You may remember Anchor: it started as a sound-based social network where users could start discussions that others could chime in on. A kind of long-form Twitter, but with voice instead of text. I remember getting involved with some discussions started by Bruce Houghton, from Hypebot, but people’s interest soon waned and many of us moved on.
So the startup went back to the drawing board and re-envisioned its service, relaunching with a complete overhaul last week. It now allows users to include music in their audio stories and aims to “completely reinvent the radio format by making it easy for anyone to easily broadcast high quality audio from your phone, to wherever audio is heard.”
My first impressions
I paused writing in order to do my first show on Anchor (listen now) in order to get more familiar with the service. You can check it out for my first impressions on the call-ins feature, which allows station hosts to let other people get some airtime, the ephemerality, as well as some thoughts about Anchor as a place for music curation.
Expires in 24 hours, so you may be hearing something else by now.
After playing around with the app a bit more, checking out some of the content, including Cherie Hu’s, I’ve come to revisit my first impressions.
Anchor is like Instagram for audio
Instagram lets people share moments from their lives. It’s used by professionals and amateurs. Some content is more social and some is not. And with the introduction of Instagram Stories, a lot of the content has become ephemeral. That’s exactly what Anchor is, or could be, but for audio content.
While I was initially skeptical of Anchor’s ephemerality, it may be an upside: it reduces the hurdle for sharing content and stimulates creators to deliver content in a bite-size format. People can use it to record their day and share their experiences, like music tech blogger Cherie Hu is doing at SXSW, while others use it as an extension of their professional podcasts or YouTube channels.
When someone calls in, it can be added to the station, after which it lives for another 24 hours. The host needs to take into account that whatever the caller might be responding to is not available anymore by the time their audience checks it, but that can be easily mitigated by adding a short “So yesterday I asked how people feel about fainting goats, and here’s what some of you had to say!”
As people add new audio, it’s added to their stories similar to what Snapchat (or Instagram) do in their apps.
The Instagram analogy extends:
A station can be seen as a profile
Pressing favorite is akin to following
Calling-in is like tweeting & featuring a call-in is like retweeting
It seems Anchor may be able to deliver upon Soundcloud-founder Alexander Ljung’s vision of the web becoming a more audible medium, with sound possibly becoming bigger than video:
“Sound is one of the only mediums that can be consumed completely while multitasking, so it has the potential to do so much more on the web than it’s already doing.”
So forget the radio lingo: Anchor is still a sound-based social network and it’s pretty awesome.
Experiment with it. Develop a format. Then ping me on Twitter, so I can check it out.
In its push to become a data-driven business, event organisers smell opportunity by connecting ticketing to real identities.
Itâs estimated that the market for secondary ticketing is worth $1bn in the UK alone. Itâs a problem for fans and artists, since tickets are often bought in bulk by resellers and sold at a much higher rate to fans. None of that added margin goes to the artists (although there are some allegationsâŚ).
Recently, Iron Maiden opted to go âpaperlessâ for their UK arena tour in order to curb ticket touting. With success:
âIn 2010, 6,294 tickets appeared overnight on three of the major resale platformsâââViagogo, Seatwave and Get Me In!âââon the day of sale. In 2016 this had dropped to 207, all on Viagogo, as Live Nation/Ticketmaster had agreed delist the tour at Iron Maidenâs request.â
The tour didnât go fully paperless, and paper tickets were available, but came with strict requirements towards the fans:
Tickets must carry the name of the purchaser;
Ticketholder must present ID and credit card at the door.
While effective, this is worrying and certainly not a âvictory for concertgoersâ as Iron Maiden manager Rob Smallwood called it.
Itâs not just ticketing: privacy is under attack from all fronts. Many events have decided to go âcashlessâ, requiring people to top up chips in special event wristbands. This way, you know exactly who is ordering what, where, how much, and at what time of the night. If youâre a large organisation like Live Nation, you can build up an extensive profile of users over time.
Valuable data, which may help secure sponsors for alcoholic beverages and helps you to target fans with specific offers, but that data comes with a great responsibility.
Privacy in the age of artificial intelligence
The first multi-day conference and festival I attended that was nearly completely cashless was Eurosonic Noorderslag, earlier this year. Itâs a music business conference and showcase event, and has lots of bands playing every night in nearly every bar and club in its host city, Groningen, in The Netherlands. It presented cashless payments as a convenience (ie. to reduce queues at bars).
I immediately researched ways to opt-out and found no good way. It was possible to âanonimizeâ your chip, but you still have to charge it with your bank card, which ties your identity to it through the transaction records. I had good reason to opt-out and so do you.
On its own, âBas entered venue X at 21:03 and drank a beer at bar Y at 21:24â seems like useless information. And it probably is. Iâm not from a country or culture that frowns upon alcohol, so Iâm unlikely to be blackmailed with such a bit of information. However, it is possible for someone to claim they met me there and try to pull some sort of scam. Or worse, for someone to claim they are me by using anecdotal evidence based on these random bits of data, and then scamming someone else.
More than how someone might use a specific data point, what we should really be worried about is larger data leaks. There are parties that try to collect all information from big leaks. Some use it for good, like Have I Been Pwned, where you can search your email address to see if your login info of any site has leaked. But some people store it for more malicious purposes.
Over time, patterns can emerge in these data sets. These become easier to identify through machine learning algorithms, which can go through large datasets faster than a person could, and can get better over time at making sense of data. Many great ones are open source, like Googleâs TensorFlow.
Now, your attendance of live events and what exactly you do there can be tied to your hacked LinkedIn or Dropbox account. Whoever holds that data has power over you.
Artificial intelligence could be trained to send hypertargeted scam emails, which use all the data available about you to trick you. This could result in ransomware being installed on your computer, which often means your hard drive is encrypted and locked and the key to decrypt your data is only turned over after paying a certain fee (usually done through Bitcoin, which makes it harder to track the perpetrators).
This could happen to your phone, but also to your car, or any other devices which are likely to be connected to the internet in a few years from now.
The important take-away is that the more data someone has about you, the wider their âattack vectorâ becomes. This means they have more paths to target you. Any data point on its own usually doesnât have much value, but itâs when large amounts of data get combined that value emerges. Facebook, a data company, has a market cap of nearly $400bn.
Privacy in music should not be an afterthought
We have learned a lot from events. Weâve learned not to use biker gangs for security. Weâve learned to have first aid staff at festivals that are trained to dealing with the effects of alcohol poisoning and mishaps with drugs. We have come a long way to providing experiences that are exciting and safe at the same time.
Now itâs time to worry about our guestsâ safety before they arrive, and after they leave our events. Let me be clear:
If you request your guests to sacrifice their privacy for âconvenienceâ, and you get hacked, leading to people getting blackmailed or scammed, it is YOUR responsibility;
If you request this data from guests, make it clear and easy for them to find out how youâre storing the data, what youâre using it for, and when it will be deleted. Don’t just refer to some boilerplate privacy policy full of legalese;
When things go wrong, be honest about it and communicate it immediately, so people can take security measures;
Never store data about people for longer than you need it. Not storing data is the best way to prevent it from being leaked.
(small sidenote: if anyone ever sent you a picture or scan of their passport, go delete that file and email now)
What can you do as a fan?
Do whatever best protects your privacy. If it feels like youâre being a pain in the ass by requesting an anonimized wristband, great. You should be a pain in the ass. Pain is a great motivator for change. So by all means, request information about how your data is stored and protected, how long it’s stored, for what purpose, etc.
Perhaps the hardest part is willing to skip concerts that donât have privacy-friendly options. As a consumer we should understand that solving ticket touting by sacrificing guestsâ privacy is not a solution. It just shifts the issue and places an additional cost on the consumer on top of the ticket price.
Event organisers need to find a way to mitigate or at the very least minimize that additional cost. This means ticketing organisations have to take measures to invest in technology which helps protect and secure guestsâ privacy. But they need to feel pressure, or pain, in order to that.
Data, for ticketing companies, is the same as it is for malicious hackers: the more data you can get on a person, the more valuable it becomes.
Techstars Music just announced their first batch. A quick look at the selected startups.
It feels like weâre seeing a new wave of music startups. A lot of the excitement that marked the time around 2007â2010 is back in the air, and itâs great to see an acclaimed startup accelerator like Techstars dedicating a program to music.
As platforms from that age, like Spotify and Soundcloud, are reaching maturity and estranging early adopters, a new generation of music startups is starting to emerge. Techstars Music just announced their first batch of music startups, so I wanted to highlight each of themâââas what these startups do may well end up profoundly shaping the business of music in years to come.
A tool to create AI-composed music for videos and other professional content. Unfortunately I havenât been able to test out the product yet, and their only demo video doesnât reveal much. It seems like theyâre working on something similar to Jukedeck, but possibly in a way where users have a higher degree of influence on the final outcome.
AI-composed music is an important trend for years to come and Amperâs working with an impressive team which includes accomplished Hollywood sound designers and composers.
LED wearables to enable interactive audience experiences at live events. They let artists light up entire audiences, or just one fan. Their pitch deck suggests lighting up people based on gender, Spotify top fans, or sports team preference. It also allows for direct messaging to fans during or after shows.
I first heard about JAAK when I met the founders at Music Tech Festâs blockchain roundtable in Berlin last year. Theyâre using blockchain technology to connect music, metadata, and rights information. Theyâve been working on pilots with Viacom, PRS for Music, and PPL. One of their founders is a core developer for Ethereum and is behind Swarm, a distributed storage platform, creating a kind of peer-to-peer web, instead of server-centric.
Iâve actually urged people to use this app in a recent piece about being an early adopter. It uses smart algorithms to turn your Spotify playlists into DJ mixes. You can then edit transitions and play around with effects. It also has a social component: you can comment on and like other peopleâs mixes in the app.
Thereâs a DJ by the name of bas on Pacemaker who has some particularly awesome mixes, so be sure to follow him đ
With Techstarsâ support, I hope they figure out how to reach that exponential growth. I think itâs a really good time to start using the app and build a profile for yourself, so you can benefit optimally when they reach that growth.
(Personal wishlist: more editing controls on transitions on mobile, particularly exact timing, rather than snapping to markers đ)
Interactivity and adaptivity of music is an important trend. I see Pacemaker as one of the first companies who has a great chance of being one of the first leaders in this domain.
The pitch on Pippaâs homepage differs a bit from what Iâve read elsewhere, so I assume theyâre pivoting. They currently present themselves as a platform which helps to distribute your podcasts and analyze data based upon that. What Iâve read elsewhere sounds very promising:
âPippa makes podcasting simpler, smarter, and more profitable by enabling targeted ads to be delivered dynamically to listeners. Pippa technology can also be used to remove ads from podcasts, enabling future subscription revenue products.â
Another startup specializing in AI-composed music. PopGun uses deep learning to create original pop music. One of its founders is well-known in music tech circles, having previously founded We Are Hunted, which sold to Twitter and eventually became Twitter Music.
Have been having some great conversations about Creative AI recently. Particularly discussing the human element: some argue computers will not be capable of creativity, but in the way we perceive the world around us, we as humans will use our creativity anyway⌠I believe that opens up the possibility for a future in which AI-created art can become mainstream.
âRobin is a personal concierge for concerts and live events. Robin reserves and secures tickets on behalf of fans while providing real-time demand data to artists and event organizers.â
Itâs an interesting proposition in times of secondary ticketing⌠Iâm concerned they may be met with some skepticism, but the idea of having fans personally connect to a tool like this and then securing tickets before scalpers can get to them seems like a good addition to the ticketing landscape.
Theyâre currently available in the US and Canada, and will be expanding to the UK early 2017.
This may be the app Iâm most excited about in this batch. Shimmur is a social network for fans and âinfluencersâ to connect. Itâs currently comprised of a lot of Musical.ly stars and their fans, so the demographic is very young.
Instead of having the artist communicating to fans, Shimmur turns it around. Tribes of fans can create comment to which the influencers react. Very appealing and the social competition that may emerge in vying for influencersâ attention may create interesting business models.
Concepts popularized by Reddit AMAs can be found in Shimmur
A mobile audio engine that provides low-latency audio for games, VR, and interactive audio apps. Itâs apparently already used by DJ app Crossfader, Uber, and a number of games and other apps, together totalling at hundreds of millions of app installs.
Syncspot uses an âAI assistant to create and fulfil free-gift media rewards for in-store promotionsâ. Their homepage lists a campaign that reminds me of Landmrk: users get a call to action to go to a certain location on the map (like a store) to receive a reward. Think PokĂŠmon Go.
This startup has been on my radar for a long time. It lets creators make adaptive music that recomposes itself in real-time, based on whatever the user is doing. Iâm a firm believer in adaptive music that adapts to the userâs context and believe the way people currently use music to augment their moods shows the opportunity for adaptive audio.
Theyâve built a tool for musicians to create this type of music, as well as an SDK for developers, so they can add a player to their apps which is capable of playing this type of media.
Fun fact: Weav is co-founded by one of the creators of Google Maps.
And mobile will, sooner or later, be replaced by augmented reality devices, and it will look nothing like Google Glass.
Not the future of augmented reality.
Why some predictions fail
When viewing trends in technology in isolation, itâs inevitable you end up misunderstanding them. What happens is that we freeze time, take a trend and project the trendâs future into a society that looks almost exactly like todayâs society.
Almost.
This drains topics of substance and replaces it with hype. It causes smart people to ignore it, while easily excited entrepreneurs jump on the perceived opportunity with little to no understanding of it. Three of these domains right now are blockchain, messaging bots, and virtual reality, although I count myself lucky to know a lot of brilliant people in these areas, too.
What Iâm trying to say is: just because itâs hyped, doesnât mean it doesnât deserve your attention. Donât believe the hype, and dig deeper.
The great convergence
In order to understand the significance of a lot of todayâs hype-surrounded topics, you have to link them. Artificial intelligence, smart homes & the âInternet of Thingsâ, and augmented reality will all click together seamlessly a decade from now.
And that shift is already well underway.
Artificial intelligence
The first time I heard about AI was as a kid in the 90s. The context: video games. I heard that non-playable characters (NPCs) or âbotsâ would have scripts that learned from my behaviour, so that theyâd get better at defeating me. That seemed amazing, but their behaviour remained predictable.
In recent years, there have been big advances in artificial intelligence. This has a lot to do with the availability of large data sets that can be used to train AI. A connected world is a quantified world and data sets are continuously updated. This is useful for training algorithms that are capable of learning.
This is also what has given rise to the whole chatbot explosion right now. Our user interfaces are changing: instead of doing things ourselves, explicitly, AI can be trained to interpret our requests or even predict and anticipate them.
Conversational interfaces sucked 15 years ago. They came with a booklet. You had to memorize all the voice commands. You had to train the interface to get used to your voice⌠Why not just use a remote control? Or a mouse & keyboard? But in the future, getting things done by tapping on our screens may look as archaic as it would be to do everything from a command-line interface (think MS-DOS).
There are certain benefits to command-line interfaces⌠(xkcd)
So, right now we see all the tech giants diving into conversational interfaces (Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Facebook Messenger, and Microsoft, err⌠Tay?) and in many cases opening up APIs to let external developers build apps for them. Thatâs right: chatbots are APPS that live inside or on top of conversational platforms.
So we get new design disciplines: conversational interfaces, and âzero UIâ which refers to voice-based interfaces. Besides developing logical conversation structures, integrating AI, and anticipating usersâ actions, a lot of design effort also goes into the personality of these interfaces.
But conversational interfaces are awkward, right? Itâs one of the things that made people uncomfortable with Google Glass: issuing voice commands in public. Optimists argued it would become normalized, just like talking to a bluetooth headset. Yet currently only 6% of of people who use voice assistants ever do so in public⌠But where weâre going, we wonât need voice commands. At least not as many.
The Internet of Things
There are still a lot of security concerns around littering our lives with smart devices: from vending machines in our offices, to refrigerators in our homes, to self-driving cars⌠But it seems to be an unstoppable march, with Amazon (Alexa) and Google (Home) intensifying the battle for the living room last year:
It's all about the battle for the living room and music is the hook. Sonos in an interesting position for apple / google / Amazon. https://t.co/mQoqyMKlVg
Letâs converge with the trend of artificial intelligence and the advances made in that domain. Instead of having the 2016 version of voice-controlled devices in our homes and work environments, these devicesâ software will develop to the point where they get a great feeling of context. Through understanding acoustics, they can gain spacial awareness. If that doesnât do it, they could use WiFi signals like radar to understand whatâs going on. Letâs not forget cameras, too.
Your smart device knows whatâs in the fridge before you do, what the weather is before you even wake up, it may even see warning signs about your health before you perceive them yourself (smart toilets are real). And it can use really large data sets to help us with decision-making.
And thatâs the big thing: our connected devices are always plugged into the digital layer of our reality, even when weâre not interacting with them. While we may think weâre âofflineâ when not near our laptops, we have started to look at the world through the lens of our digital realities. Weâre acutely aware of the fact that we can photograph things and share them to Instagram or Facebook, even if we havenât used the apps in the last 24 hours. Similarly, we go places without familiarizing ourselves with the layout of the area, because we know we can just open Google Maps any time. We are online, even when weâre offline.
Your connected home will be excellent at anticipating your desires andbehaviour. Itâs in that context that augmented reality will reach maturity.
Augmented reality
Youâve probably already been using AR. For a thorough take on the trend, go read my piece on how augmented reality is overtaking mobile. Two current examples of popular augmented reality apps: Snapchat and PokĂŠmon Go. The latter is a great example of how you can design a virtual interaction layer for the physical world.
So the context in which you have to imagine augmented reality reaching maturity is a world in which our environments are smart and understand our intentions⌠in some cases predicting them before we even become aware of them.
Our smart environments will interact with our AR device to pull up HUDs when we most need them. So we wonât have to do awkward voice commands, because a lot of the time, it will already be taken care of.
Head-up displays (HUDs) have long been a staple of video games.
This means we donât actually have to wear computers on our heads. Meaning that the future of augmented reality can come through contact lenses, rather than headsets.
But who actually wants to bother with that, right? Whatâs the point if you can already do everything you need right now? Perhaps youâre too young to remember, but thatâs exactly what people said about mobile phones years ago. Even without contact lenses, all of these trends are underway now.
Augmented reality is an audiovisual medium, so if you want to prepare, spend some time learning about video game design, conversational interfaces, and get used to sticking your head in front of a camera.
There will be so many opportunities emerging on the way there, from experts on privacy and security (even political movements), to designing the experiences, to new personalities⌠because AR will have its own PewDiePie.
Itâs why I just bought a mic and am figuring out a way to add audiovisual content to the mix of what I produce for MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. Not to be the next PewDiePie, but to be able to embrace mediums that will extend into trends that will shape our digital landscapes for the next 20 years. More on that soon.
Donât spend your time on something broken, when you can do something that works even better.
Unless youâre a huge business with a lot of legacy to deal with, the shape of the long tail doesnât matter. It doesnât matter whether music is getting increasingly âwinner takes allâ. This graph does NOT matter:
Going into music, you know that the economics are messed up. Everyone has told you so. Unless you havenât told anyone youâre going into music. Even thenâââopening one music business blog will tell you the samething. Constant bickering over the way money is distributed, who gets paid, how much, why not more, why not less, ticket scalping, streaming royalties, exclusives, royalty split disputesâŚ
Itâs not pretty.
So you know that you should not create a reality for yourself where youâll be dependent on the outcome of the ugly side of the music business. Create one where it doesnât matter.
As soon as you commit to that, the overall economic picture of the music industry wonât matter quite as much.
What matters most
You should be focusing on your music, and on your fans, and on people who make music just like you. Focus on positivity.
Money is not the problem. Your attitude is.
Be proactive. Tell people about your music constantly. Find out who the programmers are for the venues where you want to play. Who the authors are of blogs or YouTube channels that post similar music. Comment. Message them. Ask them for feedback. Be humble and positive.
One day theyâll give you a chance. But they have to SEE that youâre working hard at it, so document your progress. Post at least 5 things to social media every day. Maybe even 10. Snapchat and Instagram Stories make that SUPER easy.
If youâre a band: set everyone up with access. More content.
You need to stand out above all the noise and you need to sustain peopleâs attention, so they donât forget about you, so they donât move on, so you keep appearing in their Facebook timelines and their inbox.
Peopleâs individual attention long tails are the only long tails that matter.
You have a camera on your phone. Get in front of it. Document. Share.
It doesnât have to be perfect. It has to be genuine. If you work hard, it will get better over time. Then people will feel part of your narrative, part of your story⌠and that it was kinda shitty early on is actually great: people LOVE a good underdog story.
If youâre worried about being boring because you spend too much time in your studioâââset up a livestream. Sure it could get boring, but there will be highlights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgeWHnSmPKE
What about the money?
Then youâre going to make money on your own. Away from the rat race. Away from the long tail. Your fans are part of your story. Set up a Patreon. Use Kickstarter to launch new projects. Give them a way to commit.
If you work hard at it, people are going to take note. Including people with money. Influencer marketing is one of the hottest areas in marketing right now. Sponsors are going to show up. Reject all of them, except for the ones that really make sense. Donât trade in your fans for money. Be you.
If you have a huge excited fanbase, theyâll be LOUD. People will hear you. So the deals will come. The shows will come. Their size will grow and so will the money you make from them.
This week MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE turns one. Born as a newsletter on Revue, itâs now (finally) a sustainable company. That word, sustainable, comes with a caveat, because it currently still depends on me selling my time. Thereâs inherent risk in that, but I digress.
Launching the newsletter, I knew it would take me places, so I dropped everything else I was doing in order to be able to get the most out of the opportunities.
Hereâs what happened next. đż
People will hire you for your most visible skill
Iâm not a writer. I write a lot, but I wouldnât consider it as a full-time profession. Yet itâs one of the things I get approached for most often.
Even when I was leading product strategy at Zvooq, a music streaming service in Russia, writing was one of my most important skills. It helped me communicate ideas to the team, investors, labels and potential partners. It also helped me keep the team inspired and motivated.
But Iâm actually a strategist. I keep a wide overview, and have a few topics that Iâm more knowledgeable about than many people in my niche. This allows me to find value through combining things.
I had always said Iâd never charge money for writing, but this year I had to reconsider that. I had always seen writing as a means to attain visibility, which would lead to bigger, better thingsâŚ
But what if youâre running on savings and those bigger, better things take a while to materialize?
So, I caved in: fine, Iâll write for money. My attitude towards it has changed now, because not only does it allow me to work on pieces with even greater quality, but it also brought me something elseâŚ
Find a base sustainable income early
Writing has been an easy skill to market: every month, thousands of people come across my articles through recommendations, my newsletter, the Synchtank blog, as well as Hypebot, which occasionally syndicates my writing.
And writing can be done from anywhere. As a matter of fact: I strongly prefer to do my writing out of office, away from officey distractions.
One of the real challenges I had was getting to a sustainable income before my savings ran out. I considered getting some part-time job, but I didnât want to commit myself to a schedule just yet. The following anecdote will explain why:
Last April I got an email on a Monday evening. It was from a well-known music business figure, with a legendary background, asking whether I could be in London for some event on Wednesday morning. After checking the email header to make sure someone wasnât pulling a prank, or scam, I called up the sender and the next evening I was on a plane to London.
It was an incredible honour to be invited, and I got to present my ideas and vision to a room full of industry execs (my 3 minute presentation). This, to me, was the first confirmation that I was onto something with the newsletter. Had I had a job at, say, a bar, I would have had to find a replacement and I might have missed out on this opportunity.
So I held out as my savings dwindled. I wanted to stay flexible.
Then people started asking whether they could pay me to write⌠and suddenly I had found something that allows me geographic freedom, an income, and it synergizes with everything else I do.
Find synergy, because youâre selling your time
Some of the things I do now:
Helping a music tech startup with content strategy
Helping a music tech startup with business model development and licensing strategy
Helping 2 artists with management & marketing
Helping a conference curate their music track
Paid writing about trends & innovation in music
Occasionally lecturing about these topics
The thing I love about these activities is that they all add value to each other. Working with the artists gives me a chance to try out new ideas around building a fan base, pitching labels, as well as creative ideas around ideas. For example, I built a chatbot for Quibus recently to let fans unlock some special goodies: now we can use it to send a push notification directly to fans (stay tuned).
If youâre dependent on selling your time, you should make sure your hour becomes more valuable: if you can draw on past work, you can achieve more by spending less time or you can charge a higher hourly rate.
Moderating a panel about interactive music experiences at Border Sessions.
Leads can take a looooong time to convert
Iâve had a lot of people reach out to me to figure out potential collaborations. Most of those went nowhere, yet.
And thatâs fine. People are busy. Priorities shift.
It made a big difference when I shifted my focus from 100% international to local. Somehow, locally, itâs easier to get a collaboration off the ground. But that, too, took me some time to figure out: I had been abroad for the bigger part of 10 years and had to accustom myself to the Dutch culture again. But thatâs a different story.
Basically: donât assume positive talks about collaboration will lead to anything tangible. I just ploughed on and focused on expanding my network and the value within it (often by connecting people). Keep seeding. Sooner or later, some of those collaborations will happen and youâll be too busy to worry about the ones that didnât happen.
Always save some time to walk around and enjoy the moment.
Make sure you have work during the summer
If I could go back in timeâŚ
Dear Bas,
Summer is dead season. Be extra proactive during Spring to find things to do during the summer, because people will be out of office and initiating new collaborations will just be a lot more difficult.
If you donât find anything to do, just get some part-time job, because last-minute invites are also unlikely to happen.
Itâs obvious, but I feel it bears mentioning, because of what it implies.
We live in a distracted age where everyone is competing for your attention. So the advice I always give to artists building their fanbase is: make sure you stay top-of-mind. For a freelancer, the best way to stay top-of-mind is through collaboration.
The next time someone has some work to do, theyâll know they can call you. Even better: they might not realize a problem can be fixed, if it werenât for knowing you. We often ignore things that seem like they canât be improved, not being aware of the problem⌠so by being present in peopleâs thoughts, you help them find more work for you.
Invest in your relations.
What this also means is: you now have an excuse to feel great about doing some work with a client that you donât find super inspiring. Just stay focused on quality and promise less, deliver more.
There is real risk in selling your time
It doesnât scale. You can only spend your time once. You can only work with so many people at a time. And if you get sick, there goes your income.
It also means unfilled gaps of time may exist between projects, which means you wonât have income for that time.
My goal is freedom. A naive goal for an entrepreneur, for sure, but to me it means: doing what I love while being able to go wherever I want to go.
So a tip Iâve had from a few people is to sell something other than my time. I have a few product ideas that I want to launch this year. Iâm also considering setting up a Patreon for MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE, which will probably somehow be tied into those products (eg. funders get early access / lifetime subscription, etc.).
The goal is to create a revenue stream to cover basic costs, like rent. Once I hit that goal, Iâll figure out whether I can scale that revenue stream or add new ones on top of it. A big example for me is Pieter Levels.
Left to right: Music Tech Festâs amazing 2016 venue (Funkhaus Berlin), one of my favourite meeting spots in Amsterdam (Quartier Putain), panel discussion at Sørveiv Conference in Kristiansand.
So that says something about MUSIC x TECH x FUTUREâs direction
But donât worry: I wonât suddenly throw up paywalls. This strategy is working well for me, so whatever is free now, will stay free. As a matter of fact, due to my focus on synergy, I aim to deliver you more value over time.
After a year, I finally got to a point where I can set up a steady pipeline of projects (by the way, Iâll have more time on my hands from mid-March, so if youâd like to work together, email me: bas@musicxtechxfuture.com). In part because of shifting my focus to The Netherlands, but also because international collaborations are finally materializing.
Year oneâs a wrap! đž
Itâs been great meeting so many awesome people this year, from Amsterdam to Groningen, London, Berlin, The Hague, Ghent, Kristiansand, and Valencia. Thank you for the follows, the shares, the correspondence, the collaborations, the advice, and the amazing conversations.
Iâm proud to be part of such an intelligent, forward-thinking, global community. Hereâs to the future! đ¤ â¤ď¸ď¸ đ¸
(If youâre feeling generous, help me work through my reading list đ)
