Tag: Bandcamp

Artificial scarcity isn’t bad and it’s not just a jpeg (on NFTs)

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

This piece addresses two common questions and critiques about NFTs:

  • “It’s just a jpeg everyone can see, so anyone paying for it is [delusional / getting scammed / etc].”
  • “The internet’s supposed to be about abundance – why are we creating unnecessary artificial scarcity and financializing everything?”

Given music’s history with ubiquity, including the economic effects of the sudden shift from paid to free post-piracy, I think these are two excellent critiques to explore the value of NFTs in general and for music specifically.

Participation

One of my own, biggest critiques of what happened to music in the 20th century is that music’s default shifted from communal to individual, from participative to consumerist, from folk to personalized. This happened through the proliferation of the recording and record players to every house, then every room of the house and eventually everyone’s pocket until even the music played from streaming services would be atomized to personalized playlists that fit an individual’s taste exactly.

This had great economic consequences for the recording industry, which eventually dwarfed other parts of the music industry like publishers. It also created a framework through which corporations own and govern the majority of contemporary culture. If you think about folk songs as songs that an entire population knows, or just subsets thereof, then pop music has essentially replaced folk. Folk music was communally owned and iterative. Pop music is, typically, corporate-owned and there will be 1 official version: everything else is ‘derivative’, less authentic, less ‘real’, than the ‘original’. In that sense, Seven Nation Army could be considered a folk song, especially in countries where it’s a common chant in football (‘soccer’ 🇺🇸) stadiums.

Don’t get me wrong: I think many of these aspects brought great attributes to music too, but it’s important to consider which other attributes, like the ones mentioned above, got deemphasised and moved into the background of our default music experience.

Back to artificial scarcity and abundance.

The time we live in is amazing. We have so much of humanity’s knowledge and cultural expression at our fingertips. We have simple, digital tools at our disposal that allow us to express ourselves through any modern type of media: image, sound, video, augmented reality (think TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram when it’s not down). After being locked out of participative culture because of decades of a creator / consumer divide, we may soon see a billion music creators. So why be so excited about something that introduces scarcity?

Open scarcity

The exciting thing about NFTs is that you can let everyone access the media, yet assign the ownership of the NFT that represents the media to one person. This is not that dissimilar from video games: your friend may have unlocked a certain skin that is purely cosmetic and does not affect gameplay. You can enjoy this skin while you play with your friend: even if they’re the ones who paid for it.

NFTs can be used in similar dynamics. Sometimes they’re used as vehicles for crowdfunding. They can bring media (or culture) into existence that wouldn’t exist otherwise. One patron, one NFT. And a jpeg or mp3 for millions to enjoy.

MP3s, for a long time, held a real price of $0. Most people would download them and wouldn’t pay for it. Streaming, unfortunately for many artists, hasn’t helped them to attain a significant income. This may be due to a number of factors, but the fact is that for a long time music has been a game with just one mode to play it. If you don’t fit that mode well, it’s going to be hard and the factors are often outside of musicians’ control. The major exception I can think of is the period before recorded music revenues bounced back to pre-piracy days, which kind of forced people to get creative. Besides contemporary streaming giants, two of the more popular crowdfunding platforms were born in this period: Kickstarter (2009) and Patreon (2013).

Graph: IFPI Global Music Report 2021

If we use the phrase ‘NFT’ to mean works of art (music, visual, both) then NFTs create an amazing situation where content no longer needs to be locked behind a paywall on a platform like Patreon. Instead, the proliferation of the media associated with the NFT, for example a song, will increase the value of the NFT. This also impacts the perceived value of future NFT drops.

Ownership is exclusive, but the media is abundant. It’s open scarcity.

But why pay if it’s free anyway?

There are many motivations why people pay for NFTs. Some people are purely speculating, but I don’t think that’s the important part of the story. Some are collectors. A web2 example I can think of is Bandcamp: for some releases you can get the free download, but if you pay $0.50 it also shows up in your collection. I love building my collection on Bandcamp, so I’ll pay for the free jpeg and mp3 to be there.

Most importantly, NFTs are decentralized social media. They are objects that exist in a social context. This social context is powered by the blockchain on which the NFTs sit, plus any social media an NFT holder might use. In this context, possessing an NFT holds meaning to the owner, because it can signify social value, taste, distinction, membership, or identity, just like people’s clothing or virtual skins in video games. All of that is portable to any social context they move to.

It’s that social aspect that gives these objects value and in many cases the social value would be greatly diminished it the object was not freely accessible for all to see.

Financializing all the things…

Finally, a conclusion I’ve drawn for myself. I sympathise a lot with the critique that the web3 is financializing everything. Should all these things have a price tag or should the price tag be secondary? Certainly, in this wave of the web3, the price tag has often been the story, but I don’t think it’s the whole story (although to some writers it is).

The real story is that value can be tracked and it can be made transparent. People who create value can participate in it. All these interactions we have with each other online, all this culture we’re accessing: it’s already financialized. The companies that host our conversations, our art, our expression, they have shareholders, they sell ads. The difference with the web3 is that 1) we don’t know what interactions are worth, and 2) we don’t participate in the value they create.

That’s different now.

From here we have options. We can choose to express things in tokens or cryptocurrency. We can choose not to. We can choose to distribute equally to all participants or reward those who contribute more. We can choose governance models where it’s one person, one vote, or where people can vote based on their stake (e.g. number of tokens held). We can choose the game we play – this has not happened since that 2009 to 2013 period that spawned so many of the current status quo.

These systems are in our hands now. There’s no one-size fits all platform. Instead we’re stringing the tools together to create brand new configurations to design communities the way we see fit. Different subcultures will emerge in the space. They already have. For example, Zora is a radically different NFT marketplace (and more) from Crypto.com. Just compare their positioning: “THEY THOUGHT THEY COULD OWN US” versus “The World’s Fastest Growing Crypto App”.

Auctioned digital cultural objects, as NFTs, have an important role to play in online culture in the next ten years. Music piracy paved the way for streaming. Streaming paved the way for microgenres on SoundCloud to playlist edits on Spotify to the meme-like behaviour of music on TikTok.

Now a web3 layer is going to start providing a new context. Let’s add social context to those mp3s and jpegs.

A music service based on collective bids on NFTs (aka fractional NFT ownership)

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 2 Comments on A music service based on collective bids on NFTs (aka fractional NFT ownership)

This week hundreds of people pooled money to collectively place a bid on NFTs and attain fractional ownership using a tool called PartyBid. They succeeded. 478 people teamed up to form the Party Of The Living Dead and secured one of the highly popular (and expensive) NFT collectible CryptoPunks. 25 people acquired an NFT released by music x web3 project Songcamp Elektra, calling themselves Elektranauts.

After purchasing the NFT (of which there exists 1), buyers get ERC-20 tokens which represent the fractional ownership (of which there exist proportional amounts for each buyer). In my recent piece about data autonomy & the creator economy I explained how tokens on blockchains can be used to create platform-independent social groups. This is an example of it: the fractional ownership of the NFT represents group membership. In the case of the Party of the Living Dead that membership is signified through 1,201,725 $DEAD tokens and in the case of the Elektranauts through 2,100 $SQUAD tokens, a reference to a term used by the Songcamp DAO. What if certain privileges were given to those group members?

From whales to swarms

The NFT boom that happened over the past year saw so-called ‘whales’, people with a lot of (crypto)currency to spend, place huge bids in auctions. As the usability layer of the web3 evolves, we see groups of people (often organised in DAOs) come up with tools like PartyBid to be able to compete with whales.

It is early days for the web3. It may feel differently if you’re out of the loop, but new ideas, interfaces, protocols, tools, improvements, standards are being proposed, shipped and adopted on a daily basis. So what can build upon PartyBid? What can build upon fractionalized ownership of music NFTs?

A Bandcamp for Fan DAOs?

Fans can now come together to place collective bids on music NFTs. Afterwards, they receive tokens to signify their status as a fractional holder of that NFT. What if there was a service that offered extra perks based on the (fractional) ownership of music NFTs?

I buy music on Bandcamp for 3 reasons: 1) to support artists (for the brave: here’s my collection), 2) to get the audio files in order to DJ, 3) to offline sync the music into the Bandcamp app. The music may also be available on large streaming platforms, but I like the idea of ownership & supporting financially – it’s a win-win. So I stream my purchases from the app, or play from the offline cache. Could similar dynamics be utilized for a next-gen music service?

Each fractional NFT token you hold could unlock things like offline playback, although it may take a few years for the music licensing landscape to catch up with the web3. So let’s look at two other scenarios:

Fan chat

Communication tools for mini-fan clubs, e.g. a group chat. You login with your crypto-wallet, the service reads your tokens and 🪄✨ like magic ✨🪄 you’re connected to other fans. It would have to compete with other apps that may implement tokenized group chats, like Telegram (and I predict Instagram), so perhaps music-specific features should be included, initially by integrating with web2 platforms like SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Spotify, etc. A web3 route would mean empowering the group with tools specifically tailored towards DAOs of music fans.

Fan galleries

As a fan you can show off your collection on a profile. A service might help people find holders of fractional tokens of NFTs minted by the same addresses. That means: if an artist created 2 NFTs, the token holders for those NFTs can find each other through the platform.

This could create an economy on its own. If other people want in on the fractional ownership, then a new community could organize and place a bid to buyout the original community. The original’s members would be able to profit from the increased value of the NFT, plus would still be able to join the new community’s bid, so they retain access after the sale. Importantly, the original artist would also be able to receive a % of resale money, if such a clause is contained in the smart contract.

And then…

To imagine what the space could look like, one should ask “and then what?” If a certain scenario plays out, what does it look like when people build from there? What would have to surround it? There’s a whole lot of imagining going on right now and a lot of building. Some of it will follow patterns we’re familiar with from the web2, but much of it will diverge.

What’s becoming clear to anyone paying attention: what makes NFTs is not the high auction sums – it’s their functionality & use to underpin a new decentralized social web.

Why Twitter is better positioned for tipping musicians than streaming services like Spotify and SoundCloud

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Twitter just launched a new tip jar feature with greater potential for musicians than those launched on popular streaming services such as Spotify and SoundCloud last year.

A new tip jar

Twitter started rolling out its new tip jar functionality last week. The functionality, which for now is only available to a limited group of creators, allows people to add Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo to their profiles via a new button on their profiles. It’s a bit like a ‘link in bio’, but specifically for payments.

Why tip jars ‘failed’ on streaming services

Streaming platforms are not creator services. They focus on monetizing the catalogue-listener relation through ads and subscriptions rather than the artist-fan relation. That means the user experience on streaming services is geared towards what people expect in exchange for their payment: quick access to the music they know, new music, and being able to find ‘music for every moment’.

I’m not entirely sure how these services defined success for the donation feature, but especially Spotify needed a PR win over the past year, so I’m interpreting their silence over the feature as an indication that nothing significant is happening through there. As a matter of fact, it seems that in its newly designed desktop profiles, the feature has been quietly removed. For reference, compare Marshmello‘s profile on mobile and the new desktop UI.

Why Twitter is better positioned for tipping

Social media is where people connect to artists. You may listen to dozens of artists per month, even hundreds, but the commitment of a social media follow is something reserved for those you actually care about. Social media is primarily about what’s new and while you can scroll back into someone’s history, it’s a secondary use case when compared to seeing months or years-old ‘content’ appear on playlists.

Through social media, it’s easier than on streaming services to stay connected with people and introduce them to new ways to support you. By creating a Tip Jar that also includes things like Bandcamp and Patreon, Twitter is reducing the distance between a person being interested in something and actually purchasing it. Any friction in that journey causes drop-offs along the way, so any reduction of friction or journey length translates to real money for creators (see also: merch integrations in (live)streaming platforms).

Expect others to follow suit

The type of direct monetization offered through Twitter’s Tip Jar is part of a wider trend that can also be seen in livestreaming services, the surging popularity of Patreon and OnlyFans, Clubhouse‘s tipping feature, and even the donation buttons in music streaming services.

Twitter will not be the last service this year to roll out more monetization options.

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.

Online music is about to experience another MySpace moment

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

An emerging void signals new opportunity for innovation in digital music.

The benefit of writing thoughts down is that you get to revisit them. Six years ago, I penned a piece for Hypebot called The Next MySpace. At that time, people in the music business were desperate to for another MySpace to emerge: the site had been a ray of hope, but as it collapsed, online music was scattered across an immature ecosystem of rapidly growing startups like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, Spotify, and many others that were eventually acquired or perished and forgotten. I argued:

The closest we will ever get to a “next MySpace” will be either a music network or a social network that manages to gather, organise and integrate the fragments in spectacular fashion.

Defining the MySpace moment

What I call a MySpace moment is not when everything was going well for MySpace: it’s when decline set in. People started replacing MySpace’s music players, which sucked, with Soundcloud’s beautiful waveform players. People started moving much of their social lives to Facebook (for friends) and Twitter (to connect to strangers). Up until then, the dominant social network had been music-driven — people, especially teenagers, expressed their identities by making long lists of bands they liked.

From the ashes of MySpace, which never managed to recover, rose a new ecosystem of music startups. They’ve managed to make it easy for artists to connect to fans, get paid for online playback, let fans know about new shows, and be able to very specifically target people with ads.

That moment, that void, was a massive opportunity and many companies benefited from it.

That moment is here once again.

The new MySpace moment

There are two main factors contributing to a new emerging void for entrepreneurs to leap in. One has to do with product adoption life cycles, which I’ll explain below. The other has to do with the important position Soundcloud claimed in the online music ecosystem.

Soundcloud came closer to being the ‘next MySpace’ than any startup has. And let’s be blunt: the company is not doing well. After years of legal pressure to tackle the problem of works being uploaded to the service without rights holders’ permission, they were forced to adopt a service model that does not make sense for Soundcloud. The typical $10 a month subscription doesn’t make sense. People are on Soundcloud for the fresh content, the mixtapes, remixes, unreleased stuff: the things that will not be on Spotify for weeks or months (or ever!). Why inject the catalogue with music of long deceased people?

There have been reports that Soundcloud would consider any bids higher than the total amount of money invested into the company to date. That’s not a good sign. The road they’ve been forced into is a dead-end street, and the only end game is a quick acquisition.

I don’t think Soundcloud will die, but it is hard for the company to focus on what they’ve always been good at. Now that they’ve been forced into the Spotify model, those are the types of metrics that are going to matter. Subscriber numbers, conversion, retention. So it may struggle to do as good a job serving the audience they’ve traditionally serviced so well. (small note: I love Soundcloud, and the people there: prove me wrong!)

This leaves a vacuum.

Adding to that vacuum, is the fact that Spotify (and other streaming services) are looking beyond early adopters. To understand the phenomenon, have a look at the below graph:

Product Life Cycle & Innovation Adoption Curve

The top part of the graph details the product life cycle. The bottom part explains the type of audience you address during the steps of that life cycle. As we’ve all noticed from the jubilant press reports on streaming’s expansion, we’re in the growth part of the cycle. This means services like Spotify and Apple Music have to get really good at targeting Early Majority and Late Majority type consumers.

If you’re reading this, you’re in the Innovator or Early Adopter segment. Startups typically start off by targeting those segments. So when Spotify moves on from Early Adopters (their de-emphasizing of user generated playlists is a big hint!), it leaves room for new startups to target and better serve those types of users.

Filling the new void

What happens then? Well, we’re going to get to the next phase of the digital music ecosystem – which is mobile-driven, and flirting with augmented reality, VR, and artificial intelligence. Early adopters are likely to keep paying for their Spotify subscriptions – it’s too big a convenience to give up… So entrepreneurs will have to figure out ways to monetize new behaviours.

Now is a great time to look at very specific problems in music. Don’t try to build the next Spotify or the next Soundcloud. For a while, everyone was trying to build the next MySpace — all those startups are dead now. Instead, take a specific problem, research it, build a solution for someone, test it, try it again for a broader group, and if it works: double down and scale up.

Personally, I’m very curious to see where startup accelerator Techstars Music’s current batch will be five years from now.

Stone maze

Breaking out of the circular blockchain music discussions

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The strategy of a thousand small steps to blaze trails while negotiating the music industry’s next big leap.

This year I’ve had the pleasure to take part in numerous discussions and think tanks about what blockchain can mean for the music business. The promise of blockchain, as will be explained, is transparency, fairness, and greater efficiency.

The longest session I partook in was the week-long Blockchain Lab at Music Tech Fest in Berlin, after which I wrote a piece about how the music industry’s not ready for the blockchain.

More recently, I flew to Kristiansand, Norway for 2 days of roundtable discussions organised by Peter Jenner and the University of Agder. It brought together an excellent selection of stakeholders from various parts of the music business ecosystem. Over the course of the sessions, we went through a wide range of topics, including registries, transparency, and blockchain. When discussing the types of problems that can be solved through blockchain, there were a lot of echoes of past meetings.

The problems in the music business ecosystem that are most important to solve, are too complex to solve without wide buy-in. It’s this complexity that gives people a feeling of powerlessness. Despite having the motivation to act and create a better ecosystem, the challenge of getting all the right players to sign up seems insurmountable.

In this sense, blockchain’s value right now, is in acting as a catalyst to re-ignite the types of conversations held about the (failed) Global Repertoire Database, like, for example, the Open Music Initiative. Why?

Blockchain technology provides a decentralized ledger of transactions that’s accessible to all the participants in the network. Transactions cannot be altered once recorded — only amended. So, when it comes to rights, claims are public. This should discourage wilful obfuscation or sloppiness with asserting rights, or adding metadata, because it will be publicly visible. If the ledger is the authority of truth, then acquiring and expressing rights, as well as guiding payment flows like royalties, should all become more efficient.

The biggest challenge to this happening on a meaningful scale is: how do you get rights holders to agree upon a minimal degree of transparency and investment into such an initiative? That’s a discussion that needs to be had, but meanwhile, let’s not wait.

The reality of the current landscape is:

  • There will be limited buy-in, which means we’re not going to see any industry-wide solutions soon;
  • There is a lot of interest in solving these issues from the music business;
  • On the tech side, people are eager to get going, too.

This means we need to work with a scenario where buy-in has to gradually increase.

Working with blockchain should be a carrot.

If people are unwilling to be transparent, then we need to think about branding that rewards the players that are willing to be transparent.

Consider fair trade products, free range certificates, security certificates, or the types of branding that shows products were made in an environmentally friendly way. For the first batch of companies that get such brands on their products, it acts as a carrot: a good way to show that you’re an ethical brand that cares about fair treatment.

When enough participants in the music business ecosystem get in, from music streaming services, to publishers, artists, labels, PROs and others, the carrot will slowly start functioning like a stick.

  • Carrot: “we’re a music company you can trust, because we’ve signed up to this initiative which guarantees fairness & transparency.”
     
  • ➟➟➟ Momentum ➟➟➟
    *please make a woosshh sound while imagining time elapsing*

  • Stick: “you can choose not to be transparent for business reasons, but how do you guarantee that creators are treated fairly without transparency?”

Currently, we’re in the pre-carrot phase.

More use cases need to be developed.
More experiments need to be organised.
More publicity needs to be generated.

There are a lot of players already and they’ll need to come together to discuss standards, so that certification can be created. The certification will need a strong brand and PR strategy, so that players in the music business will care, including the consumers. This means that it can’t start by targeting mainstream consumers on Spotify or Apple Music. A more realistic place to start would be Bandcamp, or next-generation platforms like Resonate, Whitestone, or Voltra, all of which are still in their early stages.

Perhaps a major label and major digital service can be incentivized to do something, eg. when they need to do damage control and need some positive PR quickly (carrot), but don’t expect them to disrupt their own status quo until it becomes necessary (stick).

If you are interested in participating in such experiments: feel free to get in touch with me and I’ll link you to the right people. I encourage you to use Medium’s response function (on this page) to advertise your own experiments or activities, or to make calls for participation.

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