Having a large fanbase or userbase opens up a lot of opportunities. You can experiment with monetization, referrals, and you won’t feel like you’re speaking to an empty room when using social media channels. Before getting there, you must get people to discover you and it’s this crucial first step where a mentality problem leads to many great musicians and startups never really taking off.

An impression is not enough

You have a “killer app”. Or you make insanely good music. Surely, upon seeing or hearing it, people will instantly fall in love and become your fan. Not quite.

We live in a noisy age and people will quite simply not be paying enough attention the first time. If you want to convince someone to change their habit and use your service, you’ll often need more than 1 impression. Don’t think you’re excluded as a label or musician: most people prefer listening to music they already know, so they have to make you part of their habit.

The Rule of Seven

In marketing, there’s a general rule of thumb that people need to hear your message seven times before most will make a purchase decision. Seven is soft and it varies from business to business, so it might be five or twelve, but the most important takeaway is:

You’re probably not going to stand out on the first impression.

This means you have to adjust your strategy. The goal is to get heard or seen by a relevant audience multiple times and to then connect them to your channels or service, so that it’s easy to get their attention again and monetize them.

The Rule of Seven for Music

I follow the fanbase as an ecosystem model by default and will be using that now. It means you connect your fanbase, play a central role in it, understand who the people are, and develop new business models and revenue streams with them (it can be as simple as just asking). It goes:

1. Be discovered
2. Retain attention
3. Connect (with) fans
4. Nurture the connection
5. Listen (and build business models)

So to master step 1 and 2, assume you need to be heard seven times before people really start to care.

Step 1: make really good music and lots of it.

Step 2: understand who your listeners are and whether there’s a ‘scene’ (can be an internet scene, too).

Step 3: identify the main channels & curators where those listeners go. Try to get in touch with these playlist curators or YouTube / Soundcloud channels (or blogs) and try to get your music on there.

Step 4: ALWAYS add proper metadata to songs so people can easily identify you.

Step 5: ALWAYS be guiding people to your OWN channels. Whether that’s newsletters, social networks, music services, whatever, you need to get people to places where you can get in touch with them again. Give people a choice: not everyone wants emails, some people prefer social network X over Y, etc. Don’t give too much choice: keep it manageable for yourself.

Step 6: keep going. Results are going to be coming in slow and unpredictably, before it steadies out. You don’t want to leave people hanging on the fifth impression… Keep going.

Step 7: learn, network and spread. Every scene has its own ways of reaching new listeners and leveraging other people’s audience. In hiphop and dance music, it often comes through collaborations and mixtapes. Where hiphop has freestyle sessions on (online) radio channels, dance music has DJ slots. Talk to people, work on your skills, produce quality and NETWORK.

Networking is an important and underestimated skill in music. It might not be hard to get your music heard, but it’s much harder to get your music heard seven times by the same person. Curators, club owners, radio programmers, YouTubers, game streamers, bloggers, Twitterati, videographers, and other artists can all help you do this, so you need to get good at building valuable connections.

Be consistent, be everywhere where your audience is, and stay persistent.

Hat tip to Jesse Dijksman of Dutch crowdfunding subscription platform Lukida, who keeps repeating this rule to makers who are part of Lukida.

It’s a point I repeat frequently: the gaming industry got into the same mess as the music industry at exactly the same time.

Suddenly, people started communicating digitally through networks. Everything that could be made digital was now communicable (at near-zero cost) through these networks. Confusion about what the product is slowed down progress. Music was never the product; the carrier was. Since games are an interactive medium, it didn’t take people long to figure out how to use interconnectedness to find new revenue models: online play, subscriptions to games, microtransactions, free-to-play with purchases to unlock things faster, etc.

While the music industry’s revenues have finally stabilized, the gaming industry’s revenue has soared. Not only that.

New platforms like Twitch, which are rapidly growing in popularity, are creating new revenues for the gaming industry by enabling ‘superfans’ to make money playing the games they love.

When I started out at Zvooq, I spent some time researching gamification, game mechanics and design, in order to understand the psychological processes behind the gaming’s ability to monetize users. I was specifically interested to learn how these concepts could be applied to music services. I’ve cherry picked 3 concepts, but if you’d like me to dig deeper in an article or specified to your product or service, let me know.

Vanity & Identity

Revenues are not the only thing the internet has ‘taken away’ from the music industry. Music has also lost its cultural significance. Pre-internet, music was sometimes the only way to find out that there were other people in the world who had the exact same thoughts you had. For an industry with such a strong background in giving people ways to explore and express their identity, we’ve done a piss poor job of taking that into the digital age.

Identity is omni-present in (social) game environments. From game-like virtual worlds such as Habbo and Second Life, to full-on MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Runescape, to social time management games like Clash of Clans & Farmville (farm layout counts as identity), and even single player games like The Sims or Fallout 4 (people share their characters and stories in online communities). And of course Minecraft with its massive economy in terms of games sales revenues, ad revenues from Twitch streamers & YouTubers, server rental, mods, skins, etc.

What are the mechanics?

Identity in virtual economies is most-often expressed through vanity and functional goods, such as items that are unlocked when reaching a certain level or accomplishing a certain feat. To keep gameplay interesting, some items may be earned while others have a random factor to them, meaning they only ‘drop’ a small percentage of the time after killing a difficult boss.

These goods provide a way to display social status in online communities. Some online games, like online collectible card game Hearthstone, only allow players to unlock certain hero portraits (pure vanity) by paying real world money, whereas other vanity items like golden cards are unlocked by playing a lot and having some luck with the random factor.

How music services can apply this

The last social platform that really emphasized music as a means to display identity was MySpace (edit: ok, and Last.fm). People would carefully compose lists of artists and bands to show off their music taste and connect to strangers. We’ve come a long way since then.

Online fan communities that are focused on certain artists or genres provide an excellent opportunity for expressing and exploring identity. This could be done inside, or on top of, existing music platforms like Apple Music (there’s an API), Spotify or YouTube. It could also be done in dedicated artist apps.

Rival Goods

A popular concept in games is rival goods: resources which are valued by gamers, but which can be (temporarily) depleted. This may be vanity items, but also functional items like health packs, resources which enable certain abilities, or pieces of equipment. The mechanics they inspire include social competition, but also collaboration as goods might be hard to attain on your own.

How music services can apply this

Music can be reproduced infinitely at zero-cost and does not perish. Creating scarce experiences is immensely valuable in the social web. You may let people compete for rival goods such as being on an exclusive artist newsletter or weekly Periscope session, the ability to vote on things artists or services have flexibility over, but also vanity items as pointed out in the previous section. These goods could be competed for whilst someone is holding them, could be spent or depleted, or they may perish after a certain amount of time. This means you don’t lose a monetization option as soon as somone pays for it once.

You can let people collaborate to unlock other types of rival goods, like: 100 tweets unlocks the next track to download from my upcoming album, but the first 70 people to tweet will get a special video as a thank you. Or you can offer autographed stuff, or something else people will value. Remember to ask!

Virtual Economies: Time-poor & Money-rich vs Time-rich & Money-poor

To me, the most interesting thing gaming has figured out is how to create environments in which people who will spend lots of time, but no money, can create value for those who have less time to spend, but are willing to pay to take a shortcut.

This can take on various forms of complexity. Here are two examples:

• Hearthstone & Farmville: free players provide a big player base, so paying players always have other players to play against.
• Games with marketplaces: free players ‘grind’ and sell resources, whereas paying players might spend real world money to purchase those resources.

The latter creates an interesting situation, because it creates an exchange rate for real world currency to in-game currency, even when in-game currency can’t be purchased directly. This provides an option to let free players ‘cash out’ or you can leave them to spend their in-game currency inside the virtual economy. Cashing out might reduce inflation, but rewarding people with extrinsic rewards will decrease the person’s intrinsic motivation for the gamified behaviour.

How music services can apply this

There are a lot of opportunity to create music-based virtual economies at scale on existing platforms. I think we’re going to see this when the competition for new listeners for streaming services dies down. Too many resources are currently stuck in marketing and expansion, instead of finding new revenue sources. One obstacle might be some record labels, as they might want to have a piece of the pie, whereas artist managers might feel that virtual goods related to artists or bands should not count towards recorded music revenue. This dispute doesn’t sound like it involves the services, but due to terms in contracts which allow music companies to gatekeep features, it’s very relevant.

If you’d start out as a new platform which is happy to have an incomplete catalogue (which can work fine if you don’t position yourself as a one-size-fits-all service), then a virtual economy can solve:

• How to give people a distinct sense of progress;
• How to add value to this progress;
• How to create a platform that’s attractive to creators;
• How to stimulate users to behave like (value) creators.

Just imagine: the money spent by paying users sets a value of virtual currency. Free users that provide a lot of value can use this currency to buy ‘real world’ stuff, like tickets to shows or even merchandise. As the free users’ lifestyles change, eg. student → yuppie, they’re increasingly going to make time-poor, money-rich decisions leading to purchases and payments around things that are easy to scale globally (compared to tickets & merch) like features and unlockables.

Further reading

I implore people in music to look at the gaming industry and see what mechanics can be applied for your product or concept. Here’s some further reading to help you along:

• Corrupted Blood incident: an interesting story about a 2005 virtual pandemic happening in World of Warcraft and how its player community reacted to it. It has been the subject of study by epidemiologists and counter-terrorism experts.
• The Science of Gamification: an introduction to applying game mechanics to non-game products and services. Great intro to game-thinking.
• Why Games Work and the Science of Learning (PDF): great paper on the motivation psychology of gaming and learning.
• Social Mechanics: the Engines behind Everything Multiplayer (PDF): a presentation which provides an excellent introduction to social mechanics in virtual environments to a deeper extent than which I’ve been able to cover in this article.

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Originally published in my weekly newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing and subscribing.

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On Wednesday I joined a think session about the music business in 2025, organised by Peter Jenner and the UK Intellectual Property Office. They brought together an amazing set of minds to which I had the pleasure of presenting the following thoughts on music’s future.

It has been about 2 decades since ‘the great disruption’. If we look at the major achievement by the recording industry, it is that there is now an established model for providing people with legal access to music.

Yet, the recording industry didn’t solve the access problem. Networks and digitisation took care of that on their own. In the Age of Networks, people will always find a way to access what they want. Licensed, or not.

What the industry has been able to contribute is the licensing framework for it. This framework has now become somewhat standardised. But can the industry whose hand has been forced claim the accomplishment of making music accessible?

And there are issues which already threaten this new status quo.

The new standard is: $10, you get everything in good quality, and you can take if offline. It caps big spenders at $10. It ignores everyone in between 0 and $10. It would be interesting to see more services unbundle.

Because of the bet on the $10 one-size-fits-all model, certain companies are not interested in licensing new models, due to a fear of undermining the existing model (which has yet to prove itself).

This actually reveals that we haven’t figured out what consumers want: if they would pay $5 for just a few features instead of $10 for everything, then we’re creating artificial scarcity instead of selling something that people value.

Luckily there are signs that the licensing regime is loosening. Still, it would be nice to see something like a global startup license put in place.

Sure, there’s a marketing benefit to exclusives, but it’s bad for the landscape of licensed services, because it sends people back to pirate services which are always going to exist, unless you want to have a North Korean internet.

Increased competition between streaming services is making things worse, with regards to exclusives, with all major music streaming services engaging and Tidal giving this tactic a very central place in their strategy.

Recent examples: Drake & Apple Music, Kanye West & Tidal.

Transparency is a prerequisite for fairer licensing, payouts, and consumer trust in these platforms. Not enough has been done to increase transparency. It’s because of this, that people like Benji Rogers and Imogen Heap are setting up initiatives like DotBlockchain and Mycelia to solve this lack of transparency through technology.

Licensed streaming provides a stable income for the industry and a treasure trove of data to identify different segments of fans, their interests and behaviours.

What if we looked at streaming as a base layer, instead of as something that is supposed to ‘save’ the music industry?

We need to imagine what comes after the stream. What do we do with the attention and engagement of fans? What can we develop to build a more valuable relationship? How can we make sure both fan and artist can extract value from that relationship?

Whenever technology changes, music changes. The most significant change in music in the last century occurred with the proliferation of recording technology.

Powerful, connected smart devices offer a way out of the static music experience of the last century.

Music is about to become adaptive, reactive, and interactive. Not for us, but for new generations that are growing up to expect interactivity from everything in their environment.

The generation that is growing up trying to swipe magazines, televisions and windows, believing they should be able to interact with it.

For this generation, music is going to have to contain code, so it knows how it can recompose itself to better suit the listener’s needs, whims or taste.

This is great, because features monetize with much higher margins than content does. Just look at how the gaming industry has coped with this.

Virtual and augmented reality offer a great way forward. They are domains of creativity and monetisation to explore. People are already finding ways to compose music entirely inside VR.

Early adopters are hungry for new experiences to try on their high-end computers with VR headsets they’ve paid hundreds of dollars for.

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For me, the most important question the music industry has to ask itself, going towards 2025, is this.