2020 has turned a surging trend into a global reality: remote work. Spotify, which currently employs around 5,000 people globally, recently committed to staying remote-friendly beyond the pandemic. What other companies in music have the same intention?
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Remote work has not taken off in the music business as it has in other industries. This can partially be attributed to some commonly held beliefs, some of which specific to creative industries:
- “The music business is a people business.”
- “Real collaboration can only be done in person.”
- “It’s hard to maintain a coherent team culture remotely.”
These are all valid concerns. Being remote-friendly requires a shift in workflows to make asynchronous work easier, a shift in management, and a general shift in mindset.
Pros & cons to remote work
Buffer, a social media tool for scheduling posts, has been championing remote-first as a company. As such, they create a yearly ‘State of Remote Work‘ report to research how remote work is developing. Its latest report found that ‘not being able to unplug’ is the biggest concern among remote workers.
Switching off is a notorious topic in music, since it’s all too common for people to work deep into the evenings. I figured the pandemic might play a role in this, due to people being stuck at home and coworking spaces being closed, but people working remotely pre-COVID struggle with this as much as others.
On the flip side, remote work also has benefits. While the below chart focuses on the worker, there are also organisational upsides. Remote work benefits from maintaining workflows in which people won’t get blocked. People have to be able to work asynchronously as much as possible, so they don’t have to wait for people in other timezones or on other schedules.
While you don’t need to work remotely to clean up workflows, the friction might not have been visible to managers since people could resolve blockers by walking over to a desk. As such, remote work brings the benefit of forcing clarity, transparency, and focus to well-performing organisations.
For further reading about the benefits of remote work, I recommend the somewhat hyperbolically titled piece by Nomad List and Remote OK founder Pieter Levels “The future of remote work: how the greatest human migration in history will happen in the next ten years“.
Remote work discussion (Feb 25 on Clubhouse)
We’ll be going live on Clubhouse on February 25, 8pm CET / 2pm EST to discuss remote work in music. I’m looking forward to hearing from leaders and workers in the music space about their learnings and plans for remote work going forward.