Why fanbases need to be networks, rather than channels

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 2 Comments on Why fanbases need to be networks, rather than channels

The foundations of the music business lie in an age of channels. Many current success models still focus on channels, despite living in an age of networks. Due to this mode of operation, a renewed demand for channels has created a landscape of influential gatekeepers over the past decade. But you can still opt to play the network game instead.

The channel landscape

Two clear examples of the new emergence of a channel landscape are Spotify and SoundCloud. Both of them started as platforms that were centered around the user and their networks. Spotify let its users build playlists and those were the playlists it served through its search and other features (actually, for a long time playlist discovery was handled by third-parties like Playlists.net, at the time called ShareMyPlaylists, now part of Warner Music). Over time, playlist brands emerged and Spotify started investing heavily into its own editorial brands – even prioritizing them over ‘user generated’ playlists.

SoundCloud started as a collaboration platform that quickly turned into a music-based social network – in some ways not very different from Twitter, which at one point considered buying SoundCloud and ended up investing $70 million. The main page was its stream, where you can see what people who you follow are uploading. Nowadays, the main page has featured playlists, personalized recommendations, charts, and themed playlists for studying, partying, sleeping, relaxing, etc.

Editorial playlists are channels. Both platforms went from social-first to channel-first and so did the much of the rest of the landscape.

Linearity

Channels are linear. You broadcast down them. You distribute through them one-directionally. In the CD days, if things start travelling in 2 directions in a distribution channel it meant there’s a big problem.

This linearity is what shaped modern music culture as it has emerged in the age of the recording and post-WW2 consumerism. It went hand in hand with the economies of scale that many also unknowingly sign up for when doing music, despite alternative ways being possible.

Non-linearity

We now live in the age of networks. This has been the most profound shift since the internet. Not streaming and not piracy, which are both just symptoms of what happens when something can be turned into data that can then travel without friction through networks.

It has created virality, internet memes, and an overabundance of ‘content’ since creating something and making it available for all to see is easier than ever. That’s true for your track, but also the 59,999 other tracks uploaded to Spotify every day. This problem has meant that platforms like the aforementioned have invested heavily in recommendation algorithms in order to ensure relevance to their users. That creates channels and in the case of certain big social media platforms, it means that people have to pay to actually reach audiences that already follow them.

The landscape also means you can branch off. You don’t need to do interviews in magazines in order to talk to your fans. You can set up your own groups on messaging apps, you can do newsletters, set up forums or Discord communities, etc. It can feel like a handful of companies are setting the rules, but you don’t have to play ball.

Non-linearity in fan communities

Whether you’re an artist, label or startup, how you structure your relation with your fan or user base determines the type of game you will be playing. For contrast, the below graphic looks at traditional linearity in artist-to-fan and fan-to-fan communication and compares it with a ‘network model’. The network model means that as an artist, instead of broadcasting down, you’re placing yourself inside your community of fans.

A community means multidirectional conversations. These conversations exist inside fan clubs, but that information would then have to be moved back up. If, instead of that, you’re participating in the fan community, you have access to more (qualitative) data and insights… with the added bonus that it gives you and others a sense of belonging.

Getting people to pay for something that’s abundantly available is a hard business. The better you understand the fans of your music, the more manageable that challenge becomes… and it will also help you develop completely novel ideas.

5 ideas for fan conversations

Basic rule of thumb: the more you interact with the people who like your music, the better you’ll understand them, which significantly impacts your odds of running a successful business. It also brings up one of the most underestimated challenges in music:

How do you get someone who likes your music to hear you again? They may have heard you on the radio or a playlist somewhere… now how do you make sure they keep listening to you over time?

Below are a few ideas that can help with fan retention and help build your understanding of your listeners in order to unlock new ideas to fold into things like Patreon memberships, crowdfunding perks, limited merch, or whatever you conceive.

  • The chatroom: “just set up a Discord” is thrown around a lot, but the relatively simple concept of creating an environment where fans can interact comes with real challenges. There’s a cold start problem meaning people join empty channels, only to disappear because the community feels dead (which then turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy). There can be abuse, where people spam channels or are not respectful of others. How you plan around these issues and the way you decide to architect your community determines what types of conversations and interactions you enable.
  • The weekly hangout: if you have a limited number of engaged fans, perhaps reach out to them individually and set up a weekly hangout where you all chat about life & music. Over time, bonds will form and people will feel more invested in the success of the reason why they’re connected: your music.
  • The monthly 1-on-1: set up a monthly, individual call with various fans, one on one. Check in on each other. You’ll not just get a snapshot of who people are, but you’ll get status updates, hear how they’re progressing on certain projects… and they’ll hear the same from you. This is one of the Patreon perks I offer to 1:1 supporters and although I expected it to be mostly consultancy calls, I’ve actually gotten a lot of value out of it by learning about new domains.
  • The ‘user interview’: user interviews are something I learned doing in various product roles at digital music services. Whenever you’re exploring a certain challenge, for example a new merch line, you reach out to a bunch of your fans directly and hold an interview with them (that you prepare well beforehand). In this situation, things you might want to find out are how they see themselves, how they express themselves through objects or clothing, how much they spend, how they decide to purchase items, etc. These are 1-on-1 calls and you can find plenty of great resources about this by learning more about a domain called ‘user research’.
  • The co-creation: you can also kick off a project where you co-create something with fans. For example, you could aim to create an audiovisual map and have fans populate parts of this map, based on their location. Working together on something helps you to understand people in new ways, it will let you see how people express themselves, and in what ways they like to be creative themselves.

Besides building a sense of community and connection, it’s important to always consider what you want to learn from these interactions. I could think of dozens of additional ideas for interaction, but what’s most important is that you understand the challenges before you and start thinking what type of insights will help you address those challenges. In some cases, the challenge might actually be to speak to fans so you can get more clarity on what goals to set.

The choice is yours

Not everything has to be in the hands of a few platforms. You can choose to interact directly with fans and you can do it today by DMing some people who recently liked your posts. Break out of the channel paradigm and see what you can build through network. It’s not one or the other: you can play both games. Just don’t be fooled by the dominance of channels. In the words of Black Sheep: the choice is yours.

The sachetization of music consumption

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

Sachetization comes from the fast-moving consumer goods industry and refers to the bite-size packaging – e.g. one biscuit, or 15ml shampoo – of goods that used to be available only in bigger, and thus more expensive, packages. Music consumption has seen a little bit of sachetization, but there is significant growth to be had if platforms and services will pick up this strategy more broadly. Two things triggered me to think about sachetization and music consumption:

  1. The continuing battle between Apple and Spotify. On the one hand, there’s the message from the former about their one penny per stream rate. On the other hand there’s the direct podcast subscriptions. While both deserve analysis and provide learnings for musicians, labels, and platforms alike a focus on either of these isn’t going to help grow ‘the pie’ of music revenues.
  2. In Spotify’s latest quarterly results we see ARPU (average revenue per user) dropping again. Mark Mulligan reckons that even with the proposed price increased Spotify’s ARPU will still go down in 2021. More broadly, MBW recently calculated that overall ARPU for all music streaming services dropped 8.8% in 2020. In other words, subscription revenue is dropping due to things such as family plans and marketing combinations (Fortnite Crew with 3 months of Spotify anyone?). Another big reason, however, is the lowering of prices in new markets, including the sachetized India. Instead of lowering overall subscription prices, music streaming services – and others – need to consider sachetizing their products.

From India to Nigeria: lessons in sachetization

The thinking behind sachetization often revolves around creating something that offers people who can’t afford something that very thing in a small dose. As such, the discourse surrounding sachetization veers towards talking about countries where the mechanism is popular as poor economies. While I won’t argue against it, I do think that focus misses out on the opportunities. Two examples will help me illustrate this.

Micro-credit in India

India is a big country with a lot of inhabitants. Many of these people are not formally employed. This does not mean they don’t have an income, but it does mean that the banking and credit system does not recognize their earnings. It’s for this reason that Viral Acharya, professor of economics at NYU-Stern, has argued for the sachetization of finance in India. One example he offered to explain its necessity in the FT article is that of a farmer. Instead of demanding a loan to this farmer to be repaid in regular monthly installments misses the point of them only earning money during the harvest. The example is meant to show that each person has its own cash-flow situation and requires a credit that reflects this specific circumstance.

The Reserve Bank of India has set out regulations to support this. In a talk Acharya delivered at Bombay Tech Fest in 2018 he argued that the public credit registry allows people to build up a reputation and the trust of lenders. Sachetizing credit thus means to create a specific set of circumstances that allows people to enter who would normally sit outside the formal credit market. In a way, it allows people to get a leg up, a first step onto a ladder, or a way to finance what they aspire to.

Nigeria’s sachet economy

There’s a lot to be said by the argument put forward in this tweet. Nairametrics, for example, see sachetization as innovation around poverty. And yet, there’s a lot of people to be reached by offering sachets instead of fullblown products. The examples in Nigeria are plenty and move from FMCGs to fin-tech and entertainment. When it works, it’s because it deletes what Efosa Ojomo calls nonconsumption.

Nonconsumption is the inability of an entity (person or organization) to purchase and use (consume) a product or service required to fulfill an important Job to Be Done. This inability to purchase can arise from the product’s cost, inconvenience and complexity, along with a host of other factors—none of which tend to be limitations for the rich, skilled, and powerful in society.

There’s a different reason to tackle nonconsumption: aspiration. M-KOPA in a Kenyan company that offers smartphones, and other products, by letting people pay in installments. The smartphone is then used by the company to track the financials of the user and, for example, unlock or lock certain URLs or payments. In the end, all of these types of services of sachetization in terms of pay-as-you-go and repay-as-you-can.

The opportunity for music

The whole idea of sachetization is to grow the number of people that can afford your product or service. There are different ways to do this for music businesses and they all don’t involve simply lowering your price for the full offer. Some of these will look like strategies used more widely around the world while others will hark back to old methods.

  • pay-as-you-go in the form of opening a music streaming service and paying only when you use it. For example, per minute, per song, etc.
  • pay-as-you-go in the form of passes. For example for a day, an hour, an album, etc.
  • there’s a lot to learn from gaming (the idea of the pass in the previous bullet point harks back to Bas’ 2016 article about gaming industry lessons). One of them is to work together with payment structures that gamers are used to. Razer Gold is one such option. A popular method for gamers to buy both games and in-game content. It’s not difficult to imagine a streaming service stepping into a partnership and offering limited access to certain playlists in-game.
  • The tactics of sachetization aren’t just for music streaming services. It’s also possible to step in at artist level through, for example, tipping. Centipenny is one example where people can work with micropayments that can go as low as, you guessed it, a penny. Users can top-up their account with small amounts and artists can include a widget, poll, mini paywall, etc. to receive funds.

Sachetization of music consumption is more than innovation for the poor. It’s real opportunity to increase the total number of people paying for music directly. Moreover, it does so on their terms instead of on those set by the major platforms.

Why YouTube is the streaming service to watch

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Spotify often gets contrasted with Bandcamp in order to explain the challenges of the music streaming landscape: low per-stream royalties versus much larger commissions on sales. The intensity of that discussion has moved all eyes from the actual one-to-watch, which is not Spotify, but YouTube – a service with a billion monthly active music listeners and 30 million subscribers.

Always has been

YouTube has of course long been on everyone’s radar due to the so-called ‘value gap’: the disparity between what YouTube was willing to pay for music & its perceived real market value. As the biggest music platform, YouTube was infamous for its low per-stream rates which, on average, are significantly lower than Spotify’s for music identified through its ContentID system (source). I chose to phrase things in past tense due to attention shifting to Spotify, but that does not mean rightsholders have found these issues to have been resolved.

Another concern is the power of YouTube and its mother companies Google and Alphabet, which is a common reason for complaints from music industry lobbyists about having imbalanced negotiations. Before I go into why I think YouTube is making all the right moves: the concentration of power towards tech monopolies is of big concern for me too (it’s why I deleted or deactivated my accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). Keep this in mind when developing a strategy: always diversify, never put your eggs in one basket, and make sure you create ways to go direct-to-fan (e.g. collect phone numbers, email addresses, build communities).

YouTube’s evolution as a creator service

Google’s video service has long had something of great strategic value: not music. I mean that literally: it’s had content and creators that were not doing music. This has meant less complexities around licensing (but also poorer representation for creatives) and has allowed YouTube to experiment with new models.

The same is happening now with podcasts at Spotify and user-centric streaming payments at SoundCloud. Having ‘user-generated content’ from unsigned artists allowed SoundCloud to start trialing its ‘fan-powered royalty‘ model without every rightsholder having to opt-in through contract negotiations. Meanwhile Spotify is exploring new monetization models around podcasts, like paid podcast subscriptions. As a relatively new medium, podcasts don’t yet have the legal and political complexities associated with intellectual property in music.

YouTube & the next layer

Streaming is a base layer for music monetization. It’s shallow in that it leverages nothing but the relation between listener and catalogue. Monetization is driven by factors like accessibility (e.g. all devices, price), portability (e.g. offline) and convenience (e.g. catalogue size, search, recommendations). It’s absolutely basic: it’s not about the relation between fan and artist, it’s not about the quality of the art or music, it’s just about having the largest and most convenient store where you can access everything by paying from a magic wallet with your costs predictably capped at $10 per month. It’s a subscription business, not a music business – as Tim Westergren (founder of Pandora and now livestreaming service Sessions) also pointed out in my recent interview with him during Karajan Music Tech.

This base layer has advantages: it generates a huge amount of money for rightsholders and creates a foundational data layer which can be used to connect listeners to new artists and music or could be leveraged to learn more about existing fans and get new music to them. But streaming was never supposed to be the future of the music economy. It needs additional layers on top.

One of these layers is the Interaction Layer. This layer has been thriving during the pandemic thanks to a particular medium: livestreams. Livestreams encourage interactivity: fans can be exposed to each other in chats and the chat functionality can make fans feel like they’re seen by the artist(s) they care about so much. That means there’s value being created beyond simple music access. Value means opportunity to monetize and YouTube has seized that opportunity.

Image taken from my Water & Music piece about fan-centric streaming services (paywall).

Through its Super Sticker and Super Chat features, YouTube allows creators to monetize their livestreams. Super Stickers are big, fun and quirky custom emoji that appear in the chat in exchange for a small fee. Super Chat allows viewers to highlight and pin a message for a certain duration of time, depending on how much they pay. In the first months of the pandemic lockdowns, from March to June 2020, over 2 million new users spent money on these features.

The second feature that provides an additional layer is channel memberships. This allows creators to created limited edition content, similar to what they might offer on Patreon or a SFW OnlyFans. At smaller numbers, it even allows them to create semi-bespoke content.

Layer integration

These features allow creators to monetize and connect with fans where they already are: YouTube (as opposed to onboarding them to Patreon or OnlyFans). This is the important distinction. These monetization options are not novel in and of themselves – many of them have been around for years or even decades. The important development is that these experience and monetization layers are integrating. Moving fans around various platforms causes friction, which means you won’t be able to convert everyone down the funnel from the streaming layer. It also keeps the data in one place instead of fracturing it.

Graphic from Streaming is not the future of the music economy, from the second edition of the MUSIC x newsletter, February 2016.

Over the next years we’re going to see many examples of artists successfully building models on layers that sit on top of streaming. YouTube is going to play a significant role in that. The conversation will move from leveraging streaming (still essential for discovery & connection to wider audience) to interaction & bespoke options.

Another service to watch in this space is Amazon Music, which is slowly expanding their integration of livestreams from Twitch (another Amazon company, which also allows micropayments and memberships like YouTube).

Livestreams mean original content and a different set of rights than what you negotiate for on-demand streaming. This has given YouTube and Amazon the flexibility to experiment with these new layers. Spotify’s business strategy has introduced similar functionality to podcasts, but will they be able to do the same for music given the complexities of licensing and the various rightsholders that will want a piece of the pie?

The music streaming landscape is in flux and it’s not about Apple Music vs Spotify or Spotify vs Bandcamp anymore.

–

For a wider read diving further into this trend, read my article The rise of the fan-centric music streaming service at Water & Music (paywall).

A special thanks to Vickie Nauman for some of the inspiration for this piece and to c/o pop and Germany’s association for independent music (VUT) for having us on a panel last week.

Live music is all you need, right? A hybrid tale

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling | 2 Comments on Live music is all you need, right? A hybrid tale

Changes that had been simmering in the live music industry for years accelerated during the pandemic. It’s hard to find an artist who hasn’t done a livestream nowadays and this has pushed musicians to ask more directly what their fans want and want to pay for. Similarly, games have provided stages for music in lieu of the physical format. At the same time, we see the first glimpses of in-person events and how they might take shape with and without restrictions. Here, I will take stock of where we stand right now through some of my own recent experiences and how I see this play out as a tale of hybrid events in the near future.

Livestreaming and in-game experiences

Some livestreams are more successful than others, this was already the case before the pandemic hit, but certainly reverberated throughout the last year. Cherie Hu got to the essence of what all successful livestreams share: intimacy/proximity, production quality, and frequency/consistency. What we should add to that is to make the livestreaming experience something totally different from what the in-person live experience is. There’s no replicating the energy of audiences in a venue and the touch of bodies in a moshpit or the power of sound hitting you in the gut. At the same time, livestreaming offers an opportunity to create something unique. And this runs from Norah Jones topping the streaming charts with her intimate, one-camera home shows to the concert venue Ancienne Belgique building a carbon copy of their venue in the Unreal Engine and dubbing it Nouvelle Belgique.

Being with the artist

What Norah Jones, and other mainly singer-songwriter style artists, have managed so well with their livestreams is bring their fans really close. Of course, it helps to be an open person who’s happy to let their fans into their homes and interact with them via video and chat. It would be difficult, for example, to see someone like The Knife or others artists who shroud themselves in mystery do the same. For those who can do it authentically, though, the intimate livestream is a winner. Fans love being close up and getting to interact with their favorite musicians directly.

There’s some precedent for this type of live experience inside music venues. From lie down concerts to those famous Snarky Puppy ‘headphone concerts‘ that allow fans to step into the studio with the band while having a personal live experience. It will be interesting to see if this type of concert will gain further traction post-pandemic. With more artists opting for perhaps smaller settings to offer fans a unique and intimate live experience. Such live events can even sit right into a regular tour schedule. While talking to Angela Huang for WHO KNEW The Smartest People in the Room she mentioned how premium ticketing, and especially VIP ticketing, works best when the experience gets created with the fan in mind.

In-game experiences

It’s also that fan-first mindset that puts artists like Travis Scott and Kaskade into Fortnite‘s Party Royale: their fans also play the game. A logical next step is for real-world venues to create an existence in the metaverse (similar to former Berlin-based club Griessmuehle being rebuilt in Minecraft). Brussels-based Ancienne Belgique took this leap and worked together with VR studio Poolpio and Granola Studios‘ Yabal application to copy their venue inside the virtual world of the Unreal engine. In a way this experiment aims to recreate the ‘real’ concert experience:

  • the artist performs on the actual Ancienne Belgique stage in a motion capture suit and is made visible on the Nouvelle Belgique stage
Inside the Ancienne Belgique during the Zwangere di-GUY-taal livestream
Inside the Nouvelle Belgique
  • Lights were done inside the Nouvelle Belgique venue by the light technicians of the Ancienne Belgique
The lightshow
  • The artist has big screens to see the avatars of the audience allowing for some form of fan-artist interaction. They can also read the chat

Overall, I feel this type of experience is a great addition to live music. It allows, for example, artists to connect with younger audiences who might not otherwise get to go to live gigs yet. It’s also a more fun and interactive way to experience a concert than simply seeing what cameras record happening on stage. This first gig in the Nouvelle Belgique showed glimpses of even more potential. Right at the end the floor opened up and it would be great if my avatar could, for example, fall into the crack and have to respawn.

Fan strategies

How many artists do you support directly right now? Through Patreon, Bandcamp, OnlyFans, etc.? Flipping the value relationship between artist and fan; getting the fan to pay directly to the artist. Again, this wasn’t a new development but one that definitely accelerated through the pandemic. The type of fan strategies related to the subscription models consider how, as an artist, you can add value for your fans in their lives. This goes way beyond the live experience, but the model has strong roots inside the live industry. Going back to the idea of VIP tickets, the question that underpins every decision is: what does the fan want?

More on gaming

Besides asking what the fan wants, the question is also: where is the fan? How willing, for example, is the average classic rock fan to download a gaming platform and create an avatar? In a report by Twitch and MIDiA the focus sits on the existence of an actual digital fandom. In other words, what music can learn from gaming is that there’s a growing fanbase that will engage online first. Similar to gamers streaming, artists can go beyond subscriptions and towards what would be in-game items. Here, I’m thinking of premium comments, shout-outs, a special look for an avatar, etc. These are all elements that musicians can learn from when they approach their fans in a virtual environment.

Post-pandemic touring: a hybrid offer

We’re seeing some glimpses of live music coming back to us recently. In places like New Zealand this amounts to proper stadium shows without any restrictions. Elsewhere, we see events with rapid testing and other restrictions. In Singapore, for example, the focus is on pre-event testing while fully vaccinated people can skip this. Where I live, in the Netherlands, there’s a combination of experiments with and without restrictions. Attending an actual, in-person concert is still second-to-none in terms of energy as I got to experience as part of the ‘testing for access‘ trial.

Eric Vloeimans’ Gatecrash live at TivoliVredenburg, 19 April 2021

That said, I see the future more as a hybrid live tale. Next to the live gig, there will be livestreams offering intimate and close-up experiences that will keep people at home instead of going out. For some artists and their fans virtual worlds, including the metaverse, will be where they meet and interact. For others, geography will be the biggest factor. Starting a livestream will simply open up a concert to much wider audience. Moreover, those who watch on a screen may have the opportunity to check in backstage before the gig or have the option to choose the camera focused on the drummer or the bass player. All of this will help drive artists to consider the best approach for them and their fans and at the same time open up a whole new way to directly add value in both directions: from artist to fan and vice versa.

Streaming services: it’s time for Two-Factor Authentication

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Scams, fraud, bots and theft: the ugly side of streaming provides a stark contrast to that beautiful feeling of having the world’s recorded music at your fingertips.

What is Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

You are already using 2FA. Certain accounts, like Google, Facebook, or Apple, require multiple forms of authentication in order to sign in from a new device. This often works by verifying it’s you from another device, or by entering a code sent to your phone number, email address, or generated in an authenticator app.

It adds a layer of security to accounts that makes it hard to get in with just the username and password.

Why don’t streaming services use 2FA?

Popular streaming services like Spotify and Netflix famously don’t use 2FA, although the latter has recently started running tests with it, presumably to tackle account sharing. The reason for not implementing 2FA? Likely because it doesn’t help growth and in fact may hamper conversion rates.

Jorge Castro on developer community dev.to sums it up well through this fictional conversation:

  • Developers: We want to implement 2FA in our platform.
  • Netflix executes: Ok, and how much will it cost us?
  • Developers: Around two months.
  • Netflix executives: Ok, and it will increase the number of viewers?
  • Developers: Well, not really. It is about security.
  • Netflix executives: So, it will not increase the number of viewers but it could be a burden for some customers and it could decrease the number of viewers.
  • Developers: Yes, but it could be optional.
  • Netflix executives: So optional, an option that it plays against the number of viewers and it will cost us time (and money). Sorry but no.
  • Developers: But the security.
  • Netflix executives: We already invested in our security. If our customers have trouble then we could reset its password. It’s their responsibility, not ours.

However building in a little more friction could be beneficial to all… and tackle certain types of fraud more efficiently than a switch to user-centric streaming payments might.

Black market for streaming service accounts

For years, there has been a thriving market for streaming service accounts, with Spotify accounts selling for under a dollar. Many though not all of these are hacked. It’s so common that people commenting on their hackers’ music tastes has become somewhat of a meme and a quick search on Twitter pulls up countless examples.

Vietnamese blogs speculate that black market accounts are what led to Spotify and Netflix halting their free trial offers in the country last year.

This is not an issue that is exclusive to Spotify and Netflix, but there’s a high availability of examples since they are two of the most popular entertainment services without 2FA.

Fake plays, scams, and fraud

Just like it’s possible to buy ‘fake followers’ on social media, it’s possible to buy fake plays for streaming services. Jacking up the numbers can help to game the recommendation algorithm and build fake legitimacy for those looking closely at big numbers (but perhaps not closely enough).

Who cares if that is what someone wants to do? Well, everyone should, because it eats away at the pool of money distributed to all artists. Hackers have been gaming this system openly since at least 2013 in order to generate revenue.

An article by William Bedell from 2015 explains how he was able to do the same. At the time, not only did Spotify not use 2FA:

“There wasn’t even a CAPTCHA or email verification when creating accounts.”

Image by William Bedell.

The lack of better security leads to these types of fraud having to be traced & fixed retroactively, which often leads to streaming services taking music with fake plays down. That sounds good, but there are two issues: 1) we don’t know what percentage of fraud goes undetected, and 2) this opens up an attack vector (want your competitor’s music taken down? Just boost it with fake streams).

Audius (primer article), a new streaming platform and protocol that awards people tokens (called $AUDIO) based on their participation, is also running into this issue. Bots are used on the platform to game the system and get music into the charts. This messes with the platform’s weekly reward system, as WeirdCityRecords on Reddit points out:

“Curators have been robbed by bot users almost every week since the rewards inception (not only in terms of $audio but engagement being buried below bots), and now with a song being clearly botted to #1, it seems like this week 1 artist or possibly more will be deprived as well.”

The track accused of being ‘botted’ to the top outperforms the #2 by over 14 times, despite the artist and account being new to the platform and seemingly not having a significant presence on other music platforms.

Two-factor authentication would make it a lot harder to create loads of accounts like in the examples above, especially if you limit to 1 account per phone number.

Report fraud

Recently, I became familiar with another scam. Unfortunately that was due to falling victim to it on Spotify, though it may also exist on other platforms.

Botnets get employed to report people’s playlists for inappropriate content. This results in the playlist title and description being taken down. Bada-bing bada-boom: it is now easier to be the #1 search result for those same terms on Spotify.

As soon as I reported the erroneous report to Spotify and had them restore the playlist title and description, the botnet took it down again. This repeated half a dozen times over 2 weeks with my playlist existing without a title or description for the majority of the time.

I’m not alone in this and have found various playlists that also seem to be suffering from this issue (click here for an example if you’re curious about Romanian Manele music and here for GTA’s excellent soundtrack). This thread in Spotify’s support forums has other users reporting the issue.

The attack seems to have ended, but I almost gave up restoring my playlist every time it got taken down (I did consider writing a script that would auto-reply to Spotify’s takedown emails, though).

Since playlists are user-generated content, Spotify needs some type of system to deal with reports and make sure content that goes against the terms & conditions is taken down. After the 5th time my playlist got taken down and I asked if they could protect my playlist from the next auto-takedown, I got this answer:

“All user-created content can be reported, and while it may be possible that a report is invalid, all such reports need to go through our official report channel so we can handle them properly.”

So that’s a no. This means that anyone building playlists on Spotify with an unverified account can fall victim to this. Sure, the reporting account may get banned, but if it’s a botnet targeting you that doesn’t matter. That’s problematic, because unlike my hobbyist playlist with 100 followers, there are curation brands and artists with playlists that depend heavily on Spotify. They’re all exposed to this type of attack that seems to rely on either hacked accounts or easily-created free accounts.

Investment without security

People around the world are putting hours of effort into their streaming accounts: building playlists, followings, brands and in some cases companies using their presence. They’re exposed to insecurity.

Even accounts on platforms with better security get hacked, e.g. to misuse the trust someone has built up and run a cryptocurrency scam on followers (as fellow music-tech writer Cherie Hu recently became a victim of on Twitter, which besides Audius and the report fraud above was my third prompt for writing this piece).

Even if a streaming service can reinstate an account after a hack: the hack can damage your brand, e.g. if the hacker changes playlist titles and imagery to something offensive or scams, or just makes it impossible for you to keep running your playlist brand due to repeated reporting. If you enjoy services’ algorithmic recommendations, a hacker’s temporary account takeover can mess that up for you also.

Two-factor authentication is a basic standard for security. Maybe it’s time for streaming services to give it some priority and prevent fraud, scams, and theft.

Pandemic state of mind: global vs local

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

‘The end is in sight’, ‘vaccines are here’, ‘let’s have a party’. We are at such a different juncture of the pandemic right now than we were a year ago. At the start of the pandemic governments were hesitant to impose widescale lockdowns because they were so different from what ‘normal’ was at the time. When lockdowns did get instituted the general consensus was that we were all in it together. A driver that hits us up with adrenaline and a can-do spirit. Now, we’re exhausted and we need to tap into our collective determination; which is a very different energy. Right now, we need governments to get us out of the ‘pandemic normal’ and into a life that will lead us into something else altogether. Let’s see where we are at in the pandemic, what’s on the horizon, and where we should focus our energies.

[ed. note: I am not a public health expert, please consult with experts when planning events, travel, etc.]

The state of the pandemic

If you want to know at what level of threat the pandemic is there’s basically two ways of looking at it:

1. the global view

The global view isn’t pretty. Trawling through the data on the WHO Coronavirus (Covid-19) Dashboard doesn’t make for pretty reading. Overall, at a global scale infections are rising for the 7th week in a row. At the same time, the number of vaccines doses administered is at over 733 million at the time of writing. That’s a positive, but there remain many unknowns. In a recent article for The Verge, Monica Chin explored what it will take in terms of vaccinations before we can open up again. Although she gets many different answers from the experts she spoke to one thing seemed clear: we need a 70-80% vaccination rate to achieve something resembling herd immunity. To achieve that at a global scale is very far away and the WHO raised the alarm on what they call a ‘shocking imbalance‘ in the way vaccines are distributed.

2. the local view

In some localities around the world many people have already had their vaccine jabs. Israel still leads the way, the UK does well, Chile and the US too.

But what if you’re in India (second wave ‘tsunami’) or Brazil (the crisis intensifies still)? The picture looks very different. This has been the case for some time now of course. If you live in New Zealand (hello stadium tour), your perception of the pandemic will be very different than if you live in the Philippines (hang in there 300 Covid-19 patients waiting in line at the hospital).

Similarly, there’s the danger of variants that mean the world on a local scale will look to shut down travel from certain other parts of the world. Axios has a Variant Tracker, which looks into the various variants and their prevalence in the US. What these variants mean, how they’ll develop, and what the impact will be on the pandemic is still to be determined. It’s the big uncertainty moving forward and science can only do so much without being able to test, prove and disprove.

Where’s the music?

Of course, we all want to go back to concerts, festivals, live experiences that involve people in close proximity. There are many local experiments that try, and succeed, at proving that it’s possible to host events in a safe manner. In the Netherlands there’s the Fieldlab Experiments. They’ve shown already (like others before them) that it’s possible to host a safe event where audiences behave predictably, spaces have good ventilation, people test before the event, and adhere to social distancing restrictions. Next up are the festivals and testing is the most important as audiences will not behave or move predictably at a festival site.

Testing and vaccines are the big hope of the live music industry. Even without herd immunity, the idea of vaccination passports is here, and most likely here to stay. In some localities the passport is already alive, but this is in notably rich countries. Will we see artists touring on a vaccination passport? And audiences travelling with their proof of vaccination in hand? For sure, this will happen, and privacy is a massive issue [as we wrote before]. One festival which was one of the first to shout they will go ahead with rapid testing is Unum Festival in Albania. They’ve now teamed up with Swallow Events and Yoti to bring their audience a home test. Moreover, the results of this test will be hosted on a blockchain. A verification model that could, potentially, alleviate some security concerns.

Now what?

The answer to this question depends on whether you think global or local. If you’re living in a country that has either done well on actively preventing the spread of the coronavirus in the first place, or in a country that does well with its vaccination program there’s light at the end of the tunnel. If you live in a country where the opposites are true, it’s a very different picture. So what to do?

On the one hand, I want to call out to governments to pinch through ‘status-quo bias‘ and assess local initiatives carefully and at face value. To let go of what has become the ‘pandemic-normal’ and look for a ‘post-pandemic-normal’ that will allow music – and culture in general – to bloom again.

On the other hand, I want to call out to organizers to look beyond themselves and take into account a global picture. Live events in isolation might be possible, but if we’ve learned one thing in the last year it’s that we don’t live in isolation from each other.