Author: Bas Grasmayer

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 BĂśhme 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.

Image
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.

You can support our work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/musicx

Vaccination Passport example

Guide: Vaccination passports & their role in reopening live music

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 1 Comment on Guide: Vaccination passports & their role in reopening live music

After a year of lockdowns, the live music business still faces as much uncertainty as it did in 2020. One of the solutions under consideration is the use of vaccination passports to make events exclusive to people who have received a vaccination. It’s a seemingly straightforward solution, but politically sensitive and technically complicated. Here’s the MUSIC x analysis, jointly written by Bas Grasmayer and Maarten Walraven.

[Disclaimer: Bas started the daily MUSIC x CORONA newsletter one year ago (now folded into MUSIC x), bringing on Maarten a little while later. Despite having studied Covid-19 and its impact on the music industry daily, we are not policy or public health experts. Furthermore, this is one of the most actively researched topics right now. New insights emerge regularly. Please consult local experts when planning & find the most up to date information.]

What are vaccination passports?

A ‘vaccination passport’ is a government-sanctioned form of evidence that the holder thereof has been vaccinated against Covid-19. The concept started appearing early in the pandemic, for example as part of an ‘immunity passport’ study by German researchers who wanted to find out how lockdown restrictions could be lifted for some people. 

Fast forward to today, plus a five hour flight away, and we find Israel as one of the first countries in the world to use a vaccination passport in order to ease restrictions. The country has already given over half of its population at least one vaccine dose. The plan, called the Green Pass, allows people to visit gyms, hotels, theatres, and concerts by showing a QR code. When scanned, it tells the business whether that person has been vaccinated recently. 

China has launched a similar scheme, which integrates with WeChat and is intended to make international travel possible. The EU will come with a similar proposal this month, dubbed a Digital Green Pass. Now, international governments are opening talks about mutual recognition of each others’ certificates in order to allow a return of unrestricted travel – or at least travel with less limitations.

Travel

This is where the topic of vaccination passports gets hairy. The World Health Organisation has cautioned against such certificates for international travel, due to the still limited global availability of vaccines. This leads to practical and ethical concerns, the latter stemming from the fact that existing inequalities get reinforced and amplified due to the unavailability of vaccines in large, mostly poorer, parts of the world.

This is not the only ethical concern.

Ethics

For a year now, we’ve all craved to ‘get back to normal’. Therefore there are justified concerns that certain vaccination passport schemes may get rushed. This would leave a number of ethical challenges unaddressed:

People who can’t or won’t get vaccinated. Leaving aside that not everyone might be able to get a jab as soon as they want it, there are people who, for health reasons like pregnancy, immunodeficiency, or allergies, can’t get vaccinated. In some places in the world, certain ethnic minorities are vaccine hesitant. That goes not just for developing countries, but even the UK. How is this dealt with? What aspects of public life are they excluded from? What accommodations are made for them? For how long? Can employers require proof of vaccination?

Privacy & security. Throughout the past year, a lot of expertise has been built up around this topic. One of our favourite examples of a privacy-friendly contact tracing app is closecontact, born out of Berlin’s club culture. Unfortunately, there are also examples of security fuck ups, like in The Netherlands where its national ‘municipal health service’ (GGD) had a data leak with millions of data points, which was then sold online (not by hackers, but by call center employees who could export everyone’s private data with a single click). In the same country, a provider of corona tests also had a data leak that exposed thousands of people. So the question is: how do these systems get designed in a way that respect privacy and don’t accidentally end up exposing sensitive information, like medical history, contacts, passport numbers, bank info or social security numbers?

Immunity

The next difficult question is how long immunity actually lasts and how different vaccination passport schemes account for that. The big question since the early days of the pandemic was: can you catch it twice? The answer to that is complicated.

While it is currently uncommon for people to catch Covid-19 twice, it is possible, as scientists in Hong Kong recently confirmed. A key word in the preceding sentence is currently, since it’s not yet known how long immunity lasts which is likely to differ from person to person. It is also unclear whether being protected by antibodies means you can’t harbour and transmit the virus to other people.

Oh, and there are open questions around the various mutations.

That’s all fine & dandy, but…

Yes. The upsides. 

We are so close to finally being able to work towards the recovery of so many sectors of our lives and societies. Patience is running thin, especially in countries where many people haven’t been able to count on any significant financial support from employers or governments.

Vaccine passports are happening. They’re already a thing in Israel and China, whereas the EU & many other countries will likely have their own schemes in place by summer. While we depend on our governments for guidance and support, it’s also up to all of us to take responsibility. Governments don’t always act in everyone’s best interest, e.g. in the case of Tanzania, where the government has been falsely claiming they’re Covid-19 free. 

So, don’t be a Villalobos and fly to Zanzibar for a plague rave. If you’re planning a tour in a country where venue wheelchair access isn’t government-mandated, do you just say “too bad” and exclude part of your fanbase? It’s a complicated topic and we don’t intend to put things in black/white terms: there is plenty of room for nuance and hard trade-offs. The point is: our responsibility doesn’t end where the law ends.

The return of live

So what’s next for live music? Are we heading into a period where live concerts and festivals start up with access restricted to those who can prove they have either been vaccinated or have a recent negative test result? It’s not a straightforward decision. In the UK, after the government announced its roadmap towards opening up society after 21 June, Reading & Leeds and Creamfields festivals sold 170k tickets in three days (whether this number includes those tickets punters kept from the previous year is not something we’ve been able to verify through their public statements). The optimism of the UK government’s roadmap isn’t shared across the European continent, let alone the rest of the world. Festivals such as Rock am Ring & Rock im Park in Germany have just been cancelled. Other organizations have moved their festivals to the fall (see: Bonnaroo, Slam Dunk, Aftershock) or are still postponed from 2020 for later this year, such as Wonderfruit. It’s all up in the air, it seems, which is one reason why organisers are keen on certainty and a Covid passport can provide it. 

Responsibility

A concert promoter, festival organiser and even artists themselves work with varying levels of insurances surrounding concerts, festivals, and tours in 2021. Whether any future cancellations are covered by insurance depends on many variables. In one landmark case in the US from last year where the venue The Raven & the Bow took their insurer to court, it seems that the parties worked out their differences outside of the courts. In other words, no precedent has been set there. In countries such as the Netherlands and Germany (but not yet the UK) governments have set up insurance schemes to secure organisations for their losses should they need to cancel because of variants or other unexpected pandemic-related changes. 

Similar to these insurance schemes, putting in place a Covid passport is something that governments will have to take the lead on. Søren Eskilde, of Danish festival Smukfest – due to take place early August – puts it as follows:

“The government has to provide a phased plan with certain criteria that must be met for us to hold a festival. For example, a dialogue about the possibilities of the quick test and what the corona pass will be able to do to get as safe and sound on its feet as possible.”

Similarly, Eric van Eerdenburg, director of Dutch festival Lowlands – scheduled for late August – firmly told NME [ed. note: emphasis ours]: 

“As long as there are restrictions then there will be a need for testing and maybe vaccination passports. It’s not something we’ll push upon the people, but if the government says we have to then we will. We won’t make it up ourselves because it’s a hell of a lot of work. It’s a government that should impose that upon the people.” 

Concert and festival organisers alike have made their day-job out of problem-solving, but they need clear guidance from their governments. If that guidance includes a vaccination passport, organisers will move forward and implement that solution to bring big crowds together. In other words, this means that responsibility for whether big and small music events can go ahead lies squarely with those same governments. Give a mouse a cookie… and they’ll put 50,000 people together in a field. 

Effectiveness, or what’s possible

Will a vaccination passport even be effective when it comes to visiting a concert or festival? Can you completely exclude Covid-19 from your event this summer with rapid testing and vaccination passports? Two questions that probably get two very different answers from the promoters of concerts and organisers of festivals versus the epidemiologists and public health experts. The reason for that lies with the risk involved. Is, to put it bluntly, a little bit of Covid at your event manageable, or a risk that should be completely avoided? There are festivals that aim to go ahead with rapid testing, like Albanian festival Unum which has its government’s blessing, even though there’s the issue of false negatives. Furthermore, talk of variants gets everyone’s hair to stand up on the back of their necks. Especially when it comes to the question of a vaccine’s effectiveness against them. It’s in the nature of a virus to mutate so it makes sense that vaccines will need upgrades in the future in the form of booster shots. But as Dr. Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health at the University of Southampton, told NME: “we’d rather that didn’t happen this year and that we could have a bit of time to prepare for that kind of thing.” The message there is clear, do not rush anything this summer, or even this year. There are so many unknowns and to invite those to play havoc would be a bad idea. 

Where to draw the line then? It makes sense to think about a couple of things when it comes to events this summer and fall. 

  • Think local, both in terms of line-ups and in terms of visitors. The risks around international travel are greater than those on the national, or even better, regional levels. This also includes the rules around quarantines for artists travelling around, or sudden lockdowns and travel restrictions. 
  • Focus on scientifically backed trials that help set boundaries on how to operate a large event within a pandemic. Remember that trial in Germany and their advice:
    • No full capacity concerts
    • Only seated concerts
    • Increased number of entry points
    • Mask-wearing mandatory
    • Consume food and drinks while seated
    • Adequate ventilation systems (for indoor events)
    • Hygiene stewards to enforce rules
  • In light of the previous point, focus on a steady return to full capacity shows. It’s great to finally be able to put concerts and festivals back on, but they don’t necessarily need to be at full capacity immediately. Let’s wait until, for example, we move from a pandemic to an endemic situation. 
  • Think about hybrid events. Livestreaming is here to stay and offers both a different dynamic and a way to engage a broader geographical audience. One example is Montreux Jazz Festival who are still hoping for a live and in-person festival in July, but have also prepared for the music to stream live and reach people regardless. 

Considering the above three points, a vaccination passport would not make too much of a difference. Of course, if you take a strict policy that only vaccinated people can attend your event, that will exclude a bunch of non-vaccinated people (whether by choice or circumstance). It could be an option this summer, whether it’s one to take is another question. And as shown in the above quotes by festival organisers, the tendency in the industry will be to jump headfirst into problem-solving mode and to get your festival, or concert, up and running with as many visitors as possible. There is a responsibility at the government level to set expectations that are realistic and, preferably, will take into account various scenarios. 

Will an event’s target audience actually be vaccinated by the time planned events occur? Most vaccination schemes are prioritized by age group, so might classical music, the audience of which tends to skew older, be one of the first genres to return to normal? To what degree will we be able to count on international and especially intercontinental travel?

Even with vaccination passports, 2021 is shaping up to be a year with much uncertainty and pioneering.

Photo by Lukas on Unsplash.