Tag: pandemic

Post-pandemic music scenes

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

There is no end in sight to the pandemic. Yet a privileged few are getting a taste of it. A preview. The ingredients of post-pandemic scenes will be an urge to move forward, a nostalgia for what existed before, and the integration of methods of resilience in the new status quo for music.

The urge to prefix ‘post-’

The urge to move forward, to connect with music and each other again, is one of the driving forces behind the demand for events and people’s willingness to spend on it. People who are attending an event for the first time since the start of the pandemic come out, vaccinated or tested, but also people who have been plague raving. While many people have spoken out against plague raves, I’m not aware of any blacklists existing and suspect perpetrators will be quickly forgotten in a wish to move on and reunite.

There are also people who have left the scene: from artists, performers, workers in other domains of music, to party-goers. Some have moved out of cities, some changed careers and became programmers, train drivers, designers. Sad as this may be, it also creates space in the most competitive areas for newcomers who perhaps carry a different vision than the old guard does.

There has always been a certain passing of the torch, usually gradually. Now we’ll see it in high contrast.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia comes in many forms. Younger generations will be nostalgic for a future they anticipated having. They’re going to manifest that future now. Then there are the people that are frozen in time. One day in February or March 2020, they left the club and went home, expecting to do the same thing next weekend. For them, in part of the world, that weekend is finally emerging.

This dynamic is also manifesting in music, creating an interesting tension between new emerging visions and the desire to return to our old place of comfort. It’s a perfect recipe for new sounds that integrate throwbacks – whether that’s Britney Spears vocals, 90s subculture aesthetics, or pop punk. 

Methods of resilience

Livestreams, NFTs & DAOs, and countless new formal and informal organisations have all emerged as methods to offer resilience in a period of hardship. Instead of zeroing in on specifics, like we do in the links section of the newsletter, let’s look at the bigger picture.

Normalization of virtual music experiences.

Livestreams and other types of virtual music experiences will sit alongside other offers. They may be highly socialized or ‘single player’ and need to adopt ‘better than real life’ strategies in order to succeed.

Interconnected communities.

Virtual events and Discords connected international communities in ways they weren’t before. While previously the connections were through traveling musicians and promoters, now people from different places have connected through music in another way. This change may be difficult to spot for most readers who have been creatively or professionally involved in music for years, but it’s tangible for superfans as well as aspiring artists just starting out.

New formal networks.

The past year has seen organisations form from the events sector lobbying and trying to stay afloat to social justice organisations standing up for people in music. These organisations are constantly finding ways to stay relevant and help people deal with the issues of the day. They’ll be able to provide representation post-pandemic where previously representation didn’t exist (or struggled to gain visibility).

New informal networks.

Most networks don’t have a name or legal entity, so the changes happening here are harder to represent, but crucial to music going forward. For example: in Berlin, organizers have been allowed to throw gigs outdoors, but with 8 months of gloomy weather per year, the city’s not exactly set up for this. People have scrambled to organize spaces, assisted by formal networks, but coming together in new configurations that previously didn’t exist, with no formal name to signify them. The connections being shaped & the integration of previously disconnected networks will shape at least part of the post-pandemic music landscape in cities around the world.

Web3.

For substance, read everything or anything we’ve already written about on this topic. In short, communities can now turn the value they create into money by raising funds through NFTs and other types of tokens. This goes into platform-agnostic community bank accounts. It’s a powerful dynamic that will be as influential for the next generation of culture as the web 2.0 was for the previous. It gives more people the chance to opt out of the status quo & do things differently. I’m particularly curious how collectives & the informal networks that formed during the pandemic will utilize this for events (real & virtual), merch (real & virtual), and to support their creative work.

At the beginning of the year, we anticipated 2021 would be characterized by new scarcity models. Rather, it’s not just the year – it’s the decade.

Pandemic state of mind: global vs local

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

‘The end is in sight’, ‘vaccines are here’, ‘let’s have a party’. We are at such a different juncture of the pandemic right now than we were a year ago. At the start of the pandemic governments were hesitant to impose widescale lockdowns because they were so different from what ‘normal’ was at the time. When lockdowns did get instituted the general consensus was that we were all in it together. A driver that hits us up with adrenaline and a can-do spirit. Now, we’re exhausted and we need to tap into our collective determination; which is a very different energy. Right now, we need governments to get us out of the ‘pandemic normal’ and into a life that will lead us into something else altogether. Let’s see where we are at in the pandemic, what’s on the horizon, and where we should focus our energies.

[ed. note: I am not a public health expert, please consult with experts when planning events, travel, etc.]

The state of the pandemic

If you want to know at what level of threat the pandemic is there’s basically two ways of looking at it:

1. the global view

The global view isn’t pretty. Trawling through the data on the WHO Coronavirus (Covid-19) Dashboard doesn’t make for pretty reading. Overall, at a global scale infections are rising for the 7th week in a row. At the same time, the number of vaccines doses administered is at over 733 million at the time of writing. That’s a positive, but there remain many unknowns. In a recent article for The Verge, Monica Chin explored what it will take in terms of vaccinations before we can open up again. Although she gets many different answers from the experts she spoke to one thing seemed clear: we need a 70-80% vaccination rate to achieve something resembling herd immunity. To achieve that at a global scale is very far away and the WHO raised the alarm on what they call a ‘shocking imbalance‘ in the way vaccines are distributed.

2. the local view

In some localities around the world many people have already had their vaccine jabs. Israel still leads the way, the UK does well, Chile and the US too.

But what if you’re in India (second wave ‘tsunami’) or Brazil (the crisis intensifies still)? The picture looks very different. This has been the case for some time now of course. If you live in New Zealand (hello stadium tour), your perception of the pandemic will be very different than if you live in the Philippines (hang in there 300 Covid-19 patients waiting in line at the hospital).

Similarly, there’s the danger of variants that mean the world on a local scale will look to shut down travel from certain other parts of the world. Axios has a Variant Tracker, which looks into the various variants and their prevalence in the US. What these variants mean, how they’ll develop, and what the impact will be on the pandemic is still to be determined. It’s the big uncertainty moving forward and science can only do so much without being able to test, prove and disprove.

Where’s the music?

Of course, we all want to go back to concerts, festivals, live experiences that involve people in close proximity. There are many local experiments that try, and succeed, at proving that it’s possible to host events in a safe manner. In the Netherlands there’s the Fieldlab Experiments. They’ve shown already (like others before them) that it’s possible to host a safe event where audiences behave predictably, spaces have good ventilation, people test before the event, and adhere to social distancing restrictions. Next up are the festivals and testing is the most important as audiences will not behave or move predictably at a festival site.

Testing and vaccines are the big hope of the live music industry. Even without herd immunity, the idea of vaccination passports is here, and most likely here to stay. In some localities the passport is already alive, but this is in notably rich countries. Will we see artists touring on a vaccination passport? And audiences travelling with their proof of vaccination in hand? For sure, this will happen, and privacy is a massive issue [as we wrote before]. One festival which was one of the first to shout they will go ahead with rapid testing is Unum Festival in Albania. They’ve now teamed up with Swallow Events and Yoti to bring their audience a home test. Moreover, the results of this test will be hosted on a blockchain. A verification model that could, potentially, alleviate some security concerns.

Now what?

The answer to this question depends on whether you think global or local. If you’re living in a country that has either done well on actively preventing the spread of the coronavirus in the first place, or in a country that does well with its vaccination program there’s light at the end of the tunnel. If you live in a country where the opposites are true, it’s a very different picture. So what to do?

On the one hand, I want to call out to governments to pinch through ‘status-quo bias‘ and assess local initiatives carefully and at face value. To let go of what has become the ‘pandemic-normal’ and look for a ‘post-pandemic-normal’ that will allow music – and culture in general – to bloom again.

On the other hand, I want to call out to organizers to look beyond themselves and take into account a global picture. Live events in isolation might be possible, but if we’ve learned one thing in the last year it’s that we don’t live in isolation from each other.

The pandemic has changed music education for good. These are the opportunities

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

1.2 billion children were learning at home instead of in their classrooms during the first phase of lockdowns last spring. This gave the e-learning market a 36.6% growth year-over-year in 2020. Overall, the global e-learning market size is projected to reach $374 billion by 2026. However, the global market size for online music learning is only projected to reach $143 million by 2025. It looks like there’s a massive gap as music education plays such a big role in many childrens’, and indeed people’s, lives. Where are the opportunities? Why haven’t they been capatilized on yet?

Digital disruption

Online educational technology disrupts, or has the potential to disrupt, offline music learning in two main practices:

  1. Solo learning, or the amateur or professional musician who uses technology to further their knowledge of an instrument or music theory.
  2. Teacher-based, interactive learning, or the more official branch of music education where one teacher has a class, or a single student, to teach a specific instrument or music theory.

In the first practice there is historically more focus on collaboration, but with the internet ‘solo-learning’ isn’t necessarity solo as it’s easily shared as user-generated content or across the user-base of a specific app.

Solo learning

There’s basically two ways to learn music on your own over the internet: 1) through video services that provide video training, teachers, and tools to learn an instrument; 2) apps that allow you to learn broadly, and often in a playful way, how to play an instrument.

Video services

Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: there’s a million – if not more – videos on YouTube that help you learn to play guitar, violin, piano, etc. There’s also a bunch of institutions who have created freely available music tutorials. The London Sinfonietta is one of them, see for example this video for Steve Reich‘s Clapping Music, which I invite you all to learn this week.

Now, of course, all this freely available stuff stands in the way of monetizing music e-learning. But there’s still plenty of options and a lot of room for growth.

Some of these services have been around for a while. For example, the imusic school, or iClassical Academy. Both of these platforms provide a raft of instruction videos and lean heavily into some of the advantages that online learning provides:

Screenshot of the teacher’s page at imusic school
  • It’s cost effective to use, paying a set subscription price to access the entire catalogue of videos
  • Being available 24/7, these services allow students to learn at their own pace and at times they want
  • It’s easy to switch it up. It you’re learning to play violin, for example, you can go back to a previous lesson with one click if you can’t remember something or want a primer to get back into it. Similarly, you have many teachers to choose from across various platforms
  • Everyone learns differently and it’s easy to set your own pace, but there’s also a lot of different options in methodology

The two services mentioned above still focus on what can be called a traditional method of learning, albeit via video. But there’s so much more e-learning can offer. Take, for example, Primephonic‘s Ludwig, it’s “a 10-week digital crash course in classical music that involves a weekly podcast, bi-daily email lessons, [and] playlists on key composers and genres.” It doesn’t teach you an instrument, but the focus on audio over video and the variety of interactions position it closer to a gamified study environment than the time-honored teacher-to-student methods of an imusic school or iClassical Academy.

App-based learning

There are so many piano apps that searching for ‘piano’ in the App Store or Play Store will leave you flabbergasted. And there’s an almost similarly distorted amount of articles if you search Google for ‘best piano apps’. Looking at these apps there’s broadly two sets: 1) apps geared towards kids and which allow learning via the app or with a real piano (example: Piano Academy); 2) apps that involve elements of the video-based learning described above (example: Hoffman Academy).

Another example of the first set is Yousician, developed with a massive funding injection from the European Commission. It was part of the EC Horizon 2020 project aimed at the next billion musicians. The idea behind it was that by making music education available to basically everyone with a smartphone or tablet this would lead to growth across the industry due to more demand for lessons and instruments.

The key element with Piano Academy or Yousician’s piano app is that of play and gamification. This attracts and rewards users and has an interesting extension into popular culture through Netflix‘s Sing On karaoke competition. If you’ve not seen Sing On, it’s basically another variation on the talent competition format. Contestants sing wellknown songs as if they’re in a karaoke bar. Success, however, is measured through something called a vocal analyzer.

Sing On vocal analyzer

Viewers can follow along on screen how well each contestant is hitting the notes and timing their lyrics. The feature is so visually attractive that the show’s creators found that: “more than half of the people love watching the lower-third graphic.” Moreover, the feature resembles that of vocal-training apps like Yousician for singing. Gamification thus not only allows people to learn better, it attracts them towards music more broadly speaking. The more this will infuse pop culture, the more it will lead to people picking up an instrument and paying for fun lessons on the go.

Teacher-based, interactive learning

The pandemic forced music school across the world to go online. A good example comes from Manila, where Sounds Kradle had its teachers and students as well as working directly with schools to reach more children. As soon as the lockdown started, the team set up their own online learning environment: The Applied Music Platform.

Applied Music Platform by Sounds Kradle

Everything is done one-on-one with group lessons currently on hold. This is, of course, intense for the teachers, but it’s also worthwhile. In an interview with The Manila Times one of the founders says that: “we have a surprising 97 percent attendance rate every week.” And it’s that number that makes this type of teaching-based learning so interesting for both teachers and schools.

Paid tutoring and online classes

When it comes to schools, it involves tuition fees. For a large part, such fees pay for the physical schools and the infrastructure needed to support them. By going more direct and online, a lot of those costs can be cut making music lessons more affordable. Here, music education can expand on the steps taking by platforms like Udemy. There are already many courses available on Udemy that focus on music: from the guitar to Ableton music production. Of course, being on a platform like Udemy gives you scale and a ready audience looking to learn. But you don’t ‘own’ these students as you would those students that you may find in your local town or city. And as any creator can tell you, it’s always better to be in control of the flow, mainly of money.

EdTech for teachers

This is where the tech comes in. Just going back to last spring again, several major tech companies opened up their virtual classroom technologies to the public. Dingtalk, Alibaba’s e-learning platform, did it, so did Google and Microsoft. Google’s Classroom app is still today the most downloaded app in, for example, the UK App Store. In other words, the tech is there, teachers just have to use it. When they do, there’s three things to pay attention to:

  • Bandwidth: not everyone has a good bandwidth connection and there’s plenty of ways to take this into account. For example by limiting video quality (or just focusing on audio), having fewer people per class (one-on-one has an extra benefit here), and using other features like an online whiteboard to explain things that don’t require video.
  • Don’t just copy an offline class: research has shown that knowledge retention rates rise from 8-10% in offline learning environments to 25-60% in e-learning settings. The idea is that students can more easily learn at their own pace and thus pick up new information more quickly. When creating an virtual class, a teacher has to take this into account and keep it challenging. This also allows for a shorter class than an offline one would usually be. Expect more focused interaction in an online class coupled with some more ‘entertaining’ elements, such as flash cards or a more playful use of an instrument.
  • Focus on process over curriculum: similar to what many bands and artists are doing with their recording process (e.g. Selena Gomez) there are opportunities to innovate when it comes to song-writing in online collaboration. One teacher had his class write songs in groups, each ‘band member’ tasked to record themselves in their own home. He encouraged them to try out the acoustics in various spaces with just one condition, that they all play in the same key, in the same tempo.

Growth opportunities

It seems that the technologies are there for online music education to grow exponentially in the coming years. Traditional schools can reach much broader audiences and involve a wider array of teachers while implementing more differentiated lessons. Similarly, for people wanting to learn a new instrument, or have their kids learn one, there’s endless options. Some geared towards students who crave gamification and rewards, others geared towards more traditional teacher-student interactions. With all this tech available and a global population accustomed to online learning through enforced lockdowns there’s no reason that the industry shouldn’t just aim for a billion users but also a billion dollar market size.

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Only 1% of a musicians’ life happens on stage, the rest is careering

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

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 argue against 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.

If you want to start a music brand, don’t wait until the pandemic is over

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Without live music, it may feel like a bad time to start a music brand. However when considering the realities of the post-pandemic landscape and the opportunities on the road to there, now is exactly the right time.

Post-pandemic

We’re probably a year away from things going back to normal. People are hopeful for the summer season, but it may not look like last year’s summer at all. Germany’s top virologist, Christian Drosten, has warned that 2021’s summer could be much worse than 2020’s:

“The fact that we had such a relaxed summer in 2020 probably had to do with the fact that our case numbers stayed below a critical threshold in the spring. But that’s not the case now.”

Getting case numbers down remains hard, because of the high infection rates in many areas and the newly mutated virus strains which are more contagious.

Drosten argues against early relaxation of lockdowns to avoid scenarios of overload in hospitals in the summer – which would lead to a summer lockdown. The article doesn’t mention what early relaxation means, but it will obviously be difficult for politicians to extend current measures deep into spring. Which, tragically, means that we have a realistic scenario of a summer spike in COVID-19 cases.

The longer this goes on, the greater the wear on the infrastructure that brings so many musicians and fans together: agencies, events, clubs, suppliers, the artists themselves… they’re all facing uncertainty and many of them will not make it to the finish line. This means that the normal we’ll go ‘back to’, will be quite different from the normal we knew before. In a sense, this can be seen as music’s 9/11 moment in the sense that there’s a demarcation of before and after or perhaps more aptly: music’s second Napster moment.

From 2021 onward, live music will have to do more with less. This may create an (even) more competitive landscape. While music fans’ eagerness to see live music and party may create large demand, the infrastructure to supply that demand is highly regulated (think: crowd & fire safety, noise regulation, alcohol licenses, sanitation, etc.) and may not be able to scale back up quickly.* I suspect there will be a lot of emerging opportunity in the informal sphere (house parties, illegal raves, etc.).

It will be hard work to launch a music brand in the competitive space of post-pandemic live music, so get started now so you’re positioned to seize the opportunities when they emerge.

* Sidenote: if this scenario of undersupply plays out like that, it will be interesting to see how it affects pricing and what role livestreaming can play to make up for the limited supply.

Pre-“post-pandemic” opportunities

What opportunities can you leverage today in order to set up a resilient music brand for the post-pandemic landscape?

Wielding influence and getting opportunities in music is highly correlated by your ability to get things in front of an audience. So, building a music brand is about building audience. If you can show you can get a crowd to a venue, the venue is more likely to give you a chance or better conditions (e.g. not having to pay fees, getting weekend slots, etc.). The same for the artists you can attract: if you can create significantly more opportunities for the artist than they already have, they’ll consider working with you. So, aside from defining your music category and brand positioning, goal number 1 should be:

Build visible audience.

If you don’t have any music you can release, start with curation. The mix of channels you’ll maintain is quite similar to when you release music. Consider the below:

  • Instagram. In my opinion one of the most important tools for music networking right now (read: Instagram vs SoundCloud: the battle for the center of music culture). For posts, focus on shareable content like memes related to your subculture / genre / scene. Instagram creates extra visibility for new features, so at the time of writing that means: create reels and add the music you stand for. Use stories to drive your audience to your other channels (set up a Linktree or similar) and to recycle previous posts to your audience’s growing audience.
  • TikTok. There are a lot of articles about how, if you’re after Gen Z, you should use TikTok. That’s bullshit. The platform is growing beyond its early demographics (John Lennon and David Bowie have profiles there now). So if your audience skews older, then get there before other music brands in your scene get there. Cut in front of them. When they join the platform, you’ll not only be an example to them, but also to the artists and events they represent.
  • Spotify. Playlist follower counts are public, so this is an important way of building visible audience and connecting people to your brand on a regular basis. Brand connection bonus: unlike with social media, people actually don’t have to look at their screen to be connected to you through curated music.

    A basic strategy would be to create two playlists. In the first, you just add all relevant tracks you can find. Try different searches for your genre and see what shows up. Claim gaps by using keywords in your title and playlist description. I did this with a Jersey club playlist I made (though I didn’t have a specific goal in mind) and was shocked to find out it had grown to hundreds of followers. Use a playlist organising tool (here are some) to reorder your playlist weekly or monthly, so that it always looks fresh when people land on the playlist (some tools remove and re-add all tracks, which creates new “added to playlist” dates for all tracks).

    Set up a second playlist, but restrict its length to 20-30 tracks. Change at least half of the tracks each week and make sure most music is released recently (e.g. last ~3 months). Add the day of the week that you refresh it to the title or description, so people know with what interval to come back to your playlist. Give everyone else a reminder through your social media whenever you refresh your Hyperpop Sunday, Post-punk Monday, Wobble Wednesday or 2step Tuesday playlist.

Depending on your scene and whether you’re releasing music yourself, you may use other channels like SoundCloud, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook (for the groups and events), etc. But as a start, don’t take on more than 2-3 channels. Get them up and running. It’s a lot of work.

Later on, you can set up a network on Discord, so that the creators and fans of the music you’re promoting on Instagram and Spotify can actually talk to each other, share music, etc. A community will help you to spot trends, new talent, and potential new collaborators (for example, you’ll probably have a need for visual artists, since your mediums are mostly visual).

If you’re planning on doing events, make an extra effort to showcase local talent and to build local audience: you’re going to need it when you start hosting your first events.

Develop experience in audience activation.

Your business will depend on your ability to get fans to go to gigs, buy merchandise, stream music, etc. As soon as you get some type of following, you should start learning about how to do these things.

Livestreams are a perfect way to learn how to get people excited and committed to something. If you’re not ready to sell tickets, that’s fine: people are paying with their time, so there’s still a transaction that will inform you about their commitment and the quality of what you’ve put together.

Financially and emotionally, it’s a lot less painful to have a livestream with only a few viewers than it is to have a new release flop or have DJs and bands play to an empty room. Livestreams are your training wheels for the real thing.

Livestreams also let you know who’s in the room, plus you can connect with a global pool of talent (timezones permitting) rather than whoever shows up to your local events. This allows you to build a network significantly faster than previously (with exceptions of those times a genre starts bubbling up online and is not represented well offline, e.g. the early days of moombahton).

You can also go beyond the livestream and throw full-on virtual events in Minecraft, in plug.dj, or various other tools. Make sure to record these events, since it will provide you with content you can share through your various channels.

Finally, these digital counterparts of the live music experience will have some role to play in the post-pandemic landscape. Having experience in this area will give you a special advantage.

In conclusion.

Just a two-word conclusion if you’re thinking about starting a music brand.

Start now.

Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash