Tag: Soundcloud

Decentraland

The Decentralized Autonomous “1,000 True Fan” Organisation

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 1 Comment on The Decentralized Autonomous “1,000 True Fan” Organisation

Decentralized ownership registries helped enable digital art’s NFT boom of the past year. Next, blockchain, the distributed ledger technology, will underpin fanbases and the way artists build careers, teams, and engage with industry infrastructure.

Can you put a fanbase on the blockchain? Here’s what it could look like.

Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAOs)

If you spend some time in Web3 circles, you will encounter the term DAO. It refers to organisations that utilize blockchains’ distributed nature and (often) smart contract functionality in order to govern themselves.

These organisations are grassroots, meaning that there’s no central leadership and the members of the organisation decide what things they want to incentivize, and what rules they want to create. They allow people to pool funds, govern those funds and use them to coordinate or incentivize communal efforts and contributions. 

At this point there are way too many DAOs to give a comprehensive overview and they come in many forms. For example, Stake Capital’s StakeDAO allows its members to earn stakeholder revenue share for their participation, for instance by supporting the Discovery and Creator nodes Stake Capital runs for the Audius network, a decentralized music streaming platform. Another well-known DAO, with the stated aim to push culture forward, is Friends With Benefits ($FWB) which requires new members to invest into the DAO by buying membership tokens, so that the community is invested in itself (you can read more about how they govern these funds here and what types of things you might expect in the community here). MetaCartel is a community of people that funds “post-hackathon” projects through grants. Decentraland, pictured above, is a game akin to Roblox and Second Life, but is governed by a DAO.

The Mint Fund, which was founded to fund underrepresented creators’ NFT minting costs, aims to become an “artist-owned curation DAO”. Mat Dryhurst (@) suggested a decentralised structure for SoundCloud in 2017, when people feared the company was running out of time (and cash) as it let go a large chunk of its staff. Back then the concept was novel, but it’s quickly becoming mainstream.

There are even tools like Aragon, Colony, and DAOhaus that make it relatively easy to set up a DAO in which the community participates in the ownership and governance of what’s created through the sum of their work, contribution, and participation.

Image via aforementioned Aragon.

The Decentralized Autonomous Artist

Not everyone’s music will drive millions of streams, not everyone is able to tour constantly, not everyone will go viral… but the one strategy that I feel almost any artist can apply is that of building a community of fans that can sustain you (sometimes referred to as “1,000 true fans”). There’s benefits to thinking small.

How can a fan community contribute to an artist’s success? Well, it depends on the artist, but they can financially sustain the artist through various types of patronage, they can amplify what an artist is doing by increasing their reach and leveraging network effects, but there are also other types of contributions that may be framed as collaborations, fan art, or other. In fact, when the community includes the artist and ‘artist team’ (ie. the business roles surrounding an artist), you can disintegrate some of those roles and place the associated activities inside the community through incentive structures.

What if the BTS Army was a DAO allowing people to either purchase or earn $BTS tokens in order to unlock various types of experiences and opportunities that are completely fan-organised? BTS wouldn’t even have to play a role in the DAO, though if what the DAO is doing is sufficiently valuable (which it would be), it may decide to let people trade $BTS tokens for tickets to concerts, livestreams, merch, or NFT collectibles. BTS can then choose to sell those tokens for fiat money (e.g. dollars or won) and cash out or retain $BTS and take a more active role in the DAO (token holders are often rewarded with increased influence in the governance of the DAO, corresponding to the amount of tokens they hold).

Since it can all be logged to a blockchain, much of this experience becomes portable beyond any specific platform, allowing the fanbase to organise itself wherever it prefers. This way experiences can travel beyond the walled gardens of Facebook, Apple, or virtual platforms and into the so-called metaverse in which the DAO and its members own their data and collect the value from it. Work is also being done on making various blockchains more interoperable, so things will be less locked into blockchain ecosystems than they are now.

Instead of communicating with an audience as followers on a social media platform owned by others, you can involve them directly in the organisation of your fan experience in a transparent, open, grassroots way through DAOs. The bonus: community ownership. We’ve seen countless artists open up Discords and other types of communities next to their social media presence – what we’ll see next is the Web3 version of this: decentralized autonomous fan organisations.

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Why Twitter is better positioned for tipping musicians than streaming services like Spotify and SoundCloud

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Twitter just launched a new tip jar feature with greater potential for musicians than those launched on popular streaming services such as Spotify and SoundCloud last year.

A new tip jar

Twitter started rolling out its new tip jar functionality last week. The functionality, which for now is only available to a limited group of creators, allows people to add Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo to their profiles via a new button on their profiles. It’s a bit like a ‘link in bio’, but specifically for payments.

Why tip jars ‘failed’ on streaming services

Streaming platforms are not creator services. They focus on monetizing the catalogue-listener relation through ads and subscriptions rather than the artist-fan relation. That means the user experience on streaming services is geared towards what people expect in exchange for their payment: quick access to the music they know, new music, and being able to find ‘music for every moment’.

I’m not entirely sure how these services defined success for the donation feature, but especially Spotify needed a PR win over the past year, so I’m interpreting their silence over the feature as an indication that nothing significant is happening through there. As a matter of fact, it seems that in its newly designed desktop profiles, the feature has been quietly removed. For reference, compare Marshmello‘s profile on mobile and the new desktop UI.

Why Twitter is better positioned for tipping

Social media is where people connect to artists. You may listen to dozens of artists per month, even hundreds, but the commitment of a social media follow is something reserved for those you actually care about. Social media is primarily about what’s new and while you can scroll back into someone’s history, it’s a secondary use case when compared to seeing months or years-old ‘content’ appear on playlists.

Through social media, it’s easier than on streaming services to stay connected with people and introduce them to new ways to support you. By creating a Tip Jar that also includes things like Bandcamp and Patreon, Twitter is reducing the distance between a person being interested in something and actually purchasing it. Any friction in that journey causes drop-offs along the way, so any reduction of friction or journey length translates to real money for creators (see also: merch integrations in (live)streaming platforms).

Expect others to follow suit

The type of direct monetization offered through Twitter’s Tip Jar is part of a wider trend that can also be seen in livestreaming services, the surging popularity of Patreon and OnlyFans, Clubhouse‘s tipping feature, and even the donation buttons in music streaming services.

Twitter will not be the last service this year to roll out more monetization options.

Why fanbases need to be networks, rather than channels

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 2 Comments on Why fanbases need to be networks, rather than channels

The foundations of the music business lie in an age of channels. Many current success models still focus on channels, despite living in an age of networks. Due to this mode of operation, a renewed demand for channels has created a landscape of influential gatekeepers over the past decade. But you can still opt to play the network game instead.

The channel landscape

Two clear examples of the new emergence of a channel landscape are Spotify and SoundCloud. Both of them started as platforms that were centered around the user and their networks. Spotify let its users build playlists and those were the playlists it served through its search and other features (actually, for a long time playlist discovery was handled by third-parties like Playlists.net, at the time called ShareMyPlaylists, now part of Warner Music). Over time, playlist brands emerged and Spotify started investing heavily into its own editorial brands – even prioritizing them over ‘user generated’ playlists.

SoundCloud started as a collaboration platform that quickly turned into a music-based social network – in some ways not very different from Twitter, which at one point considered buying SoundCloud and ended up investing $70 million. The main page was its stream, where you can see what people who you follow are uploading. Nowadays, the main page has featured playlists, personalized recommendations, charts, and themed playlists for studying, partying, sleeping, relaxing, etc.

Editorial playlists are channels. Both platforms went from social-first to channel-first and so did the much of the rest of the landscape.

Linearity

Channels are linear. You broadcast down them. You distribute through them one-directionally. In the CD days, if things start travelling in 2 directions in a distribution channel it meant there’s a big problem.

This linearity is what shaped modern music culture as it has emerged in the age of the recording and post-WW2 consumerism. It went hand in hand with the economies of scale that many also unknowingly sign up for when doing music, despite alternative ways being possible.

Non-linearity

We now live in the age of networks. This has been the most profound shift since the internet. Not streaming and not piracy, which are both just symptoms of what happens when something can be turned into data that can then travel without friction through networks.

It has created virality, internet memes, and an overabundance of ‘content’ since creating something and making it available for all to see is easier than ever. That’s true for your track, but also the 59,999 other tracks uploaded to Spotify every day. This problem has meant that platforms like the aforementioned have invested heavily in recommendation algorithms in order to ensure relevance to their users. That creates channels and in the case of certain big social media platforms, it means that people have to pay to actually reach audiences that already follow them.

The landscape also means you can branch off. You don’t need to do interviews in magazines in order to talk to your fans. You can set up your own groups on messaging apps, you can do newsletters, set up forums or Discord communities, etc. It can feel like a handful of companies are setting the rules, but you don’t have to play ball.

Non-linearity in fan communities

Whether you’re an artist, label or startup, how you structure your relation with your fan or user base determines the type of game you will be playing. For contrast, the below graphic looks at traditional linearity in artist-to-fan and fan-to-fan communication and compares it with a ‘network model’. The network model means that as an artist, instead of broadcasting down, you’re placing yourself inside your community of fans.

A community means multidirectional conversations. These conversations exist inside fan clubs, but that information would then have to be moved back up. If, instead of that, you’re participating in the fan community, you have access to more (qualitative) data and insights… with the added bonus that it gives you and others a sense of belonging.

Getting people to pay for something that’s abundantly available is a hard business. The better you understand the fans of your music, the more manageable that challenge becomes… and it will also help you develop completely novel ideas.

5 ideas for fan conversations

Basic rule of thumb: the more you interact with the people who like your music, the better you’ll understand them, which significantly impacts your odds of running a successful business. It also brings up one of the most underestimated challenges in music:

How do you get someone who likes your music to hear you again? They may have heard you on the radio or a playlist somewhere… now how do you make sure they keep listening to you over time?

Below are a few ideas that can help with fan retention and help build your understanding of your listeners in order to unlock new ideas to fold into things like Patreon memberships, crowdfunding perks, limited merch, or whatever you conceive.

  • The chatroom: “just set up a Discord” is thrown around a lot, but the relatively simple concept of creating an environment where fans can interact comes with real challenges. There’s a cold start problem meaning people join empty channels, only to disappear because the community feels dead (which then turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy). There can be abuse, where people spam channels or are not respectful of others. How you plan around these issues and the way you decide to architect your community determines what types of conversations and interactions you enable.
  • The weekly hangout: if you have a limited number of engaged fans, perhaps reach out to them individually and set up a weekly hangout where you all chat about life & music. Over time, bonds will form and people will feel more invested in the success of the reason why they’re connected: your music.
  • The monthly 1-on-1: set up a monthly, individual call with various fans, one on one. Check in on each other. You’ll not just get a snapshot of who people are, but you’ll get status updates, hear how they’re progressing on certain projects… and they’ll hear the same from you. This is one of the Patreon perks I offer to 1:1 supporters and although I expected it to be mostly consultancy calls, I’ve actually gotten a lot of value out of it by learning about new domains.
  • The ‘user interview’: user interviews are something I learned doing in various product roles at digital music services. Whenever you’re exploring a certain challenge, for example a new merch line, you reach out to a bunch of your fans directly and hold an interview with them (that you prepare well beforehand). In this situation, things you might want to find out are how they see themselves, how they express themselves through objects or clothing, how much they spend, how they decide to purchase items, etc. These are 1-on-1 calls and you can find plenty of great resources about this by learning more about a domain called ‘user research’.
  • The co-creation: you can also kick off a project where you co-create something with fans. For example, you could aim to create an audiovisual map and have fans populate parts of this map, based on their location. Working together on something helps you to understand people in new ways, it will let you see how people express themselves, and in what ways they like to be creative themselves.

Besides building a sense of community and connection, it’s important to always consider what you want to learn from these interactions. I could think of dozens of additional ideas for interaction, but what’s most important is that you understand the challenges before you and start thinking what type of insights will help you address those challenges. In some cases, the challenge might actually be to speak to fans so you can get more clarity on what goals to set.

The choice is yours

Not everything has to be in the hands of a few platforms. You can choose to interact directly with fans and you can do it today by DMing some people who recently liked your posts. Break out of the channel paradigm and see what you can build through network. It’s not one or the other: you can play both games. Just don’t be fooled by the dominance of channels. In the words of Black Sheep: the choice is yours.

Why YouTube is the streaming service to watch

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Spotify often gets contrasted with Bandcamp in order to explain the challenges of the music streaming landscape: low per-stream royalties versus much larger commissions on sales. The intensity of that discussion has moved all eyes from the actual one-to-watch, which is not Spotify, but YouTube – a service with a billion monthly active music listeners and 30 million subscribers.

Always has been

YouTube has of course long been on everyone’s radar due to the so-called ‘value gap’: the disparity between what YouTube was willing to pay for music & its perceived real market value. As the biggest music platform, YouTube was infamous for its low per-stream rates which, on average, are significantly lower than Spotify’s for music identified through its ContentID system (source). I chose to phrase things in past tense due to attention shifting to Spotify, but that does not mean rightsholders have found these issues to have been resolved.

Another concern is the power of YouTube and its mother companies Google and Alphabet, which is a common reason for complaints from music industry lobbyists about having imbalanced negotiations. Before I go into why I think YouTube is making all the right moves: the concentration of power towards tech monopolies is of big concern for me too (it’s why I deleted or deactivated my accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). Keep this in mind when developing a strategy: always diversify, never put your eggs in one basket, and make sure you create ways to go direct-to-fan (e.g. collect phone numbers, email addresses, build communities).

YouTube’s evolution as a creator service

Google’s video service has long had something of great strategic value: not music. I mean that literally: it’s had content and creators that were not doing music. This has meant less complexities around licensing (but also poorer representation for creatives) and has allowed YouTube to experiment with new models.

The same is happening now with podcasts at Spotify and user-centric streaming payments at SoundCloud. Having ‘user-generated content’ from unsigned artists allowed SoundCloud to start trialing its ‘fan-powered royalty‘ model without every rightsholder having to opt-in through contract negotiations. Meanwhile Spotify is exploring new monetization models around podcasts, like paid podcast subscriptions. As a relatively new medium, podcasts don’t yet have the legal and political complexities associated with intellectual property in music.

YouTube & the next layer

Streaming is a base layer for music monetization. It’s shallow in that it leverages nothing but the relation between listener and catalogue. Monetization is driven by factors like accessibility (e.g. all devices, price), portability (e.g. offline) and convenience (e.g. catalogue size, search, recommendations). It’s absolutely basic: it’s not about the relation between fan and artist, it’s not about the quality of the art or music, it’s just about having the largest and most convenient store where you can access everything by paying from a magic wallet with your costs predictably capped at $10 per month. It’s a subscription business, not a music business – as Tim Westergren (founder of Pandora and now livestreaming service Sessions) also pointed out in my recent interview with him during Karajan Music Tech.

This base layer has advantages: it generates a huge amount of money for rightsholders and creates a foundational data layer which can be used to connect listeners to new artists and music or could be leveraged to learn more about existing fans and get new music to them. But streaming was never supposed to be the future of the music economy. It needs additional layers on top.

One of these layers is the Interaction Layer. This layer has been thriving during the pandemic thanks to a particular medium: livestreams. Livestreams encourage interactivity: fans can be exposed to each other in chats and the chat functionality can make fans feel like they’re seen by the artist(s) they care about so much. That means there’s value being created beyond simple music access. Value means opportunity to monetize and YouTube has seized that opportunity.

Image taken from my Water & Music piece about fan-centric streaming services (paywall).

Through its Super Sticker and Super Chat features, YouTube allows creators to monetize their livestreams. Super Stickers are big, fun and quirky custom emoji that appear in the chat in exchange for a small fee. Super Chat allows viewers to highlight and pin a message for a certain duration of time, depending on how much they pay. In the first months of the pandemic lockdowns, from March to June 2020, over 2 million new users spent money on these features.

The second feature that provides an additional layer is channel memberships. This allows creators to created limited edition content, similar to what they might offer on Patreon or a SFW OnlyFans. At smaller numbers, it even allows them to create semi-bespoke content.

Layer integration

These features allow creators to monetize and connect with fans where they already are: YouTube (as opposed to onboarding them to Patreon or OnlyFans). This is the important distinction. These monetization options are not novel in and of themselves – many of them have been around for years or even decades. The important development is that these experience and monetization layers are integrating. Moving fans around various platforms causes friction, which means you won’t be able to convert everyone down the funnel from the streaming layer. It also keeps the data in one place instead of fracturing it.

Graphic from Streaming is not the future of the music economy, from the second edition of the MUSIC x newsletter, February 2016.

Over the next years we’re going to see many examples of artists successfully building models on layers that sit on top of streaming. YouTube is going to play a significant role in that. The conversation will move from leveraging streaming (still essential for discovery & connection to wider audience) to interaction & bespoke options.

Another service to watch in this space is Amazon Music, which is slowly expanding their integration of livestreams from Twitch (another Amazon company, which also allows micropayments and memberships like YouTube).

Livestreams mean original content and a different set of rights than what you negotiate for on-demand streaming. This has given YouTube and Amazon the flexibility to experiment with these new layers. Spotify’s business strategy has introduced similar functionality to podcasts, but will they be able to do the same for music given the complexities of licensing and the various rightsholders that will want a piece of the pie?

The music streaming landscape is in flux and it’s not about Apple Music vs Spotify or Spotify vs Bandcamp anymore.

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For a wider read diving further into this trend, read my article The rise of the fan-centric music streaming service at Water & Music (paywall).

A special thanks to Vickie Nauman for some of the inspiration for this piece and to c/o pop and Germany’s association for independent music (VUT) for having us on a panel last week.

How SoundCloud should tackle fan-artist payments and reconquer lost ground from Bandcamp, Instagram & TikTok

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 1 Comment on How SoundCloud should tackle fan-artist payments and reconquer lost ground from Bandcamp, Instagram & TikTok

SoundCloud is rumoured to announce new plans to “let fans pay artists directly” which some commentators interpret as the music streaming service exploring user-centric payment systems.

While user-centric payments definitely make the landscape fairer and realign incentives by making sure the money generated by fans of certain artists actually end up in those pockets, it’s definitely not a silver bullet solution to make up for the difference between desired and actual revenue artists receive from streaming services. In other words: for the vast majority of artists, the immediate change in royalties from a shift to user-centric would be negligible.

Furthermore, it’s complex to negotiate, as SoundCloud’s VP of content partnerships Raoul Chatterjee pointed out during a recent session of the UK streaming inquiries:

“The whole investigation into user-centric is a very detailed and complex investigation that needs to be taken. It’s one potential path we’re exploring… and it would require industry-wide conversations and support to be impactful.”

SoundCloud is doing ok (especially compared to a few years ago), is reporting growing revenues, but it’s losing relevance. SoundCloud does not have time for lengthy negotiations. As a platform, they’ve lost their footing at the center of music subcultures and the longer it takes for SoundCloud to regain its position, the harder it will become.

Keep the lawyers at the (virtual) negotiation tables, but in the meantime, claw your way back.

SoundCloud’s relative interest over time based on Google searches.

Instagram, Bandcamp, and the post-Covid landscape

Two questions.

Firstly, where do music scenes go to connect to stay connected with each other in 2021? I’ve argued that Instagram has usurped community building from SoundCloud. Of course it should be noted that TikTok is playing an increasingly important role there, especially for certain genres. To a lesser degree, groups on Facebook, Telegram, and Discord form places for people to share their latest tracks, get feedback, find people to do collabs or exchange remixes with, etc. As such, they’re also great places for fans to keep track of the latest developments in music.

Secondly, where did musicians turn when they struggled to make ends meet with just the income from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc.? They turned to Bandcamp in a massive way. SoundCloud, with its creator-centric roots, wasn’t well-positioned yet to accommodate these artists, because what it offers artists hasn’t changed much from its early beginnings. In 2020, being creator-centric meant helping creators make money – and SoundCloud didn’t have much to offer beyond what it offered artists since the service’s early days. That is: a place to upload your music and present it to other people. That addresses a pre-2015~ market need: making music easy to access. Access has been solved. Monetization hasn’t.

Another place that made music easy to access, YouTube, has been SoundCloud’s most important competitor. YouTube, since its early days, has offered social functionality similar to SoundCloud’s, in that one can follow creators (once innovative! Spotify only launched this 4+ years after launch), comment on tracks, and see other users’ profiles.

By 2021, YouTube’s suite has evolved to include membership clubs with monthly fees, monetization through content identification, and livestream monetization through social features that make fans more visible in the chat (similar to Twitch).

This is the landscape SoundCloud must address & find relevancy in.

(more about this landscape in my piece for Water & Music about the rise of the fan-centric music streaming service (paywall))

The social opportunity

SoundCloud was strongest when it catered to its early adopter users or users who exhibit that type of behaviour. Behaviour commonly associated with early adopter users is word of mouth, being a power user, and a willingness to overlook certain flaws as long as the product delivers exceedingly well on its core value proposition. These users are not well-addressed, since the value proposition has diluted over time in order to target wider audiences (e.g. through its Spotify-like subscription service). SoundCloud has made some great initiatives to woo creators in recent years, but the unifying aspect for all users on the platform is its listening experience – and that’s a social one.

People go to SoundCloud to discover new music. To find what’s ‘Next Up’ before it’s uploaded anywhere else. If you’re into a particular type of music, you’ll follow many of the same artists as other fans of that music and you’ll see some of those fans appear in the timeline comments on tracks.

Timed comments on Masayoshi Iimori’s track Alcohol.

On profiles, which have the same feature sets for fans and for artists, this social functionality is also present by displaying who someone follows and is followed by, as well as any tracks they’ve liked and comments they’ve left. For users who don’t upload any music, the main profile real estate consists of reposted tracks (similar to a Twitter user who only retweets). All of that is social.

Do the majority of users explicitly engage in social behaviour on the platform? Unlikely and it’s probable that a small minority of users create most of the (visible) activity, as on Twitter. SoundCloud is a community product where a minority of users create the value that the majority of users get off of the platform. Unlike Spotify, which tries to help users get as much value out of the catalogue as possible, SoundCloud should focus on the value users can get out of communities and the artist-fan relationship.

Lessons from gaming

This is not dissimilar to what fueled the success of games like Farmville or Clash of Clans. In free-to-play games, the majority of users will never spend any money. Instead, they create value for the ecosystem, so that a minority of users becomes willing to spend (big).

In order to leverage these dynamics, and create revenue for artists, SoundCloud must double down on social. How?

  • Step 1: Leaderboards on tracks and profiles. Show off the top fans of tracks and artists. Dedicated fans will want to earn their spot as the top fan. It’s not just fans: if you’re part of a certain music scene and want to make sure you’re ‘seen’, you’ll play new tracks on repeat, so you appear on the leaderboards on day 1. (just imagine K-pop stans, if you find it hard to imagine how fan communities would approach these types of dynamics)

    This functionality already exists inside the stats dashboards artists have access to. All SoundCloud needs to do is make leaderboards visible on the various pages and perhaps create a setting so people can exclude themselves from public leaderboards.
Screenshot of the top listeners of a particular track in a 7-day time period (stats dashboard).
  • Step 2: Track and profile pages as real estate. Leaderboards create social competition and a way for fans to earn status. Now comes the monetization: let fans pay to claim pages in a non-obtrusive way, similar to how YouTube’s Super Chat feature lets you claim visibility in a chat during a livestream. You could let artists set prices or create some type of market dynamic for this.
  • Step 3: Place activity & payment on the same currency. As in gaming, certain users will spend more time creating value through activity and other users will fuel the economy through payments. By creating an on-platform currency, SoundCloud could reward active users with tokens that accrue value as people purchase tokens to spend on the platform with ‘real money’.

The tokens could then help artists mint their work as NFTs and create a more sophisticated dynamic for ‘tracks as real estate’. Basically, artists could earn money from playback, from selling tracks as NFTs, and by making commissions off of people speculating and reselling music NFTs (a commission percentage can be defined in the smart contracts associated with an NFT). From here, SoundCloud could come to function more as a protocol and create a metaverse-friendly version of its other early value proposition: music playback that embeds everywhere. This time with music as a vanity item that all can enjoy, but can only be owned by one person at a time while always staying associated with the creator – even when NFT ownership transfers from one person to another.

As the user-facing part of the platform shifts towards creating more value from the artist-fan relationship and the activity inside fan communities, subcultures, and scenes, lawyers can negotiate with industry gatekeepers to change royalty administration to a user-centric model.

Some of the above is actually what the Audius protocol is trying to accomplish. You could also go a lot further than what I’ve described, as Audius intends and as Mat Dryhurst explored in his essay SoundCrowd: Tokenizing & Collectivizing Soundcloud. Long term blockchain visions aside, for 2021, being a creator-centric company means being a company that helps monetize, so SoundCloud must focus on the short term and employ an “opportunities multiply as they are seized” type of strategy. That means: not standing still to evaluate distant forks in the road, because what you do along the way will determine the paths you can take from that fork.

User-centric is too slow for SoundCloud

Is user-centric streaming the right thing to do? Yes. Will it help SoundCloud in the short term? No, because artists will not see significant enough returns in order for them to drive more traffic to the platform.

How can SoundCloud be as significant to artists as Bandcamp was in 2020?

SoundCloud must emphasize its community nature, since that’s how the type of value can be created that part of its core users will pay for. That won’t be most of the audience that SoundCloud has been marketing its music streaming subscription to (which can’t beat catalog-centric Spotify or value gap YouTube).

The platform must be selective about what type of behaviour it wants to cater to and the value it can create out of that. For that, it makes sense to use its DNA as a social music platform – something that Spotify, Apple (through Ping & Connect), and others have not been able to figure out. It needs to focus on the users that can amplify community excitement around significant monetization functionality and help make SoundCloud as culturally relevant as it was half a decade ago.

Signed,

A long term SoundCloud user with a 3-letter username: Bas (and more recently Viva Bas Vegas).

Endlesss studio

Music’s non-static future as seen through music making app Endlesss

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

For those unfamiliar with Endlesss: it’s a collaborative music making app founded by musician Tim Exile that has been on the market as a (free) mobile app for a while already. In December, Endlesss launched its desktop app which I’ve now given a go and it provided a glimpse of how music is reconquering a quality it has lost in the age of the recording: participation.

Why Endlesss is different

Instead of writing songs, the app’s users are encouraged to make ‘jams’ which essentially are iterative loops of up to 8 bars. Each iteration is called a riff. When you add an instrument or effect to a riff, it creates a new riff inside your jam which then plays as a loop. The audio keeps playing, the interface keeps staring at you, encouraging you to keep jamming.

Endlesss’ desktop interface. Instrument selection at the left. At the top right, you can see the visual representation of the riffs in your jam, allowing you to go back a few steps.
Endlesss’ desktop interface. Instrument selection at the left. At the top right, you can see the visual representation of the riffs in your jam, allowing you to go back a few steps.

The app is also social, allowing users to participate in jams with others or just to listen in and explore riffs. There are prominent public jams that everyone can participate in as well as invite-only ones. Some of these jams lead to users sharing interesting moments of the jams (riffs) to the community, which can then be remixed and used to kick off another jam. Pretty cool considering some of the app’s users are popular producers themselves (Imogen Heap and Ninja Tune co-founder Matt Black joined Endlesss founder Tim Exile for livestreamed jams last year).

Endlesss Jams have chat rooms for participants (or observers) of jams to share thoughts, tips, expertise, or coordinate the direction of the jam.
Jams have chat rooms for participants (or observers) of jams to share thoughts, tips, expertise, or coordinate the direction of the jam.

How Endlesss redefines music

The social dimension, culturally speaking, is Endlesss’ most important aspect, because it changes the default meaning of music. For people who are not creators, music is something you listen to. It’s the same every time you hear it and it doesn’t change. If a remix or a cover version is made, it’s considered as ‘less real’ than the ‘original version’ (which in some cases may just be the most famous version, but not the first recording).

These are new qualities of music – at least as a default – introduced by the age of recorded music and mass consumerism. Music has become less participatory in that you don’t need anyone to play or sing a song if you want to hear it. The fact that it’s a new quality also means that it’s not inherent to music, meaning we can use the power of our devices (now easily amplified by connected AI) to experience music in new ways.

In the case of Endlesss, that means music is not a song, but an iterative jam. It’s something that happens, that invites participation, and that changes over time (though a snapshot of each iteration remains on the platform as a riff).

The age of non-static

This trend extends way beyond Endlesss and goes decades back to ‘affordable’ drum computers and samplers sparking the foundations of today’s most popular genres: house and hiphop. Then we got the rapid interchange of ideas and remixes enabled by Soundcloud which enshrined the platform’s cultural influence into genre names such as cloud rap. Outside of music, internet meme culture evolved through remixes and iteration, providing a non-linear visual culture detached from the channels of mass media and behaving according to the network reality of the internet.

They don't know where this song was originally sampled from People Line art Cartoon Text Head Arm Child Standing Human Organism
A recent example of a highly participatory meme format called They Don’t Know (and originally I Wish I Was At Home).

For the connection back to music, you only have to look at today’s hottest social media company, TikTok, which is completely based on remix culture. I’m not saying Endlesss is the TikTok of music production software; I’m saying that there’s a generation of people for whom the primary point of interaction with music is through a new set of interfaces that make music more than just its static, recorded self. It’s participatory and made to be engaging, like live music… but scalable.