Mike Shinoda auction on Zora

NFTs are blockchain’s hottest new use case for music. They should not come as a surprise.

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 1 Comment on NFTs are blockchain’s hottest new use case for music. They should not come as a surprise.

Linkin Park‘s Mike Shinoda just sold a digital piece of art for $30.000 and took to Twitter explaining some of this thoughts in a thread:

“Even if I upload the full version of the contained song to DSPs worldwide (which I can still do), i would never get even close to $10k, after fees by DSPs, label, marketing, etc.”

The ownership of this piece of art is tracked through a non-fungible token on a blockchain. Blockchains are commonly used as distributed ledgers: databases operated by networks of users, like Ethereum. They keep records of any changes to the ledger and can track things like ownership of tokens or cryptocurrency, e.g. Bitcoin.

But so what if a piece of art is recorded into a distributed database? Why the hype?

The current cultural moment is strongly influenced by the pandemic. Artists saw a big drop in income. Streaming revenue isn’t cutting it for most. So the big experimentation began. Artists searched for revenue through things like livestreaming, fan clubs, ticketed virtual meet & greets, online courses, and NFT auctions…

Why are people buying content that can easily be duplicated?

Many a music industry conference panel has bemoaned the fact that people are willing to buy a cup of coffee or bottle of water, but won’t spend that money on a download and instead chose to pirate it (in the days long before Spotify counted 150M paying subscribers). Two decades later and many of the same philosophical debates about the price and value of music continue. Meanwhile, gaming, an industry that faced the same piracy issues as the music industry, pragmatically pioneered ways to get people to pay for completely virtual items.

Gaming gave the ownership of virtual items a valuable context. People who spent many hours a week inside games would find value in virtual real estate or vanity items that translates into real world currency. This is not something recent. In 2013, someone paid $38,000 for an in-game item in Dota2 – an item which doesn’t improve a player’s performance, but just makes them look cooler. In 2010, virtual real estate by the name of Club Neverdie in online game Entropia sold for $635,000.

Now, ten years later, we’re seeing the same dynamic emerge for music. Owning an NFT doesn’t necessarily mean that nobody else can enjoy the work of art associated with the token, much like with physical art that’s exhibited. With the emerging metaverse, some are expecting NFTs to become its property rights.

NFT x Metaverse

The idea of the metaverse essentially boils down to a virtual shared space. One prominent example of this concept is Roblox, which is a gaming platform in which people can build their own experiences that are all interconnected through Roblox’ economy (its currency being Robux). Another is Fortnite, which has some of the ingredients already, but hasn’t yet developed a marketplace with low barriers to entry like Roblox has. Despite that, one of the best primers on the topic of the metaverse is the below interview with Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, which owns Fortnite.

It’s the convergence of various pandemic-accelerated trends (VR / XR, virtual economies, crypto) and the expectations of people in these domains that is currently driving NFT art’s success stories ($750,000 CryptoPunk sale, Panther Modern‘s $666 sale, virtual critters for $100,000 a piece). If you want to know what the future holds, look at what the smartest people in the room are doing, because they’ll be the ones building that future.

12 years after the initial release of Bitcoin and the world’s introduction to blockchain, crypto is starting to emerge as an anticipated layer of connectivity for transactions occurring in the metaverse. With a market cap higher than Facebook at the time of writing, Bitcoin has made many early adopters very rich (as have other cryptocurrencies). Besides figuring out how to build an infrastructure in which they can effectively use their blockchain-riches, we’re seeing this money flow into other spaces, like art (and soon Tesla).

Simplified: to understand some of NFTs’ success, you should look at the crypto space as a metaverse without an interface that looks like a video game. The participants of that space are still players: they’re building their own world, their own infrastructure. They care about what they look like in that world, just like how people in virtual worlds care enough about their looks that they’re willing to buy in-game currencies like Robux (to the sum of billions of USD in 2020). Owning art is cool – it gives you standing in your micro-community which is part of larger meta-communities (e.g. a gaming clan is a community inside the community of one server of a game, which is a community inside the global player-base of that game).

And sure, there’s altruism too, because it’s cool to support art. However counting on altruism tends to spawn panel discussions to compare bottles of water to digital art. Focus on non-altruistic value.

Join the MUSIC x newsletter.

Music is the creator economy catalyst

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling | 1 Comment on Music is the creator economy catalyst

In his book The Passion Economy Adam Davidson argues that our current century is one where people set up businesses that centre around their passions. This contrasts with the main tenet of the previous century, where the focus was on commoditization, production and scale. This economic change underpins an important marker which Davidson generalizes as follows: “The Passion Economy is about quality and the conversation you have with your clients.” (p.38) Music is perfectly positioned to play into this shift and, indeed, does so already.

Davidson doesn’t specifically write about music and musicians. Similarly, if we look at the top 100 social media as defined by the Knight Institute at Columbia University, we see platforms not designed for music or musicians but used by them nonetheless.

Social platforms sized by popularity. Source: Knight Institute

How creators create the most

The researchers at the Knight Institute call these bubbles ‘logics’ hinting at an underlying logic, or function, that connects what’s inside of the bubble. The biggest bubble is that of the ‘creator logic’ which the researchers define as follows:

“creator logic platforms are for everyone and enable users to share a specific type of media (like video, livestreams, or art), in a one-to-many fashion. They are home to “creators,” people who consistently make content for the platform, often as a source of income. Some examples of creator logic are YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Wattpad.”

Other platforms to include here are the subscription platforms such as Patreon, Currents.fm or Ampled. As Cherie Hu has argued last year, music is at the core of the the crowdfunding model underlying these platforms. What they may lack in popularity against platforms like Twitch, they gain in terms of the value they capture. Let’s go a little deeper into how music catalyzes these creator platforms and permeates the broader social media ecosystem.

Adding value

Whereas crowdfunding has strong roots in music, platforms such as Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube are first and foremost video-sharing services aimed at connecting people through experiences and stories. By now, we know how important music has been and still is when it comes to growth on these platforms. Twitch, for example, while still primarily being a platform for gamers, has seen massive growth in music streamers. Looking at Twitchtracker, the growth in channels and viewers between February 2020 and February 2021 is impressive. The number of channels broadcasting music tripled, and the number of viewers grew by almost 7x. Of course, the integration between Amazon Music and Twitch further establishes the role of music on the livestreaming platform. Similarly, music is a driver of growth on TikTok and music remains a key driver of traffic on YouTube with 22% of all views attributed to music videos. The reason, I argue, that music plays such a key part on these creator platforms is its ability to convey quality and trigger conversation.

A great example for this, which will immediately show how music permeates the wider social media ecosystem, is by going back to 2019’s biggest TikTok star: Lil Nas X. Besides having a breakout song that was ripe for conflict, perfect for meme-creation, ideal for dance challenges, etc., the artist also played into the feedback loops necessary to engage an audience. Moreover, he did so using a broad variety of social media, posting short snippets of songs on Twitter for example and asking for feedback. Of course, this requires a certain type of artist and not everyone is willing to engage in, what Jade Gomez recently described in Complex as: “commentary and memes that almost make them separate entities from their music itself.”

Capturing value

When, as an artist, you ask yourself how do I add value and how do I capture that value through my audience, it’s important to stay close to who you are. If you’re not the type of person who is happy to enter an endless feedback loop of commentary and memes, you can still look at how you can take advantage of stepping into a dialogue with your fans. The platforms are there and users are eager to engage with music. More and more, fans are becoming creators themselves, the dialogue between fan and artist becoming one where music-making is a shared passion. The creator tools for this are many and the business around it is worth almost $900million. Artists can draw the most loyal of their fans to places like Patreon, where they can give insights into their production processes and provide access to their own sound files for their fans to work on. A great example of this is Jamie Lidell, who sends out audio packs of all the sounds used during his podcast recordings to the higher-tier fans on his Patreon.

Big Tech and the Creator Economy

Recent developments show how the bigger tech companies are wisening up to the chain of feedback that allows artists, and creators more generally, to find audiences, cultivate them, and then capture their value directly. Amazon is one example of a company trying to create an integrated flow for this, but they miss the platform where people can take a megaphone and shout. A great place to do just that is Twitter. With their development of Spaces and the acquisition of Revue, Twitter seems to position itself as, what Peter Yang calls, “the full-stack platform for expert creators.”

Source: Peter Yang, creatoreconomy.so

The key element to this that Yang focuses on is the ability to mix content types. Again, this will have to fit the personality of the artist, but the message is clear: flip the value relationship between yourself as artist and fan and there’s a lot of value you can capture by directly adding value to the lives of your fans. This two-way street seems paved with music and while other creators can walk across it, it’s music that often acts as a springboard to growth and success.

Storytelling, a final word

Music drives the creator economy and permeates across all levels of social platforms. From Snapchat Stories to music subreddits, millions of people use social media every day to engage with music and musicians. As the Creator Economy continues to grow it’s the best storytellers that will reach the top. With a broad variety of available tools artists are primed to find, engage and connect with an audience that is just passionate, and sometimes even more passionate, as they are about their music. Let fans share in the story and capture the value they feel you’ve added to their lives.

Smarter Playlists: automate your music discovery, playlist strategy, and library organisation

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Smarter Playlists is still the best way to ‘automagically’ create and update playlists on Spotify. The tool, made by Paul Lamere of music data firm The Echo Nest (now Spotify), provides you with countless ways to source music, combine it, filter it, sort it and turn it into playlists.

I hinted at the value of Smarter Playlists / Playlist Machinery when I wrote about playlist strategy in a previous post titled If you want to start a music brand, don’t wait until the pandemic is over. Here’s how to use it.

Music discovery

Not everyone needs a playlist strategy, but everyone reading this is crazy about music and always curious to explore more. Here are some examples of recipes that surface gems.

New Music Friday… but high-energy from around the world

Fridays are when new music is released and Spotify helps surface that new music in numerous ways. It has its the algorithmic Release Radar which lets you listen to tracks from artists you personally follow. It also has New Music Friday playlists for specific territories that are editorial and mostly pop-focused.

I love seeing how trends emerge and are adopted around the world and have a soft spot for high-energy music, so I created a weekly tool to scout new tunes.

A lot happening in this screenshot, so let’s break it down by steps.

Firstly, all of the data streams in from the left and streams out (to a Spotify playlist) on the right. In between, there are various steps which either combine data (e.g. tracks from different playlists), filter, or sort it.

  1. First I added a number of Sources. The Sources are Spotify’s New Music Friday (NMF) playlists from various regions. You copy the playlist URI and add it to the box. I’ve changed the box names to the region it’s sourced from.
  2. Since the international NMFs also tend to feature the world’s biggest pop stars, who I’m already familiar with, I took the global New Music Friday playlist (which has over 3M followers) and connected it to the mixer with a red line. This ‘bans’ all the tracks on the global NMF playlist and essentially filters out the global hits from progressing down the workflow, in case they’re present on any regional playlist.
  3. Since I’m working with 7 input sources, I set the mixer’s max tracks to a few thousand. Otherwise it clips to a low number by default.
  4. It’s Friday – I want energy (tbh, I always want energy). So I took the energy filter and set it to ‘most energy‘. This filters out all tracks that are not energetic.
  5. Next, I’ve sorted the stream by artist popularity and picked ‘reverse’, so that the most popular artist shows up on top of the list. This is counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you dive into how they rank artist popularity numerically. I do this, because if people visit the playlist and play track 1, it makes it more likely it fits current trends and expectations and people are less likely to move on to another playlist.
  6. But life shouldn’t be too predictable. So I’ve used ‘weighted shuffle‘, which lets you set the degree to which you want the list to be randomized. If you want things to be roughly in order of popularity, you set it to 0.1.
  7. In the above recipe or formula, I save the output to an existing Spotify playlist in my collection. I’ve chosen to overwrite, but you can also select to append. Additionally, you can choose to create a new playlist altogether.
  8. Hit the play button to run your workflow, check if the output makes sense in the Tracks tab and also check your Spotify library for the playlist.

👉 Playlist | Program

I’ve used the scheduler to update it weekly, because I was happy with the result and I imagine I can build a following with the playlist. You can find the scheduler by going to the Program section after saving your playlist recipe.

Scout labels’ playlists for unknown talent

Labels usually have regularly updated playlists which showcase their new releases. If you’re curious about musicians that are less well-known, you can set a filter that removes all tracks by artists that are too ‘popular’ (according to Spotify) for your taste.

The above example features 3 prominent drum & bass labels and is set to append less well-known artists’ tracks to a playlist on a weekly basis. (for the connoisseurs: some of the artists in the playlist are indeed quite legendary, but somehow don’t index high on Spotify’s popularity scoring)

👉 Playlist | Program

Playlist strategy

This toolset is also excellent for simplifying the work that goes into maintaining playlists one might use to build their following. Here are two examples.

Sourcing scene playlists for fresh music

Let’s say you read my recent post and are now building a new music brand. You already have a feeling of what it should sound like and are familiar with popular & less popular playlists in your scene. Your flow might look something like this:

I’ve added red dots to the playlist boxes to make it clearer which is which. In the big group, I have 8 different playlists (Wixapolo, Hardtekk, Lobsta B, Clubland, Pumping, Makina, Hard Dance Interpretations and an old playlist I no longer update) that get randomized and duplicate tracks removed before the mixer picks 50 tracks from them.

I’ve split 3 playlists from that path. For Lento Violento, I want to limit the amount of tracks that may show up, so the mixer on the left is set to a very low number, so only a couple of tracks enter the pool. For the Hyperpop playlist, I only care about the high BPM tracks that may be in there. Lastly, there’s trash rave, which is a big pool of music I add music to regularly. I want this playlist to dominate the flavour of the final playlist, so I’ve seperated it, so I can make sure the mix from the 10 playlists on the left have about a 50/50 ratio to the trash rave playlist.

Artist separation makes sure the same artist doesn’t appear multiple times in a row.

Enjoy some of the goofier bpms of dance music.

👉 Playlist | Program

Turn one big playlist into daily instalments

Let’s say you’ve been collecting loads of music into one big playlist, but you want to turn that into a highly engaging format that people come back to daily. This one is really simple.

For years, I’ve been compiling various types of Club Music into one big playlist – from Jersey Club to Juke to Bmore, you name it. Let’s turn it into a brief playlist that people can come back to daily.

Shuffle the input, so you don’t end up with only the top tracks (update: in this case, the ‘sample’ selector does the same as ‘shuffle → mixer’). Remove duplicate artists, since it updates daily, so keep it varied. That’s it. Don’t forget to set it to update every day via the clock icon in the Programs tab.

If you’re ready to move, give the resulting playlist a listen.

👉 Playlist | Program

Library organisation

Not everyone’s building playlist brands, but you may have a library that could use some organisation.

‘Focus music’ playlist based on what you know

This one was shared by Antoine Marguerie, a designer at Base Secrete.

I’ve rebuilt it and it takes familiar music (less distracting), filters the stream to only include low BPM tracks, removes some duplication, removes any lyric-heavy tracks, and takes a 100 tracks to add to the focused work playlist. A good way to reconnect with music you’ve already discovered.

For me, the result still requires some fine-tuning, because sometimes Spotify gets the BPM wrong and thinks a 160 bpm track is 80 bpm. This may not be an issue for most people, but my music taste makes those false positives quite likely to appear in my library. You could address that with energy and danceability filters.

👉 Program

Cleaning up a playlist with lots of albums

One of Spotify’s strengths is the convenience with which you can build playlists. Just drag and drop albums into a playlist and you’re done. The result is a playlist with albums all grouped together. In case you don’t want that, here’s something you can do.

This takes an unorganized source playlist, puts the most popular tracks towards the top and then shuffles things around with ‘weight’ (meaning you can set how random you want things — less random preserves the rough order of the list). In this formula I sent it to a new playlist, because I wanted to hold on to the source playlist.

👉 Playlist | Program

Your turn

The Smarter Playlists has FAQs and many additional examples. Start playing around and think of how you may put this to use. By automating, you’re programming, since this tool is a lot like a visual programming language. You can drop your programs in the comment section below, or drop them in this Twitter thread. Don’t forget to make backups in case you’re overwriting playlists.

If you thought this post was valuable, please consider joining the 2x-week MUSIC x newsletter and / or joining the MUSIC x Patreon.

Only 1% of a musicians’ life happens on stage, the rest is careering

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

One of the key things I took away from being a part of the Music Business Day at the University of Utrecht last weekend is that there’s ways to balance the weaknesses and opportunities that the pandemic has respectively exposed and opened up. I’ll look into this by focusing on four things to consider that Catherine Moore highlighted in our panel on ‘music futures, near and far’:

  • People
    • How to measure the market?
  • Place
    • How does music enrich the environment in which we live?
  • Public health
    • What is the role of music & musicians to support mental health?
  • Communication
    • Change the vocabulary around how music works within, e.g., a city: music venue is a sound manager not a noise maker. How do we communicate across disciplines?

Do you really want to be a musician?

When Jonathan Irons mentioned that only 1% of a musicians’ life takes place on stage, it presented a hook that allowed everyone else on this day of music business to contextualize. So much of what we feel is ‘the music industry’ focuses on the live experience. Fans mythologize live events and artists need to perform at 100% night after night on stage. Yet, there’s so much happening around those brief moments that musicians experience on stage. It’s there that musicians, or agencies, or labels, etc. can build a brand and a franchise out of the music.

That’s one thing that became clear: musicians need to treat their music as a business. And the second thing is that if the artist cannot do it, there’s an opportunity for another business to step in and help the artist sell their music. Most musicians grapple with all the many things that are expected from them: keep track of your social media, practice, do community management, write new music, practice more, and so on. Being able to do that requires time and money. As Sarah Osborn, of UK-based Incorporated Society of Musicians, mentioned, employment is one of the weaknesses that the pandemic has exposed within the music industry. So much in the business relies on freelancers and the question was raised whether the music industry will go the way of the acting profession. Will it become normal for a professional musician to have another job and just music doesn’t provide a sustainable life in and of itself?

We discussed this part of the music industry with the students to help them step into it with their eyes wide open and that it’s necessary to approach the portfolio career. Professor Emile Wennekes pushed everyone to put their names out there, either by publishing your music, writing about music, or even engaging in policy. Having set this stage, the day took a turn around Anthony Gritten‘s notion that we should look at career as a verb.

Careering through the music industry

People

When we start to think about the music business as a network that involves a lot of performativity this allows us to reshape our roles within it. Moreover, it takes those brief moments of live interaction between musicians and fans and networks them into more stages of reciprocity. When starting any venture, it’s important to know your market, to analyse your potential audience and find out where they are. If you make music, for example, you can use Spotify for Artists, Chartmetric, etc. to understand where your music is popular. A next step is to create something that brings benefits to both you and the fan. This is the staple of the creator economy, something that underlines the 1000-fan and 100-fan theories. There’s plenty to argue against this theory, but the essence sits behind every creator with a Patreon, every newsletter author who monetizes through Substack, and every band with a Shopify website.

Place

Music has the ability to enrich the environment in which we live and move. Starting with R. Murray Schafer (check out the World Soundscape Project), there’s a whole scholarship on ‘the soundscape’ and its role in determining how people relate to their surroundings. With Barry Truax this notion developed into something more attuned to design, something to influence. What our discussions during the Music Business Day added to this is that we need to embrace more the idea of music as a utility. Creating music for and bringing music into places to help improve experiences, interactions, and even personal psychology is not ‘selling out’ but a valid way to create and add value.

Public health

On the one hand this topic segues nicely from the previous argument around ‘place’. Creating music, making playlists, performing wellbeing are all great ways to help situate music in the cross-section of adding value for the musician and a fan (or not even necessarily a fan in this case). Moreover, there’s plenty of research to support that music has a positive effect both on health care and its associated costs. On the other hand, there’s the mental health risks for musicians, exacerbated by the current pandemic. With many musicians already having trouble securing a modal income through their music, taking out income related to session work and live performance made that even harder.

Communication

Terminology matters. It matters how we communicate and which vocabulary we use. Just think of how different it is to consider a music venue in a city a sound manager instead of noise maker. One key group working hard to change our vocabulary when it comes to music is Sound Diplomacy. Their objective is to show how music, and culture in general, bring economic, social and cultural growth to cities. One thing the pandemic has done is to shine a light on what music and culture bring to the table and how those industries could even help to kickstart the economy post-pandemic. Rebuilding Europe, research conducted by EY for GESAC, the European collective societies, shows that before Covid-19 hit the music industry grew 4% year-over-year, then, in 2020, it shrunk by 76%. And yet, because of the social cohesion attached to music and the power of communication connected to music it has strong potential to help bring about both a social and economic upturn as and when we start to move through the final stages of the pandemic. To help facilitate that, we’ll need to choose our words carefully.

Overall a day of music business left me with a firm notion that there’s only music industries instead of a singular music industry. At the end of the day, we were all quietly optimistic about the future with exciting changes happening right now to how music is created, performed, and consumed. And yet, there was also a strong sense that music needs to increase social capital and that a political voice is necessary to navigate what will be a rocky recovery from the impact of the pandemic.

If you want to start a music brand, don’t wait until the pandemic is over

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Without live music, it may feel like a bad time to start a music brand. However when considering the realities of the post-pandemic landscape and the opportunities on the road to there, now is exactly the right time.

Post-pandemic

We’re probably a year away from things going back to normal. People are hopeful for the summer season, but it may not look like last year’s summer at all. Germany’s top virologist, Christian Drosten, has warned that 2021’s summer could be much worse than 2020’s:

“The fact that we had such a relaxed summer in 2020 probably had to do with the fact that our case numbers stayed below a critical threshold in the spring. But that’s not the case now.”

Getting case numbers down remains hard, because of the high infection rates in many areas and the newly mutated virus strains which are more contagious.

Drosten argues against early relaxation of lockdowns to avoid scenarios of overload in hospitals in the summer – which would lead to a summer lockdown. The article doesn’t mention what early relaxation means, but it will obviously be difficult for politicians to extend current measures deep into spring. Which, tragically, means that we have a realistic scenario of a summer spike in COVID-19 cases.

The longer this goes on, the greater the wear on the infrastructure that brings so many musicians and fans together: agencies, events, clubs, suppliers, the artists themselves… they’re all facing uncertainty and many of them will not make it to the finish line. This means that the normal we’ll go ‘back to’, will be quite different from the normal we knew before. In a sense, this can be seen as music’s 9/11 moment in the sense that there’s a demarcation of before and after or perhaps more aptly: music’s second Napster moment.

From 2021 onward, live music will have to do more with less. This may create an (even) more competitive landscape. While music fans’ eagerness to see live music and party may create large demand, the infrastructure to supply that demand is highly regulated (think: crowd & fire safety, noise regulation, alcohol licenses, sanitation, etc.) and may not be able to scale back up quickly.* I suspect there will be a lot of emerging opportunity in the informal sphere (house parties, illegal raves, etc.).

It will be hard work to launch a music brand in the competitive space of post-pandemic live music, so get started now so you’re positioned to seize the opportunities when they emerge.

* Sidenote: if this scenario of undersupply plays out like that, it will be interesting to see how it affects pricing and what role livestreaming can play to make up for the limited supply.

Pre-“post-pandemic” opportunities

What opportunities can you leverage today in order to set up a resilient music brand for the post-pandemic landscape?

Wielding influence and getting opportunities in music is highly correlated by your ability to get things in front of an audience. So, building a music brand is about building audience. If you can show you can get a crowd to a venue, the venue is more likely to give you a chance or better conditions (e.g. not having to pay fees, getting weekend slots, etc.). The same for the artists you can attract: if you can create significantly more opportunities for the artist than they already have, they’ll consider working with you. So, aside from defining your music category and brand positioning, goal number 1 should be:

Build visible audience.

If you don’t have any music you can release, start with curation. The mix of channels you’ll maintain is quite similar to when you release music. Consider the below:

  • Instagram. In my opinion one of the most important tools for music networking right now (read: Instagram vs SoundCloud: the battle for the center of music culture). For posts, focus on shareable content like memes related to your subculture / genre / scene. Instagram creates extra visibility for new features, so at the time of writing that means: create reels and add the music you stand for. Use stories to drive your audience to your other channels (set up a Linktree or similar) and to recycle previous posts to your audience’s growing audience.
  • TikTok. There are a lot of articles about how, if you’re after Gen Z, you should use TikTok. That’s bullshit. The platform is growing beyond its early demographics (John Lennon and David Bowie have profiles there now). So if your audience skews older, then get there before other music brands in your scene get there. Cut in front of them. When they join the platform, you’ll not only be an example to them, but also to the artists and events they represent.
  • Spotify. Playlist follower counts are public, so this is an important way of building visible audience and connecting people to your brand on a regular basis. Brand connection bonus: unlike with social media, people actually don’t have to look at their screen to be connected to you through curated music.

    A basic strategy would be to create two playlists. In the first, you just add all relevant tracks you can find. Try different searches for your genre and see what shows up. Claim gaps by using keywords in your title and playlist description. I did this with a Jersey club playlist I made (though I didn’t have a specific goal in mind) and was shocked to find out it had grown to hundreds of followers. Use a playlist organising tool (here are some) to reorder your playlist weekly or monthly, so that it always looks fresh when people land on the playlist (some tools remove and re-add all tracks, which creates new “added to playlist” dates for all tracks).

    Set up a second playlist, but restrict its length to 20-30 tracks. Change at least half of the tracks each week and make sure most music is released recently (e.g. last ~3 months). Add the day of the week that you refresh it to the title or description, so people know with what interval to come back to your playlist. Give everyone else a reminder through your social media whenever you refresh your Hyperpop Sunday, Post-punk Monday, Wobble Wednesday or 2step Tuesday playlist.

Depending on your scene and whether you’re releasing music yourself, you may use other channels like SoundCloud, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook (for the groups and events), etc. But as a start, don’t take on more than 2-3 channels. Get them up and running. It’s a lot of work.

Later on, you can set up a network on Discord, so that the creators and fans of the music you’re promoting on Instagram and Spotify can actually talk to each other, share music, etc. A community will help you to spot trends, new talent, and potential new collaborators (for example, you’ll probably have a need for visual artists, since your mediums are mostly visual).

If you’re planning on doing events, make an extra effort to showcase local talent and to build local audience: you’re going to need it when you start hosting your first events.

Develop experience in audience activation.

Your business will depend on your ability to get fans to go to gigs, buy merchandise, stream music, etc. As soon as you get some type of following, you should start learning about how to do these things.

Livestreams are a perfect way to learn how to get people excited and committed to something. If you’re not ready to sell tickets, that’s fine: people are paying with their time, so there’s still a transaction that will inform you about their commitment and the quality of what you’ve put together.

Financially and emotionally, it’s a lot less painful to have a livestream with only a few viewers than it is to have a new release flop or have DJs and bands play to an empty room. Livestreams are your training wheels for the real thing.

Livestreams also let you know who’s in the room, plus you can connect with a global pool of talent (timezones permitting) rather than whoever shows up to your local events. This allows you to build a network significantly faster than previously (with exceptions of those times a genre starts bubbling up online and is not represented well offline, e.g. the early days of moombahton).

You can also go beyond the livestream and throw full-on virtual events in Minecraft, in plug.dj, or various other tools. Make sure to record these events, since it will provide you with content you can share through your various channels.

Finally, these digital counterparts of the live music experience will have some role to play in the post-pandemic landscape. Having experience in this area will give you a special advantage.

In conclusion.

Just a two-word conclusion if you’re thinking about starting a music brand.

Start now.

Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash

John Legend performs in Wave

Music startup Wave ditches VR as Steam reports 71% YoY increase in virtual reality revenue

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

To those that have been paying attention to immersive music experience startup Wave, the recent announcement that they are sunsetting their VR app on Steam should not come as a surprise:

We founded Wave almost five years ago to connect humanity through immersive music experiences. That journey started in the VR space, with our community-driven VR app on Steam, and it’s been rewarding watching our community of creators use our tools to host their own VR concerts. We never foresaw the incredible things people would create, and often attending those shows felt like peering into the future of live music / visual art performance and being blown away by the result. Two years ago we pivoted out of VR into gaming and live-streaming, as the VR industry didn’t develop as quickly as we’d hoped. Artists need audiences to thrive, and we realized VR just wasn’t there yet, and there was a bigger opportunity for artists outside headsets. Even though ti doesn’t fit our current business model, we’ve kept TheWaveVR app and servers running just because the community in there has made such inspiring stuff. Unfortunately we built the user tools on top of Google Poly, which is shutting down. As much as we’d love to, we aren’t able to spend the resources to build a new backend pipeline, since we are already spread so thin trying to accomplish our current set of non VR objectives. We are still a relatively small startup. The hardest part of running a startup is choosing what to focus on, which has led us to the difficult decision to sunset TheWaveVR app on Steam and Oculus. Even though this means the Wave VR shows will come to a pause, we think this is the best decision for the long term future of the Wave community, and we promise to do everything we can to one day bring back this experience in an even more evolved form. Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for joining us for all those multi-hour VR raves and for helping us craft this vision of the future of music and art. We hope you’ll join us for this next chapter.
Originally tweeted by Wave (@TheWaveXR) on January 15, 2021.

The startup, originally known as TheWaveVR, had increasingly started to focus on immersive experiences that don’t require VR. The VR was replaced in their URL and social media handles by XR, which typically denotes mixed reality although it’s also used for ‘extended reality’ or ‘cross-reality’.

Will Wave still let online music subcultures thrive, as I wrote in 2017? They have and they will. Wave’s co-founder, Adam Arrigo, rightly remarks that artists need audiences to thrive and VR hadn’t taken off in the way they’d hoped. Startups being startups, tough choices have to be made and being spread too thin while juggling different priorities and audiences kills startups. For Wave, that meant getting out of VR (for now) despite growth in the space.

Steam, the world’s online largest gaming store & platform, just reported that 2020 saw 71% more VR revenue compared to 2019. A large portion of which can be attributed to a single game called Half Life: Alyx (39% to be exact). However, some of that revenue can be attributed to Beat Saber, a game that combines music & VR, which has been called “the closest thing VR has seen yet to a ‘killer app’“.

In other news, Bootshaus, a well-known club in Germany, ‘re-launched’ itself as a virtual reality version of its real-life location and has been hosting events since November. These types of developments are interesting, because of the challenges they knowingly or unknowingly take on.

  • Only ~2% of Steam’s users use a VR headset. That’s a gaming platform. What do these numbers look like for a club and their own audience?
  • Clubs are experts in targeting local audiences: how do you promote on a global scale (or at least across adjacent timezones) as you inevitably have to branch out beyond your usual audience?
  • People know what a club night is, so the promotion of one is straight forward. Selling them a new experience requires some form of consumer education and relies on different promotional techniques and strategies.
  • The way people socially coordinate to attend events in real life is different from the decision-making process to attend an online event.
Image: Bootshaus VR.

And that’s not even considering the technical challenges and aspects of user experience design. This is exactly why it’s unreasonable to expect clubs to “reinvent themselves” for the duration of the pandemic – it’s a different business. It’s why government support is so important.

Having said that, those that do manage to translate their experience and expertise into the virtual realm are important to watch. We spend much more of our time online than before. Just look at the jump in Steam’s data delivery in 2020:

Image: Steam

The pandemic has a lot to do with the jump above, but one should not be too quick to dismiss the new habits that are being established. As Theodore Krantz, the CEO mobile data and analytics company App Annie, recently said:

“The world has forever changed. While people stay at home across the world, we saw mobile habits accelerate by three years.”

Trends is exactly the right word. We may see a dip as we leave the pandemic, but the trend will catch up again. Every live music company, whether a venue or promoter, is already a media company with its channels on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and perhaps TikTok.

What type of media company will venues become now that the virtual experience is mainstream?