Tag: digital strategy

Thinking small: a meditation on scale vs success for artists

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 4, pause for 4… Repeat.

When we think success, we tend to think big numbers. Most familiar examples of success have big numbers in common, especially those examples discussed around the world in newsletters and blogs like this one. The logical conclusion: success = big numbers.

Yet, when discussing success with musicians, I’ve found most would just be happy to make a difference to some people & be able to make a living off of it. If the goal is to make a living, then why does success necessarily involve racking up small amounts of royalties through thousands of plays until you finally have enough to make a living when combined with live gigs?

Our success maps are lousy. They’re based on highly visible examples of success which leads to a biased map. It also models strategy after something that worked in the past, but may not work as well now. If an artist achieved scale by cleverly playing the game of early-SoundCloud & the iTunes charts (Yellow Claw comes to mind) it’s impossible to copy that exact foundation since the context for the methodology has changed.

Breathe in, breathe out, think small

If the goal is to make a living, why bother playing the game of big numbers? Pitching playlists, building various social media profiles, gaming algorithms and spending countless hours on all that in the hope that the thousands of followers will translate into sufficient streams and bookings. It’s considered ‘the way’ to do it, but what if the goal can be achieved more efficiently on your own terms?

  • What does making a living mean for you? How much would you need monthly?
  • What do you enjoy doing? What would you like to have more time for?
  • How much time do you want to spend on your craft?
  • What do you dislike doing?

Take a moment (actually, take a week, or a month: this is your life we’re talking about). Breathe. Reflect. Define your goals by what you want, not by what you think is needed. Is having hundreds of thousands of fans a fun goal or is it actually methodology masquerading as as a goal? Achieving massive scale as an artist may look like success, but it’s often just a symptom of the methodology to achieve goals and not the goal itself.

Question your goals. Carefully & deliberately choose the game you play.

Why scale matters / mattered

Scale is a game. For companies that make money exploiting catalogues, scale is required in order to turn low margins into a big business. The same is true for ad-funded business: each individual ad serving isn’t worth much, but if you manage to get lots of people to constantly pay attention to your platform and your ads, you have a business. These dynamics underpin a lot of the modern music landscape: labels, social networks, music services – they generally all play a game of scale.

In the past, the range of available business models for musicians was quite limited, so musicians often opted to play the game of scale in order to sell lots of low margin products to make a living.

Thinking small(er)

Imagine you could only ever have 1,000 fans (not necessarily ‘1,000 true fans‘). How would you turn that into a business? Your livelihood would depend on the patronage of these people: how would you win that patronage?

But a fanbase is not actually the starting point of either your strategy or the ‘user journey’ to becoming a paid fan. Thinking small requires you to question how people discover you and your music. What do you need to convey in order for people to understand that being a fan of your music is different?

Inhale, hold, exhale, wait, repeat.

Ask: What are you leading your fans towards? What can you ‘sell’ to them and at what price? Remember: the higher the price, the smaller you can keep your numbers. Small scale has considerable advantages: the communication overhead is smaller, signal to noise ratio is better, you personally feel much more connected to your fans and so will they, plus it will be easier to reach them. A common trap is that people focus on ‘how to get heard’ by new people without thinking carefully about ‘how will they hear me again?’ In the case of small scale, you could potentially drop everyone a personal note or even a call.

Be brave in imagining scenarios. What if 90% of your art was only available to your Patreon, Substack or OnlyFans subscribers?

Create scarcity early

Figure out what’s the smallest number of fans you could monetize in order to make a living. Making abundant what’s easy to replicate is typically a good idea, as it helps with word of mouth & leverages the network effect of platforms & organisations that play the game of scale. But pause there.

Hold your breathe for 4 seconds, breathe out for 4 seconds, wait, and breathe again.

Now consider the fan journey: if people discover you through word of mouth or a playlist, what do you want their first impressions to be? What type of relation do you want them to have with you & your music? Through what tools and platforms? How do you bring them there when they’re first introduced to you? What does this introduction look like?

Reward fans with scarcity and do so early on. Scarcity is everything that can’t be easily made abundant: a one-on-one call, limited edition items, an NFT, playing a video game with you online, etc. Align it with what you like & what your fans like. Consider how you reward: perhaps you reward everyone who completes certain steps in the fan journey with something scarce, which can be as simple as a personalized message or a public shout-out. Of course, in order to build a business model, you will also reward people with scarce items in exchange for currency.

You can’t start early enough. Set your goals. Think about scarcity. Think about your fan experience, even if nobody has heard your music yet. Build it out together with your community.

(And if you decide you want scale: that’s fine)

Exhale.

Free competes with paid and abundant competes with scarce

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Facebook recently launched a sound library including tracks you can use for free on videos. People criticized the concept in a music business discussion group (also on Facebook, ironically). I would hear the same rhetoric that people have when they say bands shouldn’t perform for free, because it’s not just a bad practice, it is also bad for your peers.

But let’s look at the reality that people in music are complaining about.

1. There are many different types of artists

There are always going to be people who find it awesome to see their music used by other people: even if they don’t get any money for it. They may be college students who are just happy to see their music travel. They may be people working full time jobs who do a little music on the side and don’t depend on the income. They may be professional producers who put out these tracks to libraries as a type of calling card.

Either way: there is always going to be free music and you will always have to compete with it.

2. Giving your music away for free can actually work

You have to have a monetization strategy at the end of this, but the easiest way to win attention online is to make great ‘content’ (in this case music). This content should be available with as few barriers as possible: which means making sure it’s available for free. The second part of your strategy should include steps on 1) how to hold people’s attention after you capture it, and 2) how to identify opportunities to monetize your fanbase (I wrote about it in detail in this thesis).

But sometimes you don’t need a strategy for monetization. It’s not easy to get signed to big labels nowadays and it usually requires you to show that you can build up your own audience. One of my favourite examples of someone who successfully leveraged free is Alan Walker. An EDM artist with tracks that have more plays than some of the most popular tracks from stars like Kendrick Lamar. How? He released his somewhat odd music through NoCopyrightSounds, which specialised in providing YouTubers and Twitch streamers with music they could use for free, without fear that their videos would get taken down. Eventually, they soundtracked the whole subculture and put a new sound in EDM on the map (read more).

3. AI is going to one up everyone

We are seeing amazing developments in AI. The most recent example is Google DeepMind‘s AlphaZero, which beat the world’s best bot in chess after spending just 4 hours practicing. Startups from Jukedeck, to Amper, to Popgun, to Scored are all trying to make music generation easier.

We already see more music being released than ever before, but so far it has still depended on human output. Through AI, music is already being untethered from human productivity. Standing out in abundance is a minuscule problem compared to what it will be 5 years from now.

Free music libraries are the least of your problem

There is no singular music business or industry. Everyone is playing by different rules and all those rules will be upended every time there’s a big shift in technology. From the record player, to the music video, to the internet, to AI and blockchain, music is the canary in the coal mine and you have to have a pioneer mentality or else you are falling behind every day.

The people who are one step ahead may be underground today, but some are the stars of tomorrow.

By all means, let us discuss the ethics. But be careful not to let your opposition blind you to the point where you cannot see how a new generation of music is thriving and leaving you behind. Because then it’s too late. For you.

How I got over a quarter million plays on my Soundcloud

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Building up a following as a DJ in the social web’s early days: a how-to for time travellers. 💫

Back when I was in college, my friend and I would go to a lot of parties. We also used to rap in a band together. Up until then, I had always been writing a lot of lyrics and would visit every hiphop gig in my city. When there was nothing better on, we’d go to student parties in a local club that gathered around 800 people every week, and in between dancing and chatting, we’d be rapping our lyrics over the beats of popular songs.

Then one day we stumbled upon the drum ‘n bass scene (with regular parties in my hometown being hosted by the renowned Black Sun Empire). I always thought electronic music was not for me, but it changed the way I looked at electronic music. Instead of trying to make beats on FL Studio, I started playing around with making electronic music. Then, one day, I stumbled upon a simpler tool that allowed me to mix tracks together. It carried the tacky name Mixmeister, but it is still my all-time favourite tool for making mixes from the comfort of (what was then) my bedroom.

I still wish a company like Native Instruments or Ableton would buy this firm, and release a better and renewed version of their software that hasn’t worked on my Mac for years. But I digress.

Up until then, I had been writing lyrics. Lots of them. Daily. I was involved in the “textcee” scene, which is how people participated in online rap back when it was still a little tricky to record and upload tracks. I participated in battles, topical challenges, wrote about complex (and often silly) subject matter, and really got my creativity out — all in text format. It was easy to distribute, light-weight, and it had its communities and forums.

Pre-Soundcloud

For DJs, it was harder. Bandwidth was not great, and back in 2006 or so, when I started, there were no good online communities. There was no Soundcloud, there was no Mixcloud, and YouTube only allowed videos of up to 10 minutes. My tools of choice, for hosting DJ sets, were YouSendIt, uploaded.to and MegaUpload. They were iffy and you always had to monitor that your files were not taken down, but they would do.

I thought a lot about the format. I never mixed over 80 minutes, because I wanted to make sure that fans (if I had any, and it was hard to tell pre-Facebook & Twitter) would be able to burn it to CDs and listen to it from their cars or home stereos.

I would write detailed information about my tracklists, for a number of reasons:

  1. It’s only fair that the creators of the music get acknowledged – especially since I was sharing their music without permission;
  2. If one of my listeners liked a track, I wanted them to be able to know what it was (there was no such thing as Shazam);
  3. I put detailed time markings, so that people would be able to identify the transitions and the amount of work I’d put into blending tracks together.

I would post them to the forums where I was already going (as well as my MySpace), where I already had my fans because of my texts, together with the links. Here’s an example of such a tracklist:

Then I started a blog on Blogspot to post all the mixes. People would subscribe via RSS and get the posts through their RSS reader. I even added a way to get email updates when the RSS feed would be updated, by using a popular tool at the time called FeedBurner. When posting my mixes to forums, I would also always include download links but also a link to the blogpost, so I could build up my followers there, too.

I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was doing really helped with SEO. If people were Googling those tracks, they’d often find my blog, because not everything was on YouTube, today’s major streaming platforms were non-existent, and the underground was not represented well on iTunes. By sharing my mixes everywhere, I was also generating a lot of backlinks. I was publishing multiple mixes per month. Throughout 2007 I published as many as 35.

Then Soundcloud arrived on the scene

I’m not sure how or when I discovered Soundcloud, but it must have been in its early days back in 2008. I managed to register my first name as my username, which I have held on to ever since, despite people trying to hack my account and even being hit by a trademark claim by an American rapper (after I rejected offers to buy it).

This is where things really started taking off. Now I was able to collect streams instead of downloads. It was so incredibly convenient. No wonder DJs flocked to the platform. All fans had to do now was hit play, but the option to download and listen in high quality was there too. On top of all that, I was able to timestamp my mixes in a much more interesting way: by commenting the tracks.

Something else happened too. By tagging my mixes, it was possible for others to find my work. And by browsing tags, I was able to find other DJs. This was a first. Never before had there been as big a community of DJs. Never before had it been so easy to connect to others. Never before had it been so easy for producers and DJs to connect from the comfort of their bedrooms.

I started listening to other DJs. Commenting everywhere. I continued the same strategy of tracklists and tagging, which maybe also helped my SEO on Soundcloud. But I also didn’t give up on my website until many years later when Facebook was more established and it was getting hard to get people to visit websites. Owning your audience was important, and I always knew this. I needed to have my own place to keep the people who are interested in what I do connected to me.

Then in 2009, Soundcloud changed the rules of the game for DJs.

The first big DJ revolt on Soundcloud

When Soundcloud started, they allowed everyone to upload 4 tracks every month. Tracks could be of any length, or at least long enough to fit a DJ set, but if you wanted to upload more than 4 in a month, you would have to get a paid account. This was great for DJs, but it didn’t last.

In October 2009, Soundcloud switched over to a model with a maximum amount of minutes per account. Even if you’d upgrade to the most expensive monthly package there was no way to get rid of the maximum. It caused an uproar (link to discussion with participation of the founders – but layout is messed up, because it’s a cached page). I participated and tried to be understanding. The model made sense for producers, who were more likely to spend money on Soundcloud. It sucked for DJs though. I wanted DJs to think about what kind of model would allow for Soundcloud to monetize them and very actively participated in the discussion.

The people who participated in that discussion got lucky, and it’s really a token of how user-centric Soundcloud was in those days. A link was shared with the participants, where they could list their accounts, and they were given 30 extra hours. For me, that was about 30 extra DJ sets and it has lasted me to this day (I never matched my 2007 streak) — and I should have probably mentioned this in my ‘Benefits of Being an Early Adopter‘ piece. And props to David Noel, who was Soundcloud’s community lead. The email exchanges (and exchanges on Soundcloud’s support community) that I had with him stuck with me. I was writing my thesis at the time and when I graduated and got into music startups those exchanges were a big inspiration for my early career.

Life goes on

As Soundcloud grew into the giant it is today, I grew along with it. My taste grew, my following grew, my tactics and strategies evolved, and I saw new genres flourish on Soundcloud, such as moombahton.

Before all the download-gate bullshit, that make you jump through hoops, follow random accounts, like Facebook Pages, etc., it was pretty convenient to get free downloads from Soundcloud. I actually set up an IFTTT script that would automatically download tracks I favourited to my Dropbox. This way I could discover new music while I was working at Zvooq by day, in passive mode, and then by night play around with the files in my mixes.

I participated actively in the new, emerging online scenes. Commenting on tracks and connecting to amazing new talent emerging from the internet, rather than from a particular network of DJs. This got me a lot of listeners. I started making mixes in which all tracks were available to download for free. This had value in different ways:

  1. I knew for sure that all DJs would be ok with me uploading this;
  2. People would listen to them, because they knew they can find and quickly download new tracks through there;
  3. I would link to all the tracks and afterwards comment on them to let people know I had featured their work. Sometimes they would share my music on their social media (this is before the repost function on SC).

If you’re not communicating your music this way, if you’re not networking with your inspirations, you’re not doing it right. This is probably how I got most of my plays from 2012 to now. Tactics and landscapes change, but some principles are true forever. Participate!

Other tactics not listed above:

  • Make playlists on 8tracks with the tracks of my mixes in order to promote my mix;
  • Try to win followers via social listening platforms like turntable.fm;
  • Make short mixes and post them on YouTube in order to find new audiences;
  • Facebook & Twitter accounts through where I would connect to segments of my audience.

My demise as a net-DJ

Then things got harder. It wasn’t any particular issue, but a lot of factors combined to halt me.

I switched to a Traktor S4 controller with Traktor software, so now I had to do all my mixes live. I’m a perfectionist, so this decreased my output. Digging also got harder: the communal nature of Soundcloud changed and a lot of DJs stopped offering their tracks as downloads (even when they’re not selling them). Others would put their stuff behind download gates, which just made it a pain in the ass to collect tracks and way more time-consuming. This also decreased my output.

As the number of mixes I put out decreased, so did the growth of my followers and my exposure to my audiences that were not directly connected to me. Followers ‘churn’ even when they stay part of your follower count. This means that followers go inactive on the platform they follow you on, so the follower count no longer translates to playback or other forms of engagement. This doesn’t matter so much when you’re new, but if you’re working on something for over a decade, it matters.

All of this compounded. It’s been about 5 years since I had a mix that got ~5k plays. And 8 years for 15k. But the lesson here is: to rack up following & plays, you can get lucky with a hit or just be insanely productive.

I’m at peace with what happened and now that I’m in Berlin, with talented friends as producers, plus friends in companies like Ableton and Native Instruments, I’m slowly getting back into DJing and producing. I haven’t put out a track in a decade, and no mix in 2 years, but I’m surrounded by the right people to get back into it… and do things right with all the experience I’ve collected plus that surrounds me. (if I actually end up having enough time — the irony of working in music)

Key takeaways

If I had to distill this into key lessons (and I do, because I owe it to you after reading 2000 words), these would be my main takeaways:

  • GET THERE EARLY. I got really lucky with being early to Soundcloud, but it also helped that what I was doing back then was not as common as it is now. Stay on top of developments in sounds and genres, and be slightly ahead of the curve, so you can shine a spotlight on up & coming talent. It will pay off when someone blows up.
  • BUILD YOUR FOLLOWING. Don’t trust in platforms: own your following. Connect them to your presence in many places, get their email addresses. Make sure your following is loyal, build trust, be consistent. If you’re slightly ahead of the curve, they know they’ll always discover new artists through you.
  • ALWAYS CREDIT PEOPLE. Scenes are small. Help each other. If you play someone’s music: list it. Don’t have time to provide a tracklist? Then you don’t have time to be a DJ. Sorry.
  • BE HELPFUL. This is connected to crediting: help people to understand the music they’re listening to. They’ll connect to you for this.
  • BE CONSISTENT & PRODUCTIVE. My best days were when I was a student. I don’t know how I found the time in between college and 12-20 hours of side jobs per week, but often I’d get home and get to mixing. I’d be doing stuff with music almost every spare minute. That’s the only type of dedication that really works.

I’ve had my run. Maybe I’ll do it again, but in a different way. I still like DJing, but prefer to do it live now. Besides, I have other ways to enjoy music now, such as my day job at IDAGIO, as well as MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE.

But to the generation that’s out there, on the cyber highways, hustling: best of luck & I hope this piece helps you.

What the End of the App Era Means for the Music Business

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The average smartphone user downloads less than 1 app per month, according to comScore. The era of apps is ending, and we’re moving in an era of artificial intelligence interacting with us through messaging apps, chatbots, voice-controlled interfaces, and smart devices.

What happens to music in this context? How do you make sure your music stands out? How do you communicate your brand when the interface goes from visual to conversational? And what strategic opportunities and challenges does the conversational interface present to streaming services?

 

How will we remember bands when interfaces are voice-controlled?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

I have phrased the above question as a problem for listeners, but this is a much bigger problem for artists.

The last few weeks have been filled with big news for those closely following voice interfaces. Amazon just announced a bunch of new devices, including a cheaper version of the Echo and a new Echo Plus, that utilize Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa. Google has upgraded its voice assistant, and has included it in new headphones which can automatically translate what people are saying, alongside a bunch of other devices that quite frankly look more exciting than Apple‘s. And to top that all off, multi-room hifi-set producer, Sonos, has just integrated Alexa in its speakers.

The problem in the title is actually easily solved for a listener: you can simply ask what’s playing. However you simply can’t be bothered to ask what’s playing every other song. So this problem is much more important for the artist, than for the listener.

If you haven’t used these devices yet, you may not be aware of some of the challenges, but here they are:

  1. It’s already hard to be remembered – how will people remember you when they don’t even see your name? On our phones or laptops, we occasionally see what’s playing. When we select a playlist, we often see what artists are on there. Something may stick. When we play ask Alexa to play Spotify‘s RapCaviar playlist, we don’t get clues of what’s playing. It’s basically the same as with radio, but at least there you have DJs who will tell you what’s playing. Any music or artist that you don’t care to Shazam will be forgotten.
  2. How do you stay top of mind enough for people to replay you? People often start playing music without looking at their phones or music libraries. This means they request what’s top of mind: artists they remember in that moment, or big brands in music and playlists, such as aforementioned Spotify playlist, Majestic Casual, or Diplo & Friends.
  3. How do you compete with ‘functional music’? The most popular ‘music’ apps on Alexa are all kinds of sleep and meditation sound apps. This list excludes Spotify and other music services, due to a deeper integration with Alexa, but it’s telling: people use these voice interfaces to request music to augment specific activities. Sleeping, bathing, meditating, cooking, whatever.

There are great solutions to these problems. And they’re not hard to figure out (people in hiphop have been shouting their name and their label’s name on tracks for decades).

I may do a follow-up on tactics and strategy for the age of “zero UI”, when the user interface is mostly controlled by voice and artificial intelligence, but for now, I’d love to hear about what you think. Ping me on Twitter: @basgras.

Painting: Wojtek Siudmak – “Le regard gourmand”

What music startup founders often get wrong

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Doing a consumer facing music startup is hard. Especially if you don’t understand what gives music value.

One of the hardest aspects of building music startups is the fact that you’re dealing with a two-sided marketplace scenario. This means you have to build up one side of your marketplace in order to attract the other. It requires creativity, or a lot of funding, in order to build up the music side of your marketplace in order to attract the consumers.

This two-sided marketplace makes decision making more challenging: when to focus on what? How do you convince artists to use yet another platform, before it can really show its value through a well-populated marketplace?

But that’s not the number one thing people get wrong.

The number 1 thing music startup founders get wrong is overvaluing their content

This is the most important lesson I’ve learned while working on 3 different music streaming startups and a bunch of other non-streaming music startups. Music in itself has little value to a user (bear with me). Your value proposition needs to be better than: “come here, there’s music” and often times music startups don’t have anything better than that.

People don’t care about the music. They don’t have a problem listening to music. And if they do, they’re likely not aware of it.

Ironically, when doing consumer-facing music startups the music is an extra. It’s assumed it’s there. Not having good music on your service will kill you, but having it does not distinguish you. It’s the same with restaurants: we don’t visit a restaurant because they have the best food necessarily, but because it’s around the corner, they have something we feel like, the staff is nice, etc. Music, on a music service, is like the basic expectations of what we expect in a restaurant: food, drinks, a place to sit, and a toilet. Not having music, like not having toilets, will kill you, but it’s not the reason why people visit you.

This is why so many music discovery apps fail, why so many social jukebox or recommendation apps fail: people don’t need more content. Music’s availability is not where the problem is, the context is where the problem is.

Building music startups is about the functionality you add. That’s what people pay for, that’s how people stick to your platform. Not the ideals of better-paid artists, not ‘high quality streaming’ – these are basic expectations by now. People need to find a very simple answer to the question: what can they do with your service that they can’t do elsewhere?

Then the next question is whether it’s distinctive enough. I think that’s why high quality streaming startups tend to remain marginal: lossless streaming on its own is not enough to convince large consumer segments. It has to be about behaviour, about function. By now, lossless streaming isn’t hard to find, so people look for the checkbox and then look at what else the platform has to offer.

At the peak of its popularity, Crazy Frog as a track on iTunes was $1. As a ringtone, it was $3. The functionality is what made it valuable. (hat tip to Ed Peto for bringing this up)

I also think 360-degree concert videos are not distinctive enough from other types of video. As a matter of fact, I think the inconvenience of them outweighs the value when compared to other types of concert videos.

Let’s widen the perspective.

The value of music is elusive

A single song can mean the world to someone. It can help sell millions of products, it can inspire revolutions.

But in an ocean of millions of songs, that are easily accessible, its value is close to zero for a person as a consumer. This is why nobody cares about your free download anymore.

So how do you get the value out?

You use the music to create the environment in which you shape the type of thing people are willing to pay for. Going back to the restaurant metaphor: music means your walls, your tables, your staff, your bathrooms, your building, your ambiance. People pay for that, but indirectly: by paying for the food you serve them in that context.

More:

Just to be really clear: I think music has immense value and I dedicate most of my waking hours to it. When I talk about ‘value’ in the above piece, I talk about it from the consumer perspective, from the marketing perspective, and as a USP for a product. I am not saying that people are not willing to pay for music. Millions already are, every month, through streaming subscriptions, but also digital and physical sales. And that’s where the problem begins for music startup founders: if people are already paying for music, what more can you sell them?

The short answer: sell functionality that augments experience and behaviour.