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When to leverage platforms, and when to own your audience

Posted on July 30, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Platforms born out of the web 2.0 wave of internet startups, like Facebook, Medium, and Spotify, have done a great job bringing huge audiences together. But building your presence on their platforms can come at the cost of them owning your link to your audience.

I was having a small discussion on Twitter with Arnon Woolfson, a smart strategist in entertainment, brands, and partnerships, which arose in response to Facebook now allowing you to link Groups to Pages, allowing for easier management of fan communities.

Personally, I see a lot of opportunity in this. Facebook is pushing groups as a feature (meaning it’s more visible in news feeds), and I’ve long been a proponent for making sure your fan base is interconnected. However, rightly so, Arnon had some objections, particularly regarding not having good control over your fan relationship. Music streaming coop Resonate‘s founder Peter Harris even went as far as to call it digital serfdom, which is a powerful analogy.

Digital serfdom

The idea is that in order to be able to attain success, you more or less have to leverage aforementioned web 2.0 platforms. As you leverage these platforms to build your connection to fans, the ones to get the most value out of that are not the participants of the relation, but the platform itself. This is a tragic reality of the dominant model for the social web as it has emerged in the last 15 years.

This is also something that will continue to be the status quo until platforms that offer an alternative distribution of value manage to create products and communities that are as sticky and as compelling as the ones they’re competing with.

When to leverage

I believe one of the key skills for people building up profiles in the digital age – whether bands, brands, or personal – is being able to move audiences from one platform to another. You should focus on 2 or 3 platforms at a time, leveraging the ones that work best for your specific purposes.

The number 1 thing young companies, brands, or artists cannot afford is friction. It has to be easy to discover your music or product. Then you have to do everything you can to make sure you can reach those people who discovered you a second time. For me, Twitter filled this role for a long time: discover my writings, follow me on Twitter, and then see my future writings. Then one and a half year ago, I decided to ‘cash out’ my Twitter following by converting them into a newsletter following. I now have over 1,500 email addresses of people who work in similar fields, and can reach them directly to their inbox (and do so every week).

Twitter stopped being effective for me. Less than 10% of my followers were actually seeing my tweets. Now, my weekly newsletters have an open rate of over 50%. For a long time I published my articles on Medium, and then that stopped being effective, so I stopped (I’ve noticed positive changes recently so I started publishing there again occasionally). I always used Medium as a platform to drive people to my newsletter.

If a platform stops being effective for you: stop using it.

Don’t invest too much time into it. Make sure you can reach your followers through other channels, and then focus on those channels that are most effective.

When to own

Focus on ownership, e.g. bringing fans to your own app or club, when that is more convenient for the fans too. Else you’re going to lose a lot of opportunities, because perhaps only 1 in 20 people will convert from Facebook to your app, and you’ll have put a lot of energy into something that simply doesn’t work well.

Spend a lot of time thinking about your long term goals and what kind of data you’d need in order to successfully measure how well you’re doing. Then look at whether the platforms you’re leveraging offer that data or not. If not, figure out a way that you might be able to drive behaviour from those places to other places where you can get that data. If that’s no good, then you need to figure out how to get your audience onto a platform that gives you more ownership.

This was one of my issues with Medium: I couldn’t get enough data on my audience. I didn’t really know where they were coming from, and didn’t know who was clicking what, what part of my audience was returning, etc. With my newsletter and own website I know this perfectly.

That’s why I was happy to hear about the Facebook Groups announcement, because I could start building a community for the newsletter there while still maintaining ownership over the data & relation to them. (the group is called MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE Backstage)

A golden rule?

Leverage digital serfdom. Even if you want to change that system: it’s easier to corrupt and co-opt it than to completely avoid it.

Create a place or channel you own: this can be through email, SMS, or other, but it’s important you get enough data from it, and you can provide people with an incentive to join your channel this way. Then when leveraging any platform, always figure out how you can use it to add people to your owned channels.

No need to reinvent the wheel. No need to build your personal ‘Facebook for fans’. Just use what works, while it works, and always be ready to move on to the next channel.

I’m a millennial and I share more music through Instagram Stories than any other medium

Posted on July 10, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

The top row on Instagram excites me. I check Instagram more often & only bother scrolling down the feed once a day, if I don’t forget. I’ve previously explained how Instagram’s Snapchat-cloned Stories functionality represents a great marketing opportunity for artists. Now I want to signify its broader importance to music, and social media in general.

Instagram's top row containing stories — Instagram’s top row containing stories

⚠️ You should be paying a lot of attention to Instagram Stories

Remember Facebook back in 2007-2010? Back when people were still posting Facebook updates in third person?

2008-style third person Facebook status update

Back then, Facebook was so compelling to just post stuff to. It was useful and fun, despite having to write status updates in third person being kind of awkward.

People would post a lot. Interaction would be high. Much of what people were posting was public. Then everyone’s family started to join. Random people from different moments in your life started adding each other. And more recently I’ve been getting more friend requests from people I know professionally than LinkedIn invites.

Facebook is not fun anymore.

Facebook is useful, but it’s not fun. People are more careful about what they choose to post. And now, people who have been using the internet since the 90s are reaching retirement age. Your family is going to be on Facebook all day; watching you.

Just posting quick thoughts on Facebook makes no sense anyway. My Facebook used to be full of “anyone want to grab a drink tonight?” but now you can’t be sure if that message even gets seen by friends. Facebook is not a timely medium anymore. If you want to do ‘spontaneous drinks’ with random friends, you better post a status update 2 days in advance.

Instagram used to be fun

The thing people used to say about Instagram, was that that’s where all the young people fled as their parents and other relatives started using Facebook. It was fun, because it was actually instant: you had a sense of what friends were up to. The filters made it easy to make decent photos and have them look ok, or artsy, or whatever.

But over time, people grew aware once more that what they post is there to stay, started feeling self-conscious, and a lot of the fun faded.

Fun is why people create

When people are having fun they interact, they dance, they talk, they laugh, they share, they kiss, and they open up. This is why Facebook was so good: people were mindlessly posting things because it was fun. Then they became self-conscious. This is why Instagram was so good, but then people became self-conscious. And this is what Snapchat absolutely nailed with their ephemeral content.

I doubt Snapchat invented the idea, but their timing of launching an app where users can share moments that expire every 24 hours was perfect. Their augmented reality filters gave people a way to keep sharing, to keep creating, even when they were uninspired. Super fun.

How Instagram became fun again

Facebook, which owns Instagram, tried to buy Snapchat, but their offer was declined. I guess the Silicon Valley version of “if you can’t beat them, join them” goes:

“If they won’t join you, copy them.”

So that’s what they did.

Instagram became fun again. Their filters are slowly becoming better, but Snapchat still has them beat: it doesn’t really matter. Instagram has this ecosystem of personalities that are looking to get discovered, looking to bind audiences to them, and Instagram is a great way to get new people to find you.

You use image posts with hash tags to get people to find you (and those lame auto follow/unfollow scripts). Instagram models also use Tinder‘s Instagram integration: they just go match with a lot of people and then some of them will convert to Instagram followers. And then, through Instagram Stories you keep your audience engaged with you, at least once every 24 hours.

How I’m using Instagram Stories

I tend to watch all of my friends’ stories. I’ve never really cared for following personalities or brands on Instagram, but most of my friends do that, and they also check those stories.

I post videos and photos to my stories basically daily, and often 5 to 15 a day. You don’t worry too much about what you post: it expires, and if it’s bad you know that people can just flick through stories fast anyway. This gives incentive to create powerful content too: you know it has to be fun from the first second, and you know having some diversity makes people come back to your stories often.

Things I post:

‘Moments’: being in the office on Sunday, travel, having lunch with friends, nice views, parties, etc.;
Hints: previews of what I’m working on (I actually added the title of this article to a story);
Calls: “anyone want to join me for…?” — it really doesn’t matter what the picture that goes with it is, as long as it’s fun and doesn’t confuse. I was looking for someone to join me to IKEA and I put that call in a pic with graffiti.
Time-lapse vids: these are a really fun way to put a lot of content in one short story and communicate action, e.g. moving from the office to a party on Friday;
Vids of vids: fits into moments, but basically if you’re at home watching artsy YouTube videos, weird Japanese commercials, memes, whatever, you can post quick snaps of that too — it helps with diversity & it’s FUN;
Creative: doing funky stuff with the filters, pinning surfers 🏄 to foam in the bath tub while the water flows, reality distortion like Hyperspektiv, using Pantone‘s photo app, etc.;

And then there is music.

Why I’m using Instagram Stories to share music

In that context, using Instagram Stories to share music makes so much sense, it’s so much fun.

When you post a 4 minute YouTube video to Facebook, nobody listens. Ok, maybe that 1 dude that always reacts with a lot of emoji, but nobody else. When you insert a short clip combined with an interesting visual into your Instagram Stories, you have a captive audience.

I wrote about Instagram Stories last month, and I don’t like repetition, but I’m so excited about this: the web is about doing what gets you the most attention, and the highest quality attention. I don’t know any other medium, other than my newsletter, that gives me a better type of attention than Instagram Stories.

And my newsletter is basically professional. So if it’s just about friends, then Instagram Stories is the best for me.

Plus people engage! Instead of acknowledging you by clicking a meaningless like button or heart icon, they actually reply to your public stories. With words! Like human beings!

They’ll say: “wow, that’s such a cool track, I didn’t know you were into that too!” or “did you know they have a concert soon?” or “what is this? can you send me more of this?”

Media changes music

The record changed music. MTV changed music. Then the internet changed music by allowing the emergence of global undergrounds. The playlist economy changed music because producers now optimize tracks to lower the skip rate, bringing the vocals into the first few seconds of the track.

The Stories format could further affect music, because it stresses the importance of making an impact with a song, even if people hear just a few seconds of any part of it. Good music has that already, so fingers crossed: we’ll see much more great music made.

Follow me on Instagram: @basgras

The Moby Problem: open letter to Matt Ogle’s successor at Spotify

Posted on May 29, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Almost every week, Spotify adds a Moby track to my Discover Weekly or Release Radar playlists – probably the playlists I listen to the most. The problem is: I don’t like Moby, and he’s not going away.

I’ve figured out exactly why Spotify keeps recommending me Moby. I’ve also figured out what types of user behaviour can discourage a recommendation system from continuing to recommend certain music. On Spotify, skips are weighted heavily. That is to say, if you skip a track, Spotify interprets it as you not liking a song or artist. I quite consistently skip the Moby tracks in my recommended playlists, but a week goes by and there he is again.

The Moby problem is not actually about Moby. It’s about the way recommendation algorithms work, and about the way we feed music data to them. The reason why Spotify keeps recommending me Moby is because I have a few Moby works in some of my playlists. I actually like his early rave stuff from the 90s, but I don’t care much for his chill out and trip hoppy stuff. Moby is perhaps also one of the most remixed electronic artists. Occasionally (and rarely), a really great remix sneaks into my playlists.

Hypothesis: playlists are weighted more heavily than skips

Three factors around playlists seem to be playing a role in Spotify’s assumption that I love Moby:

Moby’s inclusion in my playlists (passive)
Moby being played from my own playlist (active)
Moby being added to my playlists (active)

The weight in the algorithm should probably get heavier towards the bottom of this list, since it signals stronger intention and commitment. There may be many other factors at play too.

The fact that I like a couple of songs from an artist, some of which from over 20 years ago, does not mean I’d like to be kept up to date on his newest music though. Most of the Moby tracks that appear in my Release Radar are actually inter-genre remixes, so that really doesn’t make much sense either (e.g. if I like drum & bass, why would I like a techno remix of a drum & bass song?).

The remix problem

Then there’s another issue with remixes. One of my most-played playlists, called If Red Bull was Music, includes an EDM remix of a Moby track. It’s the only Moby track I listen to regularly, besides perhaps the Moby stuff in my Discover Weekly and Release Radar, when I forget to skip.

The problem is: it’s not a Moby track anymore. Sure, Moby is the original artist, but it doesn’t sound like a Moby track at all. It’s almost like categorizing a hiphop beat that samples Mozart as a piece of classical music.

It seems like Spotify is barely taking this into account when two artists can be lumped into the same category (electronic), even when that category is too broad to mean anything.

The solution

Let me banish artists! Give me a big fat ban button.

But hey, I’m a product person: I know the Moby problem is a symptom and you shouldn’t develop features to address symptoms — that’s how you kill a good product.

Spotify has a great product and Discover Weekly & Release Radar are a strong part of my music habits nowadays. So what it needs to do, is get better at understanding users’ actions and intentions, and how they weight them.

Personally, I think it’s important for them to look at how users interact with the music in their recommended mix playlists, and then weigh that much heavier. No engagement with a certain artist (or actually: skips), then that artist slowly becomes invisible, like in the Facebook news feed.

So to whomever is succeeding Matt Ogle, one of the creators of Discover Weekly, who just departed Spotify for Instagram, please solve my Moby problem. Let me escape this filter bubble.

(Just in case: hey Moby, I love your music, but most of it just doesn’t fit my taste so well. Keep doing what you’re doing!)

Online music is about to experience another MySpace moment

Posted on April 17, 2017 | 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:

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.

Music for the Snapchat generation: conceptualizing Music Stories

Posted on March 19, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Whether you’ve ever used Snapchat or not, you have felt the influence of the social app’s design choices. How will it shape the future of music?

Snapchat is perhaps best known for its photo filters

Snapchat created something called ‘Stories’. Stories are composed of photos and short videos that stay available for 24 hours. They allow people to get a look into other people’s days, including celebrities. The feature has been shamelessly copied by Facebook and integrated in Instagram, but the low-barrier channel-flicking content format is now seeing integration in unexpected places.

Forbes launched Cards, Huffington Post launched storybooks, and Medium launched Series. This led David Emery, VP Global Marketing Strategy of Kobalt Label Services, to ask the question: what will the Snapchat for music look like?

I decided to take a stab at the challenge and conceptualize how people may interact with music in the future.

How people engage with content

I specifically looked at Soundcloud, Instagram, and Tinder for some of the most innovative and influential design choices for navigating, sharing, and engaging with content. Soundcloud for the music, Instagram for visuals, and Tinder for how it lets people sift through ‘content’. I apologize in advance for all the times I’m going to refer to people on Tinder as ‘content’, but that’s the most effective way to approach Tinder for the sake of this article.

Learning from Soundcloud

One key strength of Soundcloud is that every time you open the app or web client there’s new content for you. Either from the artists you follow, through its Explore feature, or through personalized recommendations. People should be able to check out content as soon as they open the app.

Text is easy to engage with: you can copy the parts you want to comment on, quote it, and comment. With audio this is harder. Soundcloud lets people comment on the timeline of tracks, which makes it much more fun to engage with content. YouTube solves this problem by letting people put time tags in comments.

If you really love the content, you can repost it to your network. This makes the service attractive to content creators, but also to fans, because the feature gives them a way to express themselves and build up their profiles without actually having to create music themselves. Compare this to Spotify, where the barrier to build up your profile as a user is much higher due to the energy that you have to put into creating (and maintaining) playlists.

Recommendations mean that people can jump in, hit play and stop thinking. Soundcloud is one of the few music services that seem to have found a great balance between very active types of behaviour, as well as more passive modes.

Learning from Instagram

There’s a reason why I’m highlighting Instagram instead of Snapchat. Instagram has two modes of creation and navigation. You can either scroll down your main feed, where people will typically only post their best content OR you can tap one of the stories at the top and watch a feed of Snapchat-like Stories. Tap to skip!

Instagram makes it really easy to create and navigate through content. Stories’ ephemeral quality reduces the barrier to sharing moments (creating) and makes people worry less that they’re ‘oversharing’. Snapchat’s filters, which Instagram hasn’t been able to clone well (yet), make it easy to create fun content. People open up their camera, see what filters are available, and create something funny. No effort, and it’s still fun for their friends or followers to watch.

Learning from Tinder

The brutal nature of dating services is that profiles (people) are content, which also means that the majority of users will not be interested in the majority of content offered on the service. So you can do two things: make going through content as effortless as possible and build a recommendation engine which delivers the most relevant content to users. Tinder’s focus on the former made them the addictive dating app they are today.

Quickly liking and disliking content is like a bookmarking function which also helps to feed information to recommendation algorithms.

If you really want to dive deeper into a piece of content, you can tap to expand it (open profile), but basically the app’s figured out a great way to present huge amounts of content to people, of which the majority is ‘irrelevant’, and make it engaging to quickly navigate through it.

Must haves

The key qualities of social content apps right now are a high volume of content, easy creation and interactivity, and fast navigation. Bookmarking and reposting allows for users to express themselves with little effort.

Breaking it down

This is the most important feature for the end user. There are already a lot of good services in order to access large catalogues, to dive deep, to search for specific content… Music Stories should not try to compete with that. Instead it is a new form of media, which needs to be so engaging that it will affect the creative decisions of artists.

Soundcloud’s feed is a good example, but so is Snapchat’s main Stories screen (pictured below). Both show the user a variety of content that they can engage with immediately by hitting the play button or by tapping on a profile image.

The content in the app needs to be bite-size so users can get a quick idea of the content immediately and decide whether they like it or not. If yes, they should be able to go deeper (eg. Tinder‘s ‘tap to expand’) or interact, like reposting. If not, they need to be able to skip and move on.

When a user has an empty content feed, you can serve recommendations. When a user went through all new content already, you should invite them to create something.

You want people to be able to lean back, but ideally you’ll pull people into your app a few times a day and get them to browse through some fresh content. To get them to re-open the app, there needs to be meaningful interaction. That can come in the form of swipes, comments, or remixing.

One of the cool things about Snapchat is that you can discover new filters through your friends. Think:

“Woah, you can be Harry Potter? I want to be Harry Potter, too!”

So if we extend that to Music Stories, creating some music idea needs to be as simple as making yourself look like Harry Potter or face-swapping with a painting or statue in a museum.

Snapchat is why millennials visit museums. (jk)

This means that artists should be able to add music to the app in a way that allows people to remix it, to make it their own. All remixes can stay linked to the original. You could even track a remix of a remix of a remix in the same way you can see repost-chains on Tumblr.

How do you make it easy to create and to interact with music?

That’s the biggest challenge. People are shy or may not feel creative. You could let them use images or video (like Musically), or you could let them replace one of the samples in the beat with a sound from their environment (imagine replacing the “yeah” from Justin Timberlake‘s SexyBack with your own sound), or you could let them play with the pitch of the vocals.

Options need to be limited, easy-to-understand and manipulate, and inviting. It should be as simple as swiping through Snapchat filter options.

Through creation and interactivity, users build up a profile to show off their music identity. Content is ephemeral, unless you choose differently (like on Instagram). I’d go for ephemeral by default and then give users the option to ‘add to profile’ once content reaches a certain engagement threshold. This will need a lot of tweaking and testing to get right.

Interactions are not ephemeral. Reposts go straight to profile, until you undo them.

Stories are all about being able to jump through content quickly. Tinder’s Like / Dislike function could work in Music Stories as a ‘skip’ and ‘bookmark’ function. By letting people bookmark stuff they’ll have content to come back to when they’re in a more passive mode. Perhaps an initial Like would send music to a personal inbox which stays available for a limited time, then when you Like content that’s in that inbox it gets shared to your profile, or saved in some other manner.

Music Stories should NOT be a Tinder for Music. Tinder’s strength is to let users navigate through a lot of content that doesn’t appeal to them, while making the interaction interesting. It’s an interesting model that manages to create value from content that may be irrelevant to some users.

Translating to features

The next steps are to start translating the concept into features. This means user stories (what you want users to be able to do with the app) need to be articulated clearly. Mock ups of specific interactions need to be drawn and tested with audiences. Challenges need to be considered, like the classic issue of getting people to start creating content when there’s no audience in the app yet (Instagram solved this by letting people share content to other social networks).

Now I invite YOU to take this challenge and develop the vision for Music Stories.

(Don’t forget to read David Emery’s original post, which prompted me to write this piece)

Is killing privacy the best we can do against secondary ticketing?

Posted on March 6, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

In its push to become a data-driven business, event organisers smell opportunity by connecting ticketing to real identities.

It’s estimated that the market for secondary ticketing is worth $1bn in the UK alone. It’s a problem for fans and artists, since tickets are often bought in bulk by resellers and sold at a much higher rate to fans. None of that added margin goes to the artists (although there are some allegations…).

Recently, Iron Maiden opted to go ‘paperless’ for their UK arena tour in order to curb ticket touting. With success:

“In 2010, 6,294 tickets appeared overnight on three of the major resale platforms — Viagogo, Seatwave and Get Me In! — on the day of sale. In 2016 this had dropped to 207, all on Viagogo, as Live Nation/Ticketmaster had agreed delist the tour at Iron Maiden’s request.”

The tour didn’t go fully paperless, and paper tickets were available, but came with strict requirements towards the fans:

Tickets must carry the name of the purchaser;
Ticketholder must present ID and credit card at the door.

While effective, this is worrying and certainly not a “victory for concertgoers” as Iron Maiden manager Rob Smallwood called it.

It’s not just ticketing: privacy is under attack from all fronts. Many events have decided to go ‘cashless’, requiring people to top up chips in special event wristbands. This way, you know exactly who is ordering what, where, how much, and at what time of the night. If you’re a large organisation like Live Nation, you can build up an extensive profile of users over time.

Valuable data, which may help secure sponsors for alcoholic beverages and helps you to target fans with specific offers, but that data comes with a great responsibility.

Privacy in the age of artificial intelligence

The first multi-day conference and festival I attended that was nearly completely cashless was Eurosonic Noorderslag, earlier this year. It’s a music business conference and showcase event, and has lots of bands playing every night in nearly every bar and club in its host city, Groningen, in The Netherlands. It presented cashless payments as a convenience (ie. to reduce queues at bars).

I immediately researched ways to opt-out and found no good way. It was possible to ‘anonimize’ your chip, but you still have to charge it with your bank card, which ties your identity to it through the transaction records. I had good reason to opt-out and so do you.

On its own, “Bas entered venue X at 21:03 and drank a beer at bar Y at 21:24” seems like useless information. And it probably is. I’m not from a country or culture that frowns upon alcohol, so I’m unlikely to be blackmailed with such a bit of information. However, it is possible for someone to claim they met me there and try to pull some sort of scam. Or worse, for someone to claim they are me by using anecdotal evidence based on these random bits of data, and then scamming someone else.

Criminals are moving from the higher risk ‘traditional crime’ into ‘cybercrime’ which is perceived as lower risk.

More than how someone might use a specific data point, what we should really be worried about is larger data leaks. There are parties that try to collect all information from big leaks. Some use it for good, like Have I Been Pwned, where you can search your email address to see if your login info of any site has leaked. But some people store it for more malicious purposes.

Over time, patterns can emerge in these data sets. These become easier to identify through machine learning algorithms, which can go through large datasets faster than a person could, and can get better over time at making sense of data. Many great ones are open source, like Google’s TensorFlow.

Now, your attendance of live events and what exactly you do there can be tied to your hacked LinkedIn or Dropbox account. Whoever holds that data has power over you.

Artificial intelligence could be trained to send hypertargeted scam emails, which use all the data available about you to trick you. This could result in ransomware being installed on your computer, which often means your hard drive is encrypted and locked and the key to decrypt your data is only turned over after paying a certain fee (usually done through Bitcoin, which makes it harder to track the perpetrators).

This could happen to your phone, but also to your car, or any other devices which are likely to be connected to the internet in a few years from now.

The important take-away is that the more data someone has about you, the wider their ‘attack vector’ becomes. This means they have more paths to target you. Any data point on its own usually doesn’t have much value, but it’s when large amounts of data get combined that value emerges. Facebook, a data company, has a market cap of nearly $400bn.

Privacy in music should not be an afterthought

We have learned a lot from events. We’ve learned not to use biker gangs for security. We’ve learned to have first aid staff at festivals that are trained to dealing with the effects of alcohol poisoning and mishaps with drugs. We have come a long way to providing experiences that are exciting and safe at the same time.

Now it’s time to worry about our guests’ safety before they arrive, and after they leave our events. Let me be clear:

If you request your guests to sacrifice their privacy for ‘convenience’, and you get hacked, leading to people getting blackmailed or scammed, it is YOUR responsibility;
If you request this data from guests, make it clear and easy for them to find out how you’re storing the data, what you’re using it for, and when it will be deleted. Don’t just refer to some boilerplate privacy policy full of legalese;
When things go wrong, be honest about it and communicate it immediately, so people can take security measures;
Never store data about people for longer than you need it. Not storing data is the best way to prevent it from being leaked.

(small sidenote: if anyone ever sent you a picture or scan of their passport, go delete that file and email now)

What can you do as a fan?

Do whatever best protects your privacy. If it feels like you’re being a pain in the ass by requesting an anonimized wristband, great. You should be a pain in the ass. Pain is a great motivator for change. So by all means, request information about how your data is stored and protected, how long it’s stored, for what purpose, etc.

Perhaps the hardest part is willing to skip concerts that don’t have privacy-friendly options. As a consumer we should understand that solving ticket touting by sacrificing guests’ privacy is not a solution. It just shifts the issue and places an additional cost on the consumer on top of the ticket price.

Event organisers need to find a way to mitigate or at the very least minimize that additional cost. This means ticketing organisations have to take measures to invest in technology which helps protect and secure guests’ privacy. But they need to feel pressure, or pain, in order to that.

Data, for ticketing companies, is the same as it is for malicious hackers: the more data you can get on a person, the more valuable it becomes.