Category: Longreads

Instagram vs SoundCloud: the battle for the center of music culture

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 1 Comment on Instagram vs SoundCloud: the battle for the center of music culture

What SoundCloud can do to win back lost ground from its most important competitor: Instagram.

What is SoundCloud, actually?

Coming out of the MySpace era, SoundCloud was easy to define. Now, in a mobile world with streaming as the default way of music listening, that has changed.

I’ll go into why, as I explain why SoundCloud’s most important competitor is not Spotify, but Instagram. One started as music app, and the other as a photo app, but they’re both more: they’re children of the web 2.0 – the social web – and as such have become important platforms for communities.

If SoundCloud is to thrive, it will have to figure out how to make up for ground lost to Instagram.

“You mean I can comment on specific parts of each track instead of just leaving a comment on a profile?”

If you never had a MySpace profile, you won’t know how mindblowing SoundCloud was when it first arrived. The web was a different place.

Before Facebook, MySpace was the dominant global social medium. The global social web was different: most countries would have their own social landscape. Brazil, for a long time, was connected through Orkut. The Netherlands through Hyves and Cu2. Much of Asia was on Friendster. Yet MySpace was the dominant global player. It didn’t just have profiles, but it also had music. Bands could upload a couple of tracks to their profile (max. 4 or 5 at any time) and fans could feature artists’ tracks on their own profiles to show what music they liked. People would make long lists of bands and artists they were into and then would search, find, and befriend other people based on this. You weren’t necessarily friends with people you know in real life, or at least not exclusively, and it wasn’t common to use your real name.

It was a social network connected by music, and in the transition years between Facebook taking over from MySpace and music streaming really establishing itself, many people in music longed back for the MySpace days. They wondered what “the next MySpace” would be, even as recently as 2011 (I even wrote a piece about it).

SoundCloud filled an important role. It launched quietly and positioned itself as a collaboration tool for artists. It had this cool feature that would let you comment on the waveforms: something that most people hadn’t seen before. Furthermore, your account could hold an unlimited amount of tracks, throttled by an upload limit of 4 tracks per month for free accounts (they later changed it to a max. minutes per account model – which DJs hated).

MySpace would let people customize their profiles with code, so people figured out how to hack their profiles and swap out the MySpace default player for the SoundCloud player (this later became a supported feature, and you can click here to see a 10-year old guide on how it was done).

Due to SoundCloud’s visually distinctive music players, its spread through music communities was visible on MySpace. The fact that it went viral meant it would saturate scene by scene, as more musicians joined the platform.

How SoundCloud changed music

While MySpace was still the main presence for many musicians, communities started to form on SoundCloud. The musicians who’d spend a lot of time on SoundCloud were different: they’d behave more like what is now called a ‘digital native’. To be online a lot wasn’t necessarily normal for artists: remember, most people didn’t have smartphones yet and music listening was done from MP3-players.

Through SoundCloud’s features, there was now a platform specifically for music that was global, included all genres (though mostly electronic at the time – hiphop wasn’t really there yet), had great commenting features, a way to form groups around topics (similar to Last.fm), and a messaging feature.

All of this existed, but now it existed on one platform. And it changed the way people connected around music, the way scenes formed, and it changed music itself.

A recent example of how the digital music landscape has changed music is the so-called “playlist edit“, a streaming era version of the radio edit. The game to keep your tracks on large playlists is to make sure to keep your skip rate low. People skip stuff they don’t know – especially when they just start listening to a playlist, so long intros get skipped until people get to something familiar, or something that sounds familiar. The top of the playlist is where you get the most streams, so economically it makes sense to cut the intro down and jump right into the track.

HELLO YES, THIS IS DOG Labrador Retriever photo caption dog dog like mammal dog breed group

A development that preceded that is that music started behaving like the image macro memes that were exploding at the time of SoundCloud’s rise (ask your older siblings about icanhascheezburger). While there is much talk about memes and music now, particularly in the context of TikTok’s impact on music, this development is something that has been going on for more than a decade and SoundCloud’s community was at the center of it.

In 2009 Dave Nada slowed down a house track at a party to match with the reggaeton being played there. It sounded amazing. He went home, made an edit, and uploaded it to SoundCloud. And that’s how moombahton was born, a genre now eclipsed by trap and subsequent developments in popular music, but it has provided the underpinnings for hits by people like Diplo, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Skrillex, and many others.

After uploading it to SoundCloud, other producers heard Dave Nada’s remix, and started making their own moombahton edits. Soon they started making originals. Some of the people from this movement grew into ‘EDM’ stars, like Dillon Francis. And perhaps this had been happening before moombahton, but for me it was the first time that I noticed a genre being born within a matter of weeks, if not days.

Why the comparison with memes? Well, they behave similarly: due to music tools becoming more widely available (mostly through pirated music production software) it became easier for people to participate in music creation. Editing an image became easy with computers entering every household, and memes became a language of expression. The same conversation happened through music: someone would upload a musical idea and someone else would run with that idea and apply it to something else according to their vision. “Remix culture” was the phrase then, but now we use the ‘memes’ label for the vast majority of that phenomenon.

As moombahton was growing, electronic music producers started playing around with sounds of trap – a style of hiphop until then, that sounded very different from the Harlem Shake and Turn Down For What-style hits that were to follow.

Community was essential to SoundCloud and then they risked it all

For a long time, SoundCloud struggled with its business model, the licensing fees it had to pay rightsholders (and was getting sued for), and the fact that people were uploading music that wasn’t theirs to the platform.

How that all played out is a story for another time (or hey, right now, since it’s already been written about a lot, just head to your favourite search engine or try Ecosia which is like a greener Google). The result of how that story played out is that SoundCloud suddenly found itself manoeuvring into the typical streaming service domain of business models and service design. It struck deals with the majors, launched ads for the free part of the service, subscriptions for the listener side of the business (with a similar pricing model as Spotify & co), and added labels’ back catalogues to the service.

More music: cool right?

Well. Not really.

SoundCloud was the place for the freshest music. SoundCloud enabled new communities to emerge and connect, and those communities enabled SoundCloud to have the newest in music before it was available anywhere else.

Now, that all got merged into a context which included artists who were dead long before the internet. That’s not why anyone was on SoundCloud.

As music industry analyst Mark Mulligan pointed out at the time:

“Unlike Spotify and Deezer, whose free tiers have long been geared towards driving subscriptions, for Soundcloud this is not a funnel tweak, it is a pivot. It is a complete change in strategy.“

Driven by the expense of the operation, the company focused on selling itself as a catalogue service, essentially competing with Spotify — something it hadn’t really done before. As an on-demand catalogue service it was simply inferior to Spotify’s product that had been developed exactly for that purpose. For its own original purpose, SoundCloud’s product was still superior to Spotify’s product and to a large extent still is.

This part of the story ended up with layoffs and a change of management at SoundCloud. Its founders out. Painful.

It looked like SoundCloud wasn’t going to make it, but after debt funding and new investment, SoundCloud survived, now with a new CEO: Kerry Trainor, who previously led creator-centric video platform Vimeo.

Somehow, he convinced the company’s investors to let SoundCloud pursue a creator-centric strategy again, despite all the sunk cost into a different direction. And that brings us to today’s landscape.

SoundCloud’s most important competitor is Instagram

The defining thing about SoundCloud is not that you can listen to music there. You can listen to music on the radio. What has always defined SoundCloud is its community that pushes boundaries of genres and develops new styles (there’s even a hugely popular, chart-topping genre that carries the company’s name: SoundCloud rap).

SoundCloud is where it pops off, but the community doesn’t really connect there anymore.

Sure, people will leave a comment, maybe send a message, and do a repost, but that’s a very narrow spectrum of interaction among communities of creatives. Where do people share their work-in-progress music? Where do artists share their excitement about releases of other artists in their community? Where do people ask for feedback and create back-and-forths around creative expression? Instagram.

If people need to get in touch with each other, they DM each other through Instagram, too. It’s actually impossible to message people on SoundCloud from your mobile phone (go ahead, try it). More frustratingly, from your mobile device it’s also impossible to read messages people sent you.

Through posts being shared in Instagram stories, people discover new accounts to follow. When you visit a profile, you see which people are already following them — this helps to determine community-membership. Seeing who someone follows and is followed by exists on SoundCloud, but it’s just not as well-done as on Instagram.

Another aspect we often forget to discuss is that music culture is not just music. Music has a visual culture. With more of our time spent discovering and connecting to music online, even pre-corona, music’s context has become more visual than before. I’m not talking about music videos necessarily. I’m talking about shots from the studio, artists’ personal life, artwork, stuff artists are inspired by, videos of digital audio workstation screens, etc.

Music is a visual culture, which is one more reason why music culture & communities congregate on Instagram.

Is Instagram a music platform?

No.

You could make the argument that it is, but in defining Instagram as a SoundCloud competitor, I don’t think Instagram as a music platform is relevant.

The exciting thing for SoundCloud has always been its community. What made SoundCloud successful is that it made its community successful. And while SoundCloud is still the place where these communities post finished tracks and DJ sets, it is no longer the community’s center.

Instagram is the center of important parts of SoundCloud’s community and that is a problem for SoundCloud.

MySpace wasn’t a Facebook and it wasn’t a music platform necessarily: it was a bit of both and in being so it was the center of a community. As Facebook and SoundCloud built compelling new services that did the 2 things MySpace was doing well, communities started shifting and MySpace lost its center.

Now SoundCloud has lost its center. It is doing better than a few years ago, but there is a risk. What does this risk look like?

Let’s look at Bandcamp’s days where they drop their revenue share. The site sees record traffic and record sales on those days. Even for underground genres, where musicians’ fans are probably musicians themselves too, I doubt that SoundCloud is responsible for anything like the traffic Instagram is sending. And that’s fine, because SoundCloud is not necessarily a social media platform – it’s a music platform. The problem is, so is Bandcamp.

SoundCloud is in a good position. It’s part of online music’s infrastructure. As is Bandcamp, and I don’t think the two platforms are competing or are likely to make deliberate choices to end up competing. But SoundCloud doesn’t own its community, and it has a problem when its position as part of music’s default infrastructure is threatened (e.g. by a large streaming service that’s already integrated with Instagram deciding to compete with labels and adopting more creator-centric features).

How can SoundCloud win back its community?

I expect this is the question you may be asking or the question you expect to be answered, but I don’t think it’s the right question to ask. This is about SoundCloud’s place in a cultural landscape. Getting to a certain position in this landscape takes long and is unpredictable. Just consider that the start of SoundCloud’s story is as a tool for music sharing and collaboration. Did they think it would become a cornerstone of global rap and electronic music culture? They could have dreamt it, sure, but they wouldn’t have been able to map out the path by which they’d eventually achieve it.

Everything depends on early adopters

Some services adapt to user expectations by widening their demographic and appealing to a larger number of people (e.g. people that are not digital-savvy, are into music but are happy to just have a radio stream, etc.). In doing so, you often alienate early adopters who will start looking for the next thing. In 2017, SoundCloud was in trouble and Spotify was aggressively trying to increase its market share. I argued that we were witnessing a new “MySpace moment”: an end of one era and a beginning of a next one, as underserved early adopters start moving on and start populating new potential markets for entrepreneurs and investors.

Well, we’re there. It’s now. Accelerated by the global lockdowns in response to COVID-19.

A new landscape is emerging and in order for SoundCloud to retain its position as infrastructure for the early adopters of this generation, then it will have to integrate into that landscape. Just like it did when everyone swapped out their MySpace player for SoundCloud’s.

It will have to integrate not just with incumbents, but also upcoming startups in:

  • Music production software (software can mean mobile or desktop apps, as well as browser-based)
  • DJ software
  • Virtual environments like video games and VR experiences
  • Augmented reality experiences

The good news, if you’re cheering for SoundCloud like I am, is that they’re already doing these integrations. I can go to Plug.dj and play SoundCloud tracks for a room of my friends’ virtual avatars, as a DJ I can access SoundCloud’s catalogue from DJ software like Rekordbox, Serato, and Traktor with the Go+ subscription. They’re already integrated with the most popular augmented reality platform, which is Instagram with its filters and effects.

This is just survival strategy though: SoundCloud must stay close to early adopters so it doesn’t risk losing its place as essential infrastructure. The road back to being the community’s center is another question.

As long as SoundCloud can grow its revenues by sustaining itself as infrastructure, it may be a difficult business decision to invest in doing more than that. Doing more than that would take research. Definitions of audiences, so they can decide which ones to focus on and which ones to risk losing. It’s easy to shout what a company should do and make a compelling point for why they would be successful doing that. It’s much harder to execute it, and I speak from experience (on both sides).

A music streaming service as an ecosystem

My attempt to build a modularized music streaming service with low-priced subscriptions ran into all kinds of issues. You think a good funding round buys you time and we were well-funded at $20M, but money burns fast if you’re a streaming service. Ultimately, we needed to get high growth numbers according to industry benchmarks. Those benchmarks were established by other companies doing bundling deals with telcos. None of the local telcos we spoke to were into the concept of an ecosystem of music apps: they wanted a one-size-fits-all app like Spotify or Deezer. For a while we pursued 2 strategies at once: we built the standard app to try to get partnerships, while also working to construct the ecosystem.

Pursuing two strategies wasn’t intentional. It was the result of compromise. We now had two competing visions and efforts in the company, and even if they were mostly compatible, it was impossible to focus on both and be successful both ways. Not at that stage, not at that scale.

With time lost and money spent, I didn’t think the company could reasonably expect to be a large international player that could compete with the likes of Deezer and Spotify (the two major streaming subscription services outside of the US at the time). I didn’t say it publicly at the time, nor to the team, but I told the founders & CEO that I thought Zvooq’s best bet was to be a strong local player. An obstacle to entry and adoption for companies like Spotify and tech giants which inevitably would launch their own music streaming services (Apple was only just launching iTunes in Russia where we were based, and hadn’t acquired Beats Music yet, which became Apple Music). Personally I felt like that was the most likely route for investors to get a return: being acquired as part of a market entry strategy.

I had nothing to prove in building ‘yet another’ streaming service, and while I had fun figuring out how to serve a market where many people’s only personal computer is the cheapest Chinese Android phone money can buy, I decided to bow out. And that’s where the anecdote ends.

There’s a similarity though:

SoundCloud ended up pursuing two strategies too. It wanted to be Spotify and it wanted to be, err… SoundCloud. It ended up being neither and has now spent 2 years rebuilding.

If I were at SoundCloud, exploring how to get back to that center (for some reason), I’d be looking into the AI landscape. It’s going to accelerate things; faster iteration on musical ideas; MORE MEMES. If you thought getting production software onto everyone’s computers and phones changed music a lot (with SoundCloud at the center!), just wait until artificial intelligence-assisted creation really breaks through.

But I’m not at SoundCloud. And as we hit the 3000 word mark, it may seem I know a lot, but I know nothing. There are opportunities to research, but to say what they mean for SoundCloud requires insight into the company’s business, user research, behaviour on the platform, market analysis, etc.

But if I were to start researching this topic, with what I know now, I think SoundCloud’s best chance for moving back into the center is called AI.

Notes

When I say AI in this piece, I’m talking about AI-assisted music creation (or perhaps even AI-generated music). Music recommendation is another popular avenue for AI and something where machine learning has been more successful in attaining mass adoption and satisfaction by end users.

A small disclaimer on early adopters: the people that make up ‘early adopters’ change. The people who were early adopters in 2009 may not be part of that group now. Some of the people who would be part of that group now were 8 years old back then and probably not part of SoundCloud’s target audience. So when you hear this term used in narratives that span potentially multiple product lifecycles, don’t think of it as a static group of people.

Top photo by Attentie Attentie on Unsplash.

Edited while listening to Perc’s DJ set for UNSTREAM (techno).

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Postinternet Music

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The third internet generation for music is here.

Purpose

MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE is on a bit of a hiatus. I started it 2 years ago with the goal of shedding light on topics that I felt were being neglected.

Two years later, I feel more positive about the conversation in the music business. Besides that, great newsletters (like Platform & Stream) and writers (like Cherie Hu) have emerged and cover a lot of the topics I set out to cover with MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. So what role can I play now in moving the conversation forward?

I have been doing a lot of thinking about what’s next. How will all these trends we discuss combine? What are we not talking about? Where are the opportunities? What is the next generation of artists doing? What do they know that we don’t?

By thinking about this, I have slowly been reinventing MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE along with the topics I cover. Music as a business is a complex ecosystem. Music as a phenomenon has kept generations of musicologists and philosophers occupied in discussions without conclusions for millennia. The question I have been answering is: what do I find important and what is nobody talking about?

Inspiration

By focusing on innovation in music, and always expanding my musical and artistic horizons, I have seen some developments over the last year that are starting to click together. I am now of the opinion that we are seeing the emergence of an important new generation of music that is going to spawn its own ecosystem.

Broadly speaking, music & the internet has had two phases so far:

Phase 1: the great disruption

Let’s call it the Napster moment. It led to the first new status quo. The rule it imposed was this: “anything that can be stored in digits can be communicated digitally through networks.” (this rule has also been called “information wants to be free”) This introduced music, and its business ecosystem, to the age of networks. Instead of moving products through distribution and media channels, it now moved through networks… and anyone that wanted to play the game, no longer had to find a way into the channels — everyone was on the network.

MySpace Tom: a friend for everyone

Phase 2: the MySpace moment

This phase is probably heralded by what I call the MySpace moment. MySpace grew as piracy thrived. Communities formed. We understood what social media could mean for music. Then MySpace collapsed and there was nothing there to take its place. Instead, the smartphone enabled the next generation of music and social platforms. On-demand music services like Spotify and SoundCloud appeared — both making an impact on modern music culture far exceeding MySpace’s. Communities formed again.

Phase 3: the SoundCloud moment

So what’s phase 3? The streaming economy is maturing. We are still figuring out how it will work exactly. Let the constant lawsuits between musicians, songwriters, labels, and streaming services be a testament to that. The shitty smartphones we used to have, have been traded in for phones that are more powerful than the computers on our desks a few years ago. AND they have cameras on both sides, AND we have fast internet, ALL the time. Queue YouTubers, Instagram stars, as well as producers rebooting their careers by becoming Snapchat personalities. 🔑

Meme culture went mainstream. People retiring now, with lots of free time on their hands, have been using the internet for 20 years. People reaching maturity now don’t know the world without internet. They may have been carrying smartphones before taking their first chemistry class. It introduces new questions and phenomena in our culture and in music. A 2017 headline that captured one of those phenomena well was: “Rap’s Biggest Stars Are Depressed & So Are Their Fans”.

Net art commenting on internet & mental health.

OK OK OK SO WHAT IS PHASE 3?!

I can’t tell you. We can only see it once it’s there. But I can tell you how to be part of it.

With each of these shifts media culture shifted, so you have to look at what changes media culture is going through right now. Artificial intelligence, voice activated devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality all play tremendously important roles here. We still don’t know what the SoundClouds, Facebooks, Spotifys, PewDiePies and Justin Biebers (discovered through YouTube) of this phase will be, but we do know what technologies and media formats they may employ.

When MySpace started collapsing, everyone wanted to figure out what the ‘next MySpace’ would be. There was no next MySpace. Not in the way anyone was thinking about it. Ultimately, Facebook and SoundCloud filled that gap and took things way further than MySpace.

So what would the next SoundCloud look like?

This is what I know about the next SoundCloud. It can be clunky. In fact, it may be better if it’s not easy to use (e.g. Snapchat): kids will spend time figuring out how to move into virtual spaces where they can do their own thing. P2P services were not easy to use at first, torrents weren’t easy to use, and as elegant as it was, SoundCloud was not as easy to use as MySpace in its early days as long as you were trying to use it for MySpacey purposes.

It has to do 1 thing extremely well though (let’s call it ‘killer feature’). I remember that SoundCloud’s waveform & commenting feature was so great that artists were learning basic code, so they could remove MySpace’s standard players from their profiles and add SoundCloud’s waveform.

Then it has to have high cultural appeal. The waveform helped SoundCloud travel. It was cool. It’s hard to say what it will be like for the next SoundCloud… But perhaps it’s a cryptotoken. Blockchain is cool and cryptocurrencies are cool. They have cultural appeal, partly because of their association with ordering drugs online via the Tor network. But also because they represent dissent against the status quo, whether that’s valid or invalid. And the first cryptocurrency millionaires in music are already here. 50 Cent.

Perhaps Mat Dryhurst, a prolific thinker and artist (some may know him from his work with Holly Herndon), will be proven right and we will see a tokenized SoundCloud. Fingers crossed, because I admire what they’ve done and the role they’ve played in helping modern music & internet culture take shape.

But what about…

We assume too often that what comes next follows more or less linearly from what was there before. By doing so, we discount important developments and blind ourselves to their potential impact. In previous paragraphs, I have done exactly that. So it’s time to clean up my mess.

What is internet culture?

First of all, I need to clarify what I mean when I talk about internet culture or online culture. I am talking about audiovisual aesthetics, language, cultural memes like jokes, discourse about identity, politics, society and psychology. These emerge online. From bedrooms. From people of all ages and countries, connecting online to collaborate, iterate, remix, and discuss in virtual space.

This has manifested through music genres like vaporwave and nightcore (example below), but also more serious topics, such as a cultural emphasis on mental health, and identity (most notably gender identity). Then there’s a darker side to it too. The alt right has been able to create so much impact, from bedrooms, by using the same internet culture dynamics that previous examples utilize — eventually memeing Trump into the White House. They accomplished it as part of an alliance of mostly pre-internet organisations, institutions, and structures, but those organisations couldn’t have pulled this off without their internet army.

When I talk about internet culture, or online culture, I do not mean to suggest a separation between online and offline. I’m just pointing at the origin. As a matter of fact, the internet has become such a standard part of our lives that we are online even when we’re offline.

On a free weekend day, leave your phone at home. Go explore the city. Go to parts you’ve never been. Soon, you may get lost and want to check Google Maps. You may see something fascinating that you’d like to photograph and share on Instagram or Facebook. You might take a mental note to look that building up on Wikipedia when you get home to get more history.

By now, our minds are always online. Even when we believe we’re offline.

Always online

This is the number 1 thing that changed over the course of aforementioned phase 2. Even when smartphones arrived, we weren’t online all the time. But now we are. The fact that we are always carrying devices around that are connected to fast internet, with cameras on both sides, and with great screens compared to those 5–10 years ago, is one of the most important realities for the future of music.

Musical.ly, sold last year for around $1bn, comes to mind.

Mixed reality

How platforms deal with ‘mixed reality’ may be as crucial as the question of how the previous generation dealt with the rise of the smartphone. Back in Facebook’s younger days, the company was struggling to crack mobile and eventually took drastic measures to become mobile-first. Getting ahead of the problem this time, Facebook entered the virtual reality space in 2014 through the early acquisition of Oculus VR for $2bn.

But I don’t think it’s VR as a medium that will have the high cultural impact that the internet did. I think it’s about the interface to other aspects of our experience. It’s why I believe the below video of Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, calling Mark from ‘the real world’ while he’s in a VR version of his home, was one of the most important tech showcases last year.

Skip to 4:50 if the video doesn’t auto-play from there.

Offline and online is blurring, so what does that imply for music?

Instreaming

Late last year I attended a gig that has really started falling into place since. A friend from Holland (Victor, also known as S x m b r a) was coming to Berlin to do a gig. I met him when he was mostly known for writing for Generation Bass — an important blog for underground bass music culture. He is extremely plugged in and knows so much about trends in music (particularly online niches), so I really trust him as a music curator.

He is also part of something called c a r e, which is described as:

c a r e is a post-internet party taking place online.
c a r e is about sharing together. c a r e is a future sensation.
this digital experience enables you to connect with internet kids worldwide. it also provides the opportunity to meet and discover artists and people which have common interests. we are a based world community that meets at url parties. we are glad to invite you to this virtual concept of partying. we hope you’ll enjoy the event! see you online.

Through c a r e, he teamed up an interdisciplinary collective called Clusterduck which specialises in internet culture. Together they organised a “url / irl party” as part of Clusterduck’s Internet Fame project, which is part of the Wrong Biennale — a global event celebrating digital art.

During the event, an audio & video stream connected people from their bedrooms to the ‘irl’ event. These people could interact with each other online, but they were also “instreamed” so their chat messages & webcam feeds on Tinychat would be shown inside the party. The founder of c a r e, who wasn’t present in person, is even billed on the poster and broadcasted a DJ set from url to the irl space in Berlin.

A lot of people at the ‘irl’ part of the event were familiar with some of the people they saw on the ‘url’ part displayed on a prominent screen above the dancefloor & bar. So it created this sense of community & connection and blurring of irl & url.

You could walk into such an event and think it’s just some young folks who set up some webcams, but when you see it as part of the greater trends in our all-absorbing media & tech culture, what was happening there becomes way more significant.

Internet culture and music

I will be going way deeper into this in future articles and newsletters, but I want to give you an example of what I think people should be paying attention to.

For example, the Sponsored Content album by an artist called Antwood. It’s a perfect example of the post-internet avant-garde expression in music. Antwood:

“In the past year, I found that ASMR [dubbed by Google as the biggest YouTube trend you’ve never heard of], which I had previously used as a source of foley in my music, was a fairly effective sleep aid. I’d been using the videos in this way for a few months, when I noticed a popular ASMR YouTuber announced a plan to incorporate ads into her videos; quiet, subtle ads, woven into the content. What bothered me about this was that these ads would target viewers, such as myself, during times of semi lucid vulnerability. This disturbed me, and I unsubscribed.

Sponsored Content explores this idea of subversive advertisement, at least superficially. It’s obviously about the ubiquity of ads and the commodification of online content. The unlikely placement of ads in the music aims to force the listener to become hyper-aware of being advertised to rather than passively internalizing it. But after the record was finished, it became undeniable that really it wasn’t so much a “concept record” about advertisement; it’s as much about intentionally devaluing the things I’ve invested myself into, and over-complicating my work. When I realized this, I considered taking the ads out, and playing the music straight. But I left the record as it is: honest, flawed, with a little humour, and slightly up its own ass.”

I’ve compiled over 25 hours of albums and releases that I feel adhere to this trend in music (Spotify playlist). My playlist biases towards the club & nightlife variants of this trend, but the visual and musical aesthetics & themes should give you a good understanding of what this is about. The most famous example is probably Arca, who has produced for Kanye West and Björk.

Aforementioned Holly Herndon, who toured with Radiohead, uses AI in her work: “We have an AI baby that we’re training on our voices; on our voices and on the voices of our ensemble. Yeah, it’s learning how to talk and how to sing, so it’s freaking weird”.

Another great example of the post-internet trend in arts and music is YouTuber Poppy, who recently released an album called Poppy.Computer on Mad Decent.

Besides the obvious commentary on internet culture & society on her channel, Poppy plays with the uncanny valley hypothesis of robotics professor Masahiro Mori. The hypothesis suggests that humans feel fine with robots that are obviously not human, but the more semblance these robots get to humans, the stronger our feelings of eeriness and revulsion.

In music, perhaps the best known example of a post-internet genre is vaporwave:

The Virtual Vaporwave Scene

From boardroom to bedroom

Over the last 2 years, I have written a lot about the music business ecosystem. Always with an innovative angle, but often focused on the type of big issues that are discussed and decided about in boardrooms. While those things are immensely important, it’s also reactive. Reaction doesn’t set trajectory — it can only adjust it.

My focus is going to shift from the boardroom to the bedroom. From complex issues with big financial implications, to profound ideas that may not always have a clear link to monetization. It is a focus on the creator, the inventor, the innovator.

The newsletter has always placed emphasis on utility. I want what I do to be useful in some way. The most important way in which I try to do that, is by showing what is next, which I will continue to do. What is next is already here — you just have to know where to look.

This is our culture we are talking about. That is primary.
That is what enables the business around it. Which is secondary.

MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. Those words say it all.

(This post originally appeared on Medium, which I’m moving away from. When you can avoid the large platforms, you should.)

How I got over a quarter million plays on my Soundcloud

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Building up a following as a DJ in the social web’s early days: a how-to for time travellers. 💫

Back when I was in college, my friend and I would go to a lot of parties. We also used to rap in a band together. Up until then, I had always been writing a lot of lyrics and would visit every hiphop gig in my city. When there was nothing better on, we’d go to student parties in a local club that gathered around 800 people every week, and in between dancing and chatting, we’d be rapping our lyrics over the beats of popular songs.

Then one day we stumbled upon the drum ‘n bass scene (with regular parties in my hometown being hosted by the renowned Black Sun Empire). I always thought electronic music was not for me, but it changed the way I looked at electronic music. Instead of trying to make beats on FL Studio, I started playing around with making electronic music. Then, one day, I stumbled upon a simpler tool that allowed me to mix tracks together. It carried the tacky name Mixmeister, but it is still my all-time favourite tool for making mixes from the comfort of (what was then) my bedroom.

I still wish a company like Native Instruments or Ableton would buy this firm, and release a better and renewed version of their software that hasn’t worked on my Mac for years. But I digress.

Up until then, I had been writing lyrics. Lots of them. Daily. I was involved in the “textcee” scene, which is how people participated in online rap back when it was still a little tricky to record and upload tracks. I participated in battles, topical challenges, wrote about complex (and often silly) subject matter, and really got my creativity out — all in text format. It was easy to distribute, light-weight, and it had its communities and forums.

Pre-Soundcloud

For DJs, it was harder. Bandwidth was not great, and back in 2006 or so, when I started, there were no good online communities. There was no Soundcloud, there was no Mixcloud, and YouTube only allowed videos of up to 10 minutes. My tools of choice, for hosting DJ sets, were YouSendIt, uploaded.to and MegaUpload. They were iffy and you always had to monitor that your files were not taken down, but they would do.

I thought a lot about the format. I never mixed over 80 minutes, because I wanted to make sure that fans (if I had any, and it was hard to tell pre-Facebook & Twitter) would be able to burn it to CDs and listen to it from their cars or home stereos.

I would write detailed information about my tracklists, for a number of reasons:

  1. It’s only fair that the creators of the music get acknowledged – especially since I was sharing their music without permission;
  2. If one of my listeners liked a track, I wanted them to be able to know what it was (there was no such thing as Shazam);
  3. I put detailed time markings, so that people would be able to identify the transitions and the amount of work I’d put into blending tracks together.

I would post them to the forums where I was already going (as well as my MySpace), where I already had my fans because of my texts, together with the links. Here’s an example of such a tracklist:

Then I started a blog on Blogspot to post all the mixes. People would subscribe via RSS and get the posts through their RSS reader. I even added a way to get email updates when the RSS feed would be updated, by using a popular tool at the time called FeedBurner. When posting my mixes to forums, I would also always include download links but also a link to the blogpost, so I could build up my followers there, too.

I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was doing really helped with SEO. If people were Googling those tracks, they’d often find my blog, because not everything was on YouTube, today’s major streaming platforms were non-existent, and the underground was not represented well on iTunes. By sharing my mixes everywhere, I was also generating a lot of backlinks. I was publishing multiple mixes per month. Throughout 2007 I published as many as 35.

Then Soundcloud arrived on the scene

I’m not sure how or when I discovered Soundcloud, but it must have been in its early days back in 2008. I managed to register my first name as my username, which I have held on to ever since, despite people trying to hack my account and even being hit by a trademark claim by an American rapper (after I rejected offers to buy it).

This is where things really started taking off. Now I was able to collect streams instead of downloads. It was so incredibly convenient. No wonder DJs flocked to the platform. All fans had to do now was hit play, but the option to download and listen in high quality was there too. On top of all that, I was able to timestamp my mixes in a much more interesting way: by commenting the tracks.

Something else happened too. By tagging my mixes, it was possible for others to find my work. And by browsing tags, I was able to find other DJs. This was a first. Never before had there been as big a community of DJs. Never before had it been so easy to connect to others. Never before had it been so easy for producers and DJs to connect from the comfort of their bedrooms.

I started listening to other DJs. Commenting everywhere. I continued the same strategy of tracklists and tagging, which maybe also helped my SEO on Soundcloud. But I also didn’t give up on my website until many years later when Facebook was more established and it was getting hard to get people to visit websites. Owning your audience was important, and I always knew this. I needed to have my own place to keep the people who are interested in what I do connected to me.

Then in 2009, Soundcloud changed the rules of the game for DJs.

The first big DJ revolt on Soundcloud

When Soundcloud started, they allowed everyone to upload 4 tracks every month. Tracks could be of any length, or at least long enough to fit a DJ set, but if you wanted to upload more than 4 in a month, you would have to get a paid account. This was great for DJs, but it didn’t last.

In October 2009, Soundcloud switched over to a model with a maximum amount of minutes per account. Even if you’d upgrade to the most expensive monthly package there was no way to get rid of the maximum. It caused an uproar (link to discussion with participation of the founders – but layout is messed up, because it’s a cached page). I participated and tried to be understanding. The model made sense for producers, who were more likely to spend money on Soundcloud. It sucked for DJs though. I wanted DJs to think about what kind of model would allow for Soundcloud to monetize them and very actively participated in the discussion.

The people who participated in that discussion got lucky, and it’s really a token of how user-centric Soundcloud was in those days. A link was shared with the participants, where they could list their accounts, and they were given 30 extra hours. For me, that was about 30 extra DJ sets and it has lasted me to this day (I never matched my 2007 streak) — and I should have probably mentioned this in my ‘Benefits of Being an Early Adopter‘ piece. And props to David Noel, who was Soundcloud’s community lead. The email exchanges (and exchanges on Soundcloud’s support community) that I had with him stuck with me. I was writing my thesis at the time and when I graduated and got into music startups those exchanges were a big inspiration for my early career.

Life goes on

As Soundcloud grew into the giant it is today, I grew along with it. My taste grew, my following grew, my tactics and strategies evolved, and I saw new genres flourish on Soundcloud, such as moombahton.

Before all the download-gate bullshit, that make you jump through hoops, follow random accounts, like Facebook Pages, etc., it was pretty convenient to get free downloads from Soundcloud. I actually set up an IFTTT script that would automatically download tracks I favourited to my Dropbox. This way I could discover new music while I was working at Zvooq by day, in passive mode, and then by night play around with the files in my mixes.

I participated actively in the new, emerging online scenes. Commenting on tracks and connecting to amazing new talent emerging from the internet, rather than from a particular network of DJs. This got me a lot of listeners. I started making mixes in which all tracks were available to download for free. This had value in different ways:

  1. I knew for sure that all DJs would be ok with me uploading this;
  2. People would listen to them, because they knew they can find and quickly download new tracks through there;
  3. I would link to all the tracks and afterwards comment on them to let people know I had featured their work. Sometimes they would share my music on their social media (this is before the repost function on SC).

If you’re not communicating your music this way, if you’re not networking with your inspirations, you’re not doing it right. This is probably how I got most of my plays from 2012 to now. Tactics and landscapes change, but some principles are true forever. Participate!

Other tactics not listed above:

  • Make playlists on 8tracks with the tracks of my mixes in order to promote my mix;
  • Try to win followers via social listening platforms like turntable.fm;
  • Make short mixes and post them on YouTube in order to find new audiences;
  • Facebook & Twitter accounts through where I would connect to segments of my audience.

My demise as a net-DJ

Then things got harder. It wasn’t any particular issue, but a lot of factors combined to halt me.

I switched to a Traktor S4 controller with Traktor software, so now I had to do all my mixes live. I’m a perfectionist, so this decreased my output. Digging also got harder: the communal nature of Soundcloud changed and a lot of DJs stopped offering their tracks as downloads (even when they’re not selling them). Others would put their stuff behind download gates, which just made it a pain in the ass to collect tracks and way more time-consuming. This also decreased my output.

As the number of mixes I put out decreased, so did the growth of my followers and my exposure to my audiences that were not directly connected to me. Followers ‘churn’ even when they stay part of your follower count. This means that followers go inactive on the platform they follow you on, so the follower count no longer translates to playback or other forms of engagement. This doesn’t matter so much when you’re new, but if you’re working on something for over a decade, it matters.

All of this compounded. It’s been about 5 years since I had a mix that got ~5k plays. And 8 years for 15k. But the lesson here is: to rack up following & plays, you can get lucky with a hit or just be insanely productive.

I’m at peace with what happened and now that I’m in Berlin, with talented friends as producers, plus friends in companies like Ableton and Native Instruments, I’m slowly getting back into DJing and producing. I haven’t put out a track in a decade, and no mix in 2 years, but I’m surrounded by the right people to get back into it… and do things right with all the experience I’ve collected plus that surrounds me. (if I actually end up having enough time — the irony of working in music)

Key takeaways

If I had to distill this into key lessons (and I do, because I owe it to you after reading 2000 words), these would be my main takeaways:

  • GET THERE EARLY. I got really lucky with being early to Soundcloud, but it also helped that what I was doing back then was not as common as it is now. Stay on top of developments in sounds and genres, and be slightly ahead of the curve, so you can shine a spotlight on up & coming talent. It will pay off when someone blows up.
  • BUILD YOUR FOLLOWING. Don’t trust in platforms: own your following. Connect them to your presence in many places, get their email addresses. Make sure your following is loyal, build trust, be consistent. If you’re slightly ahead of the curve, they know they’ll always discover new artists through you.
  • ALWAYS CREDIT PEOPLE. Scenes are small. Help each other. If you play someone’s music: list it. Don’t have time to provide a tracklist? Then you don’t have time to be a DJ. Sorry.
  • BE HELPFUL. This is connected to crediting: help people to understand the music they’re listening to. They’ll connect to you for this.
  • BE CONSISTENT & PRODUCTIVE. My best days were when I was a student. I don’t know how I found the time in between college and 12-20 hours of side jobs per week, but often I’d get home and get to mixing. I’d be doing stuff with music almost every spare minute. That’s the only type of dedication that really works.

I’ve had my run. Maybe I’ll do it again, but in a different way. I still like DJing, but prefer to do it live now. Besides, I have other ways to enjoy music now, such as my day job at IDAGIO, as well as MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE.

But to the generation that’s out there, on the cyber highways, hustling: best of luck & I hope this piece helps you.

The next 3 interfaces for music’s near future

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Our changing media reality means everyone in music will have to come to grips with three important new trends.

Understanding the music business means understanding how people access, discover, and continuously listen to music. This used to be the record player, cassette player, radio, cd player, and now increasingly happens on our computers and smartphones. First by playing downloads in media players like Winamp, Musicmatch Jukebox, or iTunes, but now mostly via streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, but also YouTube.

Whenever the interface for music changes, the rules of the game change. New challenges emerge, new players get to access the space, and those to best leverage the new media reality gain a significant lead over competing services or companies, like Spinnin Records‘ early YouTube success.

What is a media reality?

I was recently talking with Gigi Johnson, the Executive Director of the UCLA Center for Music Innovation, for their podcast, and as we were discussing innovation, I wanted to point out two different types of innovation. There is technological innovation, like invention, but you don’t have to be a scientist or an inventor to be innovative.

When the aforementioned categories of innovations get rolled out, they create new realities. Peer-to-peer technology helped Spotify with the distribution of music early on (one of their lead engineers is Ludvig Strigeus, creator of BitTorrent client utorrent), and for this to work, Spotify needed a media reality in which computers were linked to each other in networks with decent bandwidth (ie. the internet).

So that’s the second type of innovation: leveraging a reality created by the proliferation of a certain technology. Studios didn’t have to invent the television in order to dominate the medium. Facebook didn’t have to invent the world wide web.

A media reality is any reality in which innovation causes a shift to a new type of media. Our media reality is increasingly shifting towards smart assistants like Siri, an ‘internet of things’ (think smart home), and we’re creating, watching, and interacting through more high quality video than ever before.

Any new media reality brings with it new interfaces through which people interact with knowledge, their environment, friends, entertainment, and whatever else might be presented through these interfaces. So let’s look at the new interfaces everyone in music will have to deal with in the coming years.

Chatbots are the new apps

People don’t download as many apps as they used to and it’s getting harder to get people to install an app. According to data by comScore, most smartphone users now download fewer than 1 app per month.

So, in dealing with this new media reality, you go to where the audience is. Apparently that’s no longer in app stores, but on social networks and messaging apps. Some of the latter, and most prominently Facebook Messenger, allow for people to build chatbots, which are basically apps inside the messenger.

Companies like Transferwise, CNN, Adidas, Nike, and many airlines already have their own bots running on Messenger. In music, well-known examples of artist chatbots are those by Katy Perry and DJ Hardwell. Record Bird, a company specialized in surfacing new releases by artists you like, launched their own bot on messenger in 2016.

The challenge with chatbots is that designing for a conversational interface is quite different from designing visual user interfaces. Sometimes people will not understand what’s going on and start requesting things from your bot that you may not have anticipated. Such behaviours need to be anticipated, since people can not see the confines of the interface.

Chatbots are set to improve a lot over time, as developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence will help the systems behind the interfaces to interpret what users may mean and come up with better answers.

VUIs: Alexa, play me music from… uhmm….

I’ve been living with an Amazon Echo for over a month and together with my Philips Hue lamps it has imbedded itself into my life to the extent that I nearly asked Alexa, Amazon‘s voice assistant, to turn off the lights in a hotel room last weekend.

It’s been a pleasure to trade in the frequent returns to touch-based user interfaces for voice user interfaces (VUIs). I thought I’d feel awkward, but it’s great to quickly ask for weather updates, planned activities, the time, changing music, changing the volume, turning the lights on or off or dimming them, setting alarms, etc. without having to grab my phone.

I also thought it would be awkward having friends over and interacting with it, but it turns into a type of play, with friends trying out all kinds of requests I had never even thought of, and finding out about new features I wasn’t aware of.

And there’s the challenge for artists and businesses.

As a user, there is no home screen. There is nothing to guide you. There is only what you remember, what’s top of mind. Which is why VUIs are sometimes referred to as ‘zero UI’.

I have hundreds of playlists on Spotify, but through Alexa I’ve only listened to around a dozen different playlists. When I feel like music that may or may not be contained inside one of my playlists, it’s easier to mentally navigate to an artist that plays music like that, than to remember the playlist. So you request the artist instead.

VUIs will make the branding of playlists crucial. For example, instead of asking for Alexa to play hiphop from Spotify, I requested their RapCaviar playlist, because I felt the former query’s outcome would be too unpredictable. As the music plays, I’m less aware of the artist names, as I don’t even see them anymore and I hardly ever bother asking. For music composed by artificial intelligence, this could be a great opportunity to enter our music listening habits.

The VUI pairs well with the connected home, which is why tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple are all using music as the trojan horse to get their home-controlling devices into our living rooms. They’re going to be the operating system for our houses, and that operating system will provide an invisible layer that we interact with through our voice.

Although many of the experiences through VUIs feel a bit limited currently, they’re supposed to get better over time (which is why Amazon calls their Alexa apps ‘skills’). And with AI improving and becoming more widespread, these skills will get better to the point that they can anticipate our intentions before we express them.

As voice-controlled user interfaces enter more of our lives, the question for artists, music companies, and startups is: how do we stand out when there is no visual component? How can you stay top of mind? How will people remember you?

Augmented reality

Google Glass was too early. Augmented reality will be nothing like it.

Instead of issuing awkward voice commands to a kind of head mounted smartphone, the media reality that augmented reality will take shape in is one of conversational interfaces through messaging apps, and voice user interfaces, that are part of connected smart environments, all utilizing powerful artificial intelligence.

You won’t have to issue requests, because you’ll see overlays with suggested actions that you can easily trigger. Voice commands are a last resort, and a sign of AI failing to predict your intent.

So what is music in that reality? In a way, we’re already there. Kids nowadays are not discovering music by watching professional video productions on MTV; they discover music because they see friends dancing to it on Musically or they applied some music-enabled Snapchat-filter. We are making ourselves part of the narrative of the music, we step into it, and forward our version of it into the world. Music is behaving like internet memes, because it’s just so easy to remix now.

One way in which augmented reality is going to change music, is that music will become ‘smart’. It will learn to understand our behaviour, our intentions, and adapt to it, just like other aspects of our lives would. Some of Amazon Alexa‘s most popular skills already include music and sound to augment our experience.

This is in line with the trend that music listeners are increasingly exhibiting a utilitarian orientation towards music; interacting with music not just for the aesthetic, but also its practical value through playlists to study, focus, workout, clean the house, relax and drink coffee, etc.

As it becomes easier to manipulate music, and make ourselves part of the narrative, perhaps the creation of decent sounding music will become easier too. Just have a look at AI-powered music creation and mastering startups such as Jukedeck, Amper, and LANDR. More interestingly, check out Aitokaiku‘s Vimu, which lets you create videos with reactive music (the music reacts to what you film).

Imagine releasing songs in such a way that fans can interact and share them this way, but even better since you’ll be able to use all the data from the smart sensors in the environment.

Imagine being able to bring your song, or your avatar, into a space shared by a group of friends. You can be like Pokemon.

It’s hard to predict what music will look like, but it’s safe to say that the changes music went through since the proliferation of the recording as the default way to listen to music are nothing compared to what’s coming in the years ahead. Music is about to become a whole lot more intelligent.

For more on how interfaces change the way we interact with music, I’ve previously written about how the interface design choices of pirate filesharing services such as Napster influence music streaming services like Spotify to this day.

If you like the concept about media realities and would like to get a better understanding of it, I recommend spending some time to go through Marshall McLuhan‘s work, as well as Timothy Leary‘s perspective on our digital reality in the 90s.

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

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happens to the agency?

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

What happens to the newsletter?

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

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

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

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

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

▶️ Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85

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

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

Creatives as victims: are artists really screwed?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read next: Why should artists be able to make a living off of music?