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Why playlists should be part of your social media strategy

Posted on May 14, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

The emphasis of playlist strategy is usually placed on how artists can get their music on popular curated playlists. Let’s discuss the long-term value of artists stepping into the curator role themselves.

In the context of this article, when referring to playlist strategy, I mean playlists that you create.

For most of the readers of this article, the two most important places for developing a cohesive playlist strategy are YouTube and Spotify (and maybe Soundcloud). They’re the places with the highest amount of traffic and search queries.

Objectives

You’re going to be using your playlists to achieve 3 things:

To get discovered by (potential) new fans;
To establish a habit for fans that keeps them connected to you;
To create regular engaging content for your socials to help you stay top of mind for fans.

Discovery. Habit. Top of mind.

Building your playlists

Let’s address objective 1 first: getting your music discovered. This is the main concern for most artists. Before anything, your music has to be good. If people are not sharing your music, it’s probably not that great. This needs to be your #1 concern and priority. If people are not sharing your music, go work on your sound instead of marketing something that people don’t care about.

Keep reading if you’re actually at a level where your music gets traffic through friend recommendations.

You’re ready to get your music discovered.

Variety

Take a couple of your best tracks. For each of these tracks, create a playlist. Add tracks from similar artists, artists that inspire you, anything that is somehow logically related to your music.

Understand that a lot of users will start playing your playlist and then switch to background listening. The logical relation has to be there, even when people are focusing on a different tab in their browser, or have moved on to another activity away from the computer.

For the music you select, the most important criterium is that it has to be music that people actually search for.

People will type search queries, and you need to create the best chance that they will land on your playlist. Think carefully the first few times you make these playlists. Over time, you’ll find the best way to do it and the amount of effort required will decrease.

Do not place your track at the top. People need somewhat familiar content to get into a playlist. Place it somewhere in the middle.

Remember the listener’s perspective: this is not about your music — this is about their experience. If you provide them with a good experience, they’ll listen to your music. If you don’t, they won’t. Simple.

Consistency & regularity

You’re going to pick a day of the week and every week you’re going to update your playlist on that day. If your playlists delight your listeners, they’ll check back every week on that day (that’s why Spotify’s Discover Weekly feature is so important to them).

This means you let people create a habit around your playlists. And while all other content of the playlists might change every week, you’ll have at least one of your tracks in there. So, the habit implies that returning listeners will listen to you every week.

It’s an elegant way to make sure fans don’t miss out on new music through their cluttered Facebook and Twitter feeds and inboxes.

Bi-weekly is also ok. Monthly is a maybe. Anything irregular is a big no. Either you execute this strategy, or you don’t. This particular strategy only works when applied consistently and with fixed regularity.

YouTube vs Spotify

YouTube and Spotify require their own approaches. They’re very different services, that drive very different types of music listening behaviours, bookmarking, etc.

For YouTube, I’d focus on making an ever-growing set of playlists from your main channel where you also post your music videos. It might net you subscribers, too.

This means every YouTube playlist becomes a finished product. Keep them short: roughly 10 tracks. Every week, you’ll create a new playlist with new content, and one of your tracks in there. Share it on your socials: some nice new content for fans.

For Spotify, you’re going to do something different. They’ve actually demoted user-generated playlists in search results, so it’s a bit harder to get found now. So, instead, you’re going to turn it into a tool to connect with your fans and familiarize them with your music taste.

Your Spotify playlists should be longer. 30 tracks or more. Think of them more as radio stations that are refreshed every week. Your followers check in, tune into the new content and also reconnect to your music (like the Diplo & Friends playlist).

User stories

I want to explain a concept from product management called ‘user stories’ — they’re used to describe certain things people expect from or want to be able to do with a product or service. They’re a useful way to not lose sight of what’s important to the people you’re making something for. What’s important to you, is not always what’s important to your target audience.

For your fans

Let’s think from the perspective of fans. And let’s define fan as someone who has shared your music with someone else. Facebook likes don’t count. We’re talking about the people who care enough about your music to share it with others.

Let’s think of some of the reasons why they might be interested in your playlist:

“I want to learn more about the music that inspires this artist.”
“I’ve already heard everything by this artist, but I want more!”
“I wonder what other music this DJ / producer plays besides his own tracks.”

As people get more familiar with your playlists, they may start to develop some more specific expectations, such as “I want to know about the freshest new releases this artist curates” or “I just need some great party music” and they associate your playlists with that.

Focus on the bullet pointed user stories first. You need to get people in, and then get them to form a habit. There are a lot of people creating good playlists for more specific purposes, but the advantage of the bullet pointed items is that they’re all focused on you — and nobody does you like you.

For people who don’t know you

This gets more tricky, because there are so many reasons why someone might land on your playlist. Think about what kind of music you’re curating. What are people trying to achieve when they’re searching for that type of music? A lot of them are going to land on your playlist by looking for an artist other than you, Four Tet for example.

“I want to listen to Four Tet.”
- Yup – some people will just click the first playlist they see if it includes Four Tet and they spot the cover art.
“I want to listen to music like Four Tet.”
“I just want to put on some chill out music and not think about it.”
“I want to listen to a playlist that includes music like Four Tet.”
“I’m curious about discovering more music like Four Tet.”

Although similar, these are different motivations that correspond with different behaviour types. It also means people will judge the quality of your playlist differently (quality is defined as to whether it scratches the person’s itch).

Long term effects

If you do well, your music might actually become associated with the other acts you include in your playlists. This means algorithms will add it to the ‘play next’ queue on YouTube, to ‘similar artists’ on Spotify, or even have you appear in the Discover Weekly of people who listen to a lot of music like that.

Your playlist may become a brand on its own: something artists try to get their music featured in. This means you’re able to shine a light on great artists you feel are not getting enough recognition. Then there will be the people who follow you on playlists, but not on other socials. These may be actual fans (people who share your music) or just people who are into the music you curate.

Playlists are a social medium in their own right. Treat them like that.

Like MC and DJ: an audiovisual alliance for the digital age

Posted on May 8, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

The digital age is demanding for artists. Simply releasing audio is often not enough. You have to take care of artwork, video material for Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, and then you still have to figure out how to get people to actually pay you.

The time has come for a new band member – even if you’re just a bedroom producer. That band member is the visual artist.

The case I’m making is not new. It has happened before. On a tremendous scale. Back in the early days of hiphop, DJs needed MCs to hype up the crowd. As MCs moved center stage, they needed DJs to keep their shows dynamic, so these two different disciplines combined and allied. It was necessary for the format of that day.

Jazzy Jeff & Will Smith / Fresh Prince — DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince: “He’s the DJ, I’m the rapper!“

The format of this day is audiovisual. It needs to compete in feeds, it needs to stop people from scrolling, and has to get them to unmute the video in order to hear your music.

Like the DJ and MC in the 1980s, the musician and the visual artist face similar problems today:

You need to get your work in front of people’s eyes;
And, outside of certain well-established business models, it’s challenging to monetize.

For the visual artist, you are usually the client, not the people who watch the final work. So they’re used to be commissioned to create their art. It’s you who monetizes the live performance and the recording. Teaming up creates the possibility to do both, together, like for brands.

Advantage #1: combining business models generates new revenue streams for the musician and the visual artist.

But before the business model comes getting your work under a lot of eyes. That requires honing your skills plus defining and refining your style. This can be challenging by yourself, but in partnership you can work off of each other. Instead of stepping in when a big part of the creative product is already finished, the visual artist can be involved in the creative process from the beginning. This has the effect that the music and video are integrated elements of the same work, rather than two separate works, and over time, the symbiosis between the artists develops further.

Advantage #2: music and video are interwoven elements, rather than separate works made at different points in time.

Advantage #3: the creative product is a new container uniquely suited for, and born out of, the digital landscape.

The song, as we know it, came from the record. We’re still thinking in songs, but it has lost its novelty as a format. While audio-only music is obviously not going anywhere, the most engaging material on social networks right now is video. Moving image is powerful — it took a while for video to take over the web, but with growing data caps, increasing network speeds, and great cameras and screens on our mobile devices, video has finally conquered the web.

What is also not going away is the live experience. In fact, it’s one of the most important revenue sources. Engaging live shows are hard if you’re a solo musician. If you’re a band, they’re tricky in terms of logistics, and possibly costly.

If you can do a live show with just 1 or 2 people the economics are much better. Bringing not just your own music, but also your own visuals that extend from the experience you provide on your site, your album artwork, and your audiovisual experiences on YouTube, Instagram, and other social media.

You should actually be able to charge a bit more for your bookings, because of this show element.

Advantage #4: the economics for live are better, and you get to offer a very integrated experience to fans.

Advantage #5: it gives a live, real-world experience to the visuals — which is something that may be trickier to achieve if the visual artist were on their own.

For some good examples of artist collectives who strongly emphasise this audiovisual fusion, check out NAAFI, ZZK Records, NON, and Meneo:

The future of music, inspired by a cheap Vietnamese restaurant in Berlin

Posted on May 1, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

I spent the last week living from an Airbnb while getting started with my new job at IDAGIO in Berlin. Down the street from my Airbnb was a cheap Vietnamese place, where I ate a couple of times. They always had Vietnamese pop music on, but one day they had a CD by a Vietnamese singer covering Western pop songs. In English. I thought about it for a little: why wouldn’t they just play the originals?

These cover releases are often financially motivated, but since the restaurant has to pay some collection society, and a Spotify subscription gives you all the music for just $10, I figured that the reason for this music playing was probably not something financial.

I then wondered: could it be that they simply have more of a connection to the Vietnamese performer, and prefer to hear these works from his mouth?

I’ve been getting into a new way of thinking about music by stepping into classical. Suddenly, there’s not 1 original and then some ‘lesser’ remixes and covers. There’s a composition, with the author of that work often having deceased before modern recording technology, and then there are countless recordings of performances of that work. Sometimes there’s an relatively undisputed ‘best’, but often it comes down to personal taste, preference, and opinion.

In the last century, music went through an enormous change. It went from ‘folk’ to ‘pop’. Here’s what I mean with each phrase:

Folk: music that’s not ‘owned’ by a single individual or corporation, but rather by the culture in which it was born. A song is not necessarily known for a particular performer, but instead is performed by many performers: ones that reach success far and wide, as well as local performers who just like to sing in front of a crowd in evenings or weekends.
Pop: music that’s controlled and owned. Songs are known for their original version and original performers. In this sense, the meaning extends beyond the charts, and into modern day underground rock, metal, and to a certain extent hiphop and dance music.

Recording technology in the 20th century brought about a transition: where once music was ‘folk’ by default, it became ‘pop’ instead. The rise of mass consumerism and cheap global distribution decreased the amount of time a song needed to spread geographically. These was now also a default version through which basically everyone became familiar with the work, rather than through their local performer or traveling bands.

While this system has generated a vast amount of money, and a huge music economy, I also think that music as an experience has lost a lot through this. People’s relationships with works are more superficial and performers are less incentivized to be the best performer of a certain work, since they can basically be the only one.

Back to the Vietnamese restaurant.

I got to thinking: what if we can ‘folk-ify’ modern pop music. It’s already being done to a certain extent. The remix culture on Soundcloud is a great example of it, and so is the cover culture on YouTube. What if the way we’re structuring the navigation in content on IDAGIO (such as: composers > works > recordings and performers) some day could become relevant for ‘pop’?

It would mean people would be able to browse based on songwriter, and then see all the pop songs related to that writer. They’d then be able to explore each song, and all the performances of it. They could sort by proximity: either offline (geographic), or online (based on your social graph and digital footprint). This could make the performance they listen to more personally relevant, just like the CD in the Vietnamese restaurant is to the owners of the restaurant.

It could make music more participative, and in a way it already is becoming so: YouTube, Soundcloud, remix apps, democratization of production tools, cheap hardware for recording (like our phones), Musical.ly, performances on livestream… The two most remix-heavy genres we know, dance and hiphop, are the ones most influential to the millennial demographic and younger. Both house and hiphop were born of affordable drum computers and samplers, of looping existing records, reinterpreting them, creating a new performance out of something that already existed.

The hard part has always been incentivizing the rights holders. Just look at the lawsuits.

We’re reaching an interesting time: we’re getting very good at interpreting really large datasets. Machine learning and AI are set to revolutionize our every day existence in just a few years. Then there’s blockchain, which is a good technology for tracking the complexity involved with a very nested type of ownership if we indeed ‘folk-ify’ pop music (without radically overhauling modern notions of intellectual property).

Music doesn’t have to become more participative, but it can. I think there’s a good economic case for it, but it still needs to be the product of deliberate choice of individuals. People in government can look at funding music education, and modernizing it, because the computer is the most important instrument for our generation (I know some of you will strongly disagree: find me at Midem, Sonár+D, or c/o pop and we can discuss over a beer). Musicians can think of how they can invite fans to contribute or interact with their music. People with entrepreneurial mindsets can think about solving some of the issues related to rights, or look at how musicians can monetize this type of interactivity.

And we all, as listeners, simply need to do one thing more often: sing.

Computers won’t have to be creative

Posted on April 23, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Every discussion about creative AI sooner or later invites the same objection: “computers will never be able to be creative.”

It’s interesting to think about. One has to define creativity. One has to understand the implications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Then you have to carefully construct an opinion, and prediction, on whether we’ll ever get to the point of computers being creative – without human involvement.

The problem is, you can think about it for weeks, but at its root it may be as philosophical a question to answer as “does free will truly exist?”

So whenever someone raises that objection I wave it away, because it’s not important whether computers can be creative.

Everyone will agree that human beings have the ability to be creative. We have our imagination. We use it to create: outside us, but also inside our heads. Our perception of the world is creative. It’s why some paintings are enjoyable to us. It’s why children can play with inanimate objects and imagine vast worlds in front of them.

That’s why I believe, no matter what happens, that computers are going to be making great music that can compete with human-created music. Imagine a type of computer-generated Soundcloud, where everything that’s not listened is instantly weeded out. Algorithms will be able to determine what sucks and what will never work, so 90% of the output can be filtered beforehand, or doesn’t even have to be generated.

But for you, as a listener, it’s actually not important whether a computer made the music or a human being… especially when you won’t be able to hear the difference.

Sure, putting on an album by your favourite singer is hard to replace… but there are also moments where you tune into a playlist for sports, for focus, or whatever. Five or ten years from now, can you be 100% sure that all the songs you hear in that playlist are made by humans? Will you think: “Oh, this song is an AI song, because it doesn’t sound creative”?

Of course not.

It’s not important whether AI can be creative, when the recipient is creative.

Online music is about to experience another MySpace moment

Posted on April 17, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

An emerging void signals new opportunity for innovation in digital music.

The benefit of writing thoughts down is that you get to revisit them. Six years ago, I penned a piece for Hypebot called The Next MySpace. At that time, people in the music business were desperate to for another MySpace to emerge: the site had been a ray of hope, but as it collapsed, online music was scattered across an immature ecosystem of rapidly growing startups like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, Spotify, and many others that were eventually acquired or perished and forgotten. I argued:

The closest we will ever get to a “next MySpace” will be either a music network or a social network that manages to gather, organise and integrate the fragments in spectacular fashion.

Defining the MySpace moment

What I call a MySpace moment is not when everything was going well for MySpace: it’s when decline set in. People started replacing MySpace’s music players, which sucked, with Soundcloud’s beautiful waveform players. People started moving much of their social lives to Facebook (for friends) and Twitter (to connect to strangers). Up until then, the dominant social network had been music-driven — people, especially teenagers, expressed their identities by making long lists of bands they liked.

From the ashes of MySpace, which never managed to recover, rose a new ecosystem of music startups. They’ve managed to make it easy for artists to connect to fans, get paid for online playback, let fans know about new shows, and be able to very specifically target people with ads.

That moment, that void, was a massive opportunity and many companies benefited from it.

That moment is here once again.

The new MySpace moment

There are two main factors contributing to a new emerging void for entrepreneurs to leap in. One has to do with product adoption life cycles, which I’ll explain below. The other has to do with the important position Soundcloud claimed in the online music ecosystem.

Soundcloud came closer to being the ‘next MySpace’ than any startup has. And let’s be blunt: the company is not doing well. After years of legal pressure to tackle the problem of works being uploaded to the service without rights holders’ permission, they were forced to adopt a service model that does not make sense for Soundcloud. The typical $10 a month subscription doesn’t make sense. People are on Soundcloud for the fresh content, the mixtapes, remixes, unreleased stuff: the things that will not be on Spotify for weeks or months (or ever!). Why inject the catalogue with music of long deceased people?

There have been reports that Soundcloud would consider any bids higher than the total amount of money invested into the company to date. That’s not a good sign. The road they’ve been forced into is a dead-end street, and the only end game is a quick acquisition.

I don’t think Soundcloud will die, but it is hard for the company to focus on what they’ve always been good at. Now that they’ve been forced into the Spotify model, those are the types of metrics that are going to matter. Subscriber numbers, conversion, retention. So it may struggle to do as good a job serving the audience they’ve traditionally serviced so well. (small note: I love Soundcloud, and the people there: prove me wrong!)

This leaves a vacuum.

Adding to that vacuum, is the fact that Spotify (and other streaming services) are looking beyond early adopters. To understand the phenomenon, have a look at the below graph:

The top part of the graph details the product life cycle. The bottom part explains the type of audience you address during the steps of that life cycle. As we’ve all noticed from the jubilant press reports on streaming’s expansion, we’re in the growth part of the cycle. This means services like Spotify and Apple Music have to get really good at targeting Early Majority and Late Majority type consumers.

If you’re reading this, you’re in the Innovator or Early Adopter segment. Startups typically start off by targeting those segments. So when Spotify moves on from Early Adopters (their de-emphasizing of user generated playlists is a big hint!), it leaves room for new startups to target and better serve those types of users.

Filling the new void

What happens then? Well, we’re going to get to the next phase of the digital music ecosystem – which is mobile-driven, and flirting with augmented reality, VR, and artificial intelligence. Early adopters are likely to keep paying for their Spotify subscriptions – it’s too big a convenience to give up… So entrepreneurs will have to figure out ways to monetize new behaviours.

Now is a great time to look at very specific problems in music. Don’t try to build the next Spotify or the next Soundcloud. For a while, everyone was trying to build the next MySpace — all those startups are dead now. Instead, take a specific problem, research it, build a solution for someone, test it, try it again for a broader group, and if it works: double down and scale up.

Personally, I’m very curious to see where startup accelerator Techstars Music’s current batch will be five years from now.

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

Posted on April 10, 2017 | 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.