How we monetize fandom in an increasingly online world is a question that doesn’t just exist in music, but also in sports. As such we can learn from each other. Brand new American football club Inter Miami just launched a video strategy that is all about engagement. Let’s see what they’re doing, how they do it, and what it means for those monetization strategies. But first
Some background into US sports on TV
In the US, sports on TV is having a hard time of it. Its ratings having been decreasing for years with a hard slump during the pandemic. Taking the Major League Baseball as a quick example this is what that decline looks like:
There are some signs that viewership for sports in the US will stabilize and, as The Hollywood Reporterrecently reported, TV networks on the one hand have too much money – roughly $140 billion – invested in sports over the course of the next 10 years. On the other hand, shrinking overall TV subscribers may make sports’ appointment viewing even more valuable. At the same time, shifting audiences will require changes in how live sports will be offered. There are already some examples that try to incorporate other franchises, such as Star Wars or Marvel, into the live broadcast. But other experiments are more interesting to analyse from a music perspective.
The Inter Miami case
A totally new football club dreamed up by David Beckham, perhaps it’s not strange that they also think about branding like Beckham. Last week, the club released an app, which they dub ‘an immersive fan video engagement experience.‘
Get ready for tonight's match by downloading the #InterMiamiCF’s app where you can livestream the game while video-chatting your family and friends!
Social engagement, focuses on being to share and like while staying with the live video of the game
Many of these elements resemble things that already exist in other live video spaces such as games like Fortnite, streaming services like Twitch, and SVOD services like Disney+. While I’m most excited about the watch party integration, it’s actually the combination of elements that music should look at when it comes to livestreaming, the total package that will help fuel a collective watching experience. This type of live and simulaneous watching is also YouTube‘s number one highlight from their recent Culture and Trends Report.
Inter Miami partnered with a company called StreamLayer on the app. Just last summer, they raised $4 million and their unique selling point is that they create overlays on any video stream. Their first focus is on mobile, because “the proclivity on mobile to interact is just dramatically higher,” as Head of Product Strategy Tim Ganschow told Forbes. The next step will focus on connected, or smart, TVs, which is also an exciting space for music.
Monetization strategies
Interaction and engagement are the key elements of this new football viewing experience. Those are two elements that musicians on Twitch or StageIt, for example, have also learned to utilize and control. However, the watch party element is something that can come in and make a big change for music livestreaming, especially when it comes to monetization. There could be, for example, ‘normal’ tickets, but also ‘watch-party’ tickets that allow you to set up a room with up to 8 friends. This wouldn’t be too dissimilar to group tickets for festivals.
Besides thinking about bringing in extra revenues through a variety of tickets, there are many more possibilities. Overlays present opportunities to show sponsors in a livestream without the need to cut out the live video. Or, it’s possible to do direct merch calls directly related to what’s happening in the livestream. Of course, the livestream itself would need to be unique and different to create interesting moments to print on a t-shirt or mint into an NFT and, most importantly, to warrant interest from fans.
In sum
We need to keep thinking about new ways to create more interactive and engaging livestreams. One way to do so is to look at what others do and develop. Just like StreamLayer looked at Twitch and tried to bring more engagement into sports livestreaming, so musicians, managers, labels, venues, and platforms can look at Inter Miami’s app and copy the watch party. Moreover, these types of developments will continue to give livestreaming a differentiating edge against in-person concerts. Novel ways to connect, interact and engage with fellow fans will be one way to keep people at home with their screen instead of in a venue or at a festival.
Music rights holders get paid astonishing amounts of money, but most artists cannot make a living from their art. All the major DSPs love throwing around the big numbers they pay out to ‘the industry.’ Yet, most artists cannot rely on them to put food on their plate. There are, however, many methods that allow musicians to step away from over-reliance on big tech companies or major labels. Most of them involve community, and more specifically community-building.
The big girls
So YouTube paid out $4 billion to music rights holders in 2020 and Spotify, by Music Ally’s calculations paid out more than $5 billion in the same period. In the US, in the first 6 months of 2020, the biggest streaming services together made up more than 85% of total revenues for recorded music. And during the recent DCMS hearings on the streaming economy in the UK, YouTube defended itself by stating that “record labels agree that it is possible we will become the music industry’s number one source of revenue by 2025.” That seems to be a good thing for YouTube more than anyone else as it probably means that even more than 2 billion people will be coming to the service “to experience music each month.”
A major argument that came out of those same DCMS hearings was to ‘simply’ grow the overall pie being paid out by the streaming services. BPI‘s Geoff Taylor, for example put forth that “[t]he total amount coming into the industry should be substantially higher and that would benefit everybody in the chain.” During the hearings, a counterargument surfaced, through BMG, that “the status quo gives the impression it was designed for the convenience of industry players, rather than with a view to the perceptions of artists and fans.” BMG used this point to set up their defence of user-centric payment systems. However, it also paves the way for another argument altogether, something BMG hinted at too in further evidence they presented: the importance of monetizing the artist-fan relationship more directly. And that should be done by building a community.
Focus on community
We’re not new to the idea of community as an important element in artists building out a living for themselves. Just last Tuesday Bas argued that “the one strategy that I feel almost any artist can apply is that of building a community of fans that can sustain you.” This related to DAOs and in my own article about why fans should want to buy NFTs one of the key arguments was that these tokens represent an opportunity for two-way communication between artist and fan. But there’s more to community-building than future-forward web3 technologies. What first of all needs to happen is a shift in mindset. One of the things that struck me in a recent podcast recording for The Daily Indie[in Dutch] is that so few artists actually experimented with building community during the pandemic.
Of course, Patreon, OnlyFansand their like saw fast growth during the pandemic. All the musicians who set up a subscription model or turned to monetize their livestreaming efforts did an amazing job. But for each one of those, there’s plenty others who still rely on their single-single-album release strategy. Why not flip it around? Take Dutch artist POSTIE who is social media first and recorded music second. He posts a video every Sunday and then after a while releases those songs as an album. Another way of putting this is that he doesn’t use social media to drive streams, but streaming services to drive followers.
Image by Alina Grubnyak via Unsplash
The community builders
Let me highlight two people who give some excellent advice on community building. First up is Anna Grigoryan, who writes a newsletter called Community Weekly in which she presents and explains tools to build community. My favorite advice of hers is to find your community mission. That’s where it starts. With the question of who you’re doing what you’re doing for. And then following that question with how you add value for those people. I would also add, that quickly after that, you should ask how your fans, your community, can add value for you. Anna is also very open about her own struggles in building a community around her newsletter. I find this very helpful when thinking about the communities I’m involved with for example.
This is where my next community builder comes in: Jen Lee. I came across her as the community manager from the Means of Creation fans Discord. First thing that happened when I joined the group was that I got a personal note welcoming me and encouraging me to post in a channel. She’s just been interviewed by Peter Yang and that message to me is pure strategy. In the interview Jen puts forward the following idea:
Like building a product, an online community needs to:
1. Exceed user expectations by personally welcoming new members.
2. Overcome the cold start problem by seeding the community with great content.
3. Deliver great UX by focusing the conversation on a few channels.
From these two community builders you have the starting gear to step into the studio. Whether you’ll focus on one of the subcriptions services (Patreon, OnlyFans, etc.), one of the social media (IGTikTok, etc.), the community platforms (Discord, Geneva, etc.), or turn your hand to web3 protocols (DAOs, NFTs, etc.) the basics are the same.
The Call-to-action
It’s as simple and easy as can be:
If you’re an artist start experimenting with community building. Do it now and be open with and towards your fans for feedback and interaction.
If you’re not an artist yourself, you’ll know them. Help them out by giving them these building blocks.
Together, we can make sure that the focus of the music industry starts to inch away from the shouting big numbers and boasting massive usage stats. Instead, we’ll focus on creating communities where artists and fans exchange value.
Twitter just launched a new tip jar feature with greater potential for musicians than those launched on popular streaming services such as Spotify and SoundCloud last year.
A new tip jar
Twitter started rolling out its new tip jar functionality last week. The functionality, which for now is only available to a limited group of creators, allows people to add Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo to their profiles via a new button on their profiles. It’s a bit like a ‘link in bio’, but specifically for payments.
show your love, leave a tip
now testing Tip Jar, a new way to give and receive money on Twitter đź’¸
Streaming platforms are not creator services. They focus on monetizing the catalogue-listener relation through ads and subscriptions rather than the artist-fan relation. That means the user experience on streaming services is geared towards what people expect in exchange for their payment: quick access to the music they know, new music, and being able to find ‘music for every moment’.
I’m not entirely sure how these services defined success for the donation feature, but especially Spotify needed a PR win over the past year, so I’m interpreting their silence over the feature as an indication that nothing significant is happening through there. As a matter of fact, it seems that in its newly designed desktop profiles, the feature has been quietly removed. For reference, compare Marshmello‘s profile on mobile and the new desktop UI.
Why Twitter is better positioned for tipping
Social media is where people connect to artists. You may listen to dozens of artists per month, even hundreds, but the commitment of a social media follow is something reserved for those you actually care about. Social media is primarily about what’s new and while you can scroll back into someone’s history, it’s a secondary use case when compared to seeing months or years-old ‘content’ appear on playlists.
Through social media, it’s easier than on streaming services to stay connected with people and introduce them to new ways to support you. By creating a Tip Jar that also includes things like Bandcamp and Patreon, Twitter is reducing the distance between a person being interested in something and actually purchasing it. Any friction in that journey causes drop-offs along the way, so any reduction of friction or journey length translates to real money for creators (see also: merch integrations in (live)streaming platforms).
Expect others to follow suit
The type of direct monetization offered through Twitter’s Tip Jar is part of a wider trend that can also be seen in livestreaming services, the surging popularity of Patreon and OnlyFans, Clubhouse‘s tipping feature, and even the donation buttons in music streaming services.
Twitter will not be the last service this year to roll out more monetization options.
Spotify often gets contrasted with Bandcamp in order to explain the challenges of the music streaming landscape: low per-stream royalties versus much larger commissions on sales. The intensity of that discussion has moved all eyes from the actual one-to-watch, which is not Spotify, but YouTube – a service with a billion monthly active music listeners and 30 million subscribers.
Always has been
YouTube has of course long been on everyone’s radar due to the so-called ‘value gap’: the disparity between what YouTube was willing to pay for music & its perceived real market value. As the biggest music platform, YouTube was infamous for its low per-stream rates which, on average, are significantly lower than Spotify’s for music identified through its ContentID system (source). I chose to phrase things in past tense due to attention shifting to Spotify, but that does not mean rightsholders have found these issues to have been resolved.
Another concern is the power of YouTube and its mother companies Google and Alphabet, which is a common reason for complaints from music industry lobbyists about having imbalanced negotiations. Before I go into why I think YouTube is making all the right moves: the concentration of power towards tech monopolies is of big concern for me too (it’s why I deleted or deactivated my accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). Keep this in mind when developing a strategy: always diversify, never put your eggs in one basket, and make sure you create ways to go direct-to-fan (e.g. collect phone numbers, email addresses, build communities).
YouTube’s evolution as a creator service
Google’s video service has long had something of great strategic value: not music. I mean that literally: it’s had content and creators that were not doing music. This has meant less complexities around licensing (but also poorer representation for creatives) and has allowed YouTube to experiment with new models.
The same is happening now with podcasts at Spotify and user-centric streaming payments at SoundCloud. Having ‘user-generated content’ from unsigned artists allowed SoundCloud to start trialing its ‘fan-powered royalty‘ model without every rightsholder having to opt-in through contract negotiations. Meanwhile Spotify is exploring new monetization models around podcasts, like paid podcast subscriptions. As a relatively new medium, podcasts don’t yet have the legal and political complexities associated with intellectual property in music.
YouTube & the next layer
Streaming is a base layer for music monetization. It’s shallow in that it leverages nothing but the relation between listener and catalogue. Monetization is driven by factors like accessibility (e.g. all devices, price), portability (e.g. offline) and convenience (e.g. catalogue size, search, recommendations). It’s absolutely basic: it’s not about the relation between fan and artist, it’s not about the quality of the art or music, it’s just about having the largest and most convenient store where you can access everything by paying from a magic wallet with your costs predictably capped at $10 per month. It’s a subscription business, not a music business – as Tim Westergren (founder of Pandora and now livestreaming service Sessions) also pointed out in my recent interview with him during Karajan Music Tech.
This base layer has advantages: it generates a huge amount of money for rightsholders and creates a foundational data layer which can be used to connect listeners to new artists and music or could be leveraged to learn more about existing fans and get new music to them. But streaming was never supposed to be the future of the music economy. It needs additional layers on top.
One of these layers is the Interaction Layer. This layer has been thriving during the pandemic thanks to a particular medium: livestreams. Livestreams encourage interactivity: fans can be exposed to each other in chats and the chat functionality can make fans feel like they’re seen by the artist(s) they care about so much. That means there’s value being created beyond simple music access. Value means opportunity to monetize and YouTube has seized that opportunity.
Through its Super Sticker and Super Chat features, YouTube allows creators to monetize their livestreams. Super Stickers are big, fun and quirky custom emoji that appear in the chat in exchange for a small fee. Super Chat allows viewers to highlight and pin a message for a certain duration of time, depending on how much they pay. In the first months of the pandemic lockdowns, from March to June 2020, over 2 million new users spent money on these features.
The second feature that provides an additional layer is channel memberships. This allows creators to created limited edition content, similar to what they might offer on Patreon or a SFW OnlyFans. At smaller numbers, it even allows them to create semi-bespoke content.
Layer integration
These features allow creators to monetize and connect with fans where they already are: YouTube (as opposed to onboarding them to Patreon or OnlyFans). This is the important distinction. These monetization options are not novel in and of themselves – many of them have been around for years or even decades. The important development is that these experience and monetization layers are integrating. Moving fans around various platforms causes friction, which means you won’t be able to convert everyone down the funnel from the streaming layer. It also keeps the data in one place instead of fracturing it.
Over the next years we’re going to see many examples of artists successfully building models on layers that sit on top of streaming. YouTube is going to play a significant role in that. The conversation will move from leveraging streaming (still essential for discovery & connection to wider audience) to interaction & bespoke options.
Another service to watch in this space is Amazon Music, which is slowly expanding their integration of livestreams from Twitch (another Amazon company, which also allows micropayments and memberships like YouTube).
Livestreams mean original content and a different set of rights than what you negotiate for on-demand streaming. This has given YouTube and Amazon the flexibility to experiment with these new layers. Spotify’s business strategy has introduced similar functionality to podcasts, but will they be able to do the same for music given the complexities of licensing and the various rightsholders that will want a piece of the pie?
The music streaming landscape is in flux and it’s not about Apple Music vs Spotify or Spotify vs Bandcamp anymore.
A special thanks to Vickie Nauman for some of the inspiration for this piece and to c/o pop and Germany’s association for independent music (VUT) for having us on a panel last week.
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).
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 LOLAÂ (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 ADOÂ 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.
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.
