Category: Newsletter

Lead articles from the weekly newsletter.

Treat Twitter like a visual medium & sync your Instagram posts to it

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Here’s a little hack I use to share my Instagram photos to Twitter automatically.

Many years ago, Instagram decided to disable its Twitter cards integration, meaning photos posted to Instagram and then shared on Twitter, no longer showed up as an image but instead just as a descriptive text + link. It’s a common strategy for social startups to first leverage other platforms by making highly shareable content, and then slowly making content harder to share so that people spend more time on the platform itself (where the platform can actually monetize them through ads).

For years now, Twitter has steadily been growing into a visual service, instead of a service of status updates and link sharing, and tweets that include images getting higher engagement. Yet many still treat it as the service it once was.

Sharing to Twitter from Instagram with the app’s native functionality is near-pointless. It leads to very low engagement, and you’re typically better off manually making a photo post to Twitter. But why do the same thing twice if you can easily configure a solution where all you have to do is post to Instagram.

Step 1: register with IFTTT

IFTTT is a service that lets you connect different services and automate behaviours between them. The name of the service is an abbreviation of “If This, Then That”, meaning that if one thing occurs in one service, something else is triggered elsewhere.

In our case, that thing that occurs is you posting a photo to your Instagram account. What’s triggered elsewhere is that your Twitter account will post the Instagram photo as a native Twitter photo post with a link to the Instagram post.

Step 2: create a new applet on IFTTT

When you create a new applet, you’ll see the service’s formula structure explained before.

Click on +this and select Instagram. Connect your account, and then choose a trigger. If you only want to share specific posts to Twitter, you can do so through the use of a hashtag that you only use on specific posts. Since I only post every couple of days or less, I’m selecting “Any new photo by you” since I don’t see a need to limit what I’m sharing to Twitter.

In the next step, +that, you select Twitter, connect to the service, and then pick Post a tweet with image. You can customize the tweet text in case you want to add text to your tweets. Keep in mind that any text in the caption you use on Instagram will be abbreviated to make room for the other text. You will see this:

Click Add ingredient and select Url. This way, each time you post a photo from Instagram to Twitter, it actually links back to your original Instagram post, which may help people with placing comments, or converting your Twitter followers to Instagram followers.

The next field, Image URL, should read SourceUrl. SourceUrl is the direct link to the image on Instagram, and Twitter needs this link in order to repost the image. Changing this will break the applet.

Step 3: finish your applet

Think of a nice, easy-to-understand title for your applet and hit the Finish button. You can choose to get notifications each time your applet runs, which means you get notified each time a photo is posted from Instagram to Twitter.

Step 4: see if it works

When you go to My Applets,  you should see your applet. Here’s mine on the left:

When you click on it, it will open a bigger version of it. Click on the cogwheel and you get a screen to configure the recipe. I’ve cut up the screenshot, but if you’ve followed all the steps, you should see something like this:

Make a photo, post it on Instagram, and see if it works. (it may take a while for it to appear on your account)

All done!

Happy posting.

For some examples, I’ve previously set this up for my friends at Quibus and Knarsetand, and I’ve also got it set up for my own Twitter account.

What music startup founders often get wrong

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Doing a consumer facing music startup is hard. Especially if you don’t understand what gives music value.

One of the hardest aspects of building music startups is the fact that you’re dealing with a two-sided marketplace scenario. This means you have to build up one side of your marketplace in order to attract the other. It requires creativity, or a lot of funding, in order to build up the music side of your marketplace in order to attract the consumers.

This two-sided marketplace makes decision making more challenging: when to focus on what? How do you convince artists to use yet another platform, before it can really show its value through a well-populated marketplace?

But that’s not the number one thing people get wrong.

The number 1 thing music startup founders get wrong is overvaluing their content

This is the most important lesson I’ve learned while working on 3 different music streaming startups and a bunch of other non-streaming music startups. Music in itself has little value to a user (bear with me). Your value proposition needs to be better than: “come here, there’s music” and often times music startups don’t have anything better than that.

People don’t care about the music. They don’t have a problem listening to music. And if they do, they’re likely not aware of it.

Ironically, when doing consumer-facing music startups the music is an extra. It’s assumed it’s there. Not having good music on your service will kill you, but having it does not distinguish you. It’s the same with restaurants: we don’t visit a restaurant because they have the best food necessarily, but because it’s around the corner, they have something we feel like, the staff is nice, etc. Music, on a music service, is like the basic expectations of what we expect in a restaurant: food, drinks, a place to sit, and a toilet. Not having music, like not having toilets, will kill you, but it’s not the reason why people visit you.

This is why so many music discovery apps fail, why so many social jukebox or recommendation apps fail: people don’t need more content. Music’s availability is not where the problem is, the context is where the problem is.

Building music startups is about the functionality you add. That’s what people pay for, that’s how people stick to your platform. Not the ideals of better-paid artists, not ‘high quality streaming’ – these are basic expectations by now. People need to find a very simple answer to the question: what can they do with your service that they can’t do elsewhere?

Then the next question is whether it’s distinctive enough. I think that’s why high quality streaming startups tend to remain marginal: lossless streaming on its own is not enough to convince large consumer segments. It has to be about behaviour, about function. By now, lossless streaming isn’t hard to find, so people look for the checkbox and then look at what else the platform has to offer.

At the peak of its popularity, Crazy Frog as a track on iTunes was $1. As a ringtone, it was $3. The functionality is what made it valuable. (hat tip to Ed Peto for bringing this up)

I also think 360-degree concert videos are not distinctive enough from other types of video. As a matter of fact, I think the inconvenience of them outweighs the value when compared to other types of concert videos.

Let’s widen the perspective.

The value of music is elusive

A single song can mean the world to someone. It can help sell millions of products, it can inspire revolutions.

But in an ocean of millions of songs, that are easily accessible, its value is close to zero for a person as a consumer. This is why nobody cares about your free download anymore.

So how do you get the value out?

You use the music to create the environment in which you shape the type of thing people are willing to pay for. Going back to the restaurant metaphor: music means your walls, your tables, your staff, your bathrooms, your building, your ambiance. People pay for that, but indirectly: by paying for the food you serve them in that context.

More:

Just to be really clear: I think music has immense value and I dedicate most of my waking hours to it. When I talk about ‘value’ in the above piece, I talk about it from the consumer perspective, from the marketing perspective, and as a USP for a product. I am not saying that people are not willing to pay for music. Millions already are, every month, through streaming subscriptions, but also digital and physical sales. And that’s where the problem begins for music startup founders: if people are already paying for music, what more can you sell them?

The short answer: sell functionality that augments experience and behaviour.

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.

The Instagram Stories rulebook (and 20 creative ideas for your short form videos)

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Instagram Stories are the most important development in social media right now. I’ve previously explained why, but the key point is that the short format expiring content makes it fun to create, share, and engage with people who share their moments.

My two articles about Instagram Stories had loads of people getting in touch, following me, and sharing their own strategies. I’m also delighted that I inspired some to take the medium more seriously and get to work on it. In this article I want to go a little deeper to help you achieve more success through it.

Defining success on Instagram Stories

Everyone has their personal goals for social media. I do it just for fun, to keep friends engaged, and to keep my network connected by staying top of mind. I have varying reasons for posting individual story items, but there’s always a bigger picture.

Let’s define success by exploring what failure looks like.

Failure is when you post such low quality or inconsistent items that your audience stops caring. Maybe they mute your story to stop it from appearing at the top. Maybe they stop tapping your name, which causes Instagram to put you towards the end of the top bar. Being inconsistent, low quality, or plain boring will result in a loss of viewership over time.

So, this implies that success means you have a captive audience. An audience that checks in at least every 24 hours, over a long period of time.

Success metrics

  • Time between sharing & viewing: do people check in once a day, or does a large proportion view your stories within the first hour of posting? The latter could imply stronger engagement.
  • Average daily viewers: this should grow over time if you’re doing well. Could also check average viewers per story.
  • Direct replies: are people responding and sending messages in response to your stories?
  • Conversion: location-tagging and adding hashtags to stories exposes your stories to wider audiences — do they end up following you and becoming long-term viewers?

A general rule book for Instagram Stories

I don’t really like rules, but I see some typical behaviour that just doesn’t work, so I need to draw the line. It’s pretty easy to make good engaging content, and pretty easy to avoid making dull content. So let’s do this. 💪

  1. ‘Never’ repost stuff you’ve already posted as normal Instagram photos to Stories.
    People will have seen it. Instagram Stories is not for old content. Stories is for fresh content. The other way around is fine: save your Stories to your camera roll, and then repost it as an Instagram post a day later. Not all your Instagram followers see your Stories, but nearly everyone who watches your Stories will also see your Instagram posts.
  2. Focus on keywords, not long texts.
    Text should be no longer than maybe a sentence. If it’s a sentence, make sure to use good keywords, so people get what you’re saying in the blink of an eye without actually having to read it. People flick through stories fast, so if you’re posting any text longer than that you are posting useless content.
  3. Video > boomerang > static images.
    In terms of what’s interesting content, video usually wins. It’s the most engaging, gives the most information, the most emotion. Uninspired boomerangs are pretty dull, so get creative. The reason why I put boomerangs at this step in the content hierarchy is because Instagram seems to favour them in Explore feeds when you’re location-tagging and hashtagging stuff.
  4. Tag your stories!
    It gives another dimension to your stories, so people can check out the location, what else is in the hashtag, or the person you’re talking about… but it also exposes your content in the Explore tab. This can easily triple or quadruple any individual story item’s audience.
  5. Keep it personal & regular.
    When you follow someone who regularly posts stuff, multiple times a day, you really get a feeling of connection. So that’s what you should be doing. Involve people in the part of your life that you don’t mind sharing. If you’re a musician or band, forget the same old shots of the audience at your gig or the “so excited about this new release” screenshots. Explain why you’re excited by talking into the camera, give people previews, take people backstage, show your journey towards a gig in the weeks leading up, and then on the day itself. Tell the story!
  6. Follow other people’s stories.
    The easiest way to get Stories wrong is by not understanding what they’re for. Check other people’s stories at least once a day! Pay attention to what’s interesting and what’s boring to you. This is something that will change with more long-term engagement, so make it part of your daily media habit if you want to take this medium seriously.
  7. Get creative.
    Repetitive content is what kills long-term engagement. So be creative.

20 creative ideas for Instagram Stories

I’m constantly thinking about what I can be posting, and drawing loads of inspiration from the people I follow. Here are my favourites.

Music

Music builds connection.

1. Take a video with music playing from your phone’s speakers. It captures the audio really well, and sometimes the best annotation for a view or moment is a song.

2. Take a screenshot of something that’s playing. Sounds dull, but if you’re posting a couple of items per day, it will blend in well. The screenshot makes sure people who have their audio disabled will understand what you’re sharing. A phone’s lock screen screenshot will also tell people things like the time of day, and whether you love living on the edge and riding that final 2-3% of your battery.

3. Take a video of a music video. I’ll get back to this further in the list, but sharing small clips by filming a YouTube clip on your laptop is surprisingly engaging… just make sure it’s interesting and not a video that everyone has already seen recently: unless for some reason the fact that you’re watching it is interesting or funny.

4. Use other music sharing apps. Some apps allow you to export small music clips, like Sounds, you can consider using them. But beware: super-polished content will feel like ads and is not very engaging.

Filters

Instagram has some basic photo filters you can use, which you can activate when taking a selfie (e.g. the virtual masks that stick to your face as you talk).

5. Get creative with filters. They’re there to make it easier to make fun or quirky content.

6. Use Snapchat filters, but post on Instagram. Snapchat has the best filters, and they regularly update them, adding new ones. You don’t have to post on Snapchat, just save the Snapchat Story to your device and then import it to Instagram.

7. Use filters in ways they weren’t intended. Faceswap with paintings, apply face filters to people on TV… get creative.

Surroundings

Your surroundings are more interesting than you may think… and there’s more waiting for you to find once you start looking for it. You should be documenting what you see and what piques your interest.

8. Street art and graffiti. Particularly stuff in original places.

9. Nature, grass, and parks. When people check Instagram Stories, they’re likely to be inside… so why not bring them outside? I personally really prefer film over static shots here, because you can capture wind, rain, animals, movement, and sound, and really share that special moment.

10. Going somewhere? Do a timelapse. The iPhone’s default camera app has a timelapse function, and if Android phones don’t have this, I’m sure there are apps for it. Hold your phone in front of your body while you’re walking and convert that 3 minute walk from the metro to the office into a 10 second clip.

11. Friends and people. Netflix founder Reed Hastings once answered that the most consistent thing they see in their data is that people really like stories about people. So bring some humanity into your stories and make it about more than yourself.

Pin text and emoji

If you put text or emoji into your stories, you can pin it to stay attached to a certain item in your video. You can have loads of fun with this.

12. Attach a surfer to the soap in your bath or sink. You can do this before taking a bath or doing the dishes. If you have some foamy soap, run your hand through the water and move it around while filming. Then attach emoji to the foam floating on the water.

13. Zoom in to pinned text. If you are doing a story with a lot of zooming, you can tag text to something you zoom in on. At the start of your story, the text may be barely noticeable until it’s fully zoomed in. Works with emoji too.

Use creative photography or video apps

Here’s two I like:

14. The Pantone app lets you tag certain colours. It’s a pretty nice way to highlight colours in your environment and share to Instagram.

15. Hyperspektiv lets you distort your reality. A very trippy app that lets you make interesting glitchy and psychedelic videos. Powerful, so you can spend hours inside the app, making all kinds of interesting content.

What are you doing?

Share what you’re doing.

16. Watching a music video.

17. Watching a documentary, TV show, or interesting movie.

18. Going to a concert or another type of public performance.

19. Flicking through an art book or going to a museum.

20. The fish tank in your local Chinese restaurant.

Just don’t overdo it: make sure content is not too similar.

21. Food? It’s a cliché, but if you’re able to take a good picture of your food, you can share it occasionally. But keep in mind that it’s usually not the food that’s important: it’s the moment. Involve people in your narrative. A plain beer is boring: a beer after a hard day of work is already more interesting. Capture the moment.

 

Hope this helps you up your content game. And if you’re wondering about how I’m doing it on Instagram (despite not necessarily being the best example), follow me: @basgras

Four of the biggest opportunities for the future of music consumption

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

A reflection on key trends in music, tech, and user interfaces.

Soundcloud is saved, for now. On top of whatever strategic decisions they make to be able to attract follow-up investments, they face the difficult task of preserving their user community’s trust and winning back part of the trust they already lost. Tumultuous times are ahead, which will be frustrating, but also very exciting as it creates opportunity for new innovation and startups to claim their piece of the pie.

Underserved early adopter: the Myspace moment

Back in April I wrote about the fact that music is about to experience another Myspace moment. What I mean by that is that when Myspace hit decline, as it lost its community’s trust, new platforms got a chance as early adopters bailed and moved on. Musicians started building up audiences on Facebook and Twitter, and sharing their music on Soundcloud.

Now we see another Myspace moment: Spotify is focusing on mass audiences, and the prime early adopter platform has a distressed community due to the continuous struggles that Soundcloud has faced over the last years.

This creates opportunities for concepts such as:

  • Connecting groups of music listeners based on music taste or curiosity:
    • Soundcloud‘s struggling with this due to its failure to keep its search & tagging feature useful as the amount of content grew over the years, and they killed their groups feature;
    • Spotify has deprioritized user-created playlists and removed messaging functionality.
    • TheWaveVR could be one of the startups to fill this gap.
  • Collaboration and feedback:
    • If people are leaving Soundcloud, they need to take that somewhere else.
    • Audiu, which was one of the hottest startups at Sonar+D this year, could play a big role here.
  • Promo services for people who need an easy way to share music to journalists, labels, etc.

You could come up with a lot more ideas and find startups striving to make a meaningful impact there.

A third device in our midst: the Voice User Interface (VUI)

I’ve recently been playing around with an Amazon Alexa I ordered. At first I was skeptical and thought it would always feel awkward, but you get used to it fast and the convenience of a voice-controlled device in the living room (and other rooms) is bigger than I expected. I thought all those times you have to grab your mobile phone, or look something up on the computer, were minor and infrequent inconveniences. Now, the VUI has embedded itself into my life and all kinds of small habits, patterns and every day rituals.

VUIs are going to be the third device: first came PCs (plus laptops), then came smartphones (plus tablets), and now we’re going to get a third addition through voice-controlled devices like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple‘s Siri-based devices, devices in the car, etc. Perhaps this is why Tesla is in talks to do a music streaming service: music is the way into these spaces.

So what happens to the way we browse and explore music when we take the visual user interface away? What place does the smartphone get? What place does the laptop get? And what behaviour extends to our smart speakers?

What happens in AI is very important for VUI apps, but also for chatbots.

Conversational interfaces: the rise of messaging apps

Messaging has frequently been called the next major platform. It enables chatbots, which are apps that live on conversational platforms (this is a trend that’s also strengthened by VUIs). Some of the biggest social platforms to rise up over the last decade were primarily messaging apps, such as  Snapchat, Whatsapp, Telegram, and Kik.

The next step of the social web is messaging, but smarter than the AIM, ICQ, and chatroom phase of social. Facebook is positioning Messenger in such a way that it can live as a platform on its own.

Read Music Ally‘s write-up of the chatbot panel I moderated at Midem.

Short-form video

I urge people to try out Instagram Stories and figure out what it takes to make good content for it. Short-form video content is so important in an age of short attention spans. Some of the hottest platforms to emerge among teens in the last years have been Snapchat and Musically, both limiting the time-length of videos being shared on the platforms. It’s fun, fast, and requires low commitment: making users share and explore more content.

I firmly believe this is going to change the way we write songs and structure them. We’ve already seen how the streaming playlist economy made tracks shorter, with people moving the vocals to the start of the track in order to make skips less likely. In the next years, the video story format is going to strongly impact music.

Instagram is another platform that may fare very well from the decline of user trust in Soundcloud‘s community.

 

I’ll be discussing more of these trends in my newsletter, which goes out every week on Monday. Sign up to stay in the loop.

Start small

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

This is for all my newsletter readers, or for anyone else building products, launching campaigns, or figuring out how to apply innovation to what they do on a day-to-day basis.

With all the options out there, things can get overwhelming.

You see the status quo, and know things need to change. Lots of things. And so you start making your plan.

You start using all those things you see tech reporters talking about, all the latest toys from Product Hunt, shiny new technologies and programming languages, perhaps you’ll even add blockchain, AI, and do some growth hacking.

And then you don’t get things done.

Either because you’re always shifting attention and don’t see things through, or just because you spend too much time on things that don’t matter. Or both.

For most of us reading this, the question is: is this something people are interested in? Not conceptually, not intellectually, but would they actually use it regularly? Would they pay for it? Would you do things the way you are doing if you already knew it wasn’t going to work?

Serial maker and digital nomad Pieter Levels advocates putting a buy button on websites even when the product isn’t ready. Even when you haven’t started on it. The button doesn’t have to work, it can just show a message that thanks people for their interest and asks for their email address. The point is, you’ve registered someone’s intent to commit.

Every week I speak to about 1,000 people in the music business. Maybe more. Those are the same people every week, and that group is growing. I do that through my newsletter. Which turned into a website, consultancy agency, and now a community. I get my articles cross-posted on popular music blogs, and in newsletters. I get people to cross-follow MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE on various social media, learned to convert people to my newsletter from said social media, generate referral traffic, convert article readers to subscribers, and automated all of those things. But it started small.

It’s me, picking a day of the week to write an article (sometimes long, sometimes short), pick the most interesting music & tech links I’ve come across, and then sending it out with the easiest newsletter tool I could find (Revue). The only tools I used initially were Medium and Revue: both free. I started small and it grew, so other things got added on. Now I have the honour to be able to bring the people I write about together into the same room as I help the c/o pop convention with music tech panel curation (explore the topics).

Start small.

If you want to do something, start doing it. Get good at it. Figure out what people expect and get better. If it takes a lot of effort or a long time to build what you want to build, find a way to build something that mimics it. For example, if you want to start a label, maybe start with a YouTube channel. If you want to start a music service, build a page with music that people regularly come back to.

It’s like building a bridge: your first priority is making sure people can get across – else you won’t even know if people will use it. Once that’s going well, move on to the next step. This is how you make it easy for yourself to make use of all those innovative things you see out there.

Start small.