Author: Maarten Walraven-Freeling

David Bowie – Artist, disruptor, creative technologist

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

It’s almost David Bowie’s birthday, it’s also almost the anniversary of his death. It’s also almost six years ago that Bowie released the wonderful Blackstar, a record that saw him reinvent his sound and artistic persona once again. This time he teamed up with jazz artists like Jason Lindner and Mark Giuliana. He also took inspiration from the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips. This record would not have sounded as it did without these contributors and inspirations. It’s also typical of how Bowie remade himself and his music time and again: by finding new collaborators. It might be the most personal lesson one can take from Bowie, that the people you commune with define not just what you make but also who you are. Bowie found communion through his artistry, his disruptions of masculinity and stardom, and his desire to try on new technologies. I’ll take you through these three communions and show you what we can learn from Bowie as move through ever faster phases of change.

Disruptor Bowie

Let’s start with how Bowie dealt with his mental wellbeing. Each iteration of the artist David Bowie allowed him to create a narrative that not only helped him sell his music, it also helped him shield his non-artist persona. And Bowie was fiercely protective of this person. In today’s creator economy it seems impossible to be so protective of your personal self. The continuous strain on creating output that others can engage with is immense. The singer-songwriter Chelsea Cutler just made this point as she tried to explain that she’s not a “content creator” but a “musician and performer.” Moreover, she says she doesn’t “know how to keep up with how insatiable our content culture has become.” In feeding the machine, creators don’t build fanbases, but simply vie for attention. I’ve written about a need to flip the funnel and build fanbases from the ground up. Tatiana Cirisano calls for tools that will help creators build fanbases that can become self-perpetuating:

“Creators need specialised tools to help them build fans – not followings – who will stick around in between content releases, as well as ways for fans to engage with the content (and each other) absent the creator.”

And Bowie himself has some fantastic advice on this. In a documentary called Inspirations from 1997 he spoke of the need to:

“never play to the gallery … Always remember that the reason you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that felt that if you could manifest it in some way you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist in society.”

Throughout Bowie’s artistic reincarnations, he also used his carnal body to disrupt how everyone else not only looked at him, but also how they regulated themselves and society more broadly. Beyond the obvious and direct references to androgyny, Bowie also put forward something else in the way he built his characters. Especially the early ones like Ziggy Stardust, where he definitely challenged standard ideas of sexuality, also included important markers for how music defines space. Again, this can be taken literally: “Major Tom to ground control” or, more completely, the version of Commander Chris Hadfield aboard the International Space Station.

But music also marks territories and provides clues that help give people an understanding of the spaces they occupy. As such, music can empower people to engage with and create spaces. These efforts are never done alone, but always together, with others.

Artist Bowie

When people want to showcase how great the variety of musical collaborators Bowie worked with was they often create a spectrum from Bing Crosby to Freddy Mercury. It is, however, more interesting to see what happened to the artist David Bowie each time he worked with a different artist or set of artists. It’s also important to note that Bowie was more than a singer. He was a producer, a songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist, a painter, an actor, and he arranged music as well as write it. Time and again, Bowie sought fresh incentives to help spur him on to try new things.

So when Bowie worked with Lou Reed or Iggy Pop he not only helped them create astonishingly good music. He also almost absorbed them into his own styles. He seems to have fed off them as much as they did off him. A similar cross-pollination can be found in Berlin when Bowie worked with Brian Eno. Likewise, when Bowie became a stage actor in The Elephant Man, he took all of the tricks he learned from performing characters through his music and implemented them in the theater setting.  

Subsequently, he took what he learned from stage acting into the angular 1980s hits like Let’s Dance.

When we hit upon Blackstar, the importance of the other musicians involved cannot be overstated. However, that’s not to say that those musicians did not feel an outsize influence from working with Bowie. I already mentioned Lindner and Guiliana, but together with Donny McCaslin and Tim Lefebvre, they actually already formed a jazz quartet. The strength of bringing in a group of musicians who knew each other inside out helped in the recording sessions and gave Bowie a strong foundation to build on. The chemistry helped form a record that’s as much rock as it is jazz. The songs received a structure befitting Bowie’s pop/rock sensibilities, but showcase a curiosity for particularities that’s inherent in jazz. Bowie learned by creating these types of synergy between himself and his collaborators.

Creative technologist Bowie

One of the big questions swirling around the NFT hype train is whether these token should be classified as securities. Whenever these NFTs involve some kind of ongoing entitlement to royalties or ownership of copyright securities bells start ringing. And yet Bowie was way ahead of the game here. In 1997 he released ‘Bowie Bonds’, which were an asset-backed security. It was also one of the first examples of using intellectual property as such an underlying asset to a bond. Not only were the bonds popular – Bowie sold $55m worth of them – but it also led Bowie’s partner in this venture, David Pullman, to do similar asset-backed securities with James Brown and The Isley Brothers.

Crucially to the current discussions around the vagueness of NFT royalties and contracts, the Bowie Bonds were very specifically defined. They had a limited time of activity – 10 years – and they only related to royalties from wholesale physical releases in the US. There’s value in such specificity, but no guarantees. The bonds Pullman worked out with The Isley Brothers ended in disputes with EMI Records, Michael Bolton because they had wanted to buy the catalogue outright. Another important point was that the intellectual property itself stayed with the creator. Only if the bond would default, would the investor end up with the copyright. Bowie himself thought copyright would be gone by now, which is why he wanted to keep control of how he made money from his IP while he still could.

Besides the financial innovation of securitizing his intellectual property, Bowie also was an early innovator in other spaces. In 1998, for example, he set up Bowienet, an internet service provider that gave users access to unreleased tracks, but also a bit of space (5mb) to create their own websites.

“I wanted to create an environment where not just my fans, but all music fans could be part of a single community where vast archives of music and information could be accessed, views stated and ideas exchanged.”

David Bowie

Every musician or band with a subscription service, such as a Patreon, is basically indebted to Bowienet. The message Bowie posted on the frontpage of Bowienet at launch already showcased the previously mentioned need to create spaces where fans can interact with content and with each other:

“The purpose of BowieNet is interactivity and community – plain and clear – everybody has a voice. We have terrific partners so the services and hopefully your experiences at BowieNet will reflect everyone’s commitment to excellence. So – let’s go – mouse rules, okay!”

Bowie legacy

Overall, David Bowie’s legacy is alive and kicking. More than musically, this legacy also allows artists today to look at how Bowie shaped himself and his environment. He was out there, but never gave himself away. He was open to new technologies and innovation, but only if they worked to his own advantage. Most importantly, however, he only ever move forward by being open to others, by understanding that he co-exists in society, and by finding ways to let inspiration be a two-way street.

Acoustic Communities in late-19th Century mills and mines

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

or what I learned about the importance of sound & listening when building community while convincing historians to think about sonic histories.

Audible history is often about hinting at the possibility of the impact of sound on issues surrounding class and gender or on the imagination of nations and smaller communities. Less is written about how exactly sound affects, something that is partially to do with the ephemeral quality of sound. The power of sound is instead analysed through the listener, talking about how sound is experienced in a variety of settings by different actors. Some of the most informed work on listeners has been done by Mark Smith whose work on nineteenth-century America demonstrates ‘how individuals experienced, understood, made sense of, and invented their environments and themselves in ways beyond mere seeing.’[1] By placing the human actor centrally, historians have been able to open up new ways of understanding how identities and relationships are constructed and negotiated. Like Smith, who has also written about time-discipline, I am inspired by the social history of E.P. Thompson who asked ‘but what of the internalization of [work-] discipline?’[2] Implying that power structures were not merely a top down affair. I am also inspired by the Alltagsgeschichte of Alf Lüdtke who worked with the concept of Eigensinn, which means self-will or sense-of-self. Lüdtke defined Eigensinn as ‘the attempt to create some welcome respite, at least for a few brief minutes, from unreasonable external (and shop floor) demands and pressures.’[3] It is the ideas and concepts of these strands of history that allow the listener to be drawn in to the moments where power, class, gender, politics etc. were negotiated. The factory discipline of Thompson was based on sound as much as it was on sight and Lüdtke’s Eigensinn, came about in often auditory actions.

Exploring the listener is not the same as understanding the role sound itself played in the negotiations of identity, power, and so on. The listener is necessary to understand the impact of sound on human experience, but here, I want to make the case that the acoustic context in which sounds were generated and perceived is equally important. Considering the role of acoustics brings sound itself centre stage and demonstrates that, in the workplaces explored by Thompson and Lüdtke, community was created and maintained through sound. Here, Eigensinn is used to demonstrate how the soundscape of the workplace made possible the micro-political negotiations of power and identity by the worker that is implicated in that concept. Thinking about workplace communities in the late-nineteenth century through the acoustic context of these sites ‘makes us re-think [the] relationship to power’ of the workers.[4] This paper demonstrates that the natural reactions of people to their sonic environment helped Eigensinn to be established.

By sound itself I mean those audible objects to which we can ascribe acoustic properties. To understand the difference between these audible objects and the spatially and temporally defined soundscape in which they were heard historians can draw on Albert Bregman’s ‘auditory stream analysis.’ According to Bregman, who studied audition – our faculty of hearing – for decades, ‘the word “stream” [stands] for a perceptual representation, and the phrase “acoustic event” or the word “sound” for the physical cause.’[5] A ‘stream,’ then, is an event in which multiple happenings occur, whereas a sound is a singular object which can be defined through its volume, pitch and so on. In any workplace there are multiple sounds that together make up the auditory stream from which the ears have to make sense. Barry Truax, the famous scholar of sound, has, quite successfully, claimed that ‘Sound signals are the most striking components of the acoustic community, and often such sounds are unique and of historical importance.’[6] What I will do here is to discuss what I argue are the most important sound signals with the auditory stream of the mine shaft and in the card room in the weaving factory.

The sound signals dominated the actions of the workers. This did not mean that these sounds were not internalised and adapted to, thus creating an acoustic community that made work more bearable and where there was a place for Eigensinn. When historians pay attention to the sounds within the sonic environments of the people whose experiences they want to contextualise they need to think about acoustics. Here, this will be done by using the acoustic properties of mines and factories in the Ruhrgebiet and Manchester. The acoustic context together with recorded sounds of workplace machinery demonstrate what the auditory stream was from which workers made sense. It was from that point that workers could start to perform micro-political acts of Eigensinn.

In the card room of Swindells’ Mill in Bollington in the south of Manchester (fig. 1) the carding engines were placed in the shed, on the right, separated from the other machines, mostly roving frames, by a partition.

Fig. 1. Card Room at Swindell’s Mill in Bollington. Source: Museum of Science and Industries MS 0631-180. Author’s photo.

While a single sound will be discussed, that of one carding engine, the plans of card rooms show that this sound was not heard in isolation. Too often, historians tend to neglect the cacophony in which sounds were heard. Using auditory stream analysis not only helps to understand how historical subjects made sense of their soundscape, but is also method to make the historian aware of this. The sound of a carding engine consisted of the hum of the leather driving strap and the rhythm of the carding rollers.

Arkwright Carding Engine, recorded 1 October 1979 at Helmshore Museum,
1979.0008, North West Sound Archive

Listening to the recording from the North West Sound Archive, the repetitive motion of the machine is immediately audible. The metallic sound that is heard throughout the recording – and which gives it an almost musical base falling on the two and the four of a 4/4 beat – is probably the shoes, which held the roller and clearer pedestals, slotting into the flanges, thus cleaning and disentangling the cotton.[7] It is this sound which gave the carding engine its most clearly defined rhythm. The other sounds were less clearly defined and therefore probably groupings of different processes within the machine. Understanding the qualities of the sound of the carding engine like this helps to understand what the mill worker was hearing. That, in turn, builds on historians’ understanding of mill workers’ experiences, which has often not taken the sensual experience into consideration. The auditory stream was filled with many different sounds, originating from different sources and locations. Working with the carding engines meant that workers had to be able to distinguish between the machines they attended and the ones they did not. The metallic sound, because it is so distinctive in the recording, may have been an important factor in making sense of the auditory stream within the card room. It has the acoustic qualities to be a sound signal. Picking up the metallic sound, a worker could let the rest of the sounds in the card room disappear into the background.

When thinking about sound and rhythm, especially in a closed space such as the card room, historians need to also be aware of acoustics. The rhythm of the carding engines and roving machines and the way they sounded within the card room was also dependent on the space’s acoustics. In most mills the card room was located in a large space on the ground floor.[8] The plans for New Bengal Mill in Manchester (fig. 2 & 3) show that the floors were covered in wood boards and the ceilings were made of concrete and that the windows comprised the largest part of the outer walls,. Because concrete has a very low absorption coefficient (table 1), meaning that it reflects nearly all of the sound waves that hit it, the floor and ceiling of the card room present surfaces that keep the sounds within the space itself. Glass has a much higher coefficient, meaning that more sound waves are being let through. The lower frequency ranges especially find their way through glass, while the higher ranges reflect off it.

Fig. 2. Details sections of floors at New Bengal Mill, Ancoats. MS 0631/34. Author’s photo.
Fig. 3. Details Sections of walls at New Bengal Mill, Ancoats. MS 0631/34. Author’s photo.
Table 1. Acoustic absorption coefficients of brick, glass, and concrete

Within the card room of a late-nineteenth century mill the carding engines mostly sent out lower frequency sound waves. The higher frequency metallic sound of the carding engine thus had another feature that made it stand out as it was a sound that reflected back into the room. Due to the close proximity of the reflecting surfaces the sound came back almost as soon as it was heard emanating from the machine. Only near the windows was there some loss of the volume that the machines created within the card room.

A similar analysis can be made for the mines in the Ruhrgebiet. Inside a mine, the enclosed space meant that sound reflected back from each direction without being able to escape into the air. Within coal mines, the absorption coefficient of the wall and floor areas have recently been determined to be the opposite of those of the glass windows in the cotton mill.

Tabel 2. Acoustic absorption coefficients within a coal mine shaft

High-pitched sounds were absorbed more than low-pitched ones. While the sounds were trapped within the shaft, the walls of the shaft did absorb some of the sound, meaning that the sonic environment gave the miners some relief from the sounds that filled the auditory stream around them. The sound of the Signalglocke, a bell which regulated the lifts bringing miners up and down, sounded like this:

Korbglocke at Zeche Zollern, recorded 1987, Schallarchiv des Ruhrgebiets of
Richard Ortmann

The lower pitch of the Signalglocke meant that its sounds did not get absorbed so easily and travelled far into the shafts, making it an important sound signal for the miners as they could not have visual contact and thus had to rely on auditory signals. They knew what the lift was doing through these signs and at each lift entrance there were signs called Schlagtafeln (fig. 4) that informed the miners of what the signals meant. When this communication went wrong, it could cost lives as this report in the Dortmunder Zeitung tells us. ‘After the given signals the operator believed that there were no people in the lift, while five workers were about to ride up. They went down to the bottom at full power and sustained significant injuries.’[9] Going down or up, there would have been a quietness in the lift, while when the signal was giving that it was stopped, the usual banter between the miners would be heard again.

Fig. 4: Anschlagtafel at Bergisches Museum für Bergbau, Handwerk und Gewerbe, Burggraben 9-21. Photographer: Frank Vincentz

For the mill workers and miners to have made sense of the auditory stream of their workplace, required them to be attuned to specific sound signals such as the metallic sound of the carding engine or the bell striking of the Signalglocke. Understanding the soundscape of the card room and the mineshaft like this, supports Mark Smith’s notion that for industrial workers ‘the sounds of the shop floor were deemed just that: sound, at worst noise that was necessary, but rarely simple, intolerable noise.’[10] Workers had to find a way to deal with the sounds in their work environment and acoustic qualities of the machines they worked with allowed them to do this, creating an acoustic community.

Conclusion

Bregman’s analysis revolves around creating a structure from the auditory input that people receive from the world around them. I have argued that this can help historians to understand how workers made sense of their environments through sound. So, going back to Truax and the acoustic community model: this has as its purpose ‘to define the environmental characteristics that promote effective communication within any environment under study?’[11] I hope you can agree with me, that by taking into account the acoustic context of the workplace, I have shown how workers used sound to allow for communication and thus created an acoustic community. Because workers adapted to the sounds of their workplace environment they were able to construct a shared identity based around Eigensinn. Through making sense of the auditory streams around them, workers enabled time and place for micro-political acts such as horseplay, banter and other social interactions which time-discipline aimed to prevent.

[1] Mark M. Smith, ‘Making Sense of Social History’ Journal of Social History 37 (2003), 165-186 (167).

[2] E.P. Thompson, ’Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ Past & Present 38 (1967), 56-97 (86-87); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1965); Mark Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997).

[3] Alf Lüdtke, ‘Polymorphous Synchrony: German Industrial Workers and the Politics of Everyday Life’ International Review of Social History 38 (1993), 39-84 (52). Alf Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (Hamburg, 1993); Alf Lüdtke, ‘Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay: Eigensinn and Politics among Factory Workers in Germany circa 1900’ in Michael Hanagan & Charles Stephenson (eds.) Confrontation, Class Consciousness and the Labor Process (London, 1986), 65-95.

[4] Michael Bull & Les Back, ‘Introduction: Into Sound’ Bull & Back (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford, 2003), 1-18 (4).

[5] Albert Bregman, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organisation of Sound (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 10.

[6] Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication 2nd ed. (London, 2001), 67.

[7] For more on the working process of the carding engine see: Evan Leigh, The Science of Modern Cotton Spinning (Manchester, 1873), 102-04; James Innes, The Cotton Spinner’s Pocket Book (Manchester, 1925), 25-33; William Murphy, The Textile Industries Vol. 2 (Manchester, 1910), 43-88.

[8] Williams, Cotton Mills, 112 describes how it was the exception to the rule to have the card room on the upper floor.

[9] Dortmunder Zeitung, 30 January, 1878.

[10] Smith, ‘The Garden in the Machine : Listening to Early American Industrialisation’ in Trevor Pinch & Karin Bijsterveld, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford, 2012), 39-57 (41).

[11] Truax, Acoustic Communication, 70.

Flipping the funnel: building your fanbase one fan at a time

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

When you’re a successful creator on YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok you need to post regularly. If you take two weeks off you break your business model. Some musicians are playing this game, others are holding on to single-single-album release strategies. They think about album years and work towards tours. This isn’t strange, since touring has been the biggest revenue-generating activity for artists in the past two decades. Part of the creator economy, though, is a move towards direct-to-fan, or perhaps more apt is to speak of direct-to-audience, monetization models. We’ve gone from crowdfunding to subscription and from just music to music experiences, or music that comes with perks that might have nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the personality behind the music. But what’s actually happening when you start monetizing your fans directly? Can you scale intimacy? And how do you flip the funnel to figure out which communities you should cater to in order to find your 100 superfans?

Scaling intimacy

Intimacy is first and foremost about creating a connection between two people or just a few people. Sometimes, a concert can feel intimate even if a band or performer is playing in front of thousands of people. Some musicians just have the skill and persona to give people the feeling they’re singing or playing to them directly. What this means is that they tap into the identity of the listener. One of the key elements of fandom is that the fan attaches their identity to the artist’s music they support. During a live show, this attachment can become a two-way street of interaction, or at least it feels that way for the fan.

Outside of the live concert, it becomes much more difficult to scale intimacy when it comes to music. Of course, it’s possible to livestream your music, but we’re still in the infancy of how to do that well and move beyond the horseless carriage syndrome. One option is to simply talk to your fans directly via meet & greets or similar. The success of this can be seen in the talent list of Looped, a service that provides the tech for various interactive experiences. There’s chefs, actors, athletes, but also lots of musicians. Most of the latter group don’t actually perform shows through Looped. Instead, they host ‘experiences’ where their fans get access to the artists they love in a way they otherwise couldn’t. This doesn’t scale like a concert, but it represents a form of digital intimacy. It can scale, for example, by doing it regularly, or by organising an hour of speed dating where an artist talks to 60 fans for 1 minute.

If we take a cue from some major brands, we see that they often achieve intimacy by finding alignment between their values and those of their consumers. In the creator economy, every artist is a brand and their fans want to align with their values. There’s a lot of over-the-top reactions to NFT drops and the environment, but it shows the power of this value alignment, especially when the alignment shifts. Put differently, intimacy at scale can only exist in a way that fits the values of the artist offering it. Similar to a company with a brand thinking about their ‘why’ before they do anything new and if that new thing fits that ‘why’, so too should artists consider if a new experience, or form of interaction, fits their ‘why’ and fits their community.

The importance of community

First of all, what is community? Or, what does community mean? For me, a community is about a sense of connection between people. To foster a community, or to build a community, means to foster those connections. If you’re good at that in an online environment, you have every chance of creating collective connections that people will want to pay for to be a part of. In one sense, music is the perfect conduit for community, because it inherently connects people. On the other hand music faces an uphill battle because it’s difficult to quantify that connection. Take Toms, the shoe brand that started the buy-a-shoe give-a-shoe model. This is a super easy-to-get model that aligns with a lot people’s values. It’s much more difficult for artists to create such a direct mission. Artists make music because they have an inherent need to. Externalizing that into things that represent the values of the artist and their music takes work.

The Toms comparison is apt in the sense that everyone needs shoes, just like everyone needs music. Some people care about the shoes they walk in, but some don’t care so much. Similarly, some people care what music they listen to, while others are happy to lean back and put on a playlist. If you want to monetize your fans directly, though, you need to be able to speak to them. In the playlist analogy, you need to get them to care enough to go look for you and your music elsewhere. How to get someone listening to a playlist to go your Bandcamp or Patreon page? Or, to put it more bluntly, how to find your 100 superfans?

The key element for Li Jin‘s thinking around 100 superfans is that you add real value to those fans’ lives to get them to pay you around $1000 per year. Premium content and community are strong elements of adding that value and extracting that money. So while we all love sharing our Spotify Wrapped data and that certainly creates a form of community, that’s not what Jin’s talking about here. Instead, this is a connected audience that interacts with the artist they’re all a fan of, but also interact with each other. In order for community to really work, the level of interaction needs to be sustained even without the person or band who built the community present. This allows for a different kind of thinking about how to build this community too, because you need considerable buy-in from the people inside the community.

Flipping the funnel

Traditionally, the funnel is broad at the top and slim at the bottom. You start with a large group of potential customers or consumers and narrow them down to the people who are actually interested in what you offer. If you decide to become a creator on Instagram, for example, your potential audience is around one billion people. Or, if you’re a creator on YouTube, you start off with a potential audience of two billion. Now let’s say that you have 5000 subscribers on your channel. How many of those people will actually convert to tipping you during your livestream? Or how many of those people will actually shift into paying you a monthly subscription fee for your content and some added perks?

Now, if we think about community as this interacting group of people that care about what you do and share your values, we can flip this funnel idea. Instead of starting with your TAM – your total addressable market – you start with a few people who are already interested in what you do. If you’re just starting out it’s okay if this is your parents and your best friends. Start somewhere and convince those people to, for example, take on your subscription fee. Then you start building from there. To do this, you need tools and your first fans need tools too.

The whole premise of Web3 is based on this kind of community I’m talking about here. As such, most of the tools built for Web3 solutions can help artists out here. As we know, however, there’s a barrier to entry for fans, and for artists, to jump on this train. Thankfully, there’s also plenty of ways to start sharing what you do, and for fans to share what they like, outside of Web3. The key element to flipping the funnel is to build a fanbase one by one. This starts with talking to the people you know. Similarly, it starts with your fans talking to who they know. One way they can do this is through Bopdrop, a fairly new social media app that’s fully focused on sharing music. We all love to share what we enjoy listening to, and now we just need to add on that little push that tells people to support the artist we love so much that we think you should listen to them. Not just because you like their music, but because you get something else out of it: this can be perks, access to a creative process, learning how to better make music yourself, etc.

There’s another benefit to flipping the funnel and that goes back to what is often the first community for any artist, which is that of their fellow artists. If we broaden this out a little bit, and go back to the idea of the musician as a creator, the community becomes that of all creators. The next step is to connect the various audiences that all of these creators have. What I see a lot in GÂRDEN is that musicians play together in unique set-ups. Albertine, for example, took the opportunity to play with two musicians to perform her music. Going from one to three artists is an easy way to triple your audience. This type of audience-sharing is potentially a big win for any direct-to-audience strategy. If I like an artist enough to support them directly, I’ll be very susceptible to them telling me to also support another artist. Broadening the scope here, there’s an opportunity for creators of all kinds to share their audiences. Say I’m a watercolor painter with a medium YouTube following. If I then tell them I made this cool painting for this other artist and that people can support them directly: that works. It can be as simple as word-of-mouth and as strong as interpersonal interactions and recommendations.

How to accelerate a music & tech start-up?

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

There’s so many people with great ideas. There’s also many people who have the technical know-how to build products. And then there’s a seemingly endless list of problems to solve in the music industry. The idea of an accelerator is to put your company through a crash course in building out your product, learning from experienced hands, and staying hyper-focused on your ‘true north’. Often, founders get matched with mentors and after a number of weeks they come out finding their company in a place where they’re ready to go out. They move beyond bootstrapping and start to look for a seed capital funding round. One of my favourite recent start-ups, Fave, has seemingly benefited from swimming with narwhals during Music Tectonics and being part of Techstars. What this example also shows is how US-focused most of this culture is. What happens when you accelerate outside of a country that has a strong venture capital culture? How do you help to focus companies on growth? And what kind of program should you offer to the start-ups involved?

Accelerators galore?

Even when you step outside of the VC bubble in the US, there’s many accelerators around: Abbey Road Red is an incubator whose core is music production technologies; MidemLab focuses specifically on consumer experiences; Marathon Labs is an accelerator, part of Marathon Music Group, which aims to support innovation in our digital music ecosystem. Another accelerator program wraps up this week: Music Tech Accelerator [MTA]. This is a program for start-ups in the ideation phase. In other words, there’s plenty of options for start-ups in the music & tech space to find partners to help them grow. Moreover, as the examples above make clear, most of these accelerators have a specific target group themselves. What this does is that it helps them hone in on the skills they can provide to the start-ups involved.

The programme

If I’m a bit more specific than the MTA finishes their pre-accelerator program this week. In this period, the start-ups involved focused on getting a business case together.

This is quite different from, for example, Marathon Labs, which looks at companies who have that first business case and who have recurring revenues in place. With that, their lab hones in on business development more than ideation. I firmly believe that more labels should do what Marathon does with their lab as it would allow them to work sustainably across the music value chain.

What’s striking about the MTA programme is that they help to pinpoint that first business case. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of great ideas out there. Those ideas, however, are only useful if they solve an actual problem. Proving that requires a business case, or at least someone signalling their enthusiasm for the solution offered.

Start-ups and solutions

To continue to put Marathon Labs and MTA next to each other for a moment, the solution offered often already exists for companies in Marathon’s lab. They need to develop it further and try to achieve a critical mass of users to become sustainable as a business. Start-ups in the MTA might need to find their first clients still. The MTA program pulls start-up founders out of their comfort zone by making them talk to potential clients.

This helps sharpen the story they tell as founders about their companies. Moreover, it forces those founders to think about what promises they make to their clients, and who their clients really are. WeShared, one of the start-ups in the current MTA pre-accelerator program, offers a solution for barrier-free tickets. If I look at their problem, my first instinct is that WeShared is a solution for the barrier-free ticket buyer.

The opposite, however, is the case. WeShared offers a solution to ticket sellers. The amount of time it take for a customer to purchase a ticket is annoying, but the app is also a time-saver for the sellers. For them, the incremental gains become a big saving overall. What’s more, barrier-free tickets become a revenue prospect instead of a loss-leader. Basically, what they have is a SaaS plugin for ticketing companies that solves a real-world problem. In doing so, they also immediately make life better for people needing a barrier-free ticket.

Start-ups and growth

The music industry has a serious problem with both metadata and copyright management. We often hear that blockchains can offer solutions for this. However, I’m personally more excited about companies that use blockchain as a tool integrated into a solution. Faniak, for example, sees obstacles with metadata across the production and distribution chains right into world of the performing rights organizations. They turned to a blockchain solution, but mainly for storage and validation. Mainly, they provide a cloud service that automatically allows metadata to synchronize across data points. All Faniak needs to do is make sure the smart folder they create with tags and other data is interoperable with various forms, websites, and tools.

Similarly, Copyright Delta aims to provide a solution for a broken royalty system. They use a blockchain, but only because it allows them to create a great technology that verifies credentials. Moreover, it allows them to create complete and consistent analyses of musical works and their recordings with streaming and other broadcast data. The gaps currently existing in this field are real and create issues for musicians and broadcasters on an almost daily basis. Streamlining data flows will help fix these issues.

What these two start-ups share, then, is that they provide solutions to real-world problems. That said, how do they make sure that their solutions become part of their potential clients everyday behaviour? This is where an accelerator can play a role. Not necessarily by providing a network, or by providing mentors, but instead by pushing founders outside of their comfort zone. They need to acquire new skills and punch through their objectives. A business model is as much about a great spreadsheet as it is about getting that first letter of intent from a client.

Next up?

When you have an idea, or when you know you can build a great product, what you need is a little push to leave your comfort zone. What’s great about accelerators like Marathon Labs and the MTA, while looking at companies in different stages of their development, is that they provide this push. Being in the growth zone forces you to go through challenges like finding your first client, talking about your idea and product, and requires you to set new goals in your business model.

Who controls the flows of money in music?

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

Traditionally, when you start to make music you’re looking for three things:

  • A manager
  • A record deal
  • A publishing deal

Of course, that third one is only if you’re a songwriter or composer. But these are the three ways you, as an artist, will look to turn your IP into profit. We’re currently moving through a paradigm shift in music – and the internet more broadly – when it comes to creation, ownership, fandom, and monetization. As this process accelerates, the previous traditional deals and contracts will also shift, adapt, change, and potentially subsumed by other types of agreements. But let’s start with some recent history on those traditional deals.

The Manager

As the music industry’s bible puts it, the single most important thing is the team an artist puts around themselves to help them grow. The first person they usually find is a manager. Together, the artist and manager work to put the music out into the world, attract fans, go on tour, build a brand, etc. Because the manager and artist should have a complete alignment of interests, the manager usually gets a flat fee on all the revenues that come through from the artist’s IP. Unfortunately, just as traditional as the mostly symbiotic relationship between manager and artist so is the fact that it’s based on a ‘handshake deal.’

Even one of the most famous independent artists, Chance the Rapper, and his manager, Pat ‘the Manager’ Corcoran, worked together for years on nothing more than an oral agreement. Even when they set up three separate companies to support merchandise, touring, and other income derived from streaming, licensing, etc., they never signed an official agreement together. Eventually, the relationship turned sour and first Pat sued Chance, and then Chance sued Pat. What’s most striking about these lawsuits isn’t the money involved, or even that the manager-artist relationship was based on a handshake deal, but how personal the filings are. What shines through everything is a deep and particular relationship. Reading those filings also shows how the manager involves themselves in every aspect of the artist’s career and brand. Again, this is aided by the monetary agreements. But if the artist is a brand, and in Chance’s case a brand with three different companies, then the manager isn’t a manager but a COO (chief of operations) to the artist’s CEO (chief executive officer) position. As artists develop this brand and entrepreneurial side of themselves and their music, they would do well to look for COOs instead of managers. The products and vision related to the music has changed from the time of the artist-manager relationship heyday.

The record deal

The proverbial golden egg that most musicians still want the most. Why? Status, advances, global marketing power, etc. There’s still a lot of pull from having a big, established, company look after your production, distribution, promotion, royalty registration and collection, and that takes care of the necessary clearances. And there’s something to be said about the luxury of an advance to help you produce your album. But that luxury comes at the expense of ownership as you mostly sign away the rights to your music to the label.

Moreover, the promise of revenues once your album is out, the royalties you agreed on, disappers into thin air when the cost deductions are taken into account. Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes once did some fantastic napkin math on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKEjTTKGIUo

How this works? It’s all about the language in the contracts. Remember when Kanye West dropped his contracts onto Twitter? There’s a helpful clause in there about ‘recoupment’. It goes as follows: “all costs incurred by UMG in connection with the … album shall be included in costs when determining recoupment.” So that’s all costs without a specific definition of what they include. For a contact which otherwise wins out in how it specifies everything, that’s remarkable. It’s also industry-standard. All in all, Kanye was not on a bad deal with his record label, but that’s beside the point. What matters is that artists do not retain their own rights.

The publisher

When you’re a songwriter or composer you deal with publishers. Throughout the 20th Century most of the money coming in through copyright flowed to those songwriters. That, however, is changing. Partly, because of how some of the rights these publishing deals are based on are archaic. And partly, because of how the industry has developed an ever increasing focus towards recorded music.

The former relates to things like mechanical rights. Something developed in the USA in the early 20th Century to make sure that composers would get paid from this new technology called the pianola, or player piano.

Nowhere and nobody in more than 100 years has been able to actually change the copyright. Instead every new technological development has been shoehorned into this mechanical right. At the very least, it should now be an electronic, or digital, right. Some moves are being made towards the establishment of digital rights, but what’s clear is that copyright will always lag technology.

Besides, whenever a new technology pops up – be it audio streaming, video streaming, creator tools, etc. – whoever is charge doesn’t do any deals surrounding copyright. Then, when a new company gets a big user base, the first ones to come calling are the major record labels. They represent the recording artists, not the songwriters or the composers. Hence, the first deals bring the money towards those labels, and officially to their roster of artists.

There’s another reason songwriters and composers are being left behind by recorded music in the flows of money. Record labels tend to invest in start-ups while publishers do not. Take Spotify, all three major labels invested in the early phases of the company. Hence, when they went public in 2018 they all stood to make quite the windfall. Of course, they all promised to share these profits with their sub labels and artists. But look at Sony Music, who was the first major to sell part of their stake in Spotify. They earned roughly $750 million from selling 50% of their share in Spotify. Not long after, Sony took a 60% share of EMI Music Publishing, valuing the company at $4.75 billion. EMI, at the time, held a catalogue of around 2 million songs. The full value of the company was solely based on the songwriters it represented. And Sony’s increasing profits also came from a streaming economy that flourished on the back of those same songwriters. And yet, those songwriters didn’t see any direct returns on these deals.

So what’s next in the paradigm shift?

So far, we’ve learned that even a forward-thinking partnership like Chance the Rapper and Pat the Manager still held its roots in old-school handshake deals. And we all know that the current streaming boom isn’t the best in terms of generating revenue for the average musician. Moreover, as catalogue music grows in stature, where does this leave new music? Or, what does a shift away from albums, and even singles, towards creation and personality mean for those flows of money?

I’ve written previously how it’s important that we have new entities and start-ups fighting to make sure that we don’t end up with unassigned royalties. In contrast, I’ve also written about how Web3 envisions a world without copyright. In that piece, I ended with a note on how that vision is still potentially decades away (there’s a great article by Dan Fowler [paywall] for Water and Music that also goes into this). In the meantime, we do well to heed Bas’ call to provide a social context to the current NFT phase of Web3 development.

So what’s next? Riding the waves as they come and experimenting with these new modes of growth. Make sure to focus on good growth, growth that enhances your ideals and the music involved. Instead of looking for a manager, experiment with a DAO structure. Instead of sharing 15% or giving away your copyright to a label or publisher, see how you can share, or fractionalize, ownership. One thing to learn from the artist-manager relationship is that to grow together a complete alignment of interests is necessary. That still counts in Web3 modes of working together: any upside is created together, whether it’s creative or monetary. Music’s paradigm shift is communal.

One billion music creators: what does that look like?

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

Making a tune is now as easy as taking a photo and uploading it to Instagram. With its 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram has made photographers out of all us. As phone cameras improved, the Instagram filters did the rest. Music has spent most of this century battling the ghosts of piracy. The major labels first reinvented themselves as licensing models, using the IP in their catalogues to generate revenues that has propelled them back to pre-Napster times. More recently, everybody in the industry has become a digital media company: Warner invests heavily in gaming, musicians like Rihanna and Jay Z build out their brands far beyond music, and every indie artist has to navigate the digital world from social media to direct-to-fan strategies. Alongside these developments music creator tools proliferate. From Myspace to Soundcloud and now TikTok, sharing and discovering music has undergone changes in relation to the underlying medium. Each new medium led to new structures in pop music. Now, the next step is that everyone can become a music creator and it won’t be long before we see a medium where we consume music as readily as we adapted our thumbs to scroll through miles of photographic content each year.

Creator tools

In November 2020 MIDiA Research already claimed that creator tools were the present of the music industry. They showed that there were 14.6 million music creators using apps and platforms like YouTube and Soundcloud, but also Vampr, Bandlab, Loopcloud, Splice, Boomy, and many more.

These tools range from a focus on distribution to collaboration and various stages of production like loops, mastering, and effect. If you look to collaborate in real time, you can. If you want to easily get your track mastered there’s no need to go to a studio. If you need a specific sound, there’s now any number of sample libraries you can turn to.

That number of 14.6 million calculated by MIDiA is sure to have grown in the past year. Similar to the number of tracks released on the streaming services, roughly 60,000 per day back in February, which will also keep increasing. If you look at an app like Bandlab, you see the potential wave of content generated through creator tools: users create 11 million tracks each month. That’s the total number of tracks released to streaming services over a period of 6 months. In other words, not all of those tracks are released. As these numbers continue to grow, the music industry will need to change to adapt.

How to stand out from the crowd? Or should you even aspire to it?

It’s already difficult to make sure you get your new track heard when you are one of 60,000. If you are an indie you may never get the chance to make it onto those New Music Friday playlists. A study released earlier this year shows how “independent label artists are getting far less than their fair share of access to the most popular playlists.” This kind of issue underlines the current power structures in music. But if we transpose the number of tracks currently released on Bandlab in a month to the DSP format, it could well be that that whole system would simply break down. Moreover, if we take the step to consider a billion music creators using an app like Bandlab each month the volume of created music would be close to unimaginable.

In a way, this is happening already. TikTok has more than one billion video views each day, and most of those include music. Snap, through it’s acquisition of Voisey, now has millions of users creating tracks each day to add to their snaps. And yet, there’s no dedicated medium for music yet that has attracted these one billion MAUs. Once we get there, though, it won’t be about standing out from the crowd of recorded music anymore. Instead, each creator will be subject to the same things anyone on a current social media-platform is: algorithms and community. It’s in the latter that we may see a different effect of music growing to the size of photography.

Since music is inherently collaborative, it means that all those creator tools also have these features built into them. Some of them in a very direct way, such as Vampr, others more indirectly, like Splice. But any medium looking to tap into people’s deep-seated desires for making music will have to build to cater to niches. As content will get churned out at an ever greater number people will find each other in shared loves of musical nooks and crannies and find ways to express their identities in relation to that.

Existential fright

Going back to the comparison with Instagram and photography we can use the development of commentary on the medium and digital photography more broadly to sketch responses to a billion music creators. 10 years ago the journalist and artist Chris Wiley wrote that:

“It is indisputable that we now inhabit a world thoroughly mediatized by and glutted with the photographic image and its digital doppelganger. Everything and everyone on earth and beyond, it would seem, has been slotted somewhere in a rapacious, ever-expanding Borgesian library of representation that we have built for ourselves. As a result, the possibility of making a photograph that can stake a claim to originality or affect has been radically called into question.”

So, in a way we’re moving into a world that’s thoroughly mediatized by the sonic in the form of melodies, beats, hooks. Some of these put together by people calling themselves artists, others by people who quickly threw together a few loops. The former might be looking to make a living from their art. The latter might just be enjoying themselves and have no ambition to share their creations beyond a few friends and like-minded people. The question of originality remains pertinent.

That question, however, isn’t new to this situation. Pop music simply doesn’t exist beyond a limited number of chords. And we’ve seen it before, of course. The advent of radio was thought to kill live music consumption – it didn’t. TV was then the death of radio – instead radio revenues increased. The music video would then kill the radio star – radio revenues increased again. The internet doomed the recorded music industry – and piracy had a serious impact, but revenues are now back to where they were 20 years ago. With each new medium, each new iteration of distribution, musicians kept creating and finding audiences.

Final note

Just as smart-phone cameras and Instagram filters have influenced a generation of photographers, so will the current boom of creator tools shape the sound of music for the next decade or so. It’s simply not necessary anymore to have any musical training in order to create music. Apps like Boomy allow everyone to play around intuitively and create sounds that feel like music. Similarly, Bandlab has a loop feature that allows anyone to create something with a pleasant enough melody. Should that lead to existential questions about what music is? Probably not. Instead, we would do well to focus on new niches popping up around shared interests in certain stems, riffs, drum rolls, etc. We may look at and listen to music differently if everyone can make it, but we won’t enjoy it less.