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Breaking out of the circular blockchain music discussions

Posted on November 14, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

The strategy of a thousand small steps to blaze trails while negotiating the music industry’s next big leap.

This year I’ve had the pleasure to take part in numerous discussions and think tanks about what blockchain can mean for the music business. The promise of blockchain, as will be explained, is transparency, fairness, and greater efficiency.

The longest session I partook in was the week-long Blockchain Lab at Music Tech Fest in Berlin, after which I wrote a piece about how the music industry’s not ready for the blockchain.

More recently, I flew to Kristiansand, Norway for 2 days of roundtable discussions organised by Peter Jenner and the University of Agder. It brought together an excellent selection of stakeholders from various parts of the music business ecosystem. Over the course of the sessions, we went through a wide range of topics, including registries, transparency, and blockchain. When discussing the types of problems that can be solved through blockchain, there were a lot of echoes of past meetings.

The problems in the music business ecosystem that are most important to solve, are too complex to solve without wide buy-in. It’s this complexity that gives people a feeling of powerlessness. Despite having the motivation to act and create a better ecosystem, the challenge of getting all the right players to sign up seems insurmountable.

In this sense, blockchain’s value right now, is in acting as a catalyst to re-ignite the types of conversations held about the (failed) Global Repertoire Database, like, for example, the Open Music Initiative. Why?

Blockchain technology provides a decentralized ledger of transactions that’s accessible to all the participants in the network. Transactions cannot be altered once recorded — only amended. So, when it comes to rights, claims are public. This should discourage wilful obfuscation or sloppiness with asserting rights, or adding metadata, because it will be publicly visible. If the ledger is the authority of truth, then acquiring and expressing rights, as well as guiding payment flows like royalties, should all become more efficient.

The biggest challenge to this happening on a meaningful scale is: how do you get rights holders to agree upon a minimal degree of transparency and investment into such an initiative? That’s a discussion that needs to be had, but meanwhile, let’s not wait.

The reality of the current landscape is:

There will be limited buy-in, which means we’re not going to see any industry-wide solutions soon;
There is a lot of interest in solving these issues from the music business;
On the tech side, people are eager to get going, too.

This means we need to work with a scenario where buy-in has to gradually increase.

Working with blockchain should be a carrot.

If people are unwilling to be transparent, then we need to think about branding that rewards the players that are willing to be transparent.

Consider fair trade products, free range certificates, security certificates, or the types of branding that shows products were made in an environmentally friendly way. For the first batch of companies that get such brands on their products, it acts as a carrot: a good way to show that you’re an ethical brand that cares about fair treatment.

When enough participants in the music business ecosystem get in, from music streaming services, to publishers, artists, labels, PROs and others, the carrot will slowly start functioning like a stick.

Carrot: “we’re a music company you can trust, because we’ve signed up to this initiative which guarantees fairness & transparency.”
➟➟➟ Momentum ➟➟➟
*please make a woosshh sound while imagining time elapsing*
Stick: “you can choose not to be transparent for business reasons, but how do you guarantee that creators are treated fairly without transparency?”

Currently, we’re in the pre-carrot phase.

More use cases need to be developed.
More experiments need to be organised.
More publicity needs to be generated.

There are a lot of players already and they’ll need to come together to discuss standards, so that certification can be created. The certification will need a strong brand and PR strategy, so that players in the music business will care, including the consumers. This means that it can’t start by targeting mainstream consumers on Spotify or Apple Music. A more realistic place to start would be Bandcamp, or next-generation platforms like Resonate, Whitestone, or Voltra, all of which are still in their early stages.

Perhaps a major label and major digital service can be incentivized to do something, eg. when they need to do damage control and need some positive PR quickly (carrot), but don’t expect them to disrupt their own status quo until it becomes necessary (stick).

If you are interested in participating in such experiments: feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll link you to the right people. I encourage you to use Medium’s response function (on this page) to advertise your own experiments or activities, or to make calls for participation.

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More soon.

10 Lesser Known Tools for Making Music in your Browser

Posted on November 7, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

When the urge to get creative strikes, here’s how you can drop a beat fast.

It’s not only the internet’s websites and platforms that change. Under the hood, our browsers are getting more powerful, allowing for rich experiences without having to manually download apps.

Here are ten fun tools to drop beats right from your desktop browser.

Splice Beat Maker

https://splice.com/sounds/beatmaker

Splice Beat Maker

How it describes itself: Make and share beats in your browser.

How it works: Splice Sounds is a subscription service with a million loops, samples and presets for producers. Beat Maker allows people to dig into Splice’s library for free. You can check out beats created by established producers, remix those beats, or just start from scratch and program something yourself.

First impression: You can easily spend hours on this. What I find most remarkable about it is that this is a perfect example of marketing done right.

108

http://martinwecke.de/108/

108

How it describes itself: A minimal beat machine in the browser.

How it works: You see a dot moving around a circle and you can populate the circle with drum samples by using your keyboard. Each time the dot hits the sample, it plays it. It runs at 108 beats per minute, hence the name.

First impression: Easy if you want to mess around quickly put some drum pattern together. Unfortunately everything gets placed in a grid: this makes it hard to create something terrible, but also hard to play with timings and get really creative.

Blokdust

https://blokdust.com/

How it describes itself: BlokDust is a free to use web-based music, sound and instrument creation app.

How it works: The web app gives you a tool box to generate tones, feed them to effects, link them to interactive components like your computer’s keyboard or even a MIDI controller, and has different tools that lets you power up the events. Because of the latter, you can create self-playing devices that generate soundscapes (click here for an example that lets you interact through the bottom row of your keyboard).

First impression: Very cool, very powerful. Not only do they provide an extensive set of guides and tutorials, but the project is also open source and the developers invite people to learn from, fork, or contribute to the code.

Sample Stitch

http://samplestitch.com/

Sample Stitch

How it describes itself: Try re-constructing the samples of popular producers’ beats.

How it works: It takes the original samples used by 3 popular hiphop tracks and lets you recompose the beat using your keyboard.

First impression: Fun to play around with and try to build something cool. It’s good to read the stories at the bottom of the page, too. It gives a perspective about the amount of work hiphop producers put into digging for samples, picking the right ones and constructing beats out of them. One downside: at the moment of writing the share-function is busted.

Incredibox

http://www.incredibox.com/

Incredibox v4

How it describes itself: Incredibox is a musical app in which you can quickly and easily create a mix by running a band of beatboxers.

How it works: You start with one guy. When you give him an accessory like a hat or sunglasses, he’ll start beatboxing or singing. As soon as you dress someone up, another guy appears until finally the box is filled with 6 beatboxers working on your song.

First impression: This one’s truly for everyone. It’s so easy that it’s impossible to make anything that doesn’t sound good. There are 4 editions, I suggest you start with the newest ones. Each edition has special unlockable moments that you have to find by combining the right elements… so it’s a game, too!

Voice Spinner

https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Voice-Spinner

Voice Spinner

How it describes itself: Spin the spinner like a record player — slow, fast, forward, backward — to hear how it affects the sound.

How it works: Click the record icon in the middle. Say something, sing something, rhyme something. Then use the slider below to play it back in various ways.

First impression: Cute little tool to play around with. Especially fun to then play some music from another player and try to layer your vocal on top of it. Highlighting this, because it’s part of the Google Chrome Music Lab which has a dozen other music making tools for in your browser.

YUME

http://unseen-music.com/yume/

YUME

How it describes itself: YUME is an interactive musical exploration created to promote the new album from ambient artist Helios. Manipulate sound and explore a dream-like world.

How it works: You‘ll see a screen with diamond-shaped objects, or perhaps kites, that you can drag to manipulate the sound. As you play around with them, you can explore other areas in the audiovisual world, which will have other configurations.

First impression: The initial screen is a little bit confusing, but that ends up really encouraging exploration, which is the right way to bring people into these types of experiences.

Sampulator

http://sampulator.com/

Sampulator

How it describes itself: Music production made easy. Create beats in your browser.

How it works: Your entire keyboard gets turned into a sampling machine. It allows you to program drums, including some great 808 sounds, keys, vocal samples, and more. If you’re good, you can make fantastic beats like this.

First impression: This is right up my alley, because I love 808 driven beats and it has some samples common in the juke and jersey club genres that I often listen to. I like that you can play stuff live and then drag them around in the grid, in case your timing was off.

wavepot

http://wavepot.com/

wavepot

How it describes itself: The digital audio workstation of the web.

How it works: A better description would be: live programming music. If you’re a decent programmer, you can make some cool things with this. If you’re not, then just load up one of the examples and start editing numbers and variables and see what happens.

First impression: Reminds me of ‘algoraves’ where people live program music in front of audiences. I wasn’t able to get the sounds out of it that I wanted to, but the interface (or lack thereof, I guess) makes up for it.

Orbit Sampler

http://www.dreampipe.io/orbit/

Orbit Sampler

How it describes itself: Another browser-based music production app by DreamPipe.

How it works: Despite the lackluster description, it’s one of the more interesting tools. It lets you arrange your samples in circular sequences, which is sometimes argued to be a more intuitive way to visualize rhythms than the typical bar line.

First impression: Save it for the weekend or a late evening. It’s very powerful, but a bit hard to do something quick, because of the level of detail it offers. You can spend hours and hours on this.

Having fun? Drop some of your most creative work in the responses to this piece. No time to play and want to listen to music made by others? Click here for some great tools to discover something new.

The Value of Ephemeral Content: Becoming Part of Your Fans’ Routines

Posted on October 24, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

What some perceive as ephemeral content’s greatest weakness is actually its most powerful quality. In an online landscape where attention is most scarce, ephemerality is key. 🔑

Last week I had the pleasure of being on a panel with some brilliant minds at Amsterdam Dance Event. The topic: marketing music to millennials. Millennials born in the nineties have a starkly different online profile than eighties babies. For instance, for teens, Snapchat now beats Facebook and Instagram as their top social platform.

The popularity of ephemeral content has to do with a number of factors. One teen writes:

No social pressure, because the main metric is view count.
Ephemerality means you don’t need to overthink what you post.
You actually know who’s watching — if people have seen your post, their usernames are revealed.

The world these people have grown up in is different from that of older generations. Eighties babies used to think online was a bit more of a playground. I cringe looking back (and deleting) some of the photos and status updates I posted on Facebook back in 2007–2009. This generation is aware that information lives forever and their strategies for dealing with that include deleting their digital histories frequently.

So for many labels, artists, and managers the question is:

How do I develop a strategy around ephemeral content?

Your strategy will have to acknowledge a few core concepts:

Attention, not money, is the scarcest good on the internet. And everyone’s competing for it.
The online landscape is now a filtered landscape, with algorithms weighing content and deciding whether to show it to your audience, or not.
In this reality, your most important question is: how do I win my fans’ attention again and again and again?

For that purpose, ephemerality is f*#ing amazing. If you content is only visible for a day at a time — your fans will have to make you part of their daily routine. Now your have your fans’ attention: every single day.

Habit is the key to winning people’s attention over and over. There’s a reason why I send out my music tech newsletter at exactly the same time every week. Some of my subscribers actually go get a cup of coffee and hit refresh on their inbox around the time my newsletter’s supposed to come in. Not only does that lead to good engagement and nice metrics, but it also gives a great connection between you and your followers — it’s a special feeling.

Once understood, ephemerality can be engineered. If Snapchat is not your thing, or if teens are not your main demographic, there are other ways to become part of people’s habit through ephemerality. The expiring nature of Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Release Radar is the reason why those features have been so successful and have deeply influenced the product’s direction.

A great example of a music company that has been engineering ephemerality for years, is the Main Course record label. They offer all of their releases for free on Soundcloud in the first week. Many labels do the opposite and try to drive sales first, but Main Course’s strategy makes sure fans check their page once a week. Imagine doing this on a page you actually owned, instead of on a social profile. You can establish a habit and then when fans come and check, you can nudge their attention to important things like gigs or crowdfunding campaigns.

What some perceive as ephemeral content’s greatest weakness, is actually its most powerful quality. Use its expiring nature to build habit, keep your fans’ attention on you, and lead them to where you need them.

Many thanks to my co-panelists Luke Hood (UKF / AEI), Amy Jayne (Hospital Records), Siofra McComb (The Other Hand), Shane Mansfield (Ticketscript), David Ireland (Magnetic Magazine), and Lucy Blair for putting it all together. You’ve inspired me to put these thoughts down.

If you’d like me to work with you on building habit loops — drop me an email: bas@musicxtechxfuture.com.

6 questions I wish music startup founders asked more often

Posted on October 17, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

Keeping a close eye on the music space, I encounter a lot of startups and fledgling products. Unfortunately, a lot of them are misguided, for a variety of reasons, most of which can be prevented. Often, these early mistakes result in painful pivots or founding teams giving up, which is a real shame, as we need more applied innovation in the music business.

Here are the questions I wish music startup founders would ask themselves early on.

Does this work as a mainstream behaviour?

The biggest mistake music startup founders make is they assume that everyone loves music the way they do. Most people simply don’t care that much about music. They like it, they love it, but in a very different way from whoever’s likely to read this — let alone found a music startup.

You need to be very critical of your idea. It’s ok if it doesn’t work for mainstream consumers, but then adjust expectations and target your product accordingly.

Does this work as a mainstream price point?

So let’s say you figure out you have the perfect lean-back experience for music listeners. You’re creating something that’s not demanding of its users and doesn’t require big changes in existing behaviours. In other words: you’re ready to cater to a mainstream audience.

What about the price point? Price points are difficult to determine and people are notoriously bad at predicting what price they’re willing to pay for something. If you’re going for a mainstream audience, your safest bet is pricing for impulse purchase decisions.

How does this work rights-wise in the long term?

You can’t live on the APIs of YouTube, Soundcloud or Spotify forever. At some point, you need to build your own business. Do you understand the costs involved of licensing? Will content disappear from the service?

Launching light weight is fine — if you’re looking to test an idea, using an API can be a great choice, but you need to understand your long term strategy, too, and plan for the next steps.

What are the ways in which people already solve this problem?

Changing an existing behaviour is hard work and takes commitment. It’s risky to assume people will immediately fall in love with your product, drop everything, and never look back. Problems I see entrepreneurs frequently try to tackle are: staying up to date with your favourite artists, better ways to find new music, or giving people all their music in one place.

Are these problems consumers are already aware of? We all have our workarounds, so it may not seem urgent to your target users. Understand exactly how people are currently solving the problem, so that your product fits into a certain behavior and augments it, so that it becomes better.

Radically changing a behaviour is painful for users.

Do I really need to do a consumer-facing startup?

Sometimes entrepreneurs do music startups, because they have a vision for the music business and they want to break into it. Doing consumer facing startups is often costly and makes it trickier to gauge interest and test the market. If your goal is to create a better music landscape, perhaps you could consider solving problems within the music business.

After all, many of the imperfections that consumers have to deal with have a lot to do with problems in the music business internally.

Does this already exist?

Shout out to the plethora of music discovery apps posted to Product Hunt every month.

Are donations becoming a viable part of artists’ business models?

Posted on October 10, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

With the rise of live streaming and new media models, donations deserve another consideration.

Napster, the early file sharing service, not only introduced many to piracy. The platform also exposed two competing world views. One believed that information should be free and the other believed in combating such ideas. They were both wrong.

As a teenager, and still today, my personal sympathy went out to those who saw a better world and wanted to accomplish that by facing down large corporations. Their envisioned world was never satisfactory enough for me, though. It seemed oversimplified. One of the most common tropes you’d hear would be:

“Artists should just release their work for free and let people donate. I’d love to be able to donate to my favourite artists.”

Donation request from a band — An example of a common donation request.

At that time, there were only about half a billion connected devices. Most of the world’s population wasn’t online yet. Those that were, and thought this way, were a minority projecting their own behaviour onto others. It’s common: most music startup founders do the same thing — overestimating how much people care about music. Simply put: the donation model could not scale.

The model didn’t take into consideration the complexity of the way music is made. Let’s say artists were able to make a living off of donations — this benefits the most visible artists; the singers, but not the songwriters. How should money from donations then be distributed so that it’s fair? Does the intention behind the donation matter? Questions like these are the reason why there’s so much legislation around creative work.

An elemental overview of merely the royalty distribution part of the music business. Via Bemuso.

Time passed and two trends have developed. Firstly, there has been an explosion of artists who do everything by themselves. Households in many countries now no longer have just 1 family PC, and music production software is easy to attain. This has led to a rise of ‘bedroom producers’, many of which are world famous and make a good living off of music.

The second trend is that the internet has become more real-time. Ten years ago you wouldn’t consider sharing memories online that would only be visible for 24 hours. Now, two of the world’s most popular apps, Instagram and Snapchat, not only encourage, but thrive because of that behaviour.

Fast wireless connections and increasingly powerful devices have enabled livestreaming. Anyone who’s ever ‘gone live’ on Facebook or Periscope knows that it changes the creative process of making a video. Live video streams are not just a new way to broadcast, they’re a creative format.

Trends mix and influence each other. If you want to understand where things are going, you have to understand how trends converge and diverge. In this case, the two highlighted trends have culminated into a particular reality: donations are becoming a viable part of artists’ business models.

Understanding how donations are becoming viable is easiest by looking outside of music. Donations are already an important part of the economy on Twitch, a platform for broadcasting gameplay, which also encourages creatives to start streaming.

Gamers use donation apps to display tip notes in the live video stream. Some apps actually automatically read out the tip notes on-stream. Tipping is done for various reasons: to actually show appreciation, to encourage the chat to discuss a certain topic (or more likely: to emote-spam), to request a song, to ask for expert feedback, to get their name or joke into a YouTube highlight reel, etc.

Twitch tip scare — And sometimes they use tips to scare streamers shitless.

For popular streamers, it’s hard to interact with the chat, because there’s just too much to read it all — and they also need to focus on their game. Tip notes provide a way for viewers or fans to rise above the noise and get the streamer’s attention.

The takeaway here is that donations do not seem to occur for altruistic reasons in most cases. The exact ratio would make for an interesting study. Much of the donation behaviour happens due to the desire to interact, stand out or to get a request fulfilled. It’s a behaviour enabled by the immediacy brought on by the rise of high quality live streaming.

DJ live streaming on Twitch — Some streamers highlight their top donators by keeping their names visible (in bottom).

Musicians that want to incorporate donations into their business model will need a clear strategy. Firstly, it’s unlikely that donations on their own are viable if the goal is to make a living off of creative work. Although if you do it all yourself, like many artists these days, you get to keep the whole cut.

Secondly, the reason why donations are becoming viable is because of live streaming. This means the artist needs to be able to consistently generate audiences and that takes time to build. One-offs are a recipe for failure, especially if they don’t sit within a broader strategy.

Live streams being a creative format of their own means that there needs to be an intrinsic motivation to work in this way. Else one won’t be able to muster the consistency and grit necessary to succeed. The question for the artist is: “is this medium compelling enough for you to spend a significant amount of your time on it?”

Whatever the answer, the trend is clear. As artists are embracing the live format, with younger ones even coming into maturity with it, we’ll see donations make a comeback. This time, not as charity, but as a well-planned part of artists’ business models.

An example of donations on Chew.tv, a live video streaming platform for music.

Two words to boost your digital strategy: and then?

Posted on October 3, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

Repeating the same question over and over to cut through the nonsense and set the right priorities.

I regularly discuss digital strategy with bloggers, DIY musicians, managers or people running their own record label. My intention is to help people think more like startups, set clear goals, collect data and know how to act on data. There are useful frameworks for this, like the AARRR framework, but they take a while to get acquainted with.

Even in quick conversations, I want to give people something useful, uncomplicated. You’re not going to be able to go through an entire framework with sets of metrics. When constructing narratives for brands, it helps to ask the question why? over and over. In digital strategy, this question is:

And then?

These two words won’t help you determine what to do, but they will help you validate your actions and uncover tasks that might need to be completed before acting. An example:

A Buddhist rapper, let’s call him Jimi Zendrix, desires to sell more merchandise. He knows that to do that, he needs to build a bond with his fans. He has the perfect solution: a newsletter.

And then?
Jimi: then I’m going to share what I’m doing with my fans.
And then?
Jimi: then they’re going to feel more engaged.
And then?
Jimi: then I’ll develop merch and link to it from my newsletter.
And then?
Jimi: then people are going to go there and buy the merch.

Each one of these answers reveals a set of tasks and extra questions.

How are you going to share what you’re doing with fans? Do you have time to prepare that every week? Are there easy ways to aggregate your social feeds like Instagram? Or do you need to use a different newsletter service for that?
How do you know that people feel more engaged? This means you have to make assumptions, before launching your newsletter, about open rates and click rates of fans. If they’re really more engaged, you should also see it in the data in other places, so you need to have a way to track that.
How will you develop this merch? Can you use the data from your newsletter and other sources to develop better products? What’s the best way to display merch in mailinglists?
Can you track sales from when someone opens the email, clicks the link, looks around the site, to purchase? Are you using a merch shop that allows you to understand this and lets you optimize? For example, you may find that newsletter readers are more likely to buy hats. You may want to show hats first to people who click through from your newsletter, but not to normal visitors.

Loads of stuff to consider before launching your newsletter. Don’t overwhelm yourself: the lesson is what’s most important. Pick something you want to do, make an assumption, then test it. Repeat.

And then there’s fallacies…

“And then?” doubles for “so what?” We often obsess with numbers called ‘vanity metrics’, which are kind of pointless to focus on.

Try to imagine an answer for these:

I want 5,000 likes on Facebook. And then?
I want to have 1,000 visitors on my homepage. And then?
I want my tweets to be retweeted more. And then?

Your answers likely contain a hypothesis. You may think that getting more retweets leads to more followers leads to more fans leads to more sales. Now you have something to measure.

Do retweets lead to more followers? You may want to exclude spam accounts, or accounts that follow tens of thousands of users.
Do followers lead to more fans? How will you be able to tell?
Do those people who stumble upon your tweets eventually convert to paying customers?

Each of these have conversion ratios. So you go from a number to a much smaller number at the end. You may determine, before even getting started, that it’s not worth your time to research hashtags and write tweets that aren’t even directly related to your music, just to get retweets.

“And then?” helps you cut through the bullshit and get your priorities straight. Don’t spend too much time on things you can’t measure or that are not part of a funnel.

Each step in your digital strategy needs to lead somewhere.

Don’t stop asking “and then?”