livestreaming

Better Than Real Life: 8 Generatives

Posted on August 3, 2020 | by Bas Grasmayer

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).

We’ve all seen recently what connected fan communities can do.

Global proximity

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. — 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:

A party exists for its own sake and for the sake of its participants. Your job is to contribute; to interact and celebrate.

When you go see Tiesto, you are not contributing anything. You are being a spectator. You might as well be dead.

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.

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6 lessons from 6 weeks without net neutrality

Posted on June 25, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

My music consumption has been clearly impacted by the lack of net neutrality on my new mobile plan. Here are my key takeaways as a heavy user of music services.

This Spring, I moved from The Netherlands to Berlin, which means setting up new contracts for everything. While I’m still waiting for my flat to be connected to the internet (for 2 months already!), my mobile plan is keeping me connected.

My mobile provider Telekom, known as T-Mobile in most countries, is zero-rating certain partner services. So data consumed by streaming from the Netflix or YouTube bundles are not deducted from my 6GB / month data bundle.

I decided to give the bundle a try, as I think the EU will eventually declare zero-rating in violation of net neutrality (which means the telco should compensate me or release me from the plan). Net neutrality demands that you treat all traffic the same, and while they’re not prioritizing traffic of particular services over others in terms of speed, zero-rating does influence consumer decisions over what service they use.

Here are my main take aways of living without net neutrality for the last 6 weeks or so.

1. Zero-rating influences the services you use

This is beyond a doubt for me. When I want to listen to music, I now search music on YouTube (zero-rated partner) instead of through Spotify (not a zero-rated partner). I basically only listen to Spotify through offline synced music, and have stopped using it as a way to explore music – until I get WiFi at home, or Spotify gets zero-rated.

Telekom's current zero-rated partners — Telekom’s current zero-rated partners

2. Spotify’s stickiness is strong

Despite the fact that Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, and Napster (Rhapsody) are all included in the zero-rated partners, I’ve somehow stuck with Spotify. I have so many years of history in there, that it’s hard to start using a different app.

I have a lot of friends on Apple Music, because they were the first major Western music service to launch in Russia and really double down on the market (as opposed to Deezer, which struggled to gain traction). Having lived there a few years, most of my friends are on there now. But having done 2 three month trials, I never really developed a feeling for the service. Can’t stand iTunes either by the way (I listen to files through VLC Mediaplayer instead).

But the key point here is:

Music is not the most important part of music services. It’s the behaviours around the music. For Spotify, the only service that has managed to help me find a new home for some of my behaviours is YouTube, but to move collection management to a new place: no way.

And to clarify that first statement: if you have all the music, and a lot of other services do too, the music is no longer the key point that people come to you for. People never had a music access problem: piracy solved that. The music access issue was an industry problem, not a consumer-problem.

3. It’s hard to dig into niches through YouTube’s mobile app

I’ve been trying to use the YouTube app as a kind of radio station, because it sucks to search for decent playlists in there. The problem with the Play Next function, is that when you start on something very niche, it sends you ‘upward’ to more popular tracks. So if you’re listening to underground trap, you end up on Migos after a couple of tracks.

Likewise for related music on particular music videos. You have to sift through unrelated recommendations that are related to your personal profile, rather than the particular thing you’re viewing, but even then, it directs you out of the niche and into the mainstream.

4. Netflix finally found its way into my life

I’ve never really developed a strong habit for Netflix, but it finally happened. Browsing the web, and reading article after article, gets tiring when you’re doing it from a small mobile screen (I’m on iPhone 5s).

Besides, I get ‘data anxiety’: am I using too much data? Will I have enough data at the end of the month? Better play it safe: Netflix.

This actually pulls me away from Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and other social platforms. Which brings me to my next point.

5. Using YouTube as my default mobile music service is keeping me from social networks

The thing with YouTube is that it can’t keep playing music in the background, unless you are on a certain subscription that’s not available in Germany.

Because of this, I have to choose: am I going to listen to music, or am I going to write to a friend, see what they’re posting on Instagram, etc.

6. If I cared less about music, I’d switch services

The reason why I’m using YouTube, if not obvious by now, is because it’s a nice temporary space to do some of the things I’d prefer to do on Spotify.

But if I were less invested in Spotify, I’d 100% be using one of the partner services offered. I would not even consider any other options. And I think this goes for most consumers, who are not quite as heavy users of music services. It’s troubling: it gives ISPs and mobile operators a lot of control over the music, video, and social landscape.

And for one aspect of music, it already changed me over: I stopped watching live streams on Facebook and Twitch, and instead the only place where I watch live video is YouTube now.

Four innovations in classical music

Posted on May 22, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of representing IDAGIO on stage at a conference for the first time since joining as Product Director one month ago. It was my first time attending a conference dedicated to classical, and since I haven’t written much about that part of the music business yet, I want to highlight some of the innovations I was introduced to at Classical:NEXT.

The classical music world has a set of specific challenges. Most discussed is how to address new audiences and how to win them as fans of orchestras, ensembles, and soloists, and get them into venues for live performances.

It’s a challenge, because you don’t want to sacrifice traditions which often go back hundreds of years. But you’re also dealing with shorter attention spans, and an enormous amount of choice when it comes to experiencing live music: classical, or not.

Another issue is the sheer number of people and instruments required to perform particular works. Or that music streaming services are designed for pop music (performer, album, song), and are not structured around all the data you get with classical (composer, work, performer, recording, instrumentation, era, soloists, etc).

I’ll be writing about these topics more in the future, because I think the wider music business has a lot to learn from classical music. For now, I want to focus on some of the innovative projects and products I met with (or shared a stage with) at Classical:NEXT.

LOLA

One of the most popular MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE articles ever, was about how the music business can become more sustainable. I mentioned developments in VR might make it easier for musicians to collaborate or practice over distance, without having to leave the home.

LOLA is a piece of to let performers practice with each other digitally, audio visually. For this, latency must be reduced as much as possible, to less than 30ms. For comparison, Skype has about 500ms latency.

So far, LOLA, short for low latency, has been able to get musicians and dancers from institutions around the world to practice, as well as perform with each other.

A demo of LOLA (starts at 3:50):

Gigle

The on-demand economy is starting to have a real impact on the music business. There are numerous platforms that let you book bands and musicians, each with their own twist. Most are kind of like an Airbnb for music: you browse the catalogue of musicians, compare prices, and book whichever suits you best.

What separates Gigle, which hails from Helsinki, Finland, is that they’re mobile-first. They’re trying to lower the barrier to booking music: instead of getting the same old boring flowers and wine for someone’s birthday, why not get a violinist in?

The excuse for focusing on the desktop browser experience is often that you want people to be able to think things over calmly, keep an overview, and then make a decision. If your goal is to remove barriers, focusing on mobile is the right way to go: if you can’t do it on mobile, then you need to go back to the drawing board. Gigle’s right to emphasise the mobile experience.

At this point, the mobile phone is the personal computer we most often access. Maybe we don’t spend less time on it than on our desktop computers or laptops (although for many it’s the other way around already), but even for those of us that are chained to our computers, the amount of times per day we access our mobile phones far exceeds that of any other computer.

Australian Discovery Orchestra

Perhaps one of Australia’s youngest orchestras, the ADO has an interesting digital strategy. Besides livestreaming their concerts, they turn some of their recordings into virtual experiences. People get placed into game-like environments, and then have to complete certain objectives to move through the composition.

A screenshot of the interactive experience for Miranda Waltz’s Imaginary Symphony No. 1

This is an interesting way of adding another layer of experience to the music, which hopefully resonates with new audiences. I think the problem for classical music is not that young audiences think classical is terrible: they don’t. They’re just indifferent, have little understanding of it, feel overwhelmed because they don’t know where to begin, or feel that the genre has a stuffy image.

So give them something they can understand. Give them something with objectives. Something that encourages them to explore, to be curious. Something that is designed for a lack of understanding and knowledge as a starting point. That’s the powerful thing about these virtual experiences.

TrueLinked

Concocted as a way to get musicians more gigs and opportunities, TrueLinked also provides a way for people in classical music to organise the process of performing and recording music.

If you thought the logistics around casting for a band were hard, imagine a full-size orchestra with anywhere between 50 and a 100 members.

The platform has ways of categorising musicians by level, understanding of repertoire, collaborators, and other factors, so that the demand-side of the marketplace can easily figure out how to prioritize the people they contact. This provides artists with a great way to market themselves within their niche.

I’m sure there were lots of other innovative ideas & apps presented at the conference. I only had the one day there, and didn’t have much time to look around and attend the talks and panel discussions. Ping me on Twitter — always happy to learn more about interesting projects.

Special thanks to Katariina Nyberg of ExClaM! Digital for organising & chairing the session I met some of these startups at.

Quick guide to the relaunched Anchor: reinventing the radio format

Posted on March 13, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

You may remember Anchor: it started as a sound-based social network where users could start discussions that others could chime in on. A kind of long-form Twitter, but with voice instead of text. I remember getting involved with some discussions started by Bruce Houghton, from Hypebot, but people’s interest soon waned and many of us moved on.

So the startup went back to the drawing board and re-envisioned its service, relaunching with a complete overhaul last week. It now allows users to include music in their audio stories and aims to “completely reinvent the radio format by making it easy for anyone to easily broadcast high quality audio from your phone, to wherever audio is heard.”

My first impressions

I paused writing in order to do my first show on Anchor (listen now) in order to get more familiar with the service. You can check it out for my first impressions on the call-ins feature, which allows station hosts to let other people get some airtime, the ephemerality, as well as some thoughts about Anchor as a place for music curation.

Expires in 24 hours, so you may be hearing something else by now.

After playing around with the app a bit more, checking out some of the content, including Cherie Hu’s, I’ve come to revisit my first impressions.

Anchor is like Instagram for audio

Instagram lets people share moments from their lives. It’s used by professionals and amateurs. Some content is more social and some is not. And with the introduction of Instagram Stories, a lot of the content has become ephemeral. That’s exactly what Anchor is, or could be, but for audio content.

While I was initially skeptical of Anchor’s ephemerality, it may be an upside: it reduces the hurdle for sharing content and stimulates creators to deliver content in a bite-size format. People can use it to record their day and share their experiences, like music tech blogger Cherie Hu is doing at SXSW, while others use it as an extension of their professional podcasts or YouTube channels.

When someone calls in, it can be added to the station, after which it lives for another 24 hours. The host needs to take into account that whatever the caller might be responding to is not available anymore by the time their audience checks it, but that can be easily mitigated by adding a short “So yesterday I asked how people feel about fainting goats, and here’s what some of you had to say!”

As people add new audio, it’s added to their stories similar to what Snapchat (or Instagram) do in their apps.

The Instagram analogy extends:

A station can be seen as a profile
Pressing favorite is akin to following
Calling-in is like tweeting & featuring a call-in is like retweeting

It seems Anchor may be able to deliver upon Soundcloud-founder Alexander Ljung’s vision of the web becoming a more audible medium, with sound possibly becoming bigger than video:

“Sound is one of the only mediums that can be consumed completely while multitasking, so it has the potential to do so much more on the web than it’s already doing.”

So forget the radio lingo: Anchor is still a sound-based social network and it’s pretty awesome.

Experiment with it. Develop a format. Then ping me on Twitter, so I can check it out.

The “F*ck the long tail” manifesto

Posted on February 13, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Don’t spend your time on something broken, when you can do something that works even better.

Unless you’re a huge business with a lot of legacy to deal with, the shape of the long tail doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether music is getting increasingly “winner takes all”. This graph does NOT matter:

Long tail in music and movies — From: Mass entertainment in the digital age is still about blockbusters, not endless choice

Why it doesn’t matter

Going into music, you know that the economics are messed up. Everyone has told you so. Unless you haven’t told anyone you’re going into music. Even then — opening one music business blog will tell you the same thing. Constant bickering over the way money is distributed, who gets paid, how much, why not more, why not less, ticket scalping, streaming royalties, exclusives, royalty split disputes…

It’s not pretty.

So you know that you should not create a reality for yourself where you’ll be dependent on the outcome of the ugly side of the music business. Create one where it doesn’t matter.

As soon as you commit to that, the overall economic picture of the music industry won’t matter quite as much.

What matters most

You should be focusing on your music, and on your fans, and on people who make music just like you. Focus on positivity.

Money is not the problem. Your attitude is.

Be proactive. Tell people about your music constantly. Find out who the programmers are for the venues where you want to play. Who the authors are of blogs or YouTube channels that post similar music. Comment. Message them. Ask them for feedback. Be humble and positive.

One day they’ll give you a chance. But they have to SEE that you’re working hard at it, so document your progress. Post at least 5 things to social media every day. Maybe even 10. Snapchat and Instagram Stories make that SUPER easy.

If you’re a band: set everyone up with access. More content.

You need to stand out above all the noise and you need to sustain people’s attention, so they don’t forget about you, so they don’t move on, so you keep appearing in their Facebook timelines and their inbox.

People’s individual attention long tails are the only long tails that matter.

You have a camera on your phone. Get in front of it. Document. Share.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be genuine. If you work hard, it will get better over time. Then people will feel part of your narrative, part of your story… and that it was kinda shitty early on is actually great: people LOVE a good underdog story.

If you’re worried about being boring because you spend too much time in your studio — set up a livestream. Sure it could get boring, but there will be highlights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgeWHnSmPKE

What about the money?

Then you’re going to make money on your own. Away from the rat race. Away from the long tail. Your fans are part of your story. Set up a Patreon. Use Kickstarter to launch new projects. Give them a way to commit.

If you work hard at it, people are going to take note. Including people with money. Influencer marketing is one of the hottest areas in marketing right now. Sponsors are going to show up. Reject all of them, except for the ones that really make sense. Don’t trade in your fans for money. Be you.

If you have a huge excited fanbase, they’ll be LOUD. People will hear you. So the deals will come. The shows will come. Their size will grow and so will the money you make from them.

Work hard.

Ask questions.

Stay humble & positive.

And communicate your passion. ❤️️

(Oh yeah, and follow my newsletter 📰 and listen to Quibus 🎶)

Monetizing virtual face time with fans

Posted on December 19, 2016 | by Bas Grasmayer

How the convergence of 2 trends opens up new business model opportunities for artists.

When I landed in Russia to get involved with music streaming service Zvooq, my goal was to look beyond streaming. The streaming layer would be the layer that brings everything together: fans, artists, and data. We started envisioning a layer on top of that, which we never fully got to roll out, in big part due to the challenges of the streaming business.

It was probably too early.

For the last decade, a lot of people have been envisioning ambitious direct-to-fan business models. The problem was that many of these were only viable for niche artists with early adopter audiences, but as technology develops, this is less so the case today.

Let’s have look at a few breakthrough trends in the last year:

Messaging apps are rapidly replacing social networks as the primary way for people to socialize online;
Better data plans & faster internet speeds have led to an increase in live streams, further enabled by product choices by Facebook & YouTube.

Messaging apps overtaking social networks is a trend that’s been underway for years now. It’s why Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for a whopping $19 billion. While 2.5 billion people had a messaging app installed earlier this year, that’s expected to rise to 3.6 billion in coming years. In part, this is driven by people coming online and messaging apps being relatively light weight in terms of data use.

In more developed markets, the trend for messaging apps is beyond text. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack have all recently enabled video calling. Other apps, like Instagram, Snapchat, Live.ly, and Tribe are finding new ways to give shape to mobile video experiences, from broadcasting short video stories, to live streaming to friends, to video group chats.

For artists that stay on top of trends, the potential for immediacy and intimacy with their fanbase is expanding.

Messaging apps make it easier to ping fans to get them involved in something, right away. And going live is one of the most engaging ways to do so.

Justin Kan, who founded Justin.tv which later became video game streaming platform Twitch (sold to Amazon for just under $1 billion), launched a new app recently which I think deserves the attention of the music business.

Whale is a Q&A app which lets people pose questions to ‘influencers’. To have your question answered, you have to pay a fee which is supposed to help your question “rise above the noise of social media”. And Whale is not the only app with this proposition.

Yam is another Q&A app which places more emphasis on personalities, who can answer fans’ questions through video, but also self-publish answers to questions they think people may be curious about.

Watching a reply to a question on Yam costs 5 cents, which is evenly split between the person who asked and the person who answered. It’s a good scheme to get people to come together to create content and for the person answering the questions to prioritize questions they think will lead to the most engagement.

What both of these apps do is that they monetize one of the truly scarce things in the digital age.

Any type of digital media is easily made abundant, but attention can only be spent once.

These trends enable creating an effective system for fans to compete for artists’ attention. I strongly believe this is where the most interesting business opportunities lie in the music business at the level of the artist, but also for those looking to create innovative new tools.

Make great music.
Grow your fan base.
Monetize your most limited resource.

This can take so many shapes or forms:

Simply knowing that your idol saw your drawing or letter;
Having your demo reviewed by an artist you look up to;
Getting a special video greeting;
Learning more about an artist through a Q&A;
Being able to tell an artist about a local fan community & “come to our city!”;
Having the top rank as a fan & receiving a perk for that.

Each of these can be a product on their own and all of these products will likely look like messaging apps, video apps, or a mix.

A lot of fan engagement platforms failed, because they were looking for money in a niche behaviour that was difficult to exploit. People had to be taught new behaviours and new interfaces, which is hard when everyone’s competing for your attention.

Now this is becoming easier, because on mobile it can be as simple as a tap on the screen. Tuning into a live stream can be as simple as opening a push notification. Asking a question to an artist can be as simple as messaging a friend.

So, the question for the platforms early to the party is whether they’ll be able to adjust to the current (social) media landscape, or whether they let sunk cost fallacy entrench them in a vision based on how things used to be.

There’s tremendous value in big platforms figuring out new ways for artists and fans to exchange value. They already have the data and the fan connections. Imagine if streaming services were to build a new engagement layer on top of what already exists.

Until then, artists will have to stay lean and use specific tools that do one thing really well. Keep Product Hunt bookmarked.