour that is already the result of strong intrinsic motivation.

The Metaverse: flashback to 2007

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Music’s future is intertwined with the development of its media context. The metaverse, a concept describing persistent shared virtual spaces, is a currently much debated topic in order to think about the media future we’re creating. This article is about that future.

The development of technology tends to move through hype cycles and reaches a peak of inflated expectations, before disillusion sets in and a phase of productivity kicks off. In music, blockchain went through such a hype cycle once and now its NFT use case is at the start of another cycle.

I assumed the same of another trending topic in music: the metaverse. I was wrong. Or at least, the Google Trends graph didn’t look as I expected: flat and then a spike in 2020. Instead it looked like this:

Google Trends: Worldwide interest over time for ‘metaverse’

I was curious about the spike in interest in 2007. Heydays of virtual world Second Life and Entropia. In particular, I was interested in how people used the word metaverse back then and what ideas they had.

Peaks of inflated expectations are often highly creative phases. There’s an influx of mental energy spent on a new technology or concept and many ideas get tested. Just look at NFTs right now. Over time, some ideas get lost or become implicit and eventually forgotten.

What stood out to me is a 2007 article by futurist Jamais Cascio titled Openness and the Metaverse Singularity. It lays out four potential pathways towards the singularity through various metaverse models based on an axis of simulation vs augmentation and intimate (personal & expression) vs extimate (informational & control).

All of these scenarios occurred simultaneously.

For virtual worlds, you can look at Fortnite and Roblox. Mirror worlds can be interacted with through Google Street View. Augmented reality in this context describes the meta-layer of information about the world around us, e.g. a friend’s review of a coffee place you’re about to enter, but also use cases such as Pokemon Go. Lifelogging describes concepts like the quantified self, but also the footprints you leave behind in Google Maps, smart speakers, and other learning systems that can then help you better in the future.

For each of these media contexts or metaverses, there are music examples:

  • Virtual worlds: VR concerts, shows inside games, but also virtual avatars and avatars as pop stars (Lil Nas X x Roblox, Travis Scott x Fortnite, The Weeknd x Wave).
  • Augmented reality: geo-located music unlockables (Jonas Brothers x Landmrk, Jeezy x Drops).
  • Lifelogging: personalized music experiences based on past data (streaming service UX, smart speakers).

I find mirror worlds a little difficult to clearly define as an existing context for music, especially right now during the pandemic, but perhaps livestreams made with 3D cameras fit the bill.

When we talk about ‘the metaverse’ in 2021, we’re discussing a convergence of trends:

  • Gaming & virtual environments going mainstream.
  • Development of new virtual economies, possibly underpinned by blockchain technology and tokens.
  • Artificial intelligence and its ability to understand users in order to create or provide suitable content and context, and create realistic simulations.
  • The Internet of Things with all its connected devices, like smart speakers and smart phones – which provide a pervasive and persistent virtual layer to our physical world which is always turned on.
  • Connectivity improvements have meant it’s feasible to jump into virtual worlds from your mobile phone, watch streams, or stream to thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people.
  • Various improvements in hardware & software have made it possible to create beautiful virtual environments, incl in VR, that are highly interactive and customizable.

In the convergence of these (and other) trends also lie the contexts in which we can explore music’s future as a business & creative medium. As we define and design that future, it’s important we embed the ethical dimensions in that process: things like privacy, representation & inclusion, power concentration & dynamics, ecological footprints.

Flashback even further than 2007:

One year of COVID-19 lockdowns

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

It’s been a year since I sent out the first MUSIC x CORONA email: the newsletter turned all of the most important music-related pandemic headlines into a daily digest (since November it’s been folded into MUSIC x). One year later, we take a moment to reflect on that extremely uncertain time.

This week, one year ago

On March 11, 2020, the coronavirus outbreak was officially classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. In the first weeks of March 2020, global stock markets saw a series of crashes, the worst being on March 16 when the Dow Jones saw the single largest point drop in history. Italy was the first country in Europe to enter lockdown, with people there expecting concert cancellations until May and then a recovery. Meanwhile, they waited and sang on their balconies.

Schemes to help live music were launched. In the UK, the government abolished business rates for small venues. Sound Royalties launched an advance fund. Bandcamp announced its first COVID-19 fundraiser, which would see monthly repeats and become known as Bandcamp Fridays. The American Guild of Musical Artists set up a fund, the Recording Academy and MusiCares set up a fund, and UK Music started calling on the government for a support scheme similar to the one already in place in Denmark.

There was a strong sense that ‘this could be it’ for the music business. Various essays outlined that the streaming model alone can’t support the industry and called on people to support artists more directly.

In an effort to explore ways to stay connected and potentially identify new revenue sources, artists turned to livestreaming:

This week, next year

One year ago, few of us imagined we’d still be in a state of lockdowns right now. Although it should be noted that for many workers & entrepreneurs in music the situation is absolutely dire, some of the worst case scenarios didn’t become reality.

While the music business still struggles with necessary restrictions and (sometimes unnecessary) uncertainty, things are a lot more predictable than one year ago. The past year has clearly shown that innovation lies not just with technology, but also the application thereof. We’ve been able to celebrate countless artists who put their creative force into livestreaming, virtual and mixed reality, new business models, or NFTs. They dreamt up ways to use this tech to build connections and new revenue and brought innovation into the world. Artists are innovators.

This thing is not over yet. As vaccinations will allow for certain parts of the world to almost completely open for business again in 2021, I implore everyone to remain supportive of industry workers in countries where vaccines are not expected to be readily available this year.

The pandemic is a bleeping marathon. I want to say “congrats! You’ve made it this far,” but we’re not at the finish line yet. So instead, a pat on the shoulder and a drink of water in the form of the MUSIC x newsletters to keep you going. It’s been rough, especially with lockdown fatigue setting in after all these long dark months in the northern hemisphere. The days are getting warmer, vaccination numbers higher… just a little bit further.

As a 2020 veteran, 2021 will be a breeze. You got this.

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Music-related meme circulating the web during the first months of the pandemic. Please consult local health authorities for the most up to date guidance.

The MUSIC x CORONA newsletter archives are available for free and provide an organised daily snapshot of how the music industry dealt with the pandemic in 2020. The newsletter has since been folded into MUSIC x, which you can subscribe to for free at http://musicx.email.

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