2020 has turned a surging trend into a global reality: remote work. Spotify, which currently employs around 5,000 people globally, recently committed to staying remote-friendly beyond the pandemic. What other companies in music have the same intention?
Remote work has not taken off in the music business as it has in other industries. This can partially be attributed to some commonly held beliefs, some of which specific to creative industries:
“The music business is a people business.”
“Real collaboration can only be done in person.”
“It’s hard to maintain a coherent team culture remotely.”
These are all valid concerns. Being remote-friendly requires a shift in workflows to make asynchronous work easier, a shift in management, and a general shift in mindset.
Pros & cons to remote work
Buffer, a social media tool for scheduling posts, has been championing remote-first as a company. As such, they create a yearly ‘State of Remote Work‘ report to research how remote work is developing. Its latest report found that ‘not being able to unplug’ is the biggest concern among remote workers.
Switching off is a notorious topic in music, since it’s all too common for people to work deep into the evenings. I figured the pandemic might play a role in this, due to people being stuck at home and coworking spaces being closed, but people working remotely pre-COVID struggle with this as much as others.
On the flip side, remote work also has benefits. While the below chart focuses on the worker, there are also organisational upsides. Remote work benefits from maintaining workflows in which people won’t get blocked. People have to be able to work asynchronously as much as possible, so they don’t have to wait for people in other timezones or on other schedules.
While you don’t need to work remotely to clean up workflows, the friction might not have been visible to managers since people could resolve blockers by walking over to a desk. As such, remote work brings the benefit of forcing clarity, transparency, and focus to well-performing organisations.
We’ll be going live on Clubhouse on February 25, 8pm CET / 2pm EST to discuss remote work in music. I’m looking forward to hearing from leaders and workers in the music space about their learnings and plans for remote work going forward.
One of the key things I took away from being a part of the Music Business Day at the University of Utrecht last weekend is that there’s ways to balance the weaknesses and opportunities that the pandemic has respectively exposed and opened up. I’ll look into this by focusing on four things to consider that Catherine Moore highlighted in our panel on ‘music futures, near and far’:
People
How to measure the market?
Place
How does music enrich the environment in which we live?
Public health
What is the role of music & musicians to support mental health?
Communication
Change the vocabulary around how music works within, e.g., a city: music venue is a sound manager not a noise maker. How do we communicate across disciplines?
Do you really want to be a musician?
When Jonathan Irons mentioned that only 1% of a musicians’ life takes place on stage, it presented a hook that allowed everyone else on this day of music business to contextualize. So much of what we feel is ‘the music industry’ focuses on the live experience. Fans mythologize live events and artists need to perform at 100% night after night on stage. Yet, there’s so much happening around those brief moments that musicians experience on stage. It’s there that musicians, or agencies, or labels, etc. can build a brand and a franchise out of the music.
That’s one thing that became clear: musicians need to treat their music as a business. And the second thing is that if the artist cannot do it, there’s an opportunity for another business to step in and help the artist sell their music. Most musicians grapple with all the many things that are expected from them: keep track of your social media, practice, do community management, write new music, practice more, and so on. Being able to do that requires time and money. As Sarah Osborn, of UK-based Incorporated Society of Musicians, mentioned, employment is one of the weaknesses that the pandemic has exposed within the music industry. So much in the business relies on freelancers and the question was raised whether the music industry will go the way of the acting profession. Will it become normal for a professional musician to have another job and just music doesn’t provide a sustainable life in and of itself?
We discussed this part of the music industry with the students to help them step into it with their eyes wide open and that it’s necessary to approach the portfolio career. Professor Emile Wennekes pushed everyone to put their names out there, either by publishing your music, writing about music, or even engaging in policy. Having set this stage, the day took a turn around Anthony Gritten‘s notion that we should look at career as a verb.
Careering through the music industry
People
When we start to think about the music business as a network that involves a lot of performativity this allows us to reshape our roles within it. Moreover, it takes those brief moments of live interaction between musicians and fans and networks them into more stages of reciprocity. When starting any venture, it’s important to know your market, to analyse your potential audience and find out where they are. If you make music, for example, you can use Spotify for Artists, Chartmetric, etc. to understand where your music is popular. A next step is to create something that brings benefits to both you and the fan. This is the staple of the creator economy, something that underlines the 1000-fan and 100-fan theories. There’s plenty to argueagainst this theory, but the essence sits behind every creator with a Patreon, every newsletter author who monetizes through Substack, and every band with a Shopify website.
Place
Music has the ability to enrich the environment in which we live and move. Starting with R. Murray Schafer (check out the World Soundscape Project), there’s a whole scholarship on ‘the soundscape’ and its role in determining how people relate to their surroundings. With Barry Truax this notion developed into something more attuned to design, something to influence. What our discussions during the Music Business Day added to this is that we need to embrace more the idea of music as a utility. Creating music for and bringing music into places to help improve experiences, interactions, and even personal psychology is not ‘selling out’ but a valid way to create and add value.
Public health
On the one hand this topic segues nicely from the previous argument around ‘place’. Creating music, making playlists, performing wellbeing are all great ways to help situate music in the cross-section of adding value for the musician and a fan (or not even necessarily a fan in this case). Moreover, there’s plenty of research to support that music has a positive effect both on health care and its associated costs. On the other hand, there’s the mental health risks for musicians, exacerbated by the current pandemic. With many musicians already having trouble securing a modal income through their music, taking out income related to session work and live performance made that even harder.
Communication
Terminology matters. It matters how we communicate and which vocabulary we use. Just think of how different it is to consider a music venue in a city a sound manager instead of noise maker. One key group working hard to change our vocabulary when it comes to music is Sound Diplomacy. Their objective is to show how music, and culture in general, bring economic, social and cultural growth to cities. One thing the pandemic has done is to shine a light on what music and culture bring to the table and how those industries could even help to kickstart the economy post-pandemic. Rebuilding Europe, research conducted by EY for GESAC, the European collective societies, shows that before Covid-19 hit the music industry grew 4% year-over-year, then, in 2020, it shrunk by 76%. And yet, because of the social cohesion attached to music and the power of communication connected to music it has strong potential to help bring about both a social and economic upturn as and when we start to move through the final stages of the pandemic. To help facilitate that, we’ll need to choose our words carefully.
Overall a day of music business left me with a firm notion that there’s only music industries instead of a singular music industry. At the end of the day, we were all quietly optimistic about the future with exciting changes happening right now to how music is created, performed, and consumed. And yet, there was also a strong sense that music needs to increase social capital and that a political voice is necessary to navigate what will be a rocky recovery from the impact of the pandemic.
Conference organisers and journalists are trying to do a better job at diversity, but unfortunately, it’s not always easy. Let’s change that.
I get asked a lot whether I know any female founders at music tech startups. Together with some wonderful people on Twitter and on my newsletter, we’ve been putting together a list. Feel free
I’ve made a start at this list – together with some wonderful people on Twitter. If you think anyone is missing, please use this form to add them. And please don’t feel excluded if you don’t identify as male or female – drop me a note (@basgras on Twitter, my DMs are always open) & I’ll figure out another name for this list.
Facebook recently launched a sound library including tracks you can use for free on videos. People criticized the concept in a music business discussion group (also on Facebook, ironically). I would hear the same rhetoric that people have when they say bands shouldn’t perform for free, because it’s not just a bad practice, it is also bad for your peers.
But let’s look at the reality that people in music are complaining about.
1. There are many different types of artists
There are always going to be people who find it awesome to see their music used by other people: even if they don’t get any money for it. They may be college students who are just happy to see their music travel. They may be people working full time jobs who do a little music on the side and don’t depend on the income. They may be professional producers who put out these tracks to libraries as a type of calling card.
Either way: there is always going to be free music and you will always have to compete with it.
2. Giving your music away for free can actually work
You have to have a monetization strategy at the end of this, but the easiest way to win attention online is to make great ‘content’ (in this case music). This content should be available with as few barriers as possible: which means making sure it’s available for free. The second part of your strategy should include steps on 1) how to hold people’s attention after you capture it, and 2) how to identify opportunities to monetize your fanbase (I wrote about it in detail in this thesis).
But sometimes you don’t need a strategy for monetization. It’s not easy to get signed to big labels nowadays and it usually requires you to show that you can build up your own audience. One of my favourite examples of someone who successfully leveraged free is Alan Walker. An EDM artist with tracks that have more plays than some of the most popular tracks from stars like Kendrick Lamar. How? He released his somewhat odd music through NoCopyrightSounds, which specialised in providing YouTubers and Twitch streamers with music they could use for free, without fear that their videos would get taken down. Eventually, they soundtracked the whole subculture and put a new sound in EDM on the map (read more).
3. AI is going to one up everyone
We are seeing amazing developments in AI. The most recent example is GoogleDeepMind‘s AlphaZero, which beat the world’s best bot in chess after spending just 4 hours practicing. Startups from Jukedeck, to Amper, to Popgun, to Scored are all trying to make music generation easier.
We already see more music being released than ever before, but so far it has still depended on human output. Through AI, music is already being untethered from human productivity. Standing out in abundance is a minuscule problem compared to what it will be 5 years from now.
Free music libraries are the least of your problem
There is no singular music business or industry. Everyone is playing by different rules and all those rules will be upended every time there’s a big shift in technology. From the record player, to the music video, to the internet, to AI and blockchain, music is the canary in the coal mine and you have to have a pioneer mentality or else you are falling behind every day.
The people who are one step ahead may be underground today, but some are the stars of tomorrow.
By all means, let us discuss the ethics. But be careful not to let your opposition blind you to the point where you cannot see how a new generation of music is thriving and leaving you behind. Because then it’s too late. For you.
What will the next format be to usher in a new music industry, like the record did in the 20th century?
The 20th century saw the rise of consumerist culture as a response to mass production causing supply to outgrow consumer demand. An example of this phenomenon is 20th century fashion which became highly cyclical (and wasteful), marketing new clothes for every season. After World War II, it became common to use clothing to express oneself through styles and fashions which often went hand-in-hand with music subcultures, just think of hippies, skinheads and punk music, hiphop, funk, or disco.
“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
– Victor Lebow (Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955)
Consumerism helped turn the recording industry into the most powerful part of the music business ecosystem, something which had previously been dominated by publishers. It changed music. The record player moved into the living room, then every room of the house, and the walkman (now smartphone) put music into every pocket. Music gained and lost qualities along the way.
Previously, it had been common for middle class families to have a piano in the home. Music was a social activity; music was alive. If you wanted to hear your favourite song, it would sound slightly different every time. With the recording, music became static and sounded the same way every time. And the shared songs of our culture were displaced by corporate-controlled pop music. People stopped playing the piano; and creators and ‘consumers’ became more clearly distinguished culturally.
With streaming, we are reaching the final stage of this development. Have a look at the above Victor Lebow quote and tell me streaming does not contribute to music being worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.
The rules of mass production don’t apply to music anymore, since it’s no longer about pressing recordings: anything can be copied & distributed infinitely on the web. The democratisation of music production has turned many ‘consumers’ into creators again. Perhaps this started with drum computers, which helped kick off two of today’s fastest growing genres in the 70s and 80s: hiphop and house music. Today, this democratisation has turned our smartphones into music studios, with producers of worldwide hits making songs on their iPhones.
We see more people producing music, our Soundcloud feeds are constantly updated, Spotify‘s algorithms send new music out to us through daily mixes, Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Fresh Finds, and we now have the global phenomenon of New Music Fridays. With this massive amount of new music, we are simply not connecting to music in the same way as we did when music was scarce. We move on faster. As a result, music services, music providers essentially, place a big emphasis on music discovery as a result. We shift from the age of mass media, and mass production, to something more complex: many-to-many, and decentralised (music) production on a massive scale.
Has consumerism broken music culture? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, consumerism is also what producers of music creation software and hardware depend on, which contributes to the democratisation of music and returning musical participation to the days of the piano as the default music playback device.
If streaming is the final stage of the age of the recording, then what’s next?
Embedded deep in the cultures of hiphop and house music, we can see what cultural values are important to the age of democratised music creation. Both genres heavily sampled disco and funk early on in their lifecycles. One of the most famous samples in hiphop and electronic music culture is the Amen Break. With the advent of the sampler, the drum break of the Winston‘s Amen Brother became widespread and instrumental to the birth and development of subgenres of electronic music in the 90s.
Not so long ago, ‘remix culture’ was still a notion one could discuss in abstract terms, for instance in the open-source documentary RiP!: A Remix Manifestowhich discussed the topic at length. Things have changed fast however, turning the formerly abstract into a daily reality for many.
Since the documentary’s release in 2008, social networks have boomed. Back then, only 24% of the US population was active on social media, but now that’s ~80%. With the increasing socialisation of the web, as well as it being easier to manipulate images, we saw an explosion of internet memes, typically in the form of image macros which can be adjusted to fit new contexts or messages.
The same is happening to music through ‘Soundcloud culture’. Genres are born fast through remix, and people iterate on new ideas rapidly. A recent example of such a genre is moombahton which is now one of the driving sounds behind today’s pop music.
Snapchat filters and apps like Musically let users playing around with music and placing ourselves in the context of the song. Teens nowadays are not discovering music by some big budget music video broadcasted to them on MTV, they are discovering it by seeing their friend dance to it on Musically.
Music is becoming interactive, and adaptable to context.
Matching consumer trends and expectations with technology
Perhaps music is one of the first fields in which consumerist culture has hit a dead end, making it necessary for it to evolve to something beyond itself. People increasingly expect interactivity, since expressing yourself just by the music you listen to is not enough anymore to express identity.
Music production is getting easier. If combined with internet meme culture, it makes sense for people to use music for jokes or to make connections by making pop culture references through sampling. Vaporwave is a great example. But also internet rave things like this:
Instead of subcultures uniting behind bands and icons, they can now participate in setting the sound of its genre, creating a more customised type of sound that is more personally relevant to the listener and creator.
That’s where the future of music lies. Not in the static recording, but in the adaptive. The recording industry that rose from the record looked nothing like the publishing industry. It latched on to the trend of consumerism and created a music industry of a scale never seen before. Now that we’ve reached peak-consumerism, and are at the final phase of the cycle for the static recording, there’s room for something new and adaptive. And like with the recording business before, the music business that will rise from adaptive media will look nothing like the current music industry.
A reflection on key trends in music, tech, and user interfaces.
Soundcloud is saved, for now. On top of whatever strategic decisions they make to be able to attract follow-up investments, they face the difficult task of preserving their user community’s trust and winning back part of the trust they already lost. Tumultuous times are ahead, which will be frustrating, but also very exciting as it creates opportunity for new innovation and startups to claim their piece of the pie.
Underserved early adopter: the Myspace moment
Back in April I wrote about the fact that music is about to experience another Myspace moment. What I mean by that is that when Myspace hit decline, as it lost its community’s trust, new platforms got a chance as early adopters bailed and moved on. Musicians started building up audiences on Facebook and Twitter, and sharing their music on Soundcloud.
Now we see another Myspace moment: Spotify is focusing on mass audiences, and the prime early adopter platform has a distressed community due to the continuous struggles that Soundcloud has faced over the last years.
This creates opportunities for concepts such as:
Connecting groups of music listeners based on music taste or curiosity:
Soundcloud‘s struggling with this due to its failure to keep its search & tagging feature useful as the amount of content grew over the years, and they killed their groups feature;
Promo services for people who need an easy way to share music to journalists, labels, etc.
You could come up with a lot more ideas and find startups striving to make a meaningful impact there.
A third device in our midst: the Voice User Interface (VUI)
I’ve recently been playing around with an Amazon Alexa I ordered. At first I was skeptical and thought it would always feel awkward, but you get used to it fast and the convenience of a voice-controlled device in the living room (and other rooms) is bigger than I expected. I thought all those times you have to grab your mobile phone, or look something up on the computer, were minor and infrequent inconveniences. Now, the VUI has embedded itself into my life and all kinds of small habits, patterns and every day rituals.
VUIs are going to be the third device: first came PCs (plus laptops), then came smartphones (plus tablets), and now we’re going to get a third addition through voice-controlled devices like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple‘s Siri-based devices, devices in the car, etc. Perhaps this is why Tesla is in talks to do a music streaming service: music is the way into these spaces.
So what happens to the way we browse and explore music when we take the visual user interface away? What place does the smartphone get? What place does the laptop get? And what behaviour extends to our smart speakers?
What happens in AI is very important for VUI apps, but also for chatbots.
Conversational interfaces: the rise of messaging apps
Messaging has frequently been called the next major platform. It enables chatbots, which are apps that live on conversational platforms (this is a trend that’s also strengthened by VUIs). Some of the biggest social platforms to rise up over the last decade were primarily messaging apps, such as Snapchat, Whatsapp, Telegram, and Kik.
The next step of the social web is messaging, but smarter than the AIM, ICQ, and chatroom phase of social. Facebook is positioning Messenger in such a way that it can live as a platform on its own.
I urge people to try out Instagram Stories and figure out what it takes to make good content for it. Short-form video content is so important in an age of short attention spans. Some of the hottest platforms to emerge among teens in the last years have been Snapchat and Musically, both limiting the time-length of videos being shared on the platforms. It’s fun, fast, and requires low commitment: making users share and explore more content.
I firmly believe this is going to change the way we write songs and structure them. We’ve already seen how the streaming playlist economy made tracks shorter, with people moving the vocals to the start of the track in order to make skips less likely. In the next years, the video story format is going to strongly impact music.
Instagram is another platform that may fare very well from the decline of user trust in Soundcloud‘s community.
I’ll be discussing more of these trends in my newsletter, which goes out every week on Monday. Sign up to stay in the loop.
