Shorts

Clubhouse = podcasts + proximity

Posted on February 17, 2021 | by Bas Grasmayer

If you haven’t spent time on Clubhouse yet, you either didn’t get an invite yet (abundant now, so ask around), are on Android, or understandably chose not to believe the hype.

The new social media kid on the block has seen plenty of long-form analysis, especially considering it’s such a simple app (highly recommended reading: Clubhouse’s Inevitability by Ben Thompson). Its success can be explained by a simple dynamic too.

Clubhouse = podcasts + proximity

The audio part of the app is popular for many of the same reasons that podcasts are popular as a type of on-demand talk radio. They’re informative, entertaining, and people derive comfort from the connection they have with the podcast hosts & guests – or just hearing their voices.

Clubhouse adds a sense of proximity to the podcast effect. Instead of the distant creator-listener relation, listeners are on a more equal footing. Even if Clubhouse has concepts of session hosts, a stage and an audience, at least you’re in the same room. You can directly follow people. You can raise your hand to speak to them. You can connect to them afterwards.

The dynamic feels similar to the early days of Twitter. Suddenly you could use 140 characters to reach out to the world’s top thinkers and artists who had already signed up to the service (an early adopter of both platforms is deadmau5). You’d usually get a reply and sometimes even a follow. It was significantly easier to build up a following in those early days and by having an following early on, you’d automatically grow your following as the platform went through its growth phase and people looked for interesting people to follow.

While FOMO may be the reason why people flock to Clubhouse, proximity is the glue that makes the experience sticky.

👋 You can find me on Twitter and Clubhouse as @basgras.

❤ If you’re on the MUSIC x Patreon, give me a ping. I have a couple of Clubhouse invites to give away and I’d love to have more of the community on there.

👀 Recommended reading: I wrote about the benefits I reaped from being an early adopter of SoundCloud (@bas).

Photo by Dmitry Mashkin on Unsplash

2018’s hot topics for the music business

Posted on December 17, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

I am typing this article on my phone in an airport. Therefore this piece is going to be a bit different than my usual MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE post.

It’s amazing what we can do on our phones now. They are fully fledged computers that are more powerful than the computers on our desks a few years ago.

Originally posted on my Medium.

And that has been a key facet of the change we see in music right now. The streaming giants were enabled by the smartphone. The iPhone (launched in 2007) and Spotify’s rise went hand in hand. I mention the iPhone because it exemplifies the modern smartphone. Now Apple has its own streaming service. And so does Google, which is also behind Android.

These two companies are now betting heavy on AI. Putting chipsets in phones capable of providing the power needed for this generation of computing. Google’s AI team have notably been working on AI that can outwit the best Go players — one of the most complex games (Alpha Go). They also built AI that could train itself to play chess in a few hours and beat the world’s best chess bot (Alpha Zero).

Where’s this AI going? Well, for one, into smart homes, and into smart speakers like Google Home, Amazon Echo, or Apple’s HomePod. We already see the operating systems for smartphones partnering with music brands. Hifi manufacturer Sonos integrated Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant into some of their hardware this year.

Smart speakers are going to change the game for music. Without a visual interface, how are you going to get your music to people? How are you going to stay top of mind? It’s like a new age of radio, but this time it’s personalised.

Then there are the countless AI music startups that are tackling everything from scoring films to mental health to generative pop to smart VSTs to soundtracking your YouTube videos. There’s investor interest too: Techstars Music has 3 AI-related music startups in their last batch, including Pacemaker which helps you turn your Spotify playlists into mixtapes.

And then there’s obviously blockchain. With the price of Bitcoin exploding recently, the whole world is paying attention. We see new models of crowd investment through ‘tokenization’ with multiple music startups already raising millions of funds using the Ethereum blockchain. There are probably dozens of startups looking at solving issues related to the complex rights situation in music through blockchain. One to watch is JAAK.

What about VR? Next year we’ll see startups like The Wave VR and NOYS VR gain further momentum, and further define what music can be in VR. More artists will get involved and build high quality fan experiences to put the 360 video to shame. Still, I’m cautious about VR — I’m not sure if 2018 is going to be THE year, just like 2008 wasn’t the year of streaming, but important foundations were laid by players such as Spotify and Soundcloud.

And that brings me to the last topic. Soundcloud. Creators are frustrated with it and are exploring other means to connect to fans. One successful medium for this is Instagram which will continue to grow in importance. But there are more gaps. Tech is changing and so is the online media culture. In 2008 it was necessary to provide light weight experiences, but now the web is video driven and everyone has a device with 2 cameras in their pocket. Producers are making tracks on Garage Band on their iPhones and then demoing the track via Snapchat and Instagram stories instead of uploading a snippet to audio platforms.

If 2017 was not already it, 2018 is going to be the year of video. It will provide musicians with a handy tool to deal with new challenges since 2018 will also be the year of the smart speaker.

Try new things. Push the new tech to its limits. When you find something you enjoy and that works well: focus on it.

Have a good end of year!

Bas

The Chris Brown problem on Spotify

Posted on November 5, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

How do we deal with bad players in music when every listen translates to payment?

For a few weeks in a row now, Chris Brown has appeared in my Spotify Release Radar. I’m not sure why, because I don’t follow him, nor do I really listen to similar music, but that’s a different topic.

The issue I have is: I do not want my streams to put money into the pockets of abusers (Chris Brown has a history of violence towards women, and victim-blaming). So that means I can’t really listen to my Release Radar in the background, or most curated playlists for that matter, because I want to make sure Spotify never plays those tracks to me.

I’m singling out Spotify here, because I’m an avid user: basically all streaming services have this problem. I’ve made the case for a global ban button for particular artists before, when I wrote about the Moby problem on Spotify. Basically, in curated environments, it would be nice to give some control back to the user and let them blacklist certain artists they’re not comfortable with.

Not only would this give listeners a more manageable overall experience, but it would also allow people to immediately make sure their money doesn’t go to abusers (and in the aftermath of the Weinstein fallout, surely Hollywood’s revelations will start spreading to the music business too).

But there’s another issue: in the streaming era, how do we listen to controversial artists without sending money their way?

For example, some brutal details around rapper XXXTentacion came out a while ago. He comes across as an abusive monster, and regularly gets into fights with fans. Yet, he’s still very popular. I’m curious why – is the music that good? I opened Spotify to check him out, but stopped myself from hitting the playback button, being aware that listening means money will go towards him (or his label, and seriously, they should do a Netflix and drop this dude + donate profits to causes that help victims / survivors of abuse).

But the ‘Chris Brown problem’ is that dudes like this keep being put into popular playlists, keep appearing in users’ personal playlists through algorithm recommendations. As listeners, we need a way to shield ourselves, and prevent our money from going into the pockets of these people.

If Spotify and other services are serious about their passive ‘lean back’ experience: give us a blacklist button. Let us ban Chris Brown.

Meanwhile one Reddit user has a suggestion for when artists you like collaborate with such people (which I’m sure a lot of readers won’t like):

Comment from discussion Snoop Dogg's new album cover features him standing over Trump's dead body.

How will we remember bands when interfaces are voice-controlled?

Posted on October 8, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

I have phrased the above question as a problem for listeners, but this is a much bigger problem for artists.

The last few weeks have been filled with big news for those closely following voice interfaces. Amazon just announced a bunch of new devices, including a cheaper version of the Echo and a new Echo Plus, that utilize Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. Google has upgraded its voice assistant, and has included it in new headphones which can automatically translate what people are saying, alongside a bunch of other devices that quite frankly look more exciting than Apple‘s. And to top that all off, multi-room hifi-set producer, Sonos, has just integrated Alexa in its speakers.

The problem in the title is actually easily solved for a listener: you can simply ask what’s playing. However you simply can’t be bothered to ask what’s playing every other song. So this problem is much more important for the artist, than for the listener.

If you haven’t used these devices yet, you may not be aware of some of the challenges, but here they are:

It’s already hard to be remembered – how will people remember you when they don’t even see your name? On our phones or laptops, we occasionally see what’s playing. When we select a playlist, we often see what artists are on there. Something may stick. When we play ask Alexa to play Spotify‘s RapCaviar playlist, we don’t get clues of what’s playing. It’s basically the same as with radio, but at least there you have DJs who will tell you what’s playing. Any music or artist that you don’t care to Shazam will be forgotten.
How do you stay top of mind enough for people to replay you? People often start playing music without looking at their phones or music libraries. This means they request what’s top of mind: artists they remember in that moment, or big brands in music and playlists, such as aforementioned Spotify playlist, Majestic Casual, or Diplo & Friends.
How do you compete with ‘functional music’? The most popular ‘music’ apps on Alexa are all kinds of sleep and meditation sound apps. This list excludes Spotify and other music services, due to a deeper integration with Alexa, but it’s telling: people use these voice interfaces to request music to augment specific activities. Sleeping, bathing, meditating, cooking, whatever.

There are great solutions to these problems. And they’re not hard to figure out (people in hiphop have been shouting their name and their label’s name on tracks for decades).

I may do a follow-up on tactics and strategy for the age of “zero UI”, when the user interface is mostly controlled by voice and artificial intelligence, but for now, I’d love to hear about what you think. Ping me on Twitter: @basgras.

Painting: Wojtek Siudmak – “Le regard gourmand”

The location-based music marketing opportunity in Instagram Stories

Posted on June 5, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Recently Instagram rolled out a new feature that lets users discover stories by location from the Explore tab.

If you have a music video recorded at recognisable locations in a city (the larger the population density, the better), go do the following:

Cut short clips from your video and optimise them for tall displays (ie. vertical view (portrait), as opposed to horizontal view (landscape);
Every day, post a clip tagged to the location where it was filmed;
Don’t forget to add some branding, so people can easily follow you (e.g. your Instagram handle, which people can tap on).

Don’t overdo it: remember that your existing followers are also going to see all these clips, no matter where they are.

You can even get more creative about this. Go to different locations in a city, record short clips, and mash them all together into a larger video, to be released when you’ve actually recorded all the clips.

[if you end up doing this, I’d be happy to feature you on the MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE newsletter which goes out to 1,500 industry people, up until top exec levels, and is growing every week — bas@musicxtechxfuture.com]

Some more thoughts about music & video:

I think too often, music videos are separate products from the music itself. Now, in a digital landscape dominated by Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook-hosted videos, it’s important to marry the two. You can try conceptualising the video, before the song. You can work on both at the same time.

I think the idea of experimenting with Instagram or Snapchat stories as a creative medium for music really forces you to mix the two. And you just have to worry about holding people’s attention for 10 seconds at a time, rather than creating some storyline that demands an attention span of a few minutes.

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.