Category: Newsletter

Last week I announced the launch of Hard Dance Berlin. Since then, I have been spending a few minutes each day building up the community around it by leveraging Instagram stories (@harddanceberlin).

I hope by highlighting some of the activities, you’ll find some inspiration for how to grow your own projects.

Goal & tools

The Instagram account is very much an extension of the project’s main site. The goal being to highlight performers and events in Berlin’s harder and faster styles of electronic music.

Instagram is a place where people interested in this already spend their time – as opposed to a random new site – and a tool many of them use to discover events and music.

Stories’ ephemeral nature make it easy to drip interesting content for this community every day.

Key principle: support, support, support

In general, whenever you create something, make sure it solves problems whether they’re your own or other people’s. This should be your primary goal and activity. This is how you shape something valuable. Look for problems; solve them.

Give more than you take. If you ask for anything in the beginning, then ask people to help you help them. In my case that means soliciting promo material, images, etc. so I can better promote other people’s events to the community.

The ethos is: support, support, support – the music, the people, the parties and the scenes. Double down on your ethos early on, because things can get muddy later on and there’s always a risk of believing in your own hype once things take off.

This also makes it easier for people to join and help the community: if there is growth potential in an area, the goal should be to grow everything. If one part of the community grows stronger, we all grow stronger.

Method & content

Here are the types of content I currently post to serve the community. I’ll highlight for each one how they help to grow the Instagram:

• Short-term highlights (“check out this party tonight”)
• Longer-term highlights (“next week xyz”, “just announced next month: x”)
• Music highlights (“check out the new mix by xyz”)

Short-term highlights

When focusing on events, I try to do the following things:

• Share a picture from the promoter or venue’s Instagram timeline. This helps connect the community to people active in the scene, and it also sends a notification to the account holder and allows them to repost the story to their own stories (in turn giving @harddanceberlin more exposure).
• Tag as many (relevant) people as possible (the event’s performers, promoter, venue, etc). This again provides value for fans to understand what’s going on and helps them check stuff out, but it also means your story can now be shared by anyone who was tagged.
• Location tags. Tagging to a location increases your discoverability for people checking out stories around that area. To be honest, I consider this optional as it usually just gives 1 or 2 more views per story and I’m not sure if it has lead to follows. Sometimes you can get lucky and get hundreds of views though.
• Add the MUSIC one might expect at the event to the story. It’s an important service to the community using the stories to determine whether to investigate an event, but if it’s music by one of the performers, it also makes it more likely they’ll repost your story.

The ‘growth hacking’ term is leveraging “other people’s audience” (OPA).

Longer-term highlights

Longer term highlights focus on events from about a week or so out. It follows a very similar approach as the shorter term highlights, incl. tagging the performers. This allows people from out of town to repost your story to announce to their fans that they’re going to be in town. It also means you can build up some extra hype for particularly interesting events and line-ups.

The above screenshots also indicate how it only takes me a few minutes per day: for story 1, the artwork was sent to me by the promoter. For story 2, I just reposted one of the promoters’ announcements. For story 3, I made a screenshot of the Resident Advisor calendar I maintain and cropped out irrelevant stuff.

Music highlights

On weekdays with zero events (Berlin can be wild and last week actually had a relevant event every night of the week), I’ll highlight music of local producers, DJs, labels, collectives, etc.

Currently about 50% of all followers see the account’s stories. That’s a high engagement rate and I want to keep it there, so ideally I have something for people daily. It’s also important to keep the growth momentum up. I’ll explain why next.

Instagram account discovery

Alright. So, someone I tagged reposted a story. What now?

I tend to go for really clear names when naming projects. MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE is exactly the scope of the content; it’s what I want to talk and think about. MUSIC x GREEN was actually going to be called MUSIC x SUSTAINABILITY, but the latter word was annoying to type out in a URL. So this is called Hard Dance Berlin – a bit tricky SEO-wise since a big YouTube music channel has done an event in this city by that name once, but it explains exactly what the project is about.

So when somebody sees the account name when content is reposted, it’s pretty self-explanatory that if you tap on the story and go to the profile, you’re going to get more of hard dance in the context of Berlin.

So here’s what you’ll see:

And that’s it. Within two weeks, I should have it organically at 100 highly relevant and engaged followers. By summer, I think I can hit 1k. Should I do some paid promotion, that can go a lot faster. The upside of something as niche as this, is that it is easy to know where to find your audience when targeting ads.

Maybe it seems highly tactical, or whatever, but the reason why I spend my spare time on it is because of the love for the music.

Not everything can be done online! I’m too old now to visit all of the events, but I try to make sure to go to a decent portion of them, speak to some people, etc. and also play sometimes. This has helped me get some early visibility with friends following and resharing some of the content.

I hope the above has been helpful and insightful, and not just blowing my own horn.

If there’s just one takeaway, let it be this: always give more than you take.

Settling in Berlin to work in classical music at IDAGIO (from which I have since moved on), I was pleased to find out that the city’s nightlife is also host to a great variety of harder styles of dance music.

Having been born in The Netherlands, I was practically spoon-fed gabber music. Maybe not by my parents, but by friends and their older siblings, music television, and the last 20-30 minutes of practically every school dance (click here for an example of one of the tracks popular among young & old back then). Hardcore, as it’s also called, was everywhere.

After moving to Berlin, I’d go out and explore different scenes every now and then. I read books about the history of the city’s subcultures, their music, their styles, and how they came together after the Wall fell (if there’s one book I can recommend, it’s Paul Hockenos’ Berlin Calling – unrelated to the film by the same title). When you read about things like this, it can feel like you have arrived too late. I felt it again when I read the book, just like how I felt when I first started researching the origins of house music and the free party culture. Back then I wished I’d been an adult when all that happened, so I could have participated.

In the case of Berlin however, that feeling turned into something else. And here’s what you should know if you’ve ever shared that feeling I just described: you ARE participating. You CAN make something that people are going to miss in the future. Starting may be the hardest part.

Oops. Where was I?

Ah yes, as I became more of a participant in Berlin’s music cultures, I started noticing something. Hard dance was surging once more. People are extremely excited about these sounds. Hardcore, hardstyle, hardtechno, breakcore, donk… Throw in a tune like that in your house or techno set and people go wild – a temporary voyage. But some scenes, particularly parts of the techno scene, started taking a more long-term journey into hard dance. Yet the scenes aren’t mixing. I don’t see the techno people at hardstyle parties, and if the techno crowds throw a hardstyle night, I don’t see any of the people from those scenes.* They’re vaguely aware of each other’s existence, but that’s about it.

So I figured: let’s map this out. Let’s list all the performers. Link their Soundclouds. Try to identify all the parties. Let’s get people listening to each other. Remove the boundaries of genres and scenes, so we can just focus on the textures, tempos, and energies of each other’s music.

That directory is now live, and lives on harddanceberlin.com. 💥

There is also a calendar on Resident Advisor and an Instagram (@harddanceberlin) which I use to highlight events through the stories feature (by far the most important platform for music, IMO – it’s really attaining Myspace levels – I’m not on boomerbook though, so my perspective may be skewed).

Local resistance: dealing with austerity, gentrification, and climate change

I hope to see more local projects. They’re so important.

Music is under pressure globally. To keep things local in context: over the past 10 years around a 100 clubs have had to close in Berlin. This is why Berlin’s Clubcommission is fighting to give nightlife venues the same status as opera houses. Austerity and gentrification are threats to the scenes, so if you care about what’s going on where you are: invest. Help promote and build audiences. Support local artists. And if you can afford it, then use guest lists to skip the queue, but still pay an entrance fee to support the venue & artists.

Another reason why it’s important to support local artists: more local gigs means they’ll have to travel less to make a living and more local talent means it becomes easier to put events together without having to fly someone over.

Air travel is bound to become more expensive through ‘Green Deals’ being discussed in Europe and the US. Further austerity might hit our music scenes still. So better start building.

All we need is some space. And this we can create for each other.

(small disclaimer: Hard Dance Berlin has no relation to the brand that’s known for filming DJ sets and putting them on YouTube, who threw a one-off event by the same name. The term has been around for a long time, and I like straightforward names for my projects.)

*big respect to some parties who actually have managed to attain some scene crossover.

Alternative title: if you can sell a Dutch guy a bicycle helmet, music can make giving a damn about the environment a lot cooler.

I made a major step last week.

After 30ish years of cycling, I finally bought a bike helmet.

I had always considered helmets inconvenient and geeky. In The Netherlands, where I grew up, nobody wears bike helmets. Well, maybe people on race bikes, but most people cycle on what is affectionally referred to as “omafietsen” (old lady bikes).

Sure, I have lived in places where I wouldn’t consider cycling without a helmet, like Moscow, Sofia, and Istanbul. In those situations I would choose not to cycle at all.

Now I live in Berlin – much more bike-friendly than those other places. I’d say about a third of all cyclists wear helmets here, although personally I didn’t. Having friends with helmets made me decide to learn more about the likeliness of getting into accidents as a cyclist and how a helmet reduces your chances of serious damage. The numbers tell a clear story, but didn’t convince me. They made me more vocal about traffic safety and creating more room for cyclists, but it didn’t throw the geeky stigma off of bike helmets that had been attached to them for all my life.

One day I cycled to a large climate protest – helmet-free (go on… let’s say my hair was flowing in the wind). I parked my bike near the protest and walked to the rally point. It was huge. Thousands of people. Scientists, game developers, feminists, antifascists, christians, communists, fashion designers, teachers, refugees, environmentalists, school children. They carried banners identifying who they are and why they’re protesting.

As I walked around to explore the groups and causes, mixed in was a small percentage of people were carrying bike helmets. Like me, they had also come to the protest by bike. They were cyclists, too.

In this context, cycling seemed like an activity of defiance. A personal act of reducing one’s climate impact in a system and city that still has a long way to go before it can truly be considered cycling-friendly. I saw them. I knew we that we found some of the same things important. Safer streets, more room for bikes, less cars in the inner city, more room for everyone on the streets – whether they own a car or not.

The bike helmet transformed.

From a geeky safety object, to an object that communicates identity. Having to carry it around when you’re not cycling transformed from a burden and inconvenience to a way to parade something you find important. A way to “be” a cyclist, even when you’re not cycling.

Suddenly I got it: helmets are cool.

A few weeks later I bought a helmet.

Creating narratives & holding each other to account

We are facing a climate emergency. It manifests in many ways and seems overwhelmingly difficult to address. It’s a struggle of energy, waste, pollution, economy, ecology. It’s also a struggle of culture.

This is where music has a unique role to play, alongside other expressions of culture.

Climate change and the environmental struggle have many helmets.

Planting trees is considered as something for ‘hippies’. Recycling is something for soy yoghurt yoga moms. Picking up waste from streets or nature is considered dirty, because “eww trash”.

Addressing the climate emergency will require lifestyle change. We need to normalize the above things and many more. What better force than creativity and personality.

There is a lot of concern about artists and brands jumping on sustainability, because it’s trending. Even if so, it’s a trend that won’t go away, and will only intensify as the symptoms of our changing climate do the same. One musician to recently draw such a response was Peggy Gou, who posted a video of her taking some trash from a beach in Bali on her Instagram.

People rightfully suggested she consider her carbon footprint – which as a popular DJ is considerable. Some people even wondered whether it’s genuine care or just jumping on a popular topic. With regards to the last part: it doesn’t matter right now.

• Let’s normalize picking up trash. Let’s remove the stigma that it’s dirty. You can use gloves and wash your hands afterwords. We need to see way more celebrities doing this. Change the narrative.
• When companies or individuals get vocal about these topics, it’s easier to hold them to account. Not doing enough can hurt your reputation and your business. So let people speak out, let them pose… but then let’s not forget what they said – we should hold them to it.

Later this year, I intend to check in on some of the artists, individuals and companies that signed the Music Declares Emergency pledge. We need to celebrate the ones that do well, and embarrass the ones that don’t take their pledge seriously, so that they get into action.

Maybe let that be a warning: if you have said you “commit to taking urgent action” and “work towards making our businesses ecologically sustainable and regenerative” I’m going to check in on that (and hopefully I am not alone). There is nothing ambiguous about urgent.

If you’re thinking: “oh my.. that’s right.. It’s been months. We need to spring into action.. Where to start?” go to the Actions section of the pledge you’ve signed. It has guides for all aspects of the business. You can also reach out to me and I see if I can do anything to help, as long as you pay it forward.

Just don’t lose sight of the two aspects where we can do something that matters: 1) within the industry by making our operations more sustainable and regenerative, and 2) beyond the industry by inspiring narratives that turn helmets into items of rebellion, that turn something people considered as “not me” into “cool”.

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In this post I’d like to highlight one of my favourite newsletters, Exponential View by Azeem Azhar, look at his predictions for the next 10 years and how they apply to the music business.

Azhar’s 10 forecasts are as follows:

• Climate change will be the dominant narrative
• Our geopolitics will continue to fragment and this will result in more conflict
• In what we have generally thought of as the West, we’ll rethink the shape and purpose of our economies
• We’ll see the rise of new digital commons, economic institutions that are neither public- nor private- sector
• World trade will face a troika of headwinds
• Cities will become relatively more important
• We’ll eat far less meat
• The big tech companies, particularly Facebook, Google and Amazon, will work aggressively to increase their footprint
• AI will be everywhere
• During the 2020s there will be a generational shift

Quite a lot to unpack. Let’s dig in.

Music x Climate Change 🌬️

Azhar mentions cheap renewables, smart entrepreneurs and net zero targets becoming enshrined in law in the EU and UK. The Supreme Court of The Netherlands recently required the government to slash carbon emissions by 25% of 1990 levels by the end of 2020.

Through initiatives like Music Declares Emergency, it has become visible that there is a broad willingness and desire in the music business to do better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, waste, circularity, and general sustainability. As various organisations in music set up comissions related to sustainability, 2020 will bring wide cross-industry discussions and exchange on this topic, including pilot projects, and other initiatives.

By 2021, the topic of sustainability in music will be ‘the new normal’ and instead of a niche subject, I expect it will be a discussion point at every industry conference.

(In case you missed it, I recently launched MUSIC x GREEN as a directory to help gather and organise all information related to this topic)

Music x Geopolitics 🗺️

The growing economies of China and India, the rise of African economies, a post-Brexit world, and what about Russia? The 20s are going to be complicated.

While it’s hard to make predictions, an annecdote may shed light on the type of complications to expect.

A few years ago, I lived in Moscow where I headed up product for Zvooq, a music streaming service. At some point Spotify started negotiating with local music services and telcos and hired local staff. Months went by and we heard rumours Spotify was having trouble getting everything in place from their usual playbook for launching in new countries (major components at that time: majority of local content, plus a bundling deal with a top telco). Then the annexation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine happened, sanctions followed. There was talk of cutting Russia off from global banking by blocking Russia from the SWIFT transaction system. In the midst of all of that, Spotify decided to cease operations. The exact reasons are unclear, but the geopolitical complications may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Too much risk. (To date Spotify still hasn’t launched in Russia, although there are signs that a launch is imminent)

What may further complicate things for the streaming dominated music industry is the fracturing of the internet into “four, or more, internets”. There is the classical Sillicon Valley model of an open internet with which we’re all familiar. In the EU, we’ve seen increased assertiveness from governments and courts in regulating the internet, whether that’s about the ‘right to be forgotten’, GDPR, and aspects like article 11 and 13. There is the Chinese internet – based on the promotion of its own tech giants operating within its tightly controlled environment. Russia has recently been experimenting with cutting itself off from the global internet and is claiming a successful trial.

To make things more complicated, many of the major music companies have geographically complex ownerships. Most recently, Chinese tech giant Tencent acquired a 10% stake in Universal Music (see chart by Cherie Hu).

Last thing I want to highlight before moving on: streaming in India is growing at a very rapid pace. Gaana announced 125 million monthly active users, Spotify is at 2 million users, and YouTube and YouTube Music Premium count 800,000 subscribers. Meanwhile the Chinese ByteDance, mother company of TikTok, is testing its own streaming service called Resso out in India.

Music x Mission-Driven States ⏩

Azhar imagines states to take a more active role in directing investments in tech and shaping our societies. He expects a departure from the economic Friedman doctrine, and for states to apply more action towards giving our economies a clearer purpose. As defined by Marianna Mazzucato:

“Rather than focusing on particular sectors – as in traditional industrial policy – mission-oriented policy focuses on problem-specific societal challenges, which many different sectors interact to solve. The focus on problems, and new types of collaborations between public and private actors to solve them, creates the potential for greater spillovers than a sectoral approach. It was this approach that put a man on the moon, and lay behind the creation of the Internet and entire new sectors like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the emerging green technology revolution. It is not enough to fix market and system failures: policy-makers need to be more future focused, creating and shaping new markets.”

Expect innovation in the problem areas addressed in the other 9 points here. Music will be on the sidelines initially, but the impact of the innovations (e.g. around AI) may end up redefining our industry – much in the same way as the internet eventually did.

Music x Digital Commons ⛓️

The last years have seen a lot of discussion about platform economy and privacy. Think the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal, think of leaks of user data, and think of the rise of AI which makes people’s data more valuable (and vulnerable to exploitation).

A proposed concept is the ‘data trust’ – a mechanism, organisation, or legal structure, that stores data and provides rule based interoperability with platforms. This trust should specialise in data governance for maximum public benefit.

In other words, we may be moving away from the current platform-driven reality of the web (2.0), towards something where individual users have more control and security. This would impact any company heavily relying on training algorithms with user data – such as ones that heavily rely on serving ads (Facebook, Google / YouTube, Spotify).

It may also create more transparency around who’s involved with the music, as envisioned in Imogen Heap’s Mycelia initiative, which is supported by IHAN – a promising fair data economy project of Finnish innovation fund Sitra.

Music x Global Headwinds 📦

Azhar highlights the falling global trade-to-GDP ratio, a trend that is already occurring. At the end of the decade, we’ll see a lower trade in raw materials and manufactures relative to GDP than current. I’m struggling to connect this to music, to be honest. It could be that more of our GDP comes from services rather than physical goods. Someone with more knowledge of this topic than I: please fill me in. If you write an article, I’m happy to share it in the next newsletter.

Music x Cities 🌆

Continued urbanisation will bring more challenges, but also great opportunities. What comes to mind is the Music Cities initiative by Sound Diplomacy. Besides regular events about the importance of thriving local music scenes, they work together with local governments to develop local music infrastructure.

As certain population centers get more expensive, we see young talent choosing to settle in places other than Sillicon Valley, New York, London, etc. As someone living in Berlin, it’s obvious that music can play a crucial role in attracting unique talent to a city. Should we anticipate cities investing more in this space? I think so.

Music x Meat 🍖

A trend mostly unrelated to the music business, although it’s worth pointing out that music festivals are often used to trial new types of food, from seaweed burgers to insects.

Music x Big Tech 🌐

“By 2030, a complex patchwork of settlements in different geographies will govern the behaviours of [Facebook, Google, and Amazon].” Leading up to that, Azhar expects these firms to agressively hoover up data and move into new arenas. Google is firmly established in the entertainment space through YouTube, Amazon has a good foothold in music streaming due to its Alexa devices, and Facebook is crucial for many reasons – to pick one, it owns two of the most important platforms for artists to connect to their fans (Facebook and Instagram).

I expect these companies to double down on this space, as well as invest in new forms of AI driven music, as they have less of a stake in the traditional songwriter / performer type music than many of the players in the music business. While the music industry will be careful not to cannabilize itself with this new form of entertainment, I expect outside forces to play a very disruptive role. For them, the value in music as we know it lies with the personalities it produces, less so with the way the music actually comes about. Which brings us to the next topic.

Music x AI 🧠

“Our computers will use machine vision, listening, path planning and robotics to build an increasingly accurate digital twin of the real world, and bringing smart, adaptive products into the real world.”

Last decade was the decade of the smartphone. Next decade will be the decade of augmented and mixed reality. With that, we’ll see a third generation of digital music.

It’s important that you think of all these things in combined contexts: Google Glass without smart environments and AI was just creepy and not that useful. Since the launch of Google Glass in 2014, the number of connected ‘Internet of Things’ devices has doubled to around 27 billion. By 2025 that number is expected to be somewhere around 75 billion.

That’s the context in which the next phase of digital music will play out. We’ll see a great convergence bringing together trends in AI, gaming, esports, entertainment, augmented, mixed, and virtual reality, and smart environments through the Internet of Things.

Music x Generational Shift 🚸

People who have spent their college years and careers online will move into global leadership. We’ll see a lot of the world’s influence fall into the hands of people who can be described as digital natives. This will affect policy, which affects the music industry broadly.

“The agitators and the creators of our economy for the next decade are between 15 and 25 now.”

Luckily, this is something the business has mastered over many decades.

The bigger question, looking at all of the above is: is the music industry ready to disrupt itself?

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