Bas Grasmayer

If you want to start a music brand, don’t wait until the pandemic is over

Posted on January 26, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer

Without live music, it may feel like a bad time to start a music brand. However when considering the realities of the post-pandemic landscape and the opportunities on the road to there, now is exactly the right time.

Post-pandemic

We’re probably a year away from things going back to normal. People are hopeful for the summer season, but it may not look like last year’s summer at all. Germany’s top virologist, Christian Drosten, has warned that 2021’s summer could be much worse than 2020’s:

“The fact that we had such a relaxed summer in 2020 probably had to do with the fact that our case numbers stayed below a critical threshold in the spring. But that’s not the case now.”

Getting case numbers down remains hard, because of the high infection rates in many areas and the newly mutated virus strains which are more contagious.

Drosten argues against early relaxation of lockdowns to avoid scenarios of overload in hospitals in the summer – which would lead to a summer lockdown. The article doesn’t mention what early relaxation means, but it will obviously be difficult for politicians to extend current measures deep into spring. Which, tragically, means that we have a realistic scenario of a summer spike in COVID-19 cases.

The longer this goes on, the greater the wear on the infrastructure that brings so many musicians and fans together: agencies, events, clubs, suppliers, the artists themselves… they’re all facing uncertainty and many of them will not make it to the finish line. This means that the normal we’ll go ‘back to’, will be quite different from the normal we knew before. In a sense, this can be seen as music’s 9/11 moment in the sense that there’s a demarcation of before and after or perhaps more aptly: music’s second Napster moment.

From 2021 onward, live music will have to do more with less. This may create an (even) more competitive landscape. While music fans’ eagerness to see live music and party may create large demand, the infrastructure to supply that demand is highly regulated (think: crowd & fire safety, noise regulation, alcohol licenses, sanitation, etc.) and may not be able to scale back up quickly.* I suspect there will be a lot of emerging opportunity in the informal sphere (house parties, illegal raves, etc.).

It will be hard work to launch a music brand in the competitive space of post-pandemic live music, so get started now so you’re positioned to seize the opportunities when they emerge.

* Sidenote: if this scenario of undersupply plays out like that, it will be interesting to see how it affects pricing and what role livestreaming can play to make up for the limited supply.

Pre-“post-pandemic” opportunities

What opportunities can you leverage today in order to set up a resilient music brand for the post-pandemic landscape?

Wielding influence and getting opportunities in music is highly correlated by your ability to get things in front of an audience. So, building a music brand is about building audience. If you can show you can get a crowd to a venue, the venue is more likely to give you a chance or better conditions (e.g. not having to pay fees, getting weekend slots, etc.). The same for the artists you can attract: if you can create significantly more opportunities for the artist than they already have, they’ll consider working with you. So, aside from defining your music category and brand positioning, goal number 1 should be:

Build visible audience.

If you don’t have any music you can release, start with curation. The mix of channels you’ll maintain is quite similar to when you release music. Consider the below:

Instagram. In my opinion one of the most important tools for music networking right now (read: Instagram vs SoundCloud: the battle for the center of music culture). For posts, focus on shareable content like memes related to your subculture / genre / scene. Instagram creates extra visibility for new features, so at the time of writing that means: create reels and add the music you stand for. Use stories to drive your audience to your other channels (set up a Linktree or similar) and to recycle previous posts to your audience’s growing audience.
TikTok. There are a lot of articles about how, if you’re after Gen Z, you should use TikTok. That’s bullshit. The platform is growing beyond its early demographics (John Lennon and David Bowie have profiles there now). So if your audience skews older, then get there before other music brands in your scene get there. Cut in front of them. When they join the platform, you’ll not only be an example to them, but also to the artists and events they represent.
Spotify. Playlist follower counts are public, so this is an important way of building visible audience and connecting people to your brand on a regular basis. Brand connection bonus: unlike with social media, people actually don’t have to look at their screen to be connected to you through curated music.

A basic strategy would be to create two playlists. In the first, you just add all relevant tracks you can find. Try different searches for your genre and see what shows up. Claim gaps by using keywords in your title and playlist description. I did this with a Jersey club playlist I made (though I didn’t have a specific goal in mind) and was shocked to find out it had grown to hundreds of followers. Use a playlist organising tool (here are some) to reorder your playlist weekly or monthly, so that it always looks fresh when people land on the playlist (some tools remove and re-add all tracks, which creates new “added to playlist” dates for all tracks).

Set up a second playlist, but restrict its length to 20-30 tracks. Change at least half of the tracks each week and make sure most music is released recently (e.g. last ~3 months). Add the day of the week that you refresh it to the title or description, so people know with what interval to come back to your playlist. Give everyone else a reminder through your social media whenever you refresh your Hyperpop Sunday, Post-punk Monday, Wobble Wednesday or 2step Tuesday playlist.

Depending on your scene and whether you’re releasing music yourself, you may use other channels like SoundCloud, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook (for the groups and events), etc. But as a start, don’t take on more than 2-3 channels. Get them up and running. It’s a lot of work.

Later on, you can set up a network on Discord, so that the creators and fans of the music you’re promoting on Instagram and Spotify can actually talk to each other, share music, etc. A community will help you to spot trends, new talent, and potential new collaborators (for example, you’ll probably have a need for visual artists, since your mediums are mostly visual).

If you’re planning on doing events, make an extra effort to showcase local talent and to build local audience: you’re going to need it when you start hosting your first events.

Develop experience in audience activation.

Your business will depend on your ability to get fans to go to gigs, buy merchandise, stream music, etc. As soon as you get some type of following, you should start learning about how to do these things.

Livestreams are a perfect way to learn how to get people excited and committed to something. If you’re not ready to sell tickets, that’s fine: people are paying with their time, so there’s still a transaction that will inform you about their commitment and the quality of what you’ve put together.

Financially and emotionally, it’s a lot less painful to have a livestream with only a few viewers than it is to have a new release flop or have DJs and bands play to an empty room. Livestreams are your training wheels for the real thing.

Livestreams also let you know who’s in the room, plus you can connect with a global pool of talent (timezones permitting) rather than whoever shows up to your local events. This allows you to build a network significantly faster than previously (with exceptions of those times a genre starts bubbling up online and is not represented well offline, e.g. the early days of moombahton).

You can also go beyond the livestream and throw full-on virtual events in Minecraft, in plug.dj, or various other tools. Make sure to record these events, since it will provide you with content you can share through your various channels.

Finally, these digital counterparts of the live music experience will have some role to play in the post-pandemic landscape. Having experience in this area will give you a special advantage.

In conclusion.

Just a two-word conclusion if you’re thinking about starting a music brand.

Start now.

Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash

Music startup Wave ditches VR as Steam reports 71% YoY increase in virtual reality revenue

Posted on January 19, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer

To those that have been paying attention to immersive music experience startup Wave, the recent announcement that they are sunsetting their VR app on Steam should not come as a surprise:

We founded Wave almost five years ago to connect humanity through immersive music experiences. That journey started in the VR space, with our community-driven VR app on Steam, and it’s been rewarding watching our community of creators use our tools to host their own VR concerts. We never foresaw the incredible things people would create, and often attending those shows felt like peering into the future of live music / visual art performance and being blown away by the result.

Two years ago we pivoted out of VR into gaming and live-streaming, as the VR industry didn’t develop as quickly as we’d hoped. Artists need audiences to thrive, and we realized VR just wasn’t there yet, and there was a bigger opportunity for artists outside headsets. Even though ti doesn’t fit our current business model, we’ve kept TheWaveVR app and servers running just because the community in there has made such inspiring stuff. Unfortunately we built the user tools on top of Google Poly, which is shutting down.

As much as we’d love to, we aren’t able to spend the resources to build a new backend pipeline, since we are already spread so thin trying to accomplish our current set of non VR objectives. We are still a relatively small startup. The hardest part of running a startup is choosing what to focus on, which has led us to the difficult decision to sunset TheWaveVR app on Steam and Oculus.

Even though this means the Wave VR shows will come to a pause, we think this is the best decision for the long term future of the Wave community, and we promise to do everything we can to one day bring back this experience in an even more evolved form. Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for joining us for all those multi-hour VR raves and for helping us craft this vision of the future of music and art. We hope you’ll join us for this next chapter. — Originally tweeted by Wave (@TheWaveXR) on January 15, 2021.

The startup, originally known as TheWaveVR, had increasingly started to focus on immersive experiences that don’t require VR. The VR was replaced in their URL and social media handles by XR, which typically denotes mixed reality although it’s also used for ‘extended reality’ or ‘cross-reality’.

Will Wave still let online music subcultures thrive, as I wrote in 2017? They have and they will. Wave’s co-founder, Adam Arrigo, rightly remarks that artists need audiences to thrive and VR hadn’t taken off in the way they’d hoped. Startups being startups, tough choices have to be made and being spread too thin while juggling different priorities and audiences kills startups. For Wave, that meant getting out of VR (for now) despite growth in the space.

Steam, the world’s online largest gaming store & platform, just reported that 2020 saw 71% more VR revenue compared to 2019. A large portion of which can be attributed to a single game called Half Life: Alyx (39% to be exact). However, some of that revenue can be attributed to Beat Saber, a game that combines music & VR, which has been called “the closest thing VR has seen yet to a ‘killer app’“.

In other news, Bootshaus, a well-known club in Germany, ‘re-launched’ itself as a virtual reality version of its real-life location and has been hosting events since November. These types of developments are interesting, because of the challenges they knowingly or unknowingly take on.

Only ~2% of Steam’s users use a VR headset. That’s a gaming platform. What do these numbers look like for a club and their own audience?
Clubs are experts in targeting local audiences: how do you promote on a global scale (or at least across adjacent timezones) as you inevitably have to branch out beyond your usual audience?
People know what a club night is, so the promotion of one is straight forward. Selling them a new experience requires some form of consumer education and relies on different promotional techniques and strategies.
The way people socially coordinate to attend events in real life is different from the decision-making process to attend an online event.

And that’s not even considering the technical challenges and aspects of user experience design. This is exactly why it’s unreasonable to expect clubs to “reinvent themselves” for the duration of the pandemic – it’s a different business. It’s why government support is so important.

Having said that, those that do manage to translate their experience and expertise into the virtual realm are important to watch. We spend much more of our time online than before. Just look at the jump in Steam’s data delivery in 2020:

The pandemic has a lot to do with the jump above, but one should not be too quick to dismiss the new habits that are being established. As Theodore Krantz, the CEO mobile data and analytics company App Annie, recently said:

“The world has forever changed. While people stay at home across the world, we saw mobile habits accelerate by three years.”

Trends is exactly the right word. We may see a dip as we leave the pandemic, but the trend will catch up again. Every live music company, whether a venue or promoter, is already a media company with its channels on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and perhaps TikTok.

What type of media company will venues become now that the virtual experience is mainstream?

Music’s non-static future as seen through music making app Endlesss

Posted on January 12, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer

For those unfamiliar with Endlesss: it’s a collaborative music making app founded by musician Tim Exile that has been on the market as a (free) mobile app for a while already. In December, Endlesss launched its desktop app which I’ve now given a go and it provided a glimpse of how music is reconquering a quality it has lost in the age of the recording: participation.

Why Endlesss is different

Instead of writing songs, the app’s users are encouraged to make ‘jams’ which essentially are iterative loops of up to 8 bars. Each iteration is called a riff. When you add an instrument or effect to a riff, it creates a new riff inside your jam which then plays as a loop. The audio keeps playing, the interface keeps staring at you, encouraging you to keep jamming.

Endlesss’ desktop interface. Instrument selection at the left. At the top right, you can see the visual representation of the riffs in your jam, allowing you to go back a few steps.

The app is also social, allowing users to participate in jams with others or just to listen in and explore riffs. There are prominent public jams that everyone can participate in as well as invite-only ones. Some of these jams lead to users sharing interesting moments of the jams (riffs) to the community, which can then be remixed and used to kick off another jam. Pretty cool considering some of the app’s users are popular producers themselves (Imogen Heap and Ninja Tune co-founder Matt Black joined Endlesss founder Tim Exile for livestreamed jams last year).

Endlesss Jams have chat rooms for participants (or observers) of jams to share thoughts, tips, expertise, or coordinate the direction of the jam. — Jams have chat rooms for participants (or observers) of jams to share thoughts, tips, expertise, or coordinate the direction of the jam.

How Endlesss redefines music

The social dimension, culturally speaking, is Endlesss’ most important aspect, because it changes the default meaning of music. For people who are not creators, music is something you listen to. It’s the same every time you hear it and it doesn’t change. If a remix or a cover version is made, it’s considered as ‘less real’ than the ‘original version’ (which in some cases may just be the most famous version, but not the first recording).

These are new qualities of music – at least as a default – introduced by the age of recorded music and mass consumerism. Music has become less participatory in that you don’t need anyone to play or sing a song if you want to hear it. The fact that it’s a new quality also means that it’s not inherent to music, meaning we can use the power of our devices (now easily amplified by connected AI) to experience music in new ways.

In the case of Endlesss, that means music is not a song, but an iterative jam. It’s something that happens, that invites participation, and that changes over time (though a snapshot of each iteration remains on the platform as a riff).

The age of non-static

This trend extends way beyond Endlesss and goes decades back to ‘affordable’ drum computers and samplers sparking the foundations of today’s most popular genres: house and hiphop. Then we got the rapid interchange of ideas and remixes enabled by Soundcloud which enshrined the platform’s cultural influence into genre names such as cloud rap. Outside of music, internet meme culture evolved through remixes and iteration, providing a non-linear visual culture detached from the channels of mass media and behaving according to the network reality of the internet.

They don't know where this song was originally sampled from People Line art Cartoon Text Head Arm Child Standing Human Organism — A recent example of a highly participatory meme format called They Don’t Know (and originally I Wish I Was At Home).

For the connection back to music, you only have to look at today’s hottest social media company, TikTok, which is completely based on remix culture. I’m not saying Endlesss is the TikTok of music production software; I’m saying that there’s a generation of people for whom the primary point of interaction with music is through a new set of interfaces that make music more than just its static, recorded self. It’s participatory and made to be engaging, like live music… but scalable.

What to watch out for in 2021: scarcity models, return to live, and sustainability

Posted on December 29, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

MUSIC x focuses on long-term thinking about music & surrounding industries, so instead of looking back at the year we’re taking a look at trends we expect to be influential in the coming months with regards to tech, the pandemic, and sustainability. Here’s what to watch out for in 2021.

This article is jointly written by Bas Grasmayer and Maarten Walraven-Freeling.

Tech: Scarcity

Music was once a scarce good; the only way to experience it was live. Throughout the twentieth century technological developments have driven music from scarce to ubiquitous:

The inventions related to recorded sound go back to the late-nineteenth century and the patent for the first gramophone disc stems from 1887. It wasn’t until the 1920s that recording techniques changed to make it easier to record music and this helped the spread of music beyond the live experience. It also spurred on the music industry as we know it today.
Moreover, the 1920s saw the advent of radio which brought recorded music into most homes. Not only did this broaden the scope of the audience for music, the medium also influenced the format of music itself and the popularity of it and its performers. Fan culture was born.
Of course, radio was thought to kill the phonograph industry. But it didn’t. The equipment used for radio broadcast helped to improve recording standards for music and with it the sale of records which doubled from around 100 million in 1921 to 200 million in 1929.
We jump to the 1950s and the rise of television and film. New opportunities first and foremost for composers and musicians to find new revenue streams. But, of course, this new medium was thought to kill the old radio industry. Again, it didn’t. Fan culture got a massive boost.
The trend continued into the broader acceptance of video and the rise of MTV in the 1980s. Video killed the radio star may be a popular song, but it didn’t happen. The age of the CD broke and recorded music industry revenues grew astronomically. More people got access to more and more music.
1999, Napster. The internet did actually nearly kill the recorded music industry. Suddenly, all music was available for free at everyone’s keyboard-fingertips. The response? All bets on ubiquity: From the failed early experiments of the major labels through YouTube to Spotify. Music is everywhere and we, the listener and fan, expect to have it all, always.
For more than 100 years the music industry has been on a wave towards ubiquity with technological innovations as a catalyst forever thought to do more harm than good. Moving into the third decade of the twenty-first century, in order to maintain growth, we’ll need to jump on the scarcity wave.

Where to find scarcity?

How many people, publications, musicians, labels, etc. do you directly support? How many in 2018? How many right now? It’s likely you support a few and that this number has grown in the past three years. To keep you supporting you’re usually given access to exclusive content. In other words, exclusive content = stickiness.

This year, the virtual Music Tectonics conference provided a couple of days of being online together with some of the frontrunners in music and tech and you would have been forgiven if you came away thinking direct-to-fan is what everybody does. This isn’t true yet, but it has grown significantly in 2020. Three things to keep an eye on:

Equity investment

From major players such as BTS’ label Big Hit Entertainment going public and the ARMY taking a stake in their own fandom to something like Bumper Collective which allows fans to buy a stake in the future royalties of their favourite artists’ music. This investment idea – and subsequently the idea behind all the major catalogue acquisitions of 2020 – comes from the belief that the music streaming economy will grow. More and more people will become a part of the music industry of ubiquity, but that also provides opportunities around the scarcity of ownership.

Non-fungible tokens

In our recent update on blockchain in 2020 we dove into so-called ‘NFTs’. One week later, a digital artwork by Beeple sold for $777,777 on Nifty Gateway, a platform that makes it possible to own digital goods, making them scarce again. Days later, rapper Lil Yachty sold a digital collectible for $16,050 through the same platform. While earlier auctioned collectibles relied on being physical, such as the infamous single-copy Wu-Tang Clan album purchased by Martin Shkreli (the story of which is being turned into a movie on Netflix), the phenomenon has now gone digital.

Gated content

When Cardi B signed up to OnlyFans earlier this year, she announced it would be a place for only her and her fans. While doing stuff out in the open may get you fans and makes it easy for people to spread the word, gating content allows fans to feel like they’re accessing or are part of something special and helps the artist feel like they’re talking to their ‘true fans’. Cardi B and OnlyFans are far from the only examples. Membership models are rising in popularity through Patreon, Substack, and good old YouTube, among many others. If 2020 didn’t do so already, 2021 will see membership access models for artists go mainstream.

Corona: live/stream

Andrea and Virginia Bocelli during Believe in Christmas — Andrea Bocelli’s Believe in Christmas livestream

The pandemic and the enforced lockdowns have accelerated many changes that were already bubbling right underneath the surface of the music industry for years. None of these accelerations went faster than with livestreaming. While the live music industry was decimated, livestreaming took centre stage. At first most everything was free and poorly produced but that thankfully changed and we’re now faced with ticketed events of high production value from major artists like Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and BTS. Similarly, there are artists who started going live often with good productions and on a subscription basis (exhibit A being Melissa Etheridge) leaning hard into their superfans. Meanwhile, the return to live seems to creep further into 2021 as we flow from lockdown to lockdown. With the vaccines, there will surely be live concerts as we head into the second half of 2021 but how will they be organised? Thus, the double-headed beast of live, streaming events and in-person events, is the trend coming through pandemic 2021.

The livestream will develop into an ever more interactive medium, both for fans and artists. There will be more productions that will include elements like BTS’ geotagged lightstick, the ARMY BOMB, during their Bang Bang Con virtual concert. Similarly, the way Billie Eilish provided engagement even the day before the show and pulled up 500 fans during one song as they were watching from behind their screen will be further developed to enhance interactions between artist and audience. Once live music returns these livestream events will remain a staple of the touring artist. Take, as an example, the Genesis Reunion tour, postponed twice due to the pandemic and now scheduled to start in April 2021. Let’s imagine for a moment this tour will go ahead, but the band has no interest in touring beyond the UK and Ireland. One full month of touring and most of the world is left without an option to attend. They can decide to bring a full camera and production crew to one of their gigs and film the whole thing as is. The other option is to take one extra date, create something more interactive and bring that as a live event around the world. Instead of 18 months of touring the globe, the band can perform once and ‘tour’ from one geofenced url to the next. This will be attractive to artists not eager to tour full time and to fans who are traditionally in geographical locations where most touring musicians don’t visit.

Pandemic, or even epidemic, in-person concerts will see new hygiene regimes enter the everyday vocabulary for concert- and festival-goers. We’ve reported before about the scientific trials taking place in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, among others. What these show is that a combination of rapid testing, staggered entry, mask-wearing, ventilation, and protocols pertaining to movement will become normal. You won’t have to decide whether you want to watch the support act, instead you’ll arrive at a very specific time to be able to enter a venue. Tickets will become just that little bit more expensive as the cost of the rapid test will be included in the price. It will be a long slog and hard work to put these types of events on and to attend them, perhaps also to perform them.

And, of course, tours could get cancelled. How the risk of cancellation will be attributed will be a spearpoint for 2021: artist, promotor, venue? What role will governments play? One of the reasons everything has been postponed is that this has deferred the losses that would have come from cancelling. At what point, however, will it become impossible to postpone a tour – again? As these risks become real as the year advances more governments will step in to make sure venues, promotors and artists alike will feel safe to plan events (Germany leading the way again). This type of risk deferral will look different for major artists and companies like Live Nation and AEG than for smaller artists and independent venues and promotors. The former rely on more long-term planning and have access to different types of funding (see AEG’s staff cuts and its owner’s loan). They will certainly be able to hold out one way or another until live and in-person events return. Smaller artists and independent venues will depend more heavily on support structures, both from governments and fundraising activities.

Sustainability: think local

European Commission Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans.

Will sustainability be on anyone’s priority list in 2021 as many feel they’re making up for lost time, and revenue? Hard to answer, but it absolutely should be as our environmental crises are of an order of magnitude disproportionate to one pandemic. No music on a dead planet, as they say. Before the pandemic broke out, climate and the environment in general had a lot of momentum as topics in popular culture. This was, in part, due to movements like Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future, the latter of which spawned movements of school kids protesting weekly in countless cities all over the world. The latter has largely moved their protests online, while also trying to figure out pandemic-friendly protests offline that can easily be amplified through social media. While this cultural force has become momentarily less visible, it’s ready to mobilize as soon as it’s possible again.

While you can find an overview of initiatives and resources regarding this topic on MUSIC x GREEN, what we think you should be watching out for next year is the following:

Regional collaboration between the music sector, government, and other industries.

In many countries, but more specifically cities, we’ve been seeing various levels of cooperation and coordination between the music sector and (local) governments & institutions. This can be over restrictions and limitations, corona-proofing venues, scientific experiments, layoffs & furloughing, or bureaucratic aspects like insurances and cancellation. This relation should be preserved coming out of the pandemic in order to drive positive change around music & sustainability.

A prime example of this is Massive Attack’s work on decarbonising live music and coming to the conclusion that the primary partner for this are cities, rather than promoters or venues, because it’s about transport infrastructure, power, and waste. For this type of innovation & problem-solving, live events can be useful trials (as we’ve highlighted before). This echoes some of the thoughts put forth by Shain Shapiro, founder of Sound Diplomacy. In a multi-part series, Shapiro points out new trends in localism such as the 15-minute city and the fact that the music sector is as organised as it’s even been. Those are two very important ingredients to actionable change. While change is also anticipated in other areas, such as more artists employing more circular models for their merchandise, 2021 will be a year of disruption with a local focus being an easy way to counter risks, and an important opportunity for bringing about sustainable change.

The decade of the virtual tour pass

Posted on December 22, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

Hands up if you’ve had to pivot to livestreaming this year. Many parts of the music ecosystem have made considerable investments of time and resources into livestreaming. Now, what’s going to happen to all that experience, expertise, and infrastructure when live music comes back at some point next year?

2020 has introduced us to a new era of fan culture. Virtual shows and other types of digital experiences have been normalized, opening up new sources of revenue for artists as well as new ways to keep fans engaged. Inevitably, tours will become hybrid phenomena with fans attaining a rich experience rather than being relegated to clips on Instagram and getting a few streamable singles thrown at them every so often. Artists will start taking fans on tour, digitally.

The virtual tour pass

It’s an idea so simple that I expect more than a handful of the companies who experimented with or pivoted towards livestreaming this year, will roll out a service for bands to allow them to sell passes for fans to join the tour and get access to the all the shows — something which may also be rolled up into a membership on Patreon.

A few years ago I was at a small party by a collective of internet culture researchers and artists. Due to the nature of their work, their network is spread over many cities with just enough critical mass locally in order to organise a gig. In order to not leave the bulk of their network out of the loop, they made sure to stream the party out to them while simultaneously streaming the remote attendees in. They were visible on a screen inside the venue and by logging into a special chatroom on your smartphone, you could interact with them through text (though making provocative gestures at the venue’s webcam also worked).

(I wrote about this event 3 years ago in my piece Postinternet Music — scroll down to Instreaming if you don’t get directed there straight away)

This concept of instreaming is something that we’ve also seen during online events this year. There will be a main stream that people can tune into on Twitch or YouTube and various Zoom-sessions where you can stream yourself partying in your room to other fans. Occasionally, fans get featured in the main stream with an effect somewhat similar to the kiss cam popular at sporting events in the US.

An example of a fan dancing in his room being featured in the livestream of Q-Dance Qonnect last spring.

When we go back to live, some artists may choose to start or close a tour with a virtual performance, either through livestreaming channels or an experience similar to Lil Nas X’s performance in Roblox or Travis Scott’s Fortnite gig. It could even be an exclusive for virtual tour pass holders. As I’ve pointed out in previous newsletters, these types of virtual environments are primarily known as games, but they also offer non-gaming experiences… so it’s not inconceivable that Fortnite might actually partner with a tour, allowing the fans to virtually experience every real-world gig as a livestream on its platform.

Other artists may go for something more personal and keep something of a diary through videos, text or drawings and include that in the virtual tour pass. In fact, I’m aware of startups with similar concepts as far back as 2009 that never really took off. What’s changed since then is that everyone now has smart phones, paying for digital media is normal, the social landscape has shifted towards video, and then there are all the shifts in consumer attitudes and behaviour created during the pandemic.

There will be tours again! If you’re active in livestreaming now: start thinking long-term. Where will this experience sit when live kicks up again? How can additional value be created for fans using this year’s investment of time and resources? How do you keep your fanbase connected beyond this challenging time and make it feel like a movement?

I’m looking forward to writing about all the cool stuff many of you will be pioneering.

Your own personal AI music star

Posted on December 15, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

Could virtual music stars reach millions of people without doing so through communal experiences? It’s something we’re bound to find out in the next decade.

Virtual stars are not a new thing. Vocaloid avatar Hatsune Miku has been around for over a decade and opened for Lady Gaga in 2014. Another type of avatars are virtual YouTubers who have been around for about half a decade. Arguably the most well-known avatar of that group, Kazuna AI, recently performed at Porter Robinson’s online Secret Sky Festival. Chinese streaming giant iQiyi’s research into virtual idols has shown that 64% of people aged 14 to 24 in the country follow one or more avatar stars.

Thus far, the music stars in this area of entertainment have followed a similar strategy to real-life pop stars: getting on a (virtual) stage and singing to many fans. An AI-powered chatbot named Xiaoice shows the potential for another approach.

Visitors view the Xiaoice booth at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2019 in Shanghai, Aug. 31, 2019. Chen Yuyu/People Visual

Xiaoice is a virtual assistant designed to keep users engaged by forming deep emotional connections to them. The result? Over 600 million people have tried the bot out over the past years with many of them becoming hyper-engaged. The company, spun off from Microsoft, estimates that “half the interactions with AI software that have taken place worldwide have been with Xiaoice.” The AI’s fans are 75% male and reading about some of the ways they describe interacting with her may remind one of the movie Her.

Xiaoice is a type of mass media to which each user feels a personal connection, because instead of one-to-many communication (like pop stars), the virtual friend is able to have one-to-one communication at scale, much like Siri and Alexa. The communication model it uses is hard to apply for a human being who can only do one thing in one place at one time, but with improvements in AI and the increasing virtualization of music the one-to-one model is easier to utilize by the music business.

I’m not aware of a one-to-one virtual music idol at scale (do leave a comment if you know of something), but I have no doubt that something like this will emerge over the next years, no doubt using channels like TikTok as part of a user acquisition funnel and becoming part of mainstream consciousness that way.

Interestingly, I think this discussion mimics one of the cultural discussions we are having around music right now as exhaustion sets in trying to attain higher streaming numbers for unsatisfactory incomes. So as musicians explore models beyond extracting small amounts of money from giant numbers of listeners — such as membership models like Patreon — we may see virtual idols mimic the cultural shift in music, but apply the dynamics at a scale that non-AI creators can’t employ.

As long as that doesn’t lead to a situation where AI idols start cannibalising the membership revenues of non-AI performers, that scale may not be an issue beyond the fact that the bargaining power may distort other markets that musicians rely on for income. While the next year’s theme will be a return to normal, the next decade will stretch and upend the meaning of normal.