Tag: social media

Lana Del Rey: how to kill an artistic persona in the social media age

Posted on | by Beatriz Negreiros

Lana Del Rey is back with her seventh studio release, ‘Blue Banisters’, tomorrow – and off social media indefinitely. A full decade after she blew up with her viral hit Video Games, it’s worth asking; can an artistic persona pull through the social media age, or is it meant to be destroyed by parasocial relationships (and rivalries) we form with the people behind them?

When I first heard the opening lines of Lana Del Rey’s 2019 record ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell!’, I was perplexed. God-damn man child, the Manhattan singer croons. You fucked me so good that I almost said, I love you. Wasn’t this self-assured narrator just singing about how he hit me and it felt like a kiss? 

Around the time ‘NFR’, as it’s known, came out, Duncan Cooper of Vice boldly claimed that if it wasn’t for Lana Del Rey, there would be no Billie Eilish or Lorde. Many found Cooper’s article to be strangely venomous towards a certain Taylor Swift, but Lana’s admirers’ aggressive defensiveness may come from a place of near-trauma. That trauma was the early 2010s, and the way social media viciously tore into the decade’s first musical star – Lana Del Rey. Last year, Elizabeth Grant (Lana Del Rey’s given name) defended herself against a slew of critics that now adored her – in a puzzling, potentially career-finishing statement. 

Long gone are the days of the mid-century nymphet singing about riches and fame; in 2020, the woman known as Lana Del Rey concluded her transformation into a real-life person, who makes music about the uncomplicated life of a waitress handling the heat. It’s as if, when she sang in ‘NFR’s The Greatest, back in 2019, the culture is lit and I had a ball, I guess I’m signing off after all, she really was.

Go play your video games: an (internet) star is born – and killed

Recently, in an act of revisionist history, Pitchfork rescored some of their past album reviews. Among them was Del Rey’s debut, 2012’s ‘Born To Die’, bumped from a 5.5. to a 7.8. Now that the singer has clawed her way into industry acceptance, it’s easy to forget that Pitchfork’s middling review was not an anomaly at the time; in fact, they were far kinder than others. Evan Rytlewski of the A.V. Club, for example, called ‘Born To Die’ shallow and overwrought, with periodic echoes of Ke$ha’s Valley Girl aloofness. Oof. 

But, for better or worse, she was a trailblazer. When Cooper pinpointed Lana Del Rey as the predecessor of Lorde and others, he didn’t just mean as the first internet sad girl (something which YouTuber bambasalad broke down perfectly). Lana may have been the first pop artist to do what is now a weekly occurrence: to blow up solely on the back of online hype. That’s exactly the reason why Paul Harris of the Guardian was quick to call her an example of modern fame. 
In October 2011, a video spread like a wildfire in the multimedia sharing platform Tumblr; it was simply titled Lana Del Rey – Video Games. The song was lush, grandiose, profoundly romantic; the video, an apparently homemade collage of old Hollywood fixtures, grainy home movies, and Lana herself. The next twelve months would be a whirlwind for Elizabeth Grant, the quiet singer who had been trying to make it for years – now Lana Del Rey.

A few months later, Lana Del Rey dropped her second music video, Blue Jeans. Her few live shows sold out. She was nominated for and won awards. Normally, this would signal a clear upward trajectory; but, as fast as she rocketed towards cultural adoration, she imploded on the very same place it had started – online. 

The smoke started rising as the internet caught wind of Elizabeth Grant’s origins. An inspiring rags-to-riches story? Turns out she’s a millionaire’s daughter. A DIY music video and song? Apparently, she’s backed by Interscope, a major label. Even the reveal that her obviously fake stage name had been picked by her management read as betrayal.

But the true fire starter was an appalling Saturday Night Live performance in January of the following year, which was trashed by everyone from anonymous bloggers to NBC News anchor Brian Williams (who called it one of the worst outings in the show’s history). At the time, the singer lamented to Rolling Stone: there’s a backlash to everything I do. True, that. By the time ‘Born To Die’ came out, two weeks later, the public was already cold.

The culture is lit and I had a ball: from redemption arc to cancelation

How did Lana Del Rey survive such a disastrous start of her career, fuelled by one of the most ferocious (and, as many have pointed out, misogynistic) character assassinations in recent memory? 

According to Reddit user gabachoelotero, it happened through sheer grit and fan adoration. These were crucial not just for Lana Del Rey’s progress, but for her triumph. Lana kept on releasing music, all the while continuing to hone her glamorous persona through sound, aesthetics, and fashion. 

As Lana carried on the fantasy – draping herself in the American flag, double-cosplaying as Jackie and Marilyn, and playing the troubled nymphet – it continued attracting controversy. One of her critics was Lorde herself, who said the gloomy singer’s world was unhealthy for young girls. In a culture that increasingly pushed for self-awareness, Lana’s out-of-touch dreamscape made many uneasy. 

Still, her fan base grew, steady and ferocious, until, in 2019, she got her due. ‘NFR’ was a certified critical darling. It nabbed the singer two Grammy nominations; Pitchfork called her one of America’s greatest living songwriters. But, with Lana Del Rey, there is always a twist.  

The day is May 21st, 2020. Lana Del Rey takes to Instagram with a question for the culture…. In her text post, which garnered over 1.6 million likes in a day, she says she is disgruntled with how her music is being treated by the critics, in comparison to other female artists. She protests about how other singers found success with songs about being sexy, wearing no clothes, cheating – while she has faced backlash for singing about sometimes submissive or passive roles in relationships. Many noticed that the other artists she compared herself to favorably – Doja Cat, Camila Cabello, Beyonce, and others – were almost all women of color. It was – as Twitter put it relentlessly – a bad look.

To make it worse, Elizabeth Grant proved she had no awareness whatsoever of how the cancel culture machine operates, and later committed the cardinal sin; defending herself. Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever call me racist, because that is bullshit, she cried. 

It was bad, really bad. Even I could tell her career was over.

Question for the culture: are we done with artistic personas? 

Looking back at Lana Del Rey’s trajectory, it’s safe to say playing the part got to her – and to us. But she hasn’t quit; since her infamous outburst, she’s released a poetry book and an album – ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’, which garnered positive reviews. Now, she’s back with ‘Blue Banisters’. The album’s first single, Arcadia, sees her tally the usual; cars, hotels, heartache, and, of course, America – a word she has alluded to so often it no longer resembles anything real. 

But there is something truthful here, as was on her last outing. In Arcadia, Lana Del Rey may still be singing her brand; but now she’s on the outside looking in. She no longer sounds cool and detached – on her chorus, her voice quivers. When she promoted the song on Instagram, she said; ‘listen to it if you listened to video games’. Then, she dipped.

Only Lana Del Rey herself can say until when she intends to chase her fictional muse; her new, unpolished sound makes it seem like she’s retired it for a new, permanently offline one. Maybe the only way to have an artistic persona nowadays is to disengage completely, or else your social media presence will find a way to break the veneer.  

Revisiting Lana Del Rey’s magnum opus, Video Games, a decade later, I find it has now the same quality of a precious antique. It’s the product of a time where the internet was radically different, as was our relationship to the artists we listened to. 

In 2011, all I knew about Lana Del Rey was what she told me; that she was an elusive ‘vamp of constant sorrow’, as Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone once profiled her. Hell, she might have not been a real person, for all I know – with no real intent, thoughts, politics. Now I know far, far too much.

Deplatform yourself: how to leave Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Social media is designed to be addictive. By monopolizing aspects of your social life, it also locks you in. Here’s how to break the cycle.

Concentration of power

My reasons for not being on Facebook and soon deleting WhatsApp and Instagram are manifold. I won’t go into them here, but I will highlight the deciding factor and hopefully pre-empt common whataboutisms. Facebook Inc., which runs FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and other social brands, is too powerful.

If all of the above were separate apps, there’s a good chance I’d be using all of them actively. They’re not, so one company controls nearly all of my digital social footprint and that of billions of others around the world.

Do I trust them? Not really. For many of the reasons you can read on DeleteFacebook.com. Meanwhile I, together with billions of other users, am building the value Facebook extracts through its advertising business. One day, I decided to stop rewarding the company and deactivated my Facebook account, before eventually deleting it. In the next weeks, I’m finally deleting Instagram and WhatsApp too.

For simplicity, I’ll be referring to Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and other brands of the social media giant as Facebook Inc. throughout this article.

Delete, deplatform

The first thing you should know about leaving Facebook Inc. is that you’re not just deleting. Instead, you’re switching platforms. You’re still going to get your news from somewhere, have digital social interactions with friends, need info about events, etc. This is the value you’re getting out of the platform. So, your first step is:

Step 1: start building value in places other than Facebook Inc.

A good example of this are events. Bonus: this example also allows me to address the local underground scenes here in Berlin (and around the world) who have many issues with Facebook policies ranging from female nudity, sex work, to human rights more broadly. Too often, the only place where one can find information about a rave doubling as a fundraising event for marginalized people is on Facebook. If we know and acknowledge that Facebook is problematic, why are we giving Facebook the information monopoly?

Giving Facebook Inc. an information monopoly accomplishes two things:

  1. It makes it harder for you to ever leave the platform, since all your audience & connections are on Facebook Inc.
  2. It makes it harder for other people to leave the platform.

Whether it’s for solidarity or for yourself, it’s time to build audience outside of Facebook. I recommend a mix of channels owned by various companies, plus something owned just by you: phone numbers and email addresses. For the former category, depending on your purpose, think LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Reddit, etc.

Start deplatforming yourself.

Build value elsewhere.

Free yourself and others.

Limit the data

Everything you do on Facebook Inc.’s apps is tracked. Everything you type (even if you delete it & never post it), scrolling, tapping, zooming, pausing on stories, everything you see, share, like, geolocation, photo metadata, contacts in your phone, etc.

Step 2: limit the data you give to Facebook Inc.

This is basically as simple as interacting with the apps less. There are a bunch of ways to do that. You can limit the screen time of specific apps, you can set your phone display to black & white to make apps less interesting, you can just delete the mobile apps and go mobile web / desktop only.

For me, this meant I stopped posting to professional communities on Facebook Groups years ago. They’d been really valuable for me, since I moved between countries a lot and groups were a great way to network with music professionals wherever I was. Due to step 1, I already had many of these people on my newsletter & other social media platforms and figured I would just have to write so well, that this group would make sure my reach would extend to the group I was leaving behind.

Take a vacation

Before I even considered deleting, I would occasionally deactivate my Facebook account (and recently did the same with Instagram). This allowed me to disappear from the site temporarily and see:

  1. How the social media designed to be addictive was nested into my daily habits and thinking patterns.
  2. Whether I would feel better without it.
  3. What information I would miss.
  4. What social connections I would miss.
  5. Which accounts I created using Facebook (e.g. Spotify).

Step 3: deactivate your Facebook Inc. accounts for short periods of time

To most of us, it feels daunting to delete these accounts, so go experience what it’s like. Deactivate your account and remove the app. If after a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks you feel like you want to return, you can reactivate your account.

During one of my first breaks a friend asked me a question I hadn’t considered: wouldn’t I miss the ability to visit a deceased family member’s profile? It held me back from deleting, but after months of going without Facebook I realized I didn’t care, made a digital backup just in case, and decided that I needed to deplatform myself asap if I was seriously considering giving Facebook a role in how I remember a dead relative.

Backup

I’ve posted thousands of bits of information to Facebook Inc.’s services. This includes photos from all the places I’ve lived in, videos, chats with friends, etc. This is how I got the most value out of this social media: as a place to collect, share and create memories. Now it’s time to take that data back.

Step 4: download your data from Facebook Inc.

Facebook’s various services have functionality that let you download all your data. Do this. Review your data. Consider what’s important to you and check if it’s in there: photos, likes, private messages, etc.

Make sure to have more than one copy of this data. I have mine on multiple hard drives & a copy securely in the cloud (basically: a digital hard drive).

You will want to follow this step multiple times: once to review all the data, so that you know if anything needs to be backed up more manually and once before you finally delete your account.

Contact

If you’ve been deplatforming yourself for a while (see step 1), you’ll probably have something like 10-40% of your contacts on platforms outside of Facebook’s realm. Through experimenting with deactivation, you should have a good grasp of who you care to stay in touch with (probably not that person who you haven’t seen for 15 years, only post a yearly ‘happy birthday’ to, and then enjoy the photos of their dog the rest of the year).

Step #5: make sure you stay in touch with the people you value

This step is probably the most work. It involves sharing & requesting contact info from people. Whereas on Instagram & Facebook, it’s easy to post updates in your feed so that people know what you’re doing, on WhatsApp you’ll need a more one-on-one approach. When direct messaging people, you’ll probably get questions about why you’re leaving. While your decision to simply not do business with Facebook Inc. anymore is simple and straightforward, people might challenge you. So make it easy for yourself and have a brief explanation or account deletion epitaph you can link to (preferably hosted somewhere outside of the Facebook Inc. realm).

Be firm: not wanting this company to dominate and monopolize your online social life is perfectly reasonable. If people want to chat about it, you can always say you’d be happy to do so on Telegram, Signal, or Zoom.

Delete yourself

Then comes the moment of liberation. Whereas a deactivation means Facebook Inc. can keep your data and use it for their extractive business model, a deletion in many countries requires Facebook to actually remove your data permanently.

Step #6: delete your Facebook Inc. accounts

There are a few important details you should not miss here and hopefully deactivating your accounts have prepared you for this: make sure to unlink your Facebook account from other accounts. If you created accounts using Facebook, make sure to have an alternative login method for them.

Here’s a guide to help with the rest, including the need to manually delete things shared in social contexts, that might not get removed when you delete your account.

A note for those who want to, but can’t

Unfortunately, deleting social media profiles can be a privilege. It makes certain things a lot harder, especially if you depend on social media for your business, as so many in music do. In my case, it means saying no to freelance jobs I was previously able to say yes to.

The most important step in this whole piece is step #1. Build value elsewhere. Instead of Facebook Groups use Discord communities. Instead of Facebook Events use Resident Advisor or your genre’s equivalent. Use both whenever necessary.

If you can’t afford to leave the platform yourself, at least make it easier for others to do so. This will eventually also decrease your own reliance on Facebook. Every little bit helps.

For marketing professionals reading this: consider being explicit about setting up campaigns that happen outside of the Facebook realm. It’s a great differentiator. A lot is possible with a mix of Twitch, YouTube, Clubhouse, Discord, Twitter, Telegram, WordPress, Shopify, Patreon, Medium, Substack, Bandcamp, etc.

All of this may take time

I first started deactivating my Facebook in 2015. Now, 6 years later, I feel confident enough to pull the trigger on Instagram and WhatsApp too, despite needing the former for professional reasons and the latter for family groups.

Start now. Take back power step by step. You can do each of the above steps without having to follow through with any subsequent step. They all have standalone benefits.

Resources

Clubhouse screenshot in the App Store

Clubhouse = podcasts + proximity

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

If you haven’t spent time on Clubhouse yet, you either didn’t get an invite yet (abundant now, so ask around), are on Android, or understandably chose not to believe the hype.

The new social media kid on the block has seen plenty of long-form analysis, especially considering it’s such a simple app (highly recommended reading: Clubhouse’s Inevitability by Ben Thompson). Its success can be explained by a simple dynamic too.

Clubhouse = podcasts + proximity

The audio part of the app is popular for many of the same reasons that podcasts are popular as a type of on-demand talk radio. They’re informative, entertaining, and people derive comfort from the connection they have with the podcast hosts & guests – or just hearing their voices.

Clubhouse adds a sense of proximity to the podcast effect. Instead of the distant creator-listener relation, listeners are on a more equal footing. Even if Clubhouse has concepts of session hosts, a stage and an audience, at least you’re in the same room. You can directly follow people. You can raise your hand to speak to them. You can connect to them afterwards.

The dynamic feels similar to the early days of Twitter. Suddenly you could use 140 characters to reach out to the world’s top thinkers and artists who had already signed up to the service (an early adopter of both platforms is deadmau5). You’d usually get a reply and sometimes even a follow. It was significantly easier to build up a following in those early days and by having an following early on, you’d automatically grow your following as the platform went through its growth phase and people looked for interesting people to follow.

While FOMO may be the reason why people flock to Clubhouse, proximity is the glue that makes the experience sticky.

👋 You can find me on Twitter and Clubhouse as @basgras.

❤ If you’re on the MUSIC x Patreon, give me a ping. I have a couple of Clubhouse invites to give away and I’d love to have more of the community on there.

👀 Recommended reading: I wrote about the benefits I reaped from being an early adopter of SoundCloud (@bas).

Photo by Dmitry Mashkin on Unsplash

Music is the creator economy catalyst

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling | 1 Comment on Music is the creator economy catalyst

In his book The Passion Economy Adam Davidson argues that our current century is one where people set up businesses that centre around their passions. This contrasts with the main tenet of the previous century, where the focus was on commoditization, production and scale. This economic change underpins an important marker which Davidson generalizes as follows: “The Passion Economy is about quality and the conversation you have with your clients.” (p.38) Music is perfectly positioned to play into this shift and, indeed, does so already.

Davidson doesn’t specifically write about music and musicians. Similarly, if we look at the top 100 social media as defined by the Knight Institute at Columbia University, we see platforms not designed for music or musicians but used by them nonetheless.

Social platforms sized by popularity. Source: Knight Institute

How creators create the most

The researchers at the Knight Institute call these bubbles ‘logics’ hinting at an underlying logic, or function, that connects what’s inside of the bubble. The biggest bubble is that of the ‘creator logic’ which the researchers define as follows:

“creator logic platforms are for everyone and enable users to share a specific type of media (like video, livestreams, or art), in a one-to-many fashion. They are home to “creators,” people who consistently make content for the platform, often as a source of income. Some examples of creator logic are YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Wattpad.”

Other platforms to include here are the subscription platforms such as Patreon, Currents.fm or Ampled. As Cherie Hu has argued last year, music is at the core of the the crowdfunding model underlying these platforms. What they may lack in popularity against platforms like Twitch, they gain in terms of the value they capture. Let’s go a little deeper into how music catalyzes these creator platforms and permeates the broader social media ecosystem.

Adding value

Whereas crowdfunding has strong roots in music, platforms such as Twitch, TikTok, and YouTube are first and foremost video-sharing services aimed at connecting people through experiences and stories. By now, we know how important music has been and still is when it comes to growth on these platforms. Twitch, for example, while still primarily being a platform for gamers, has seen massive growth in music streamers. Looking at Twitchtracker, the growth in channels and viewers between February 2020 and February 2021 is impressive. The number of channels broadcasting music tripled, and the number of viewers grew by almost 7x. Of course, the integration between Amazon Music and Twitch further establishes the role of music on the livestreaming platform. Similarly, music is a driver of growth on TikTok and music remains a key driver of traffic on YouTube with 22% of all views attributed to music videos. The reason, I argue, that music plays such a key part on these creator platforms is its ability to convey quality and trigger conversation.

A great example for this, which will immediately show how music permeates the wider social media ecosystem, is by going back to 2019’s biggest TikTok star: Lil Nas X. Besides having a breakout song that was ripe for conflict, perfect for meme-creation, ideal for dance challenges, etc., the artist also played into the feedback loops necessary to engage an audience. Moreover, he did so using a broad variety of social media, posting short snippets of songs on Twitter for example and asking for feedback. Of course, this requires a certain type of artist and not everyone is willing to engage in, what Jade Gomez recently described in Complex as: “commentary and memes that almost make them separate entities from their music itself.”

Capturing value

When, as an artist, you ask yourself how do I add value and how do I capture that value through my audience, it’s important to stay close to who you are. If you’re not the type of person who is happy to enter an endless feedback loop of commentary and memes, you can still look at how you can take advantage of stepping into a dialogue with your fans. The platforms are there and users are eager to engage with music. More and more, fans are becoming creators themselves, the dialogue between fan and artist becoming one where music-making is a shared passion. The creator tools for this are many and the business around it is worth almost $900million. Artists can draw the most loyal of their fans to places like Patreon, where they can give insights into their production processes and provide access to their own sound files for their fans to work on. A great example of this is Jamie Lidell, who sends out audio packs of all the sounds used during his podcast recordings to the higher-tier fans on his Patreon.

Big Tech and the Creator Economy

Recent developments show how the bigger tech companies are wisening up to the chain of feedback that allows artists, and creators more generally, to find audiences, cultivate them, and then capture their value directly. Amazon is one example of a company trying to create an integrated flow for this, but they miss the platform where people can take a megaphone and shout. A great place to do just that is Twitter. With their development of Spaces and the acquisition of Revue, Twitter seems to position itself as, what Peter Yang calls, “the full-stack platform for expert creators.”

Source: Peter Yang, creatoreconomy.so

The key element to this that Yang focuses on is the ability to mix content types. Again, this will have to fit the personality of the artist, but the message is clear: flip the value relationship between yourself as artist and fan and there’s a lot of value you can capture by directly adding value to the lives of your fans. This two-way street seems paved with music and while other creators can walk across it, it’s music that often acts as a springboard to growth and success.

Storytelling, a final word

Music drives the creator economy and permeates across all levels of social platforms. From Snapchat Stories to music subreddits, millions of people use social media every day to engage with music and musicians. As the Creator Economy continues to grow it’s the best storytellers that will reach the top. With a broad variety of available tools artists are primed to find, engage and connect with an audience that is just passionate, and sometimes even more passionate, as they are about their music. Let fans share in the story and capture the value they feel you’ve added to their lives.

Postinternet Music

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

The third internet generation for music is here.

Purpose

MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE is on a bit of a hiatus. I started it 2 years ago with the goal of shedding light on topics that I felt were being neglected.

Two years later, I feel more positive about the conversation in the music business. Besides that, great newsletters (like Platform & Stream) and writers (like Cherie Hu) have emerged and cover a lot of the topics I set out to cover with MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. So what role can I play now in moving the conversation forward?

I have been doing a lot of thinking about what’s next. How will all these trends we discuss combine? What are we not talking about? Where are the opportunities? What is the next generation of artists doing? What do they know that we don’t?

By thinking about this, I have slowly been reinventing MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE along with the topics I cover. Music as a business is a complex ecosystem. Music as a phenomenon has kept generations of musicologists and philosophers occupied in discussions without conclusions for millennia. The question I have been answering is: what do I find important and what is nobody talking about?

Inspiration

By focusing on innovation in music, and always expanding my musical and artistic horizons, I have seen some developments over the last year that are starting to click together. I am now of the opinion that we are seeing the emergence of an important new generation of music that is going to spawn its own ecosystem.

Broadly speaking, music & the internet has had two phases so far:

Phase 1: the great disruption

Let’s call it the Napster moment. It led to the first new status quo. The rule it imposed was this: “anything that can be stored in digits can be communicated digitally through networks.” (this rule has also been called “information wants to be free”) This introduced music, and its business ecosystem, to the age of networks. Instead of moving products through distribution and media channels, it now moved through networks… and anyone that wanted to play the game, no longer had to find a way into the channels — everyone was on the network.

MySpace Tom: a friend for everyone

Phase 2: the MySpace moment

This phase is probably heralded by what I call the MySpace moment. MySpace grew as piracy thrived. Communities formed. We understood what social media could mean for music. Then MySpace collapsed and there was nothing there to take its place. Instead, the smartphone enabled the next generation of music and social platforms. On-demand music services like Spotify and SoundCloud appeared — both making an impact on modern music culture far exceeding MySpace’s. Communities formed again.

Phase 3: the SoundCloud moment

So what’s phase 3? The streaming economy is maturing. We are still figuring out how it will work exactly. Let the constant lawsuits between musicians, songwriters, labels, and streaming services be a testament to that. The shitty smartphones we used to have, have been traded in for phones that are more powerful than the computers on our desks a few years ago. AND they have cameras on both sides, AND we have fast internet, ALL the time. Queue YouTubers, Instagram stars, as well as producers rebooting their careers by becoming Snapchat personalities. 🔑

Meme culture went mainstream. People retiring now, with lots of free time on their hands, have been using the internet for 20 years. People reaching maturity now don’t know the world without internet. They may have been carrying smartphones before taking their first chemistry class. It introduces new questions and phenomena in our culture and in music. A 2017 headline that captured one of those phenomena well was: “Rap’s Biggest Stars Are Depressed & So Are Their Fans”.

Net art commenting on internet & mental health.

OK OK OK SO WHAT IS PHASE 3?!

I can’t tell you. We can only see it once it’s there. But I can tell you how to be part of it.

With each of these shifts media culture shifted, so you have to look at what changes media culture is going through right now. Artificial intelligence, voice activated devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality all play tremendously important roles here. We still don’t know what the SoundClouds, Facebooks, Spotifys, PewDiePies and Justin Biebers (discovered through YouTube) of this phase will be, but we do know what technologies and media formats they may employ.

When MySpace started collapsing, everyone wanted to figure out what the ‘next MySpace’ would be. There was no next MySpace. Not in the way anyone was thinking about it. Ultimately, Facebook and SoundCloud filled that gap and took things way further than MySpace.

So what would the next SoundCloud look like?

This is what I know about the next SoundCloud. It can be clunky. In fact, it may be better if it’s not easy to use (e.g. Snapchat): kids will spend time figuring out how to move into virtual spaces where they can do their own thing. P2P services were not easy to use at first, torrents weren’t easy to use, and as elegant as it was, SoundCloud was not as easy to use as MySpace in its early days as long as you were trying to use it for MySpacey purposes.

It has to do 1 thing extremely well though (let’s call it ‘killer feature’). I remember that SoundCloud’s waveform & commenting feature was so great that artists were learning basic code, so they could remove MySpace’s standard players from their profiles and add SoundCloud’s waveform.

Then it has to have high cultural appeal. The waveform helped SoundCloud travel. It was cool. It’s hard to say what it will be like for the next SoundCloud… But perhaps it’s a cryptotoken. Blockchain is cool and cryptocurrencies are cool. They have cultural appeal, partly because of their association with ordering drugs online via the Tor network. But also because they represent dissent against the status quo, whether that’s valid or invalid. And the first cryptocurrency millionaires in music are already here. 50 Cent.

Perhaps Mat Dryhurst, a prolific thinker and artist (some may know him from his work with Holly Herndon), will be proven right and we will see a tokenized SoundCloud. Fingers crossed, because I admire what they’ve done and the role they’ve played in helping modern music & internet culture take shape.

But what about…

We assume too often that what comes next follows more or less linearly from what was there before. By doing so, we discount important developments and blind ourselves to their potential impact. In previous paragraphs, I have done exactly that. So it’s time to clean up my mess.

What is internet culture?

First of all, I need to clarify what I mean when I talk about internet culture or online culture. I am talking about audiovisual aesthetics, language, cultural memes like jokes, discourse about identity, politics, society and psychology. These emerge online. From bedrooms. From people of all ages and countries, connecting online to collaborate, iterate, remix, and discuss in virtual space.

This has manifested through music genres like vaporwave and nightcore (example below), but also more serious topics, such as a cultural emphasis on mental health, and identity (most notably gender identity). Then there’s a darker side to it too. The alt right has been able to create so much impact, from bedrooms, by using the same internet culture dynamics that previous examples utilize — eventually memeing Trump into the White House. They accomplished it as part of an alliance of mostly pre-internet organisations, institutions, and structures, but those organisations couldn’t have pulled this off without their internet army.

When I talk about internet culture, or online culture, I do not mean to suggest a separation between online and offline. I’m just pointing at the origin. As a matter of fact, the internet has become such a standard part of our lives that we are online even when we’re offline.

On a free weekend day, leave your phone at home. Go explore the city. Go to parts you’ve never been. Soon, you may get lost and want to check Google Maps. You may see something fascinating that you’d like to photograph and share on Instagram or Facebook. You might take a mental note to look that building up on Wikipedia when you get home to get more history.

By now, our minds are always online. Even when we believe we’re offline.

Always online

This is the number 1 thing that changed over the course of aforementioned phase 2. Even when smartphones arrived, we weren’t online all the time. But now we are. The fact that we are always carrying devices around that are connected to fast internet, with cameras on both sides, and with great screens compared to those 5–10 years ago, is one of the most important realities for the future of music.

Musical.ly, sold last year for around $1bn, comes to mind.

Mixed reality

How platforms deal with ‘mixed reality’ may be as crucial as the question of how the previous generation dealt with the rise of the smartphone. Back in Facebook’s younger days, the company was struggling to crack mobile and eventually took drastic measures to become mobile-first. Getting ahead of the problem this time, Facebook entered the virtual reality space in 2014 through the early acquisition of Oculus VR for $2bn.

But I don’t think it’s VR as a medium that will have the high cultural impact that the internet did. I think it’s about the interface to other aspects of our experience. It’s why I believe the below video of Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan, calling Mark from ‘the real world’ while he’s in a VR version of his home, was one of the most important tech showcases last year.

Skip to 4:50 if the video doesn’t auto-play from there.

Offline and online is blurring, so what does that imply for music?

Instreaming

Late last year I attended a gig that has really started falling into place since. A friend from Holland (Victor, also known as S x m b r a) was coming to Berlin to do a gig. I met him when he was mostly known for writing for Generation Bass — an important blog for underground bass music culture. He is extremely plugged in and knows so much about trends in music (particularly online niches), so I really trust him as a music curator.

He is also part of something called c a r e, which is described as:

c a r e is a post-internet party taking place online.
c a r e is about sharing together. c a r e is a future sensation.
this digital experience enables you to connect with internet kids worldwide. it also provides the opportunity to meet and discover artists and people which have common interests. we are a based world community that meets at url parties. we are glad to invite you to this virtual concept of partying. we hope you’ll enjoy the event! see you online.

Through c a r e, he teamed up an interdisciplinary collective called Clusterduck which specialises in internet culture. Together they organised a “url / irl party” as part of Clusterduck’s Internet Fame project, which is part of the Wrong Biennale — a global event celebrating digital art.

During the event, an audio & video stream connected people from their bedrooms to the ‘irl’ event. These people could interact with each other online, but they were also “instreamed” so their chat messages & webcam feeds on Tinychat would be shown inside the party. The founder of c a r e, who wasn’t present in person, is even billed on the poster and broadcasted a DJ set from url to the irl space in Berlin.

A lot of people at the ‘irl’ part of the event were familiar with some of the people they saw on the ‘url’ part displayed on a prominent screen above the dancefloor & bar. So it created this sense of community & connection and blurring of irl & url.

You could walk into such an event and think it’s just some young folks who set up some webcams, but when you see it as part of the greater trends in our all-absorbing media & tech culture, what was happening there becomes way more significant.

Internet culture and music

I will be going way deeper into this in future articles and newsletters, but I want to give you an example of what I think people should be paying attention to.

For example, the Sponsored Content album by an artist called Antwood. It’s a perfect example of the post-internet avant-garde expression in music. Antwood:

“In the past year, I found that ASMR [dubbed by Google as the biggest YouTube trend you’ve never heard of], which I had previously used as a source of foley in my music, was a fairly effective sleep aid. I’d been using the videos in this way for a few months, when I noticed a popular ASMR YouTuber announced a plan to incorporate ads into her videos; quiet, subtle ads, woven into the content. What bothered me about this was that these ads would target viewers, such as myself, during times of semi lucid vulnerability. This disturbed me, and I unsubscribed.

Sponsored Content explores this idea of subversive advertisement, at least superficially. It’s obviously about the ubiquity of ads and the commodification of online content. The unlikely placement of ads in the music aims to force the listener to become hyper-aware of being advertised to rather than passively internalizing it. But after the record was finished, it became undeniable that really it wasn’t so much a “concept record” about advertisement; it’s as much about intentionally devaluing the things I’ve invested myself into, and over-complicating my work. When I realized this, I considered taking the ads out, and playing the music straight. But I left the record as it is: honest, flawed, with a little humour, and slightly up its own ass.”

I’ve compiled over 25 hours of albums and releases that I feel adhere to this trend in music (Spotify playlist). My playlist biases towards the club & nightlife variants of this trend, but the visual and musical aesthetics & themes should give you a good understanding of what this is about. The most famous example is probably Arca, who has produced for Kanye West and Björk.

Aforementioned Holly Herndon, who toured with Radiohead, uses AI in her work: “We have an AI baby that we’re training on our voices; on our voices and on the voices of our ensemble. Yeah, it’s learning how to talk and how to sing, so it’s freaking weird”.

Another great example of the post-internet trend in arts and music is YouTuber Poppy, who recently released an album called Poppy.Computer on Mad Decent.

Besides the obvious commentary on internet culture & society on her channel, Poppy plays with the uncanny valley hypothesis of robotics professor Masahiro Mori. The hypothesis suggests that humans feel fine with robots that are obviously not human, but the more semblance these robots get to humans, the stronger our feelings of eeriness and revulsion.

In music, perhaps the best known example of a post-internet genre is vaporwave:

The Virtual Vaporwave Scene

From boardroom to bedroom

Over the last 2 years, I have written a lot about the music business ecosystem. Always with an innovative angle, but often focused on the type of big issues that are discussed and decided about in boardrooms. While those things are immensely important, it’s also reactive. Reaction doesn’t set trajectory — it can only adjust it.

My focus is going to shift from the boardroom to the bedroom. From complex issues with big financial implications, to profound ideas that may not always have a clear link to monetization. It is a focus on the creator, the inventor, the innovator.

The newsletter has always placed emphasis on utility. I want what I do to be useful in some way. The most important way in which I try to do that, is by showing what is next, which I will continue to do. What is next is already here — you just have to know where to look.

This is our culture we are talking about. That is primary.
That is what enables the business around it. Which is secondary.

MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. Those words say it all.

(This post originally appeared on Medium, which I’m moving away from. When you can avoid the large platforms, you should.)

How I got over a quarter million plays on my Soundcloud

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Building up a following as a DJ in the social web’s early days: a how-to for time travellers. 💫

Back when I was in college, my friend and I would go to a lot of parties. We also used to rap in a band together. Up until then, I had always been writing a lot of lyrics and would visit every hiphop gig in my city. When there was nothing better on, we’d go to student parties in a local club that gathered around 800 people every week, and in between dancing and chatting, we’d be rapping our lyrics over the beats of popular songs.

Then one day we stumbled upon the drum ‘n bass scene (with regular parties in my hometown being hosted by the renowned Black Sun Empire). I always thought electronic music was not for me, but it changed the way I looked at electronic music. Instead of trying to make beats on FL Studio, I started playing around with making electronic music. Then, one day, I stumbled upon a simpler tool that allowed me to mix tracks together. It carried the tacky name Mixmeister, but it is still my all-time favourite tool for making mixes from the comfort of (what was then) my bedroom.

I still wish a company like Native Instruments or Ableton would buy this firm, and release a better and renewed version of their software that hasn’t worked on my Mac for years. But I digress.

Up until then, I had been writing lyrics. Lots of them. Daily. I was involved in the “textcee” scene, which is how people participated in online rap back when it was still a little tricky to record and upload tracks. I participated in battles, topical challenges, wrote about complex (and often silly) subject matter, and really got my creativity out — all in text format. It was easy to distribute, light-weight, and it had its communities and forums.

Pre-Soundcloud

For DJs, it was harder. Bandwidth was not great, and back in 2006 or so, when I started, there were no good online communities. There was no Soundcloud, there was no Mixcloud, and YouTube only allowed videos of up to 10 minutes. My tools of choice, for hosting DJ sets, were YouSendIt, uploaded.to and MegaUpload. They were iffy and you always had to monitor that your files were not taken down, but they would do.

I thought a lot about the format. I never mixed over 80 minutes, because I wanted to make sure that fans (if I had any, and it was hard to tell pre-Facebook & Twitter) would be able to burn it to CDs and listen to it from their cars or home stereos.

I would write detailed information about my tracklists, for a number of reasons:

  1. It’s only fair that the creators of the music get acknowledged – especially since I was sharing their music without permission;
  2. If one of my listeners liked a track, I wanted them to be able to know what it was (there was no such thing as Shazam);
  3. I put detailed time markings, so that people would be able to identify the transitions and the amount of work I’d put into blending tracks together.

I would post them to the forums where I was already going (as well as my MySpace), where I already had my fans because of my texts, together with the links. Here’s an example of such a tracklist:

Then I started a blog on Blogspot to post all the mixes. People would subscribe via RSS and get the posts through their RSS reader. I even added a way to get email updates when the RSS feed would be updated, by using a popular tool at the time called FeedBurner. When posting my mixes to forums, I would also always include download links but also a link to the blogpost, so I could build up my followers there, too.

I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was doing really helped with SEO. If people were Googling those tracks, they’d often find my blog, because not everything was on YouTube, today’s major streaming platforms were non-existent, and the underground was not represented well on iTunes. By sharing my mixes everywhere, I was also generating a lot of backlinks. I was publishing multiple mixes per month. Throughout 2007 I published as many as 35.

Then Soundcloud arrived on the scene

I’m not sure how or when I discovered Soundcloud, but it must have been in its early days back in 2008. I managed to register my first name as my username, which I have held on to ever since, despite people trying to hack my account and even being hit by a trademark claim by an American rapper (after I rejected offers to buy it).

This is where things really started taking off. Now I was able to collect streams instead of downloads. It was so incredibly convenient. No wonder DJs flocked to the platform. All fans had to do now was hit play, but the option to download and listen in high quality was there too. On top of all that, I was able to timestamp my mixes in a much more interesting way: by commenting the tracks.

Something else happened too. By tagging my mixes, it was possible for others to find my work. And by browsing tags, I was able to find other DJs. This was a first. Never before had there been as big a community of DJs. Never before had it been so easy to connect to others. Never before had it been so easy for producers and DJs to connect from the comfort of their bedrooms.

I started listening to other DJs. Commenting everywhere. I continued the same strategy of tracklists and tagging, which maybe also helped my SEO on Soundcloud. But I also didn’t give up on my website until many years later when Facebook was more established and it was getting hard to get people to visit websites. Owning your audience was important, and I always knew this. I needed to have my own place to keep the people who are interested in what I do connected to me.

Then in 2009, Soundcloud changed the rules of the game for DJs.

The first big DJ revolt on Soundcloud

When Soundcloud started, they allowed everyone to upload 4 tracks every month. Tracks could be of any length, or at least long enough to fit a DJ set, but if you wanted to upload more than 4 in a month, you would have to get a paid account. This was great for DJs, but it didn’t last.

In October 2009, Soundcloud switched over to a model with a maximum amount of minutes per account. Even if you’d upgrade to the most expensive monthly package there was no way to get rid of the maximum. It caused an uproar (link to discussion with participation of the founders – but layout is messed up, because it’s a cached page). I participated and tried to be understanding. The model made sense for producers, who were more likely to spend money on Soundcloud. It sucked for DJs though. I wanted DJs to think about what kind of model would allow for Soundcloud to monetize them and very actively participated in the discussion.

The people who participated in that discussion got lucky, and it’s really a token of how user-centric Soundcloud was in those days. A link was shared with the participants, where they could list their accounts, and they were given 30 extra hours. For me, that was about 30 extra DJ sets and it has lasted me to this day (I never matched my 2007 streak) — and I should have probably mentioned this in my ‘Benefits of Being an Early Adopter‘ piece. And props to David Noel, who was Soundcloud’s community lead. The email exchanges (and exchanges on Soundcloud’s support community) that I had with him stuck with me. I was writing my thesis at the time and when I graduated and got into music startups those exchanges were a big inspiration for my early career.

Life goes on

As Soundcloud grew into the giant it is today, I grew along with it. My taste grew, my following grew, my tactics and strategies evolved, and I saw new genres flourish on Soundcloud, such as moombahton.

Before all the download-gate bullshit, that make you jump through hoops, follow random accounts, like Facebook Pages, etc., it was pretty convenient to get free downloads from Soundcloud. I actually set up an IFTTT script that would automatically download tracks I favourited to my Dropbox. This way I could discover new music while I was working at Zvooq by day, in passive mode, and then by night play around with the files in my mixes.

I participated actively in the new, emerging online scenes. Commenting on tracks and connecting to amazing new talent emerging from the internet, rather than from a particular network of DJs. This got me a lot of listeners. I started making mixes in which all tracks were available to download for free. This had value in different ways:

  1. I knew for sure that all DJs would be ok with me uploading this;
  2. People would listen to them, because they knew they can find and quickly download new tracks through there;
  3. I would link to all the tracks and afterwards comment on them to let people know I had featured their work. Sometimes they would share my music on their social media (this is before the repost function on SC).

If you’re not communicating your music this way, if you’re not networking with your inspirations, you’re not doing it right. This is probably how I got most of my plays from 2012 to now. Tactics and landscapes change, but some principles are true forever. Participate!

Other tactics not listed above:

  • Make playlists on 8tracks with the tracks of my mixes in order to promote my mix;
  • Try to win followers via social listening platforms like turntable.fm;
  • Make short mixes and post them on YouTube in order to find new audiences;
  • Facebook & Twitter accounts through where I would connect to segments of my audience.

My demise as a net-DJ

Then things got harder. It wasn’t any particular issue, but a lot of factors combined to halt me.

I switched to a Traktor S4 controller with Traktor software, so now I had to do all my mixes live. I’m a perfectionist, so this decreased my output. Digging also got harder: the communal nature of Soundcloud changed and a lot of DJs stopped offering their tracks as downloads (even when they’re not selling them). Others would put their stuff behind download gates, which just made it a pain in the ass to collect tracks and way more time-consuming. This also decreased my output.

As the number of mixes I put out decreased, so did the growth of my followers and my exposure to my audiences that were not directly connected to me. Followers ‘churn’ even when they stay part of your follower count. This means that followers go inactive on the platform they follow you on, so the follower count no longer translates to playback or other forms of engagement. This doesn’t matter so much when you’re new, but if you’re working on something for over a decade, it matters.

All of this compounded. It’s been about 5 years since I had a mix that got ~5k plays. And 8 years for 15k. But the lesson here is: to rack up following & plays, you can get lucky with a hit or just be insanely productive.

I’m at peace with what happened and now that I’m in Berlin, with talented friends as producers, plus friends in companies like Ableton and Native Instruments, I’m slowly getting back into DJing and producing. I haven’t put out a track in a decade, and no mix in 2 years, but I’m surrounded by the right people to get back into it… and do things right with all the experience I’ve collected plus that surrounds me. (if I actually end up having enough time — the irony of working in music)

Key takeaways

If I had to distill this into key lessons (and I do, because I owe it to you after reading 2000 words), these would be my main takeaways:

  • GET THERE EARLY. I got really lucky with being early to Soundcloud, but it also helped that what I was doing back then was not as common as it is now. Stay on top of developments in sounds and genres, and be slightly ahead of the curve, so you can shine a spotlight on up & coming talent. It will pay off when someone blows up.
  • BUILD YOUR FOLLOWING. Don’t trust in platforms: own your following. Connect them to your presence in many places, get their email addresses. Make sure your following is loyal, build trust, be consistent. If you’re slightly ahead of the curve, they know they’ll always discover new artists through you.
  • ALWAYS CREDIT PEOPLE. Scenes are small. Help each other. If you play someone’s music: list it. Don’t have time to provide a tracklist? Then you don’t have time to be a DJ. Sorry.
  • BE HELPFUL. This is connected to crediting: help people to understand the music they’re listening to. They’ll connect to you for this.
  • BE CONSISTENT & PRODUCTIVE. My best days were when I was a student. I don’t know how I found the time in between college and 12-20 hours of side jobs per week, but often I’d get home and get to mixing. I’d be doing stuff with music almost every spare minute. That’s the only type of dedication that really works.

I’ve had my run. Maybe I’ll do it again, but in a different way. I still like DJing, but prefer to do it live now. Besides, I have other ways to enjoy music now, such as my day job at IDAGIO, as well as MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE.

But to the generation that’s out there, on the cyber highways, hustling: best of luck & I hope this piece helps you.