Last week I wrote about blockchain-based streaming platformĀ AudiusĀ in this newsletter. I criticized the strategy of ‘becoming the anti-SoundCloud’ and its plans for dealing with takedowns while recognizing the exciting potential of aĀ more complex music economy. The next dayĀ Holly HerndonĀ andĀ Mat DryhurstĀ released a newĀ InterdependenceĀ podcast episode where they goĀ in conversation with the Audius founders. It made me completely change my mind about the platform.
Don’t be too quick to dismiss Audius: separating the content & functionality layer is one of the keys to unlocking a new music economy.
Protocol or platform, not service
Audius should be thought of as a decentralized platform rather than as a startup or streaming service. While there is a team behind the project, it seems they mostly work to bring into existence the components outlined in their whitepaper (PDF). These aspects are open-sourced and governed by the user community of the protocol.
While a service’s success is dependent on whatever interface is slapped on to the technical infrastructure, a protocol is less dependent on any one interface. For example, a company poorly redesigning an email client isn’t going to kill email, but it may kill the app or the company behind it. The most exciting aspect of Audius is not the current interface; it’s that they’re trying to create a protocol for digital music that could have any number of interfaces plug into it.
Clipped from the Audius whitepaper linked above.
One of the most important elements of that protocol is a concept I was previously very skeptical about.
Artist-determined stream pricing
Audius wants to let artists set a per-stream rate for their tracks, so if someone wants $1 / stream, they could do so. If they want something close to whatever are the current average Spotify or Apple rates, that’s possible too.
Why I was skeptical about per-stream rates is that it creates a form of metered streaming: load up your wallet and watch the currency tick away as you listen to music. If you’re creating a SoundCloud lookalike (or: ālike Soundcloud, but betterā) to fit into the current landscape of streaming services, then metered streaming is a constraint that will inevitably scare users off. It won’t just scare people off in the sense that they won’t want to load up their wallet if they don’t know what they’re going to listen to yet, but more importantly it will have people make economical decisions about established micro-behaviours around music listening. I think in the end, that would be stressful and exhausting and users would stop coming back. However Iāve come to realize I’m wrong about this.
Differently priced music does not have to live in the same streaming interface. Lower-priced music might be what fuels background-listening type radio apps. Higher-priced music may be at the center of interfaces that connect you to new releases by your favourite artists. There are some pieces of classical music that I listen to maybe once a year, that I value more than some music that I listen to weekly. Per-stream pricing could help make up for the fact that that classical piece gets only 1 yearly stream from me versus 52 streams for a random track ā whose creator I don’t even know ā in a playlist I use to focus on writing.
What Mat and Holly communicate very well in their podcast with Audius is that ‘music’ is not one thing, yet the online landscape doesn’t reflect that fact well. To some degree, the compensation model embedded in the licenses dictates a lot of the user experience. In the past I’ve led teams at two music streaming services wanting to do things differently and while you can go quite a long way, in the end you have to exist in a landscape dictated by just one economic game: maximization of streams.
A change to that landscape would be refreshing and a welcome way to generate more revenue streams.
Content / interface-layer challenges
There is still a whole range of challenges to deal with in such a system. Who sets the per-stream price for example? Is it whoever has the highest degree of ownership of the sound recording? What if they change the price while itās live and because of that the track is no longer playable through certain interfaces? Or if it all lives in the same interface: do you interrupt playback to give people a warning before an expensive track starts playing? What if their phone is in their pocket? These are just some of the design problems developers would have to think about in a decentralized system with such principles.
Itās possible that the decentralization of the functionality layer doesnāt go as far as I imagine. In any case, Audius or the apps using the protocol will have to deal with the existing national and international copyright regimes which inevitably dictate some of the economics.
In the end, itās not about Audius versus SoundCloud; itās about creating a new layer for music streaming. Imagining music streaming as a protocol, rather than a competitive space of services, is refreshing though. It allows for a rethink of the principles underpinning the digital music landscape without going through the arduous mental exercise of imagining small iterative improvements to solve streamingās flaws.
Recently blockchain-based music streaming service Audiusdistributed tokens to 10,000 of its top users, giving them ownership of the platform and rights to vote on its future plus make changes to its structure.
While its advisory board ā which includes Twitch co-founder Justin Kan and EA Games co-founder Bing Gordon ā is impressive (though all-male), I have my reservations about the platform. Iāll explain why in a moment.
Despite my reservations, I do believe Audius is on to something. When it distributed the tokens, they didnāt all go to artists, but also fans. Music is in desperate need for a digital economy more complex than one-directionally spreading out subscription fees over stream counts.
The āanti-SoundCloudā
From the beginning, Audius set itself up as ālike SoundCloud, but not SoundCloud.ā Thereās a real difficulty in positioning yourself that way. SoundCloud is a company with more than half a billion USD in funding to date. It has relations with most of the music business, technical integrations with all kinds of hardware & software, and has spent over a decade building up its community, team and infrastructure.
The standards for music streaming are incredibly high now compared to the landscape that the current incumbents started out in. While I definitely think SoundCloud and other music streaming services of that generation are leaving space for newcomers to claim, I think itās important to focus on what in particular a newcomer can do better and excel in that. In terms of doing a particular thing better, Iād argue Instagram has become the anti-SoundCloud.
How do you deliver a good user experience and an audience to people? How do you get them to regularly visit your app / platform? How do you grow beyond the front of the adoption curve? All of these have answers, but how do you do that better than others? Setting yourself up as a one-size-fits-all service creates expectations you canāt fulfill.
Takedown issues
On to a more complicated matter. Audius, as a decentralized service, will pass takedown requests on to uploaders who will have to take action. If it canāt be resolved, it moves to anĀ arbitration committeeĀ made up of Audius users:
āThat group can vote on whether a track legally should be removed or its revenue reattributed, and both plaintiffs and committee members must put up a small financial stake theyāll lose if their claim is frivolous or they make erroneous decisions.ā
I appreciate the idealism in letting its community resolve these issues. The financial stake part also makes sense, assuming the party issuing is on the platform, but it also reads like the type of maximalist thought usually associated with blockchain or ādisruptive startupā culture. It assumes as a newcomer it can set a new status quo that everyone will have to interact with ā even people who are not on the platform. In actuality, as a newcomer youāre an outlier and the type of strategy you have to employ is growth, so you can actually become the status quo.
What does not help growth is artists finding parts of their catalogue on the platform without uploading it themselves and then going through a tedious and risky process to right the wrong.
A more complex economy
Another company I had similar reservations about in terms of being able to stand out as a compelling streaming platform is Resonate, a community-owned cooperative. However what excites me about Audius and Resonate are their visions for a different music streaming economy. In particular, giving fans and artists equal participation in that economy.
Money in streaming flows in one direction and thatās away from fans. It feels like thatās the point, but itās also a limitation. Thereās a reductionist vision that music services are solely about listening to music. Yet what could be created by incentivizing platform participation? What if the $10/month subscription fee was more like an entrance ticket or season pass and thereās additional, optional value exchange happening on the platform, much like in video games?
Some users wouldnāt be able to afford a fee higher than that $10. As a matter of fact, I know music fans who only stream from free services. By participating in the platformās economy they could still unlock perks theyāre after. They could do so by creating value on the platform, e.g. by building experiences, creating fan art and other value for communities, or by participating in platform improvements like the cleaning of metadata or, I suppose, DMCA takedown arbitration.
This type of thing has been happening in games for years. A current prominent example being Roblox (est. 2004), which recently saw Lil Nas X perform in-game.
The starting point isnāt the economy though ā itās to envision what you want players to be able to do in the world created for them. From engagement flow the opportunities to shape an economy (another reason why Iām skeptical of consumer-facing startups whose value propositions focus on the economy more than the user experience). In order to create robust digital economies around music, the likely question to figure out is how to create a compelling platform for fan culture at large.
This is a rough transcript of my talk at Most Wanted: Music Dial-in on July 20.
Just before the pandemic hit, I started a new project called Hard Dance Berlin.
My intention was to map out the local scenes of harder electronic music and try to bring them together more after I noticed that people like each other’s music, but rarely come together.
I wanted to shine a light on all the local events happening that cater to people who love those sounds and in many weeks found events on 4 of the nights. One week in February even had relevant events all 7 nights. Berlin š
But then it stopped. Abruptly. First the cancellations came from concerned organisers and then the lockdown happened and forced organisers who hadn’t caught up yet to also cancel their events.
My vision had been this:
Focusing on local allows people from various scenes to collaborate and create new scenes. By bringing audiences together, we’d be able to support each other. No more having to easyJet around Europe every weekend just to pay the bills as a DJ.
But in the middle of March there was no local to focus on. Everyone’s ‘local’ was reduced to staying at home. While everyone’s at home, focusing on local seems pointless, because what would once emerge as a local subculture from a record shop and venue in a particular city, now emerges through networks of artists on SoundCloud and Instagram.
Organisers and artists scrambled to get livestreams up and running, while the amount of daily new information added an edge of overload to a time of uncertainty.
Something happened since the initial lockdowns:
We went from something that was very hard to grasp and felt completely overwhelming to a certain calm. We know most countries have similar style lockdowns in place. While uncertainty and hardship is part of the daily reality for many of us, things have also become a lot more predictable than back in March and April.
Unfortunately, that is temporary.
We’re now seeing governments inside the EU giving negative travel advice to their citizens traveling to certain countries or regions in Europe.
So while we’re now carefully trying to get live music back on its feet, with proper safety measures in place, we’re seeing a landscape evolve that is as complicated as it was in early March when some cities and regions locked down, but countries were still open… but would they be by the time you had to be there?
Risk management
In order to maintain or increase certainty and predictability, we are seeing organisers of drive-in shows, the rare socially distanced event, and even many livestreams depend on local cultures: venues, crews, artists.
Now let’s imagine a few months forward: we’ll likely see a complicated landscape of lockdowns as countries, states, and cities deal with outbreaks. When all’s clear, events with proper hygiene may be permitted, but when an outbreak occurs the area might go into a form of lockdown at almost no notice.
So let’s imagine next summer. Let’s say that we have a vaccine by then – which is optimistic, but not unrealistic. Will that vaccine give long-term immunity or be more like a flu shot? Can we get it out to large enough parts of our populations – how quickly? And what about all the other places in the world? And then what does the world look like? We’ll know that this can happen again – as it nearly did with bird flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS, you name it.
And what about other crises? Every year we see record temperatures and more extreme weather events. Governments are discussing “green new deals” to reorganise their economies in order to address the crises of climate, waste, and biodiversity.
The new normal is not a static thing: it’s a future of new normals.
So that current local focus we’re seeing: it’s here to stay. It’s risk mitigation. That’s not to say your favourite bands won’t be coming to town anymore: they probably will. But since focusing on local scenes is one of the most effective strategies for mitigating risk in the face of these crises, we’ll see a renaissance of local scenes in an interconnected world – where scenes from Berlin, New Orleans, Shanghai, etc. can be made visible to each other.
By what we’re learning now about building online business models, we can make sure music won’t depend as much on cheap air travel as it used to ā because eventually there probably won’t be air travel as cheap as it is now.
So I’d like to encourage everyone to think long-term and build global networks for local impact. Our future kind of depends on it.
What SoundCloud can do to win back lost ground from its most important competitor: Instagram.
What is SoundCloud, actually?
Coming out of the MySpace era, SoundCloud was easy to define. Now, in a mobile world with streaming as the default way of music listening, that has changed.
I’ll go into why, as I explain why SoundCloud’s most important competitor is not Spotify, but Instagram. One started as music app, and the other as a photo app, but they’re both more: they’re children of the web 2.0 – the social web – and as such have become important platforms for communities.
If SoundCloud is to thrive, it will have to figure out how to make up for ground lost to Instagram.
“You mean I can comment on specific parts of each track instead of just leaving a comment on a profile?”
If you never had a MySpace profile, you won’t know how mindblowing SoundCloud was when it first arrived. The web was a different place.
Before Facebook, MySpace was the dominant global social medium. The global social web was different: most countries would have their own social landscape. Brazil, for a long time, was connected through Orkut. The Netherlands through Hyves and Cu2. Much of Asia was on Friendster. Yet MySpace was the dominant global player. It didn’t just have profiles, but it also had music. Bands could upload a couple of tracks to their profile (max. 4 or 5 at any time) and fans could feature artists’ tracks on their own profiles to show what music they liked. People would make long lists of bands and artists they were into and then would search, find, and befriend other people based on this. You weren’t necessarily friends with people you know in real life, or at least not exclusively, and it wasn’t common to use your real name.
It was a social network connected by music, and in the transition years between Facebook taking over from MySpace and music streaming really establishing itself, many people in music longed back for the MySpace days. They wondered what “the next MySpace” would be, even as recently as 2011 (I even wrote a piece about it).
SoundCloud filled an important role. It launched quietly and positioned itself as a collaboration tool for artists. It had this cool feature that would let you comment on the waveforms: something that most people hadn’t seen before. Furthermore, your account could hold an unlimited amount of tracks, throttled by an upload limit of 4 tracks per month for free accounts (they later changed it to a max. minutes per account model – which DJs hated).
MySpace would let people customize their profiles with code, so people figured out how to hack their profiles and swap out the MySpace default player for the SoundCloud player (this later became a supported feature, and you can click here to see a 10-year old guide on how it was done).
Due to SoundCloud’s visually distinctive music players, its spread through music communities was visible on MySpace. The fact that it went viral meant it would saturate scene by scene, as more musicians joined the platform.
How SoundCloud changed music
While MySpace was still the main presence for many musicians, communities started to form on SoundCloud. The musicians who’d spend a lot of time on SoundCloud were different: they’d behave more like what is now called a ‘digital native’. To be online a lot wasn’t necessarily normal for artists: remember, most people didn’t have smartphones yet and music listening was done from MP3-players.
Through SoundCloud’s features, there was now a platform specifically for music that was global, included all genres (though mostly electronic at the time – hiphop wasn’t really there yet), had great commenting features, a way to form groups around topics (similar to Last.fm), and a messaging feature.
All of this existed, but now it existed on one platform. And it changed the way people connected around music, the way scenes formed, and it changed music itself.
A recent example of how the digital music landscape has changed music is the so-called “playlist edit“, a streaming era version of the radio edit. The game to keep your tracks on large playlists is to make sure to keep your skip rate low. People skip stuff they don’t know – especially when they just start listening to a playlist, so long intros get skipped until people get to something familiar, or something that sounds familiar. The top of the playlist is where you get the most streams, so economically it makes sense to cut the intro down and jump right into the track.
A development that preceded that is that music started behaving like the image macro memes that were exploding at the time of SoundCloud’s rise (ask your older siblings about icanhascheezburger). While there is much talk about memes and music now, particularly in the context of TikTok’s impact on music, this development is something that has been going on for more than a decade and SoundCloud’s community was at the center of it.
In 2009 Dave Nada slowed down a house track at a party to match with the reggaeton being played there. It sounded amazing. He went home, made an edit, and uploaded it to SoundCloud. And that’s how moombahton was born, a genre now eclipsed by trap and subsequent developments in popular music, but it has provided the underpinnings for hits by people like Diplo, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Skrillex, and many others.
After uploading it to SoundCloud, other producers heard Dave Nada’s remix, and started making their own moombahton edits. Soon they started making originals. Some of the people from this movement grew into ‘EDM’ stars, like Dillon Francis. And perhaps this had been happening before moombahton, but for me it was the first time that I noticed a genre being born within a matter of weeks, if not days.
Why the comparison with memes? Well, they behave similarly: due to music tools becoming more widely available (mostly through pirated music production software) it became easier for people to participate in music creation. Editing an image became easy with computers entering every household, and memes became a language of expression. The same conversation happened through music: someone would upload a musical idea and someone else would run with that idea and apply it to something else according to their vision. “Remix culture” was the phrase then, but now we use the ‘memes’ label for the vast majority of that phenomenon.
As moombahton was growing, electronic music producers started playing around with sounds of trap – a style of hiphop until then, that sounded very different from the Harlem Shake and Turn Down For What-style hits that were to follow.
Community was essential to SoundCloud and then they risked it all
For a long time, SoundCloud struggled with its business model, the licensing fees it had to pay rightsholders (and was getting sued for), and the fact that people were uploading music that wasn’t theirs to the platform.
How that all played out is a story for another time (or hey, right now, since it’s already been written about a lot, just head to your favourite search engine or try Ecosia which is like a greener Google). The result of how that story played out is that SoundCloud suddenly found itself manoeuvring into the typical streaming service domain of business models and service design. It struck deals with the majors, launched ads for the free part of the service, subscriptions for the listener side of the business (with a similar pricing model as Spotify & co), and added labels’ back catalogues to the service.
More music: cool right?
Well. Not really.
SoundCloud was the place for the freshest music. SoundCloud enabled new communities to emerge and connect, and those communities enabled SoundCloud to have the newest in music before it was available anywhere else.
Now, that all got merged into a context which included artists who were dead long before the internet. That’s not why anyone was on SoundCloud.
“Unlike Spotify and Deezer, whose free tiers have long been geared towards driving subscriptions, for Soundcloud this is not a funnel tweak, it is a pivot. It is a complete change in strategy.“
Driven by the expense of the operation, the company focused on selling itself as a catalogue service, essentially competing with Spotify ā something it hadn’t really done before. As an on-demand catalogue service it was simply inferior to Spotify’s product that had been developed exactly for that purpose. For its own original purpose, SoundCloud’s product was still superior to Spotify’s product and to a large extent still is.
This part of the story ended up with layoffs and a change of management at SoundCloud. Its founders out. Painful.
It looked like SoundCloud wasn’t going to make it, but after debt funding and new investment, SoundCloud survived, now with a new CEO: Kerry Trainor, who previously led creator-centric video platform Vimeo.
Somehow, he convinced the company’s investors to let SoundCloud pursue a creator-centric strategy again, despite all the sunk cost into a different direction. And that brings us to today’s landscape.
SoundCloud’s most important competitor is Instagram
The defining thing about SoundCloud is not that you can listen to music there. You can listen to music on the radio. What has always defined SoundCloud is its community that pushes boundaries of genres and develops new styles (there’s even a hugely popular, chart-topping genre that carries the company’s name: SoundCloud rap).
SoundCloud is where it pops off, but the community doesn’t really connect there anymore.
Sure, people will leave a comment, maybe send a message, and do a repost, but that’s a very narrow spectrum of interaction among communities of creatives. Where do people share their work-in-progress music? Where do artists share their excitement about releases of other artists in their community? Where do people ask for feedback and create back-and-forths around creative expression? Instagram.
If people need to get in touch with each other, they DM each other through Instagram, too. It’s actually impossible to message people on SoundCloud from your mobile phone (go ahead, try it). More frustratingly, from your mobile device it’s also impossible to read messages people sent you.
Through posts being shared in Instagram stories, people discover new accounts to follow. When you visit a profile, you see which people are already following them ā this helps to determine community-membership. Seeing who someone follows and is followed by exists on SoundCloud, but it’s just not as well-done as on Instagram.
Another aspect we often forget to discuss is that music culture is not just music. Music has a visual culture. With more of our time spent discovering and connecting to music online, even pre-corona, music’s context has become more visual than before. I’m not talking about music videos necessarily. I’m talking about shots from the studio, artists’ personal life, artwork, stuff artists are inspired by, videos of digital audio workstation screens, etc.
Music is a visual culture, which is one more reason why music culture & communities congregate on Instagram.
Is Instagram a music platform?
No.
You could make the argument that it is, but in defining Instagram as a SoundCloud competitor, I don’t think Instagram as a music platform is relevant.
The exciting thing for SoundCloud has always been its community. What made SoundCloud successful is that it made its community successful. And while SoundCloud is still the place where these communities post finished tracks and DJ sets, it is no longer the community’s center.
Instagram is the center of important parts of SoundCloud’s community and that is a problem for SoundCloud.
MySpace wasn’t a Facebook and it wasn’t a music platform necessarily: it was a bit of both and in being so it was the center of a community. As Facebook and SoundCloud built compelling new services that did the 2 things MySpace was doing well, communities started shifting and MySpace lost its center.
Now SoundCloud has lost its center. It is doing better than a few years ago, but there is a risk. What does this risk look like?
Let’s look at Bandcamp’s days where they drop their revenue share. The site sees record traffic and record sales on those days. Even for underground genres, where musicians’ fans are probably musicians themselves too, I doubt that SoundCloud is responsible for anything like the traffic Instagram is sending. And that’s fine, because SoundCloud is not necessarily a social media platform – it’s a music platform. The problem is, so is Bandcamp.
SoundCloud is in a good position. It’s part of online music’s infrastructure. As is Bandcamp, and I don’t think the two platforms are competing or are likely to make deliberate choices to end up competing. But SoundCloud doesn’t own its community, and it has a problem when its position as part of music’s default infrastructure is threatened (e.g. by a large streaming service that’s already integrated with Instagram deciding to compete with labels and adopting more creator-centric features).
How can SoundCloud win back its community?
I expect this is the question you may be asking or the question you expect to be answered, but I don’t think it’s the right question to ask. This is about SoundCloud’s place in a cultural landscape. Getting to a certain position in this landscape takes long and is unpredictable. Just consider that the start of SoundCloud’s story is as a tool for music sharing and collaboration. Did they think it would become a cornerstone of global rap and electronic music culture? They could have dreamt it, sure, but they wouldn’t have been able to map out the path by which they’d eventually achieve it.
Everything depends on early adopters
Some services adapt to user expectations by widening their demographic and appealing to a larger number of people (e.g. people that are not digital-savvy, are into music but are happy to just have a radio stream, etc.). In doing so, you often alienate early adopters who will start looking for the next thing. In 2017, SoundCloud was in trouble and Spotify was aggressively trying to increase its market share. I argued that we were witnessing a new “MySpace moment”: an end of one era and a beginning of a next one, as underserved early adopters start moving on and start populating new potential markets for entrepreneurs and investors.
Well, we’re there. It’s now. Accelerated by the global lockdowns in response to COVID-19.
A new landscape is emerging and in order for SoundCloud to retain its position as infrastructure for the early adopters of this generation, then it will have to integrate into that landscape. Just like it did when everyone swapped out their MySpace player for SoundCloud’s.
It will have to integrate not just with incumbents, but also upcoming startups in:
Music production software (software can mean mobile or desktop apps, as well as browser-based)
DJ software
Virtual environments like video games and VR experiences
Augmented reality experiences
The good news, if you’re cheering for SoundCloud like I am, is that they’re already doing these integrations. I can go to Plug.dj and play SoundCloud tracks for a room of my friends’ virtual avatars, as a DJ I can access SoundCloud’s catalogue from DJ software like Rekordbox, Serato, and Traktor with the Go+ subscription. They’re already integrated with the most popular augmented reality platform, which is Instagram with its filters and effects.
This is just survival strategy though: SoundCloud must stay close to early adopters so it doesn’t risk losing its place as essential infrastructure. The road back to being the community’s center is another question.
As long as SoundCloud can grow its revenues by sustaining itself as infrastructure, it may be a difficult business decision to invest in doing more than that. Doing more than that would take research. Definitions of audiences, so they can decide which ones to focus on and which ones to risk losing. It’s easy to shout what a company should do and make a compelling point for why they would be successful doing that. It’s much harder to execute it, and I speak from experience (on both sides).
A music streaming service as an ecosystem
My attempt to build a modularized music streaming service with low-priced subscriptions ran into all kinds of issues. You think a good funding round buys you time and we were well-funded at $20M, but money burns fast if you’re a streaming service. Ultimately, we needed to get high growth numbers according to industry benchmarks. Those benchmarks were established by other companies doing bundling deals with telcos. None of the local telcos we spoke to were into the concept of an ecosystem of music apps: they wanted a one-size-fits-all app like Spotify or Deezer. For a while we pursued 2 strategies at once: we built the standard app to try to get partnerships, while also working to construct the ecosystem.
Pursuing two strategies wasn’t intentional. It was the result of compromise. We now had two competing visions and efforts in the company, and even if they were mostly compatible, it was impossible to focus on both and be successful both ways. Not at that stage, not at that scale.
With time lost and money spent, I didn’t think the company could reasonably expect to be a large international player that could compete with the likes of Deezer and Spotify (the two major streaming subscription services outside of the US at the time). I didn’t say it publicly at the time, nor to the team, but I told the founders & CEO that I thought Zvooq’s best bet was to be a strong local player. An obstacle to entry and adoption for companies like Spotify and tech giants which inevitably would launch their own music streaming services (Apple was only just launching iTunes in Russia where we were based, and hadn’t acquired Beats Music yet, which became Apple Music). Personally I felt like that was the most likely route for investors to get a return: being acquired as part of a market entry strategy.
I had nothing to prove in building ‘yet another’ streaming service, and while I had fun figuring out how to serve a market where many people’s only personal computer is the cheapest Chinese Android phone money can buy, I decided to bow out. And that’s where the anecdote ends.
There’s a similarity though:
SoundCloud ended up pursuing two strategies too. It wanted to be Spotify and it wanted to be, err… SoundCloud. It ended up being neither and has now spent 2 years rebuilding.
If I were at SoundCloud, exploring how to get back to that center (for some reason), I’d be looking into the AI landscape. It’s going to accelerate things; faster iteration on musical ideas; MORE MEMES. If you thought getting production software onto everyone’s computers and phones changed music a lot (with SoundCloud at the center!), just wait until artificial intelligence-assisted creation really breaks through.
But I’m not at SoundCloud. And as we hit the 3000 word mark, it may seem I know a lot, but I know nothing. There are opportunities to research, but to say what they mean for SoundCloud requires insight into the company’s business, user research, behaviour on the platform, market analysis, etc.
But if I were to start researching this topic, with what I know now, I think SoundCloud’s best chance for moving back into the center is called AI.
Notes
When I say AI in this piece, I’m talking about AI-assisted music creation (or perhaps even AI-generated music). Music recommendation is another popular avenue for AI and something where machine learning has been more successful in attaining mass adoption and satisfaction by end users.
A small disclaimer on early adopters: the people that make up ‘early adopters’ change. The people who were early adopters in 2009 may not be part of that group now. Some of the people who would be part of that group now were 8 years old back then and probably not part of SoundCloud’s target audience. So when you hear this term used in narratives that span potentially multiple product lifecycles, don’t think of it as a static group of people.
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Building up a following as a DJ in the social web’s early days: a how-to for time travellers.Ā š«
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 theĀ 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,Ā 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:
It’s only fair that the creators of the music get acknowledged – especially since I was sharing their music without permission;
If one of my listeners liked a track, I wanted them to be able to know what it was (there was no such thing asĀ Shazam);
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 onĀ BlogspotĀ 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 calledĀ 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 discoveredĀ 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,Ā 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,Ā 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 onĀ Soundcloud. It sucked for DJs though. I wanted DJs to think about what kind of model would allow forĀ 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-centricĀ 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 toĀ David Noel, who was Soundcloud’s community lead.Ā The email exchanges (and exchanges on Soundcloud’s support community) that I had with him stuck with me.Ā 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 fromĀ Soundcloud. I actually set up an IFTTT script that would automatically download tracks I favourited to myĀ Dropbox. This way I could discover new music while I was working atĀ 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:
I knew for sure that all DJs would be ok with me uploading this;
People would listen to them, because they knew they can find and quickly download new tracks through there;
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 likeĀ 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 aĀ 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,Ā 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.
Last week, at SĆ³nar+D, I finally got to try out TheWaveVR as the founders were there to demo and pitch in the startup competition. The company has built a way for DJs to perform in VR and bring an audience from around the world together. It does this in a very fun and visual way, and this was probably the first time that a VR experience has made me seriously considering buying a VR setup.
Here’s why.
Over the last decade, I’ve spent a lot of time discovering music on Soundcloud and have seen microgenres rise and fall, with some blowing up and changing the sound of pop (e.g. moombahton, and then ‘EDM trap’). Subcultures and music styles used to be clustered to particular cities, but because of online platforms people from around the world can build on each other’s sounds rapidly. I call it ‘Soundcloud culture’, although the phenomenon is not limited to Soundcloud.
Tools like Turntable.fm, and now Plug.dj, have made it possible for people to gather online into chatrooms and play music to each other. These subcultures have embraced these tools to throw small online gatherings, bringing together all the top producers in their styles for virtual listening parties, or cyber raves.
It’s very akin to the subcultures that exist around video games, and particularly MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft. There’s a sense of community and friendship, because people get to share something they don’t get to do irl (‘in real life’). I’ve written about gamers as a music subculture before, but I haven’t pointed out the connection to Soundcloud culture.
Many of these pioneering DJs and producers in microgenres have nowhere to go. They might not live anywhere with clubs, be too young to go to any, or there might simply not be enough critical mass for their sound to take it into the local clubs. So they take it online, where every niche can find an audience (for an example of a microgenre, check out Gorge). As with many gamers, it becomes far easier for these producers to express themselves virtually than in non-digital settings.
Back to TheWaveVR.
TheWaveVR isĀ taking this to the next level, making the entire experience more immersive. What caught my attention is when Aaron Lemke, one of the founders, explained to me that they’re doing a weekly rave at a set time. All of the above instantly clicked into place.
When gamers have free time, they check out Steam, Battle.net, or similar tools, to see if any of their friends or team members are online, so they can play a round or just sign on, chat, and hang out. Social listening platforms do a similar thing, but they’re not nearly as fun or engaging for the audience as games. For the audience, they’re basically a radio station with a chatroom.
This is what TheWaveVR is changing, by giving the audience visual ways to interact with each other and the DJ. And this is what makes me finallyĀ ‘get it’ when it comes to VR: as aĀ media format for social platforms it makes so much sense.
People are skeptical whether virtual reality is ‘the next big thing’ for music. And they’re right: there are many obstacles. But it’s not important. The people pondering such questions are not the target audience for these experiences in the next few years.
Online subcultures are the target audience for VR experiences, and particularly the ones connected to gamer subculture. Gamers are going to be the ones to first embrace this medium, and while the world’s figuring out whether to take it seriously and what to do with it, it’s gamers that will define the soundtrack for the medium: just like they’ve done with YouTube.
