Making a tune is now as easy as taking a photo and uploading it to Instagram. With its 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram has made photographers out of all us. As phone cameras improved, the Instagram filters did the rest. Music has spent most of this century battling the ghosts of piracy. The major labels first reinvented themselves as licensing models, using the IP in their catalogues to generate revenues that has propelled them back to pre-Napster times. More recently, everybody in the industry has become a digital media company: Warner invests heavily in gaming, musicians like Rihanna and Jay Z build out their brands far beyond music, and every indie artist has to navigate the digital world from social media to direct-to-fan strategies. Alongside these developments music creator tools proliferate. From Myspace to Soundcloud and now TikTok, sharing and discovering music has undergone changes in relation to the underlying medium. Each new medium led to new structures in pop music. Now, the next step is that everyone can become a music creator and it won’t be long before we see a medium where we consume music as readily as we adapted our thumbs to scroll through miles of photographic content each year.
Creator tools
In November 2020 MIDiA Research already claimed that creator tools were the present of the music industry. They showed that there were 14.6 million music creators using apps and platforms like YouTube and Soundcloud, but also Vampr, Bandlab, Loopcloud, Splice, Boomy, and many more.
These tools range from a focus on distribution to collaboration and various stages of production like loops, mastering, and effect. If you look to collaborate in real time, you can. If you want to easily get your track mastered there’s no need to go to a studio. If you need a specific sound, there’s now any number of sample libraries you can turn to.
That number of 14.6 million calculated by MIDiA is sure to have grown in the past year. Similar to the number of tracks released on the streaming services, roughly 60,000 per day back in February, which will also keep increasing. If you look at an app like Bandlab, you see the potential wave of content generated through creator tools: users create 11 million tracks each month. That’s the total number of tracks released to streaming services over a period of 6 months. In other words, not all of those tracks are released. As these numbers continue to grow, the music industry will need to change to adapt.
How to stand out from the crowd? Or should you even aspire to it?
It’s already difficult to make sure you get your new track heard when you are one of 60,000. If you are an indie you may never get the chance to make it onto those New Music Friday playlists. A study released earlier this year shows how “independent label artists are getting far less than their fair share of access to the most popular playlists.” This kind of issue underlines the current power structures in music. But if we transpose the number of tracks currently released on Bandlab in a month to the DSP format, it could well be that that whole system would simply break down. Moreover, if we take the step to consider a billion music creators using an app like Bandlab each month the volume of created music would be close to unimaginable.
In a way, this is happening already. TikTok has more than one billion video views each day, and most of those include music. Snap, through it’s acquisition of Voisey, now has millions of users creating tracks each day to add to their snaps. And yet, there’s no dedicated medium for music yet that has attracted these one billion MAUs. Once we get there, though, it won’t be about standing out from the crowd of recorded music anymore. Instead, each creator will be subject to the same things anyone on a current social media-platform is: algorithms and community. It’s in the latter that we may see a different effect of music growing to the size of photography.
Since music is inherently collaborative, it means that all those creator tools also have these features built into them. Some of them in a very direct way, such as Vampr, others more indirectly, like Splice. But any medium looking to tap into people’s deep-seated desires for making music will have to build to cater to niches. As content will get churned out at an ever greater number people will find each other in shared loves of musical nooks and crannies and find ways to express their identities in relation to that.
Existential fright
Going back to the comparison with Instagram and photography we can use the development of commentary on the medium and digital photography more broadly to sketch responses to a billion music creators. 10 years ago the journalist and artist Chris Wiley wrote that:
“It is indisputable that we now inhabit a world thoroughly mediatized by and glutted with the photographic image and its digital doppelganger. Everything and everyone on earth and beyond, it would seem, has been slotted somewhere in a rapacious, ever-expanding Borgesian library of representation that we have built for ourselves. As a result, the possibility of making a photograph that can stake a claim to originality or affect has been radically called into question.”
So, in a way we’re moving into a world that’s thoroughly mediatized by the sonic in the form of melodies, beats, hooks. Some of these put together by people calling themselves artists, others by people who quickly threw together a few loops. The former might be looking to make a living from their art. The latter might just be enjoying themselves and have no ambition to share their creations beyond a few friends and like-minded people. The question of originality remains pertinent.
That question, however, isn’t new to this situation. Pop music simply doesn’t exist beyond a limited number of chords. And we’ve seen it before, of course. The advent of radio was thought to kill live music consumption – it didn’t. TV was then the death of radio – instead radio revenues increased. The music video would then kill the radio star – radio revenues increased again. The internet doomed the recorded music industry – and piracy had a serious impact, but revenues are now back to where they were 20 years ago. With each new medium, each new iteration of distribution, musicians kept creating and finding audiences.
Final note
Just as smart-phone cameras and Instagram filters have influenced a generation of photographers, so will the current boom of creator tools shape the sound of music for the next decade or so. It’s simply not necessary anymore to have any musical training in order to create music. Apps like Boomy allow everyone to play around intuitively and create sounds that feel like music. Similarly, Bandlab has a loop feature that allows anyone to create something with a pleasant enough melody. Should that lead to existential questions about what music is? Probably not. Instead, we would do well to focus on new niches popping up around shared interests in certain stems, riffs, drum rolls, etc. We may look at and listen to music differently if everyone can make it, but we won’t enjoy it less.
Social media is designed to be addictive. By monopolizing aspects of your social life, it also locks you in. Here’s how to break the cycle.
Concentration of power
My reasons for not being on Facebook and soon deleting WhatsApp and Instagram are manifold. I won’t go into them here, but I will highlight the deciding factor and hopefully pre-empt common whataboutisms. Facebook Inc., which runs FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and other social brands, is too powerful.
If all of the above were separate apps, there’s a good chance I’d be using all of them actively. They’re not, so one company controls nearly all of my digital social footprint and that of billions of others around the world.
Do I trust them? Not really. For many of the reasons you can read on DeleteFacebook.com. Meanwhile I, together with billions of other users, am building the value Facebook extracts through its advertising business. One day, I decided to stop rewarding the company and deactivated my Facebook account, before eventually deleting it. In the next weeks, I’m finally deleting Instagram and WhatsApp too.
For simplicity, I’ll be referring to Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and other brands of the social media giant as Facebook Inc. throughout this article.
Delete, deplatform
The first thing you should know about leaving Facebook Inc. is that you’re not just deleting. Instead, you’re switching platforms. You’re still going to get your news from somewhere, have digital social interactions with friends, need info about events, etc. This is the value you’re getting out of the platform. So, your first step is:
Step 1: start building value in places other than Facebook Inc.
A good example of this are events. Bonus: this example also allows me to address the local underground scenes here in Berlin (and around the world) who have many issues with Facebook policies ranging from female nudity, sex work, to human rights more broadly. Too often, the only place where one can find information about a rave doubling as a fundraising event for marginalized people is on Facebook. If we know and acknowledge that Facebook is problematic, why are we giving Facebook the information monopoly?
Giving Facebook Inc. an information monopoly accomplishes two things:
It makes it harder for you to ever leave the platform, since all your audience & connections are on Facebook Inc.
It makes it harder for other people to leave the platform.
Whether it’s for solidarity or for yourself, it’s time to build audience outside of Facebook. I recommend a mix of channels owned by various companies, plus something owned just by you: phone numbers and email addresses. For the former category, depending on your purpose, think LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Reddit, etc.
Start deplatforming yourself.
Build value elsewhere.
Free yourself and others.
Limit the data
Everything you do on Facebook Inc.’s apps is tracked. Everything you type (even if you delete it & never post it), scrolling, tapping, zooming, pausing on stories, everything you see, share, like, geolocation, photo metadata, contacts in your phone, etc.
Step 2: limit the data you give to Facebook Inc.
This is basically as simple as interacting with the apps less. There are a bunch of ways to do that. You can limit the screen time of specific apps, you can set your phone display to black & white to make apps less interesting, you can just delete the mobile apps and go mobile web / desktop only.
For me, this meant I stopped posting to professional communities on Facebook Groups years ago. They’d been really valuable for me, since I moved between countries a lot and groups were a great way to network with music professionals wherever I was. Due to step 1, I already had many of these people on my newsletter & other social media platforms and figured I would just have to write so well, that this group would make sure my reach would extend to the group I was leaving behind.
Take a vacation
Before I even considered deleting, I would occasionally deactivate my Facebook account (and recently did the same with Instagram). This allowed me to disappear from the site temporarily and see:
How the social media designed to be addictive was nested into my daily habits and thinking patterns.
Whether I would feel better without it.
What information I would miss.
What social connections I would miss.
Which accounts I created using Facebook (e.g. Spotify).
Step 3: deactivate your Facebook Inc. accounts for short periods of time
To most of us, it feels daunting to delete these accounts, so go experience what it’s like. Deactivate your account and remove the app. If after a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks you feel like you want to return, you can reactivate your account.
During one of my first breaks a friend asked me a question I hadn’t considered: wouldn’t I miss the ability to visit a deceased family member’s profile? It held me back from deleting, but after months of going without Facebook I realized I didn’t care, made a digital backup just in case, and decided that I needed to deplatform myself asap if I was seriously considering giving Facebook a role in how I remember a dead relative.
Backup
I’ve posted thousands of bits of information to Facebook Inc.’s services. This includes photos from all the places I’ve lived in, videos, chats with friends, etc. This is how I got the most value out of this social media: as a place to collect, share and create memories. Now it’s time to take that data back.
Step 4: download your data from Facebook Inc.
Facebook’s various services have functionality that let you download all your data. Do this. Review your data. Consider what’s important to you and check if it’s in there: photos, likes, private messages, etc.
Make sure to have more than one copy of this data. I have mine on multiple hard drives & a copy securely in the cloud (basically: a digital hard drive).
You will want to follow this step multiple times: once to review all the data, so that you know if anything needs to be backed up more manually and once before you finally delete your account.
Contact
If you’ve been deplatforming yourself for a while (see step 1), you’ll probably have something like 10-40% of your contacts on platforms outside of Facebook’s realm. Through experimenting with deactivation, you should have a good grasp of who you care to stay in touch with (probably not that person who you haven’t seen for 15 years, only post a yearly ‘happy birthday’ to, and then enjoy the photos of their dog the rest of the year).
Step #5: make sure you stay in touch with the people you value
This step is probably the most work. It involves sharing & requesting contact info from people. Whereas on Instagram & Facebook, it’s easy to post updates in your feed so that people know what you’re doing, on WhatsApp you’ll need a more one-on-one approach. When direct messaging people, you’ll probably get questions about why you’re leaving. While your decision to simply not do business with Facebook Inc. anymore is simple and straightforward, people might challenge you. So make it easy for yourself and have a brief explanation or account deletion epitaph you can link to (preferably hosted somewhere outside of the Facebook Inc. realm).
Be firm: not wanting this company to dominate and monopolize your online social life is perfectly reasonable. If people want to chat about it, you can always say you’d be happy to do so on Telegram, Signal, or Zoom.
Delete yourself
Then comes the moment of liberation. Whereas a deactivation means Facebook Inc. can keep your data and use it for their extractive business model, a deletion in many countries requires Facebook to actually remove your data permanently.
Step #6: delete your Facebook Inc. accounts
There are a few important details you should not miss here and hopefully deactivating your accounts have prepared you for this: make sure to unlink your Facebook account from other accounts. If you created accounts using Facebook, make sure to have an alternative login method for them.
Here’s a guide to help with the rest, including the need to manually delete things shared in social contexts, that might not get removed when you delete your account.
A note for those who want to, but can’t
Unfortunately, deleting social media profiles can be a privilege. It makes certain things a lot harder, especially if you depend on social media for your business, as so many in music do. In my case, it means saying no to freelance jobs I was previously able to say yes to.
The most important step in this whole piece is step #1. Build value elsewhere. Instead of Facebook Groups use Discord communities. Instead of Facebook Events use Resident Advisor or your genre’s equivalent. Use both whenever necessary.
If you can’t afford to leave the platform yourself, at least make it easier for others to do so. This will eventually also decrease your own reliance on Facebook. Every little bit helps.
For marketing professionals reading this: consider being explicit about setting up campaigns that happen outside of the Facebook realm. It’s a great differentiator. A lot is possible with a mix of Twitch, YouTube, Clubhouse, Discord, Twitter, Telegram, WordPress, Shopify, Patreon, Medium, Substack, Bandcamp, etc.
All of this may take time
I first started deactivating my Facebook in 2015. Now, 6 years later, I feel confident enough to pull the trigger on Instagram and WhatsApp too, despite needing the former for professional reasons and the latter for family groups.
Start now. Take back power step by step. You can do each of the above steps without having to follow through with any subsequent step. They all have standalone benefits.
While user-centric payments definitely make the landscape fairer and realign incentives by making sure the money generated by fans of certain artists actually end up in those pockets, it’s definitely not a silver bullet solution to make up for the difference between desired and actual revenue artists receive from streaming services. In other words: for the vast majority of artists, the immediate change in royalties from a shift to user-centric would be negligible.
Furthermore, it’s complex to negotiate, as SoundCloud’s VP of content partnerships Raoul Chatterjeepointed out during a recent session of the UK streaming inquiries:
“The whole investigation into user-centric is a very detailed and complex investigation that needs to be taken. It’s one potential path we’re exploring… and it would require industry-wide conversations and support to be impactful.”
SoundCloud is doing ok (especially compared to a few years ago), is reporting growing revenues, but it’s losing relevance. SoundCloud does not have time for lengthy negotiations. As a platform, they’ve lost their footing at the center of music subcultures and the longer it takes for SoundCloud to regain its position, the harder it will become.
Keep the lawyers at the (virtual) negotiation tables, but in the meantime, claw your way back.
Firstly, where do music scenes go to connect to stay connected with each other in 2021? I’ve argued that Instagram has usurped community building from SoundCloud. Of course it should be noted that TikTok is playing an increasingly important role there, especially for certain genres. To a lesser degree, groups on Facebook, Telegram, and Discord form places for people to share their latest tracks, get feedback, find people to do collabs or exchange remixes with, etc. As such, they’re also great places for fans to keep track of the latest developments in music.
Secondly, where did musicians turn when they struggled to make ends meet with just the income from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc.? They turned to Bandcamp in a massive way. SoundCloud, with its creator-centric roots, wasn’t well-positioned yet to accommodate these artists, because what it offers artists hasn’t changed much from its early beginnings. In 2020, being creator-centric meant helping creators make money – and SoundCloud didn’t have much to offer beyond what it offered artists since the service’s early days. That is: a place to upload your music and present it to other people. That addresses a pre-2015~ market need: making music easy to access. Access has been solved. Monetization hasn’t.
Another place that made music easy to access, YouTube, has been SoundCloud’s most important competitor. YouTube, since its early days, has offered social functionality similar to SoundCloud’s, in that one can follow creators (once innovative! Spotify only launched this 4+ years after launch), comment on tracks, and see other users’ profiles.
By 2021, YouTube’s suite has evolved to include membership clubs with monthly fees, monetization through content identification, and livestream monetization through social features that make fans more visible in the chat (similar to Twitch).
This is the landscape SoundCloud must address & find relevancy in.
SoundCloud was strongest when it catered to its early adopter users or users who exhibit that type of behaviour. Behaviour commonly associated with early adopter users is word of mouth, being a power user, and a willingness to overlook certain flaws as long as the product delivers exceedingly well on its core value proposition. These users are not well-addressed, since the value proposition has diluted over time in order to target wider audiences (e.g. through its Spotify-like subscription service). SoundCloud has made some great initiatives to woo creators in recent years, but the unifying aspect for all users on the platform is its listening experience – and that’s a social one.
People go to SoundCloud to discover new music. To find what’s ‘Next Up’ before it’s uploaded anywhere else. If you’re into a particular type of music, you’ll follow many of the same artists as other fans of that music and you’ll see some of those fans appear in the timeline comments on tracks.
Timed comments on Masayoshi Iimori’s track Alcohol.
On profiles, which have the same feature sets for fans and for artists, this social functionality is also present by displaying who someone follows and is followed by, as well as any tracks they’ve liked and comments they’ve left. For users who don’t upload any music, the main profile real estate consists of reposted tracks (similar to a Twitter user who only retweets). All of that is social.
Do the majority of users explicitly engage in social behaviour on the platform? Unlikely and it’s probable that a small minority of users create most of the (visible) activity, as on Twitter. SoundCloud is a community product where a minority of users create the value that the majority of users get off of the platform. Unlike Spotify, which tries to help users get as much value out of the catalogue as possible, SoundCloud should focus on the value users can get out of communities and the artist-fan relationship.
Lessons from gaming
This is not dissimilar to what fueled the success of games like Farmville or Clash of Clans. In free-to-play games, the majority of users will never spend any money. Instead, they create value for the ecosystem, so that a minority of users becomes willing to spend (big).
In order to leverage these dynamics, and create revenue for artists, SoundCloud must double down on social. How?
Step 1: Leaderboards on tracks and profiles. Show off the top fans of tracks and artists. Dedicated fans will want to earn their spot as the top fan. It’s not just fans: if you’re part of a certain music scene and want to make sure you’re ‘seen’, you’ll play new tracks on repeat, so you appear on the leaderboards on day 1. (just imagine K-pop stans, if you find it hard to imagine how fan communities would approach these types of dynamics)
This functionality already exists inside the stats dashboards artists have access to. All SoundCloud needs to do is make leaderboards visible on the various pages and perhaps create a setting so people can exclude themselves from public leaderboards.
Screenshot of the top listeners of a particular track in a 7-day time period (stats dashboard).
Step 2: Track and profile pages as real estate. Leaderboards create social competition and a way for fans to earn status. Now comes the monetization: let fans pay to claim pages in a non-obtrusive way, similar to how YouTube’s Super Chat feature lets you claim visibility in a chat during a livestream. You could let artists set prices or create some type of market dynamic for this.
Step 3: Place activity & payment on the same currency. As in gaming, certain users will spend more time creating value through activity and other users will fuel the economy through payments. By creating an on-platform currency, SoundCloud could reward active users with tokens that accrue value as people purchase tokens to spend on the platform with ‘real money’.
The tokens could then help artists mint their work as NFTs and create a more sophisticated dynamic for ‘tracks as real estate’. Basically, artists could earn money from playback, from selling tracks as NFTs, and by making commissions off of people speculating and reselling music NFTs (a commission percentage can be defined in the smart contracts associated with an NFT). From here, SoundCloud could come to function more as a protocol and create a metaverse-friendly version of its other early value proposition: music playback that embeds everywhere. This time with music as a vanity item that all can enjoy, but can only be owned by one person at a time while always staying associated with the creator – even when NFT ownership transfers from one person to another.
As the user-facing part of the platform shifts towards creating more value from the artist-fan relationship and the activity inside fan communities, subcultures, and scenes, lawyers can negotiate with industry gatekeepers to change royalty administration to a user-centric model.
Some of the above is actually what the Audius protocol is trying to accomplish. You could also go a lot further than what I’ve described, as Audius intends and as Mat Dryhurst explored in his essay SoundCrowd: Tokenizing & Collectivizing Soundcloud. Long term blockchain visions aside, for 2021, being a creator-centric company means being a company that helps monetize, so SoundCloud must focus on the short term and employ an “opportunities multiply as they are seized” type of strategy. That means: not standing still to evaluate distant forks in the road, because what you do along the way will determine the paths you can take from that fork.
User-centric is too slow for SoundCloud
Is user-centric streaming the right thing to do? Yes. Will it help SoundCloud in the short term? No, because artists will not see significant enough returns in order for them to drive more traffic to the platform.
Spotify is cool.. but @Bandcamp put double glazing on my house this year.
How can SoundCloud be as significant to artists as Bandcamp was in 2020?
SoundCloud must emphasize its community nature, since that’s how the type of value can be created that part of its core users will pay for. That won’t be most of the audience that SoundCloud has been marketing its music streaming subscription to (which can’t beat catalog-centric Spotify or value gap YouTube).
The platform must be selective about what type of behaviour it wants to cater to and the value it can create out of that. For that, it makes sense to use its DNA as a social music platform – something that Spotify, Apple (through Ping & Connect), and others have not been able to figure out. It needs to focus on the users that can amplify community excitement around significant monetization functionality and help make SoundCloud as culturally relevant as it was half a decade ago.
Signed,
A long term SoundCloud user with a 3-letter username: Bas (and more recently Viva Bas Vegas).
This is a rough transcript of my talk at Most Wanted: Music Dial-in on July 20.
Just before the pandemic hit, I started a new project called Hard Dance Berlin.
My intention was to map out the local scenes of harder electronic music and try to bring them together more after I noticed that people like each other’s music, but rarely come together.
I wanted to shine a light on all the local events happening that cater to people who love those sounds and in many weeks found events on 4 of the nights. One week in February even had relevant events all 7 nights. Berlin 💁
But then it stopped. Abruptly. First the cancellations came from concerned organisers and then the lockdown happened and forced organisers who hadn’t caught up yet to also cancel their events.
My vision had been this:
Focusing on local allows people from various scenes to collaborate and create new scenes. By bringing audiences together, we’d be able to support each other. No more having to easyJet around Europe every weekend just to pay the bills as a DJ.
But in the middle of March there was no local to focus on. Everyone’s ‘local’ was reduced to staying at home. While everyone’s at home, focusing on local seems pointless, because what would once emerge as a local subculture from a record shop and venue in a particular city, now emerges through networks of artists on SoundCloud and Instagram.
Organisers and artists scrambled to get livestreams up and running, while the amount of daily new information added an edge of overload to a time of uncertainty.
Something happened since the initial lockdowns:
We went from something that was very hard to grasp and felt completely overwhelming to a certain calm. We know most countries have similar style lockdowns in place. While uncertainty and hardship is part of the daily reality for many of us, things have also become a lot more predictable than back in March and April.
Unfortunately, that is temporary.
We’re now seeing governments inside the EU giving negative travel advice to their citizens traveling to certain countries or regions in Europe.
So while we’re now carefully trying to get live music back on its feet, with proper safety measures in place, we’re seeing a landscape evolve that is as complicated as it was in early March when some cities and regions locked down, but countries were still open… but would they be by the time you had to be there?
Risk management
In order to maintain or increase certainty and predictability, we are seeing organisers of drive-in shows, the rare socially distanced event, and even many livestreams depend on local cultures: venues, crews, artists.
Now let’s imagine a few months forward: we’ll likely see a complicated landscape of lockdowns as countries, states, and cities deal with outbreaks. When all’s clear, events with proper hygiene may be permitted, but when an outbreak occurs the area might go into a form of lockdown at almost no notice.
So let’s imagine next summer. Let’s say that we have a vaccine by then – which is optimistic, but not unrealistic. Will that vaccine give long-term immunity or be more like a flu shot? Can we get it out to large enough parts of our populations – how quickly? And what about all the other places in the world? And then what does the world look like? We’ll know that this can happen again – as it nearly did with bird flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS, you name it.
And what about other crises? Every year we see record temperatures and more extreme weather events. Governments are discussing “green new deals” to reorganise their economies in order to address the crises of climate, waste, and biodiversity.
The new normal is not a static thing: it’s a future of new normals.
So that current local focus we’re seeing: it’s here to stay. It’s risk mitigation. That’s not to say your favourite bands won’t be coming to town anymore: they probably will. But since focusing on local scenes is one of the most effective strategies for mitigating risk in the face of these crises, we’ll see a renaissance of local scenes in an interconnected world – where scenes from Berlin, New Orleans, Shanghai, etc. can be made visible to each other.
By what we’re learning now about building online business models, we can make sure music won’t depend as much on cheap air travel as it used to — because eventually there probably won’t be air travel as cheap as it is now.
So I’d like to encourage everyone to think long-term and build global networks for local impact. Our future kind of depends on it.
Virtual concerts are not here to replace live music. They’re here to provide a new type of entertainment. Personally, I find the average virtual concert dull and inconvenient. It’s dull because it’s usually not more stimulating than a conversation with a friend, playing a video game, reading a book, watching a show on Netflix, or in some cases even scrolling through my Instagram. It’s inconvenient, because I’m supposed to tune in at a specific moment, whereas all other in-home entertainment in my life is basically on-demand.
So, what is better than all those things? What can make people decide to stay at home, rather than catch some fresh summer air before we head into inevitable winter lockdowns?
Virtual music events have to offer things that other types of entertainment can’t. A virtual event has to leverage the context of music, rather than just transmit a performance to an audience. If it is to be sustainable for musicians beyond the pandemic, because they prefer not to travel as much or want to stay more closely connected with fans on a regular basis, it will also have to be in some ways better than the real life equivalent.
A vast number of livestreams are basically just a poor version of an actual live event. The only edge it has is that you can be lazy and stay on your couch (and it’s easier to social distance with a front door between you and the world). So where does a virtual event have an edge? What can you do online that you can’t do in real life?
This post is inspired by Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free published in 2008. He describes generatives as follows: “a generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. […] In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.”
Putting it into the context of the post, generatives are qualities or attributes that make people choose virtual events over “real life”.
8 generatives better than real life
Magical powers
Let’s start big: we would all love to have magical powers. Whether it’s flying around a (virtual) venue or invisibly teleporting on to the stage to see what the artists are doing. Through virtual live events you can let people do things they literally can’t do in real life – not because it’s illegal, but because of the constraints of our oft-lamented physical reality.
Figure out what makes sense for you as an artist, band, or organiser and then give your audience superpowers. That could be multi-camera setups that let fans jump around the room and zoom in on what you’re doing, virtual environments in which people can move by flying around, or a telekenetic airhorn that you’ve set up to respond to people’s tips on Twitch.
Interactivity
Recognize people’s contexts and attention span. Asking people to sit on their couch and quietly watch a music performance does not fit most types of music well. Most concerts are interactive: people dance, sing, jump, clap, cheer, drink, take photos, meet people, and perhaps jump into a mosh pit.
The home context is different: there’s mobile phone notifications that compete for attention, there’s messaging apps, there’s that untidy corner of the room you will definitely get around to cleaning up some time this week…
Keep this in mind. You can give people an escape from interactions by making events interactive – even if that just means responding to what’s happening in the chat.
Context synergy
Imagine loving a virtual environment like a video game so much that you spend the majority of your free time in it or even just a few hours a week. Now imagine an artist you’re a fan of coming to this digital space that’s like a virtual home to you. Are you going to go outside and do something else? Hell no.
One could argue that the context of Minecraft or Fortnite is part of ‘real life’ anno 2020. In that case: are you going to play on your usual server and miss that concert? Hell no.
Artist proximity
Fans can feel much closer to an artist from the safety of their home and a keyboard than they might in real life. Some people go up to artists to thank them, some don’t because they don’t want to bother them, and some are just absolutely terrified of the interaction. If there is any interaction, it’s usually a quick thank you and signature after a concert and that’s it.
Online, you can leave room for fans to really interact: you can talk about topics, show them what you’re working on, answer questions, and acknowledge the individual by mentioning their name or nickname on the stream.
Fan community or scene networking
Music brings people together. Before the web, listening to music by an artist you were into was the only way for some people to know that there were other people who feel or think just like them (especially young people). Now you can just Google those feelings and thoughts and go down an internet rabbit hole of communities, so while music has lost that monopoly it’s still a powerful force as a connector.
Although people are still connected to various degrees of their social lives (flatmates, family, close friends, colleagues) they are likely disconnected from further degrees such as acquaintances, people they’d run into at concerts, and other people they’d only meet when at events and social gatherings. Furthermore, while performers would see the scene they’re part of in many cities, many fans wouldn’t be exposed to their own scene in other places.
If this is an important aspect to your music, bringing these scenes and communities together online can create social meaning that’s better than a Zoom call with mom (sorry, moms).
Similarly, it’s great to feel closer to the rest of the world while being unable to travel. Many dance music streams will have Zoom sessions running which fans can join in order to broadcast themselves. You’ll see ravers sitting in their living rooms or at their desks, waving flags, drinking, or eating chicken (as seen on-stream during Dominator‘s virtual event). Occasionally, some of these webcams will be shown alongside the performers in the main stream, showing a global fan community from Canada to Brazil to Thailand to Italy (in the case of Dominator, that chicken-eating guy’s backdrop was a Mad Max-like stage with cars and motorbikes making jumps behind the DJ – unfortunately the “in-stream” is not visible on the recordings uploaded to YouTube).
If people have friends far away, they can experience that proximity together by tuning into the same stream. While there are ways to do watch Netflix together in a synced session, it’s not as special as coming together in an event that thousands of others are also using to come together.
An example of DJs “instreaming” a fan during Q-Dance’s Qonnect event in April.
A role to play for the viewer
This was already captured above, but I think the principle is so important that it’s worth making it explicit. Instead of broadcasting a stream and implying fans should just sit down and shut up, you can involve them.
Think instreaming by showing fans’ cams to the wider fan community, by improvising based on fan input, or by letting them interact with each other through magical powers. To put it in Ishkur’s words:
The premise may be awkward as a performer, but make the event about more than yourself. Let the people who attend participate. Make them part of ‘you’.
Personal example from back in March: with Hard Dance Berlin I created a line-up of performers and then used Plug.dj to let the crowd have a chance to go back to back with the DJs, so DJs would play half of their set time and the crowd was responsible for the other half of the tracks played during that time. The event was called DJs vs Berlin. Afterwards, we opened up the decks to the audience queue.
Another example is audience avatar customization as can be done in Fortnite, Minecraft, IMVU, Club Cooee (pictured at the top) and other virtual event spaces.
FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out
I never listened to Slayer much, but when they announced their last tour I got tickets to their show and started listening to their discography a lot. And the show itself? It was awesome. However, similar decisions motivated by FOMO-related impulses haven’t always panned out as well. Sometimes something was a waste of money or a night better spent asleep. Oh well.
My point: FOMO is powerful. It can make people prioritize things that normally wouldn’t be high on their list. Whether it’s a one-time only virtual event like the screening of Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer, the release of limited edition merch during a stream, rotating line-ups like the Verzuz battles, or just having unique sets in your events as a result of improvisation and interaction: all of these create FOMO and make people want to tune in instead of going out.
Bonus: if your event doesn’t go as well as you hoped, but is not terrible either, cognitive dissonance will make sure that people’s anticipation translates into satisfaction. (But remember: trust and attention are fickle: do what you can to avoid disappointing people)
A nod to Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free post, which inspired my own.The post has seen hundreds of comments since publication: if you think I missed something, please leave a comment below.
What SoundCloud can do to win back lost ground from its most important competitor: Instagram.
What is SoundCloud, actually?
Coming out of the MySpace era, SoundCloud was easy to define. Now, in a mobile world with streaming as the default way of music listening, that has changed.
I’ll go into why, as I explain why SoundCloud’s most important competitor is not Spotify, but Instagram. One started as music app, and the other as a photo app, but they’re both more: they’re children of the web 2.0 – the social web – and as such have become important platforms for communities.
If SoundCloud is to thrive, it will have to figure out how to make up for ground lost to Instagram.
“You mean I can comment on specific parts of each track instead of just leaving a comment on a profile?”
If you never had a MySpace profile, you won’t know how mindblowing SoundCloud was when it first arrived. The web was a different place.
Before Facebook, MySpace was the dominant global social medium. The global social web was different: most countries would have their own social landscape. Brazil, for a long time, was connected through Orkut. The Netherlands through Hyves and Cu2. Much of Asia was on Friendster. Yet MySpace was the dominant global player. It didn’t just have profiles, but it also had music. Bands could upload a couple of tracks to their profile (max. 4 or 5 at any time) and fans could feature artists’ tracks on their own profiles to show what music they liked. People would make long lists of bands and artists they were into and then would search, find, and befriend other people based on this. You weren’t necessarily friends with people you know in real life, or at least not exclusively, and it wasn’t common to use your real name.
It was a social network connected by music, and in the transition years between Facebook taking over from MySpace and music streaming really establishing itself, many people in music longed back for the MySpace days. They wondered what “the next MySpace” would be, even as recently as 2011 (I even wrote a piece about it).
SoundCloud filled an important role. It launched quietly and positioned itself as a collaboration tool for artists. It had this cool feature that would let you comment on the waveforms: something that most people hadn’t seen before. Furthermore, your account could hold an unlimited amount of tracks, throttled by an upload limit of 4 tracks per month for free accounts (they later changed it to a max. minutes per account model – which DJs hated).
MySpace would let people customize their profiles with code, so people figured out how to hack their profiles and swap out the MySpace default player for the SoundCloud player (this later became a supported feature, and you can click here to see a 10-year old guide on how it was done).
Due to SoundCloud’s visually distinctive music players, its spread through music communities was visible on MySpace. The fact that it went viral meant it would saturate scene by scene, as more musicians joined the platform.
How SoundCloud changed music
While MySpace was still the main presence for many musicians, communities started to form on SoundCloud. The musicians who’d spend a lot of time on SoundCloud were different: they’d behave more like what is now called a ‘digital native’. To be online a lot wasn’t necessarily normal for artists: remember, most people didn’t have smartphones yet and music listening was done from MP3-players.
Through SoundCloud’s features, there was now a platform specifically for music that was global, included all genres (though mostly electronic at the time – hiphop wasn’t really there yet), had great commenting features, a way to form groups around topics (similar to Last.fm), and a messaging feature.
All of this existed, but now it existed on one platform. And it changed the way people connected around music, the way scenes formed, and it changed music itself.
A recent example of how the digital music landscape has changed music is the so-called “playlist edit“, a streaming era version of the radio edit. The game to keep your tracks on large playlists is to make sure to keep your skip rate low. People skip stuff they don’t know – especially when they just start listening to a playlist, so long intros get skipped until people get to something familiar, or something that sounds familiar. The top of the playlist is where you get the most streams, so economically it makes sense to cut the intro down and jump right into the track.
A development that preceded that is that music started behaving like the image macro memes that were exploding at the time of SoundCloud’s rise (ask your older siblings about icanhascheezburger). While there is much talk about memes and music now, particularly in the context of TikTok’s impact on music, this development is something that has been going on for more than a decade and SoundCloud’s community was at the center of it.
In 2009 Dave Nada slowed down a house track at a party to match with the reggaeton being played there. It sounded amazing. He went home, made an edit, and uploaded it to SoundCloud. And that’s how moombahton was born, a genre now eclipsed by trap and subsequent developments in popular music, but it has provided the underpinnings for hits by people like Diplo, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Skrillex, and many others.
After uploading it to SoundCloud, other producers heard Dave Nada’s remix, and started making their own moombahton edits. Soon they started making originals. Some of the people from this movement grew into ‘EDM’ stars, like Dillon Francis. And perhaps this had been happening before moombahton, but for me it was the first time that I noticed a genre being born within a matter of weeks, if not days.
Why the comparison with memes? Well, they behave similarly: due to music tools becoming more widely available (mostly through pirated music production software) it became easier for people to participate in music creation. Editing an image became easy with computers entering every household, and memes became a language of expression. The same conversation happened through music: someone would upload a musical idea and someone else would run with that idea and apply it to something else according to their vision. “Remix culture” was the phrase then, but now we use the ‘memes’ label for the vast majority of that phenomenon.
As moombahton was growing, electronic music producers started playing around with sounds of trap – a style of hiphop until then, that sounded very different from the Harlem Shake and Turn Down For What-style hits that were to follow.
Community was essential to SoundCloud and then they risked it all
For a long time, SoundCloud struggled with its business model, the licensing fees it had to pay rightsholders (and was getting sued for), and the fact that people were uploading music that wasn’t theirs to the platform.
How that all played out is a story for another time (or hey, right now, since it’s already been written about a lot, just head to your favourite search engine or try Ecosia which is like a greener Google). The result of how that story played out is that SoundCloud suddenly found itself manoeuvring into the typical streaming service domain of business models and service design. It struck deals with the majors, launched ads for the free part of the service, subscriptions for the listener side of the business (with a similar pricing model as Spotify & co), and added labels’ back catalogues to the service.
More music: cool right?
Well. Not really.
SoundCloud was the place for the freshest music. SoundCloud enabled new communities to emerge and connect, and those communities enabled SoundCloud to have the newest in music before it was available anywhere else.
Now, that all got merged into a context which included artists who were dead long before the internet. That’s not why anyone was on SoundCloud.
“Unlike Spotify and Deezer, whose free tiers have long been geared towards driving subscriptions, for Soundcloud this is not a funnel tweak, it is a pivot. It is a complete change in strategy.“
Driven by the expense of the operation, the company focused on selling itself as a catalogue service, essentially competing with Spotify — something it hadn’t really done before. As an on-demand catalogue service it was simply inferior to Spotify’s product that had been developed exactly for that purpose. For its own original purpose, SoundCloud’s product was still superior to Spotify’s product and to a large extent still is.
This part of the story ended up with layoffs and a change of management at SoundCloud. Its founders out. Painful.
It looked like SoundCloud wasn’t going to make it, but after debt funding and new investment, SoundCloud survived, now with a new CEO: Kerry Trainor, who previously led creator-centric video platform Vimeo.
Somehow, he convinced the company’s investors to let SoundCloud pursue a creator-centric strategy again, despite all the sunk cost into a different direction. And that brings us to today’s landscape.
SoundCloud’s most important competitor is Instagram
The defining thing about SoundCloud is not that you can listen to music there. You can listen to music on the radio. What has always defined SoundCloud is its community that pushes boundaries of genres and develops new styles (there’s even a hugely popular, chart-topping genre that carries the company’s name: SoundCloud rap).
SoundCloud is where it pops off, but the community doesn’t really connect there anymore.
Sure, people will leave a comment, maybe send a message, and do a repost, but that’s a very narrow spectrum of interaction among communities of creatives. Where do people share their work-in-progress music? Where do artists share their excitement about releases of other artists in their community? Where do people ask for feedback and create back-and-forths around creative expression? Instagram.
If people need to get in touch with each other, they DM each other through Instagram, too. It’s actually impossible to message people on SoundCloud from your mobile phone (go ahead, try it). More frustratingly, from your mobile device it’s also impossible to read messages people sent you.
Through posts being shared in Instagram stories, people discover new accounts to follow. When you visit a profile, you see which people are already following them — this helps to determine community-membership. Seeing who someone follows and is followed by exists on SoundCloud, but it’s just not as well-done as on Instagram.
Another aspect we often forget to discuss is that music culture is not just music. Music has a visual culture. With more of our time spent discovering and connecting to music online, even pre-corona, music’s context has become more visual than before. I’m not talking about music videos necessarily. I’m talking about shots from the studio, artists’ personal life, artwork, stuff artists are inspired by, videos of digital audio workstation screens, etc.
Music is a visual culture, which is one more reason why music culture & communities congregate on Instagram.
Is Instagram a music platform?
No.
You could make the argument that it is, but in defining Instagram as a SoundCloud competitor, I don’t think Instagram as a music platform is relevant.
The exciting thing for SoundCloud has always been its community. What made SoundCloud successful is that it made its community successful. And while SoundCloud is still the place where these communities post finished tracks and DJ sets, it is no longer the community’s center.
Instagram is the center of important parts of SoundCloud’s community and that is a problem for SoundCloud.
MySpace wasn’t a Facebook and it wasn’t a music platform necessarily: it was a bit of both and in being so it was the center of a community. As Facebook and SoundCloud built compelling new services that did the 2 things MySpace was doing well, communities started shifting and MySpace lost its center.
Now SoundCloud has lost its center. It is doing better than a few years ago, but there is a risk. What does this risk look like?
Let’s look at Bandcamp’s days where they drop their revenue share. The site sees record traffic and record sales on those days. Even for underground genres, where musicians’ fans are probably musicians themselves too, I doubt that SoundCloud is responsible for anything like the traffic Instagram is sending. And that’s fine, because SoundCloud is not necessarily a social media platform – it’s a music platform. The problem is, so is Bandcamp.
SoundCloud is in a good position. It’s part of online music’s infrastructure. As is Bandcamp, and I don’t think the two platforms are competing or are likely to make deliberate choices to end up competing. But SoundCloud doesn’t own its community, and it has a problem when its position as part of music’s default infrastructure is threatened (e.g. by a large streaming service that’s already integrated with Instagram deciding to compete with labels and adopting more creator-centric features).
How can SoundCloud win back its community?
I expect this is the question you may be asking or the question you expect to be answered, but I don’t think it’s the right question to ask. This is about SoundCloud’s place in a cultural landscape. Getting to a certain position in this landscape takes long and is unpredictable. Just consider that the start of SoundCloud’s story is as a tool for music sharing and collaboration. Did they think it would become a cornerstone of global rap and electronic music culture? They could have dreamt it, sure, but they wouldn’t have been able to map out the path by which they’d eventually achieve it.
Everything depends on early adopters
Some services adapt to user expectations by widening their demographic and appealing to a larger number of people (e.g. people that are not digital-savvy, are into music but are happy to just have a radio stream, etc.). In doing so, you often alienate early adopters who will start looking for the next thing. In 2017, SoundCloud was in trouble and Spotify was aggressively trying to increase its market share. I argued that we were witnessing a new “MySpace moment”: an end of one era and a beginning of a next one, as underserved early adopters start moving on and start populating new potential markets for entrepreneurs and investors.
Well, we’re there. It’s now. Accelerated by the global lockdowns in response to COVID-19.
A new landscape is emerging and in order for SoundCloud to retain its position as infrastructure for the early adopters of this generation, then it will have to integrate into that landscape. Just like it did when everyone swapped out their MySpace player for SoundCloud’s.
It will have to integrate not just with incumbents, but also upcoming startups in:
Music production software (software can mean mobile or desktop apps, as well as browser-based)
DJ software
Virtual environments like video games and VR experiences
Augmented reality experiences
The good news, if you’re cheering for SoundCloud like I am, is that they’re already doing these integrations. I can go to Plug.dj and play SoundCloud tracks for a room of my friends’ virtual avatars, as a DJ I can access SoundCloud’s catalogue from DJ software like Rekordbox, Serato, and Traktor with the Go+ subscription. They’re already integrated with the most popular augmented reality platform, which is Instagram with its filters and effects.
This is just survival strategy though: SoundCloud must stay close to early adopters so it doesn’t risk losing its place as essential infrastructure. The road back to being the community’s center is another question.
As long as SoundCloud can grow its revenues by sustaining itself as infrastructure, it may be a difficult business decision to invest in doing more than that. Doing more than that would take research. Definitions of audiences, so they can decide which ones to focus on and which ones to risk losing. It’s easy to shout what a company should do and make a compelling point for why they would be successful doing that. It’s much harder to execute it, and I speak from experience (on both sides).
A music streaming service as an ecosystem
My attempt to build a modularized music streaming service with low-priced subscriptions ran into all kinds of issues. You think a good funding round buys you time and we were well-funded at $20M, but money burns fast if you’re a streaming service. Ultimately, we needed to get high growth numbers according to industry benchmarks. Those benchmarks were established by other companies doing bundling deals with telcos. None of the local telcos we spoke to were into the concept of an ecosystem of music apps: they wanted a one-size-fits-all app like Spotify or Deezer. For a while we pursued 2 strategies at once: we built the standard app to try to get partnerships, while also working to construct the ecosystem.
Pursuing two strategies wasn’t intentional. It was the result of compromise. We now had two competing visions and efforts in the company, and even if they were mostly compatible, it was impossible to focus on both and be successful both ways. Not at that stage, not at that scale.
With time lost and money spent, I didn’t think the company could reasonably expect to be a large international player that could compete with the likes of Deezer and Spotify (the two major streaming subscription services outside of the US at the time). I didn’t say it publicly at the time, nor to the team, but I told the founders & CEO that I thought Zvooq’s best bet was to be a strong local player. An obstacle to entry and adoption for companies like Spotify and tech giants which inevitably would launch their own music streaming services (Apple was only just launching iTunes in Russia where we were based, and hadn’t acquired Beats Music yet, which became Apple Music). Personally I felt like that was the most likely route for investors to get a return: being acquired as part of a market entry strategy.
I had nothing to prove in building ‘yet another’ streaming service, and while I had fun figuring out how to serve a market where many people’s only personal computer is the cheapest Chinese Android phone money can buy, I decided to bow out. And that’s where the anecdote ends.
There’s a similarity though:
SoundCloud ended up pursuing two strategies too. It wanted to be Spotify and it wanted to be, err… SoundCloud. It ended up being neither and has now spent 2 years rebuilding.
If I were at SoundCloud, exploring how to get back to that center (for some reason), I’d be looking into the AI landscape. It’s going to accelerate things; faster iteration on musical ideas; MORE MEMES. If you thought getting production software onto everyone’s computers and phones changed music a lot (with SoundCloud at the center!), just wait until artificial intelligence-assisted creation really breaks through.
But I’m not at SoundCloud. And as we hit the 3000 word mark, it may seem I know a lot, but I know nothing. There are opportunities to research, but to say what they mean for SoundCloud requires insight into the company’s business, user research, behaviour on the platform, market analysis, etc.
But if I were to start researching this topic, with what I know now, I think SoundCloud’s best chance for moving back into the center is called AI.
Notes
When I say AI in this piece, I’m talking about AI-assisted music creation (or perhaps even AI-generated music). Music recommendation is another popular avenue for AI and something where machine learning has been more successful in attaining mass adoption and satisfaction by end users.
A small disclaimer on early adopters: the people that make up ‘early adopters’ change. The people who were early adopters in 2009 may not be part of that group now. Some of the people who would be part of that group now were 8 years old back then and probably not part of SoundCloud’s target audience. So when you hear this term used in narratives that span potentially multiple product lifecycles, don’t think of it as a static group of people.
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