Tag: startups

Online music is about to experience another MySpace moment

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

An emerging void signals new opportunity for innovation in digital music.

The benefit of writing thoughts down is that you get to revisit them. Six years ago, I penned a piece for Hypebot called The Next MySpace. At that time, people in the music business were desperate to for another MySpace to emerge: the site had been a ray of hope, but as it collapsed, online music was scattered across an immature ecosystem of rapidly growing startups like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, Spotify, and many others that were eventually acquired or perished and forgotten. I argued:

The closest we will ever get to a “next MySpace” will be either a music network or a social network that manages to gather, organise and integrate the fragments in spectacular fashion.

Defining the MySpace moment

What I call a MySpace moment is not when everything was going well for MySpace: it’s when decline set in. People started replacing MySpace’s music players, which sucked, with Soundcloud’s beautiful waveform players. People started moving much of their social lives to Facebook (for friends) and Twitter (to connect to strangers). Up until then, the dominant social network had been music-driven — people, especially teenagers, expressed their identities by making long lists of bands they liked.

From the ashes of MySpace, which never managed to recover, rose a new ecosystem of music startups. They’ve managed to make it easy for artists to connect to fans, get paid for online playback, let fans know about new shows, and be able to very specifically target people with ads.

That moment, that void, was a massive opportunity and many companies benefited from it.

That moment is here once again.

The new MySpace moment

There are two main factors contributing to a new emerging void for entrepreneurs to leap in. One has to do with product adoption life cycles, which I’ll explain below. The other has to do with the important position Soundcloud claimed in the online music ecosystem.

Soundcloud came closer to being the ‘next MySpace’ than any startup has. And let’s be blunt: the company is not doing well. After years of legal pressure to tackle the problem of works being uploaded to the service without rights holders’ permission, they were forced to adopt a service model that does not make sense for Soundcloud. The typical $10 a month subscription doesn’t make sense. People are on Soundcloud for the fresh content, the mixtapes, remixes, unreleased stuff: the things that will not be on Spotify for weeks or months (or ever!). Why inject the catalogue with music of long deceased people?

There have been reports that Soundcloud would consider any bids higher than the total amount of money invested into the company to date. That’s not a good sign. The road they’ve been forced into is a dead-end street, and the only end game is a quick acquisition.

I don’t think Soundcloud will die, but it is hard for the company to focus on what they’ve always been good at. Now that they’ve been forced into the Spotify model, those are the types of metrics that are going to matter. Subscriber numbers, conversion, retention. So it may struggle to do as good a job serving the audience they’ve traditionally serviced so well. (small note: I love Soundcloud, and the people there: prove me wrong!)

This leaves a vacuum.

Adding to that vacuum, is the fact that Spotify (and other streaming services) are looking beyond early adopters. To understand the phenomenon, have a look at the below graph:

Product Life Cycle & Innovation Adoption Curve

The top part of the graph details the product life cycle. The bottom part explains the type of audience you address during the steps of that life cycle. As we’ve all noticed from the jubilant press reports on streaming’s expansion, we’re in the growth part of the cycle. This means services like Spotify and Apple Music have to get really good at targeting Early Majority and Late Majority type consumers.

If you’re reading this, you’re in the Innovator or Early Adopter segment. Startups typically start off by targeting those segments. So when Spotify moves on from Early Adopters (their de-emphasizing of user generated playlists is a big hint!), it leaves room for new startups to target and better serve those types of users.

Filling the new void

What happens then? Well, we’re going to get to the next phase of the digital music ecosystem – which is mobile-driven, and flirting with augmented reality, VR, and artificial intelligence. Early adopters are likely to keep paying for their Spotify subscriptions – it’s too big a convenience to give up… So entrepreneurs will have to figure out ways to monetize new behaviours.

Now is a great time to look at very specific problems in music. Don’t try to build the next Spotify or the next Soundcloud. For a while, everyone was trying to build the next MySpace — all those startups are dead now. Instead, take a specific problem, research it, build a solution for someone, test it, try it again for a broader group, and if it works: double down and scale up.

Personally, I’m very curious to see where startup accelerator Techstars Music’s current batch will be five years from now.

Why I’m joining IDAGIO  —  a classical music startup — and moving to Berlin

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Today I’m excited to announce that I’m joining IDAGIO, a streaming service for classical music lovers, as Director of Product. I’m already in the process of relocating to Berlin, where I’ll be joining the team later this month.

In this post, I want to explain why I so strongly believe in this niche focused music service and IDAGIO’s mission. I also want to shed light on the future of MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE as a newsletter, a type of media, and an agency. (tl;dr: the newsletter lives on!)

Two months ago, a friend whom I had worked with in Moscow, at music streaming service Zvooq, forwarded me a vacancy as a Twitter DM. By then, I had developed a kind of mental auto-ignore, because friends kept sending me junior level vacancies in music companies. I was never looking for a ‘job’ — I had a job (but thanks for thinking of me ❤️). However, I trusted that this friend knew me better as a professional, so I opened the link.

I was immediately intrigued. I hadn’t heard of IDAGIO before, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about niche services. At one point, the plan for Zvooq was to not build a typical one-size-fits-all app like all the other music streaming services are doing, but instead it would be to split different types of music-related behaviours into smaller apps. The goal would then become to monopolize those behaviours: like Google has monopolized search behaviour (now called Googling), and Shazam has monopolized Shazaming. Long term, it would allow us to expand that ecosystem of apps beyond streaming content, so we would be able to monetize behaviours with higher margins than behaviours related to music listening.

We ended up building just one, Fonoteka, before we had to switch strategies due to a mix of market reality, licensing terms, and burn rate. That was fine: it was what the business needed, and what Russia as a market needed.

Since then, there have been a number of niche music ideas, like services for indie rock, high quality streaming, etc. And while those are all commendable, I was never quite interested in them, because it just seemed like those services would not have a strong enough strategic competitive advantage in the face of tech giants with bulging coffers. Their offers were often also just marginally better, but getting people to install an app and build a habit around your service, unlearn their old solution, learn to do it your way… that’s a huge thing to ask of people, especially once you need to go beyond the super early adopters.

But niche works on a local level. You can see it with Yandex.Music and Zvooq in Russia, with Anghami in the Middle East, and Gaana in India.

Over the last decade, I’ve lived in Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey, and The Netherlands (where I’m from). Each country has unique ways of interacting with music. Music has a different place in each culture. I think local music services work, because they combine catalogues and local taste with a deep understanding of how their target audience connects to music. It allows them to build something catering exactly to those behaviours. It’s music and behaviour combined.

When I started talking to the IDAGIO team, I soon understood that they too combine these elements. Classical music, in all its shapes and forms, has many peculiarities, which will remain an object of study for me for the next years. The fact that the same work often has a multitude of recordings by different performers already sets it apart. One can map a lot of behaviours around navigation, exploring, and comparison to just this one fact.

An example of one way in which IDAGIO lets people explore various performances of the same work.

Despite being younger and having more modest funding, IDAGIO has already built a product that caters better to classical music fans than the other streaming services do (and also serves lossless streams). Understanding that, I was fast convinced that this was something I seriously needed to consider.

So I got on a plane and met the team. Over the course of three days, we ran a condensed design sprint, isolated a problem we wanted to tackle together, interviewed expert team members, explored options, drew up solutions, and prototyped a demo to test with the target audience. It’s an intense exercise, especially when you’re also being sized up as a potential team member, but the team did such a good job at making me feel welcome and at home (❤️). Through our conversations, lunches, and collaboration, I was impressed with the team’s intelligence, creativity, and general thoughtfulness.

Then I spent some extra time in Berlin — after all, I’d be moving there. Aforementioned friend took me to a medical museum with a room full of glass cabinets containing jars with contents which will give me nightmares for years to come. Besides that, I met a bunch of other friends, music tech professionals, and entrepreneurs, who collectively convinced me of the high caliber of talent and creative inspiration in the city.

Returning home, I made a decision I didn’t expect to make this year, nor in the years to come. A decision to make a radical switch in priorities.

Motivation, for me, comes from the capacity to grow and to do things with meaningful impact. MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE has exposed me to a lot of different people, a lot of different problems, and has allowed me to do what I find interesting, what I’m good at, but also what I grow and learn from. With IDAGIO I can do all of the latter, but with depth, and with a team.

Classical music online has been sidelined a bit. It makes a lot of sense when you place it in a historical perspective: a lot has changed in recent years. The web’s demographic skews older now. You can notice this by counting the number of family members on Facebook. The internet used to be something most adults would just use for work, so if you were building entertainment services, you target the young, early adopter demographic. That’s pop music, rock, electronic, hiphop, etc. Classical was there, sure, but Spotify wasn’t designed around it, iTunes wasn’t, YouTube wasn’t.

Now we’re actually reaching a new phase for music online. The streaming foundation has been built. Streaming is going mainstream. The platforms from the 2007–2009 wave are maturing and looking beyond their original early adopter audiences… So we’re going to see a lot of early adopters that are not properly served anymore. They’re going to migrate, look for new homes. A very important segment there, one that has always been underserved, are classical music fans. And now, this niche audience is sizeable enough to actually build a service around.

Why? Well, the internet has changed since the large last wave of music startups. Mobile is becoming the default way people connect to the web. For adults, this has made the web less of a thing for ‘work’, and has made entertainment more accessible. Connected environments make it easy to send your mobile audio to your home hifi set, or car speakers. The amount of people on the internet has more than doubled.

This makes the niche play so much more viable than just a few years ago. It has to be done with love, care, and a very good understanding of whose problem you’re trying to solve (and what that problem is). IDAGIO has exactly the right brilliant minds in place to pull this off and I’m flattered that in 2 weeks time, I’ll get to spend 2,000 hours a year with them.

What happens to the agency?

I’ll be winding down the agency side of MxTxF. This means I’m not taking on any more clients, but I’m happy to refer you to great people I know. Some longer term projects, that just take a couple of hours per week, I’ll keep on to bring to completion.

What happens to the newsletter?

The newsletter goes on! I get a lot of personal fulfilment out of it. The agency was born out of the newsletter, so who knows what more it will spawn. I’m actually figuring out a way to add audio and video content to the mix. I expect Midem and Sónar+D next June will be pilots for that. Berlin is a great place for music tech, so if anything, I hope the newsletter will only get more interesting as time goes on.

Besides the personal fulfilment, it allows me to be in touch with this wonderful community, to meet fascinating people, and occasionally to help organise a panel and bring some of my favourite minds into the same room at the same time.

If you’d like to support the newsletter, you can help me out on Patreon. You can become a patron of the newsletter — with your support, I can add extra resources to the newsletter, which will let me push the content to the next level (high on the list: a decent camera).

Elgar making an early recording of the work in 1920. Those pipes are acoustic recording horns, which were piped to a diaphragm which would vibrate a cutting stylus — directly turning sound waves into a material recording.

I leave you with Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85, which I discovered as a student, listening to the brilliant Szamár Madár by Venetian Snares in which it is sampled.

▶️ Cello Concerto in E Minor, Op. 85

You can listen to the work, in full, on IDAGIO.

I’d love to hear about your favourite works and recordings. Feel free to email me on bg@idagio.com, with a link, and tell me what I should listen for.

Quick guide to the relaunched Anchor: reinventing the radio format

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

You may remember Anchor: it started as a sound-based social network where users could start discussions that others could chime in on. A kind of long-form Twitter, but with voice instead of text. I remember getting involved with some discussions started by Bruce Houghton, from Hypebot, but people’s interest soon waned and many of us moved on.

So the startup went back to the drawing board and re-envisioned its service, relaunching with a complete overhaul last week. It now allows users to include music in their audio stories and aims to “completely reinvent the radio format by making it easy for anyone to easily broadcast high quality audio from your phone, to wherever audio is heard.”

Screenshots of the relaunched Anchor 2.0

My first impressions

I paused writing in order to do my first show on Anchor (listen now) in order to get more familiar with the service. You can check it out for my first impressions on the call-ins feature, which allows station hosts to let other people get some airtime, the ephemerality, as well as some thoughts about Anchor as a place for music curation.


Expires in 24 hours, so you may be hearing something else by now.

After playing around with the app a bit more, checking out some of the content, including Cherie Hu’s, I’ve come to revisit my first impressions.

Anchor is like Instagram for audio

Instagram lets people share moments from their lives. It’s used by professionals and amateurs. Some content is more social and some is not. And with the introduction of Instagram Stories, a lot of the content has become ephemeral. That’s exactly what Anchor is, or could be, but for audio content.

While I was initially skeptical of Anchor’s ephemerality, it may be an upside: it reduces the hurdle for sharing content and stimulates creators to deliver content in a bite-size format. People can use it to record their day and share their experiences, like music tech blogger Cherie Hu is doing at SXSW, while others use it as an extension of their professional podcasts or YouTube channels.

When someone calls in, it can be added to the station, after which it lives for another 24 hours. The host needs to take into account that whatever the caller might be responding to is not available anymore by the time their audience checks it, but that can be easily mitigated by adding a short “So yesterday I asked how people feel about fainting goats, and here’s what some of you had to say!”

As people add new audio, it’s added to their stories similar to what Snapchat (or Instagram) do in their apps.

The Instagram analogy extends:

  • A station can be seen as a profile
  • Pressing favorite is akin to following
  • Calling-in is like tweeting & featuring a call-in is like retweeting

It seems Anchor may be able to deliver upon Soundcloud-founder Alexander Ljung’s vision of the web becoming a more audible medium, with sound possibly becoming bigger than video:

“Sound is one of the only mediums that can be consumed completely while multitasking, so it has the potential to do so much more on the web than it’s already doing.”

So forget the radio lingo: Anchor is still a sound-based social network and it’s pretty awesome.

Experiment with it. Develop a format. Then ping me on Twitter, so I can check it out.

11 startups innovating the future of music

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Techstars Music just announced their first batch. A quick look at the selected startups.

It feels like we’re seeing a new wave of music startups. A lot of the excitement that marked the time around 2007–2010 is back in the air, and it’s great to see an acclaimed startup accelerator like Techstars dedicating a program to music.

As platforms from that age, like Spotify and Soundcloud, are reaching maturity and estranging early adopters, a new generation of music startups is starting to emerge. Techstars Music just announced their first batch of music startups, so I wanted to highlight each of them — as what these startups do may well end up profoundly shaping the business of music in years to come.

Alphabetically:

Amper — ampermusic.com

A tool to create AI-composed music for videos and other professional content. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to test out the product yet, and their only demo video doesn’t reveal much. It seems like they’re working on something similar to Jukedeck, but possibly in a way where users have a higher degree of influence on the final outcome.

AI-composed music is an important trend for years to come and Amper‘s working with an impressive team which includes accomplished Hollywood sound designers and composers.

Hurdl — hurdl.com

LED wearables to enable interactive audience experiences at live events. They let artists light up entire audiences, or just one fan. Their pitch deck suggests lighting up people based on gender, Spotify top fans, or sports team preference. It also allows for direct messaging to fans during or after shows.

Hurdl Ecosystem

JAAK — jaak.io

I first heard about JAAK when I met the founders at Music Tech Fest’s blockchain roundtable in Berlin last year. They’re using blockchain technology to connect music, metadata, and rights information. They’ve been working on pilots with Viacom, PRS for Music, and PPL. One of their founders is a core developer for Ethereum and is behind Swarm, a distributed storage platform, creating a kind of peer-to-peer web, instead of server-centric.

Pacemaker — pacemaker.net

I’ve actually urged people to use this app in a recent piece about being an early adopter. It uses smart algorithms to turn your Spotify playlists into DJ mixes. You can then edit transitions and play around with effects. It also has a social component: you can comment on and like other people’s mixes in the app.

There’s a DJ by the name of bas on Pacemaker who has some particularly awesome mixes, so be sure to follow him 😉

Pacemaker apps

With Techstars’ support, I hope they figure out how to reach that exponential growth. I think it’s a really good time to start using the app and build a profile for yourself, so you can benefit optimally when they reach that growth.

(Personal wishlist: more editing controls on transitions on mobile, particularly exact timing, rather than snapping to markers 😇)

Interactivity and adaptivity of music is an important trend. I see Pacemaker as one of the first companies who has a great chance of being one of the first leaders in this domain.

Pippa — pippa.io

The pitch on Pippa’s homepage differs a bit from what I’ve read elsewhere, so I assume they’re pivoting. They currently present themselves as a platform which helps to distribute your podcasts and analyze data based upon that. What I’ve read elsewhere sounds very promising:

“Pippa makes podcasting simpler, smarter, and more profitable by enabling targeted ads to be delivered dynamically to listeners. Pippa technology can also be used to remove ads from podcasts, enabling future subscription revenue products.”

PopGun — wearepopgun.com

Another startup specializing in AI-composed music. PopGun uses deep learning to create original pop music. One of its founders is well-known in music tech circles, having previously founded We Are Hunted, which sold to Twitter and eventually became Twitter Music.

Have been having some great conversations about Creative AI recently. Particularly discussing the human element: some argue computers will not be capable of creativity, but in the way we perceive the world around us, we as humans will use our creativity anyway… I believe that opens up the possibility for a future in which AI-created art can become mainstream.

Robin — tryrobin.co

The pitch:

“Robin is a personal concierge for concerts and live events. Robin reserves and secures tickets on behalf of fans while providing real-time demand data to artists and event organizers.”

It’s an interesting proposition in times of secondary ticketing… I’m concerned they may be met with some skepticism, but the idea of having fans personally connect to a tool like this and then securing tickets before scalpers can get to them seems like a good addition to the ticketing landscape.

They’re currently available in the US and Canada, and will be expanding to the UK early 2017.

Shimmur — shimmur.com

This may be the app I’m most excited about in this batch. Shimmur is a social network for fans and ‘influencers’ to connect. It’s currently comprised of a lot of Musical.ly stars and their fans, so the demographic is very young.

Instead of having the artist communicating to fans, Shimmur turns it around. Tribes of fans can create comment to which the influencers react. Very appealing and the social competition that may emerge in vying for influencers’ attention may create interesting business models.

Shimmur
Concepts popularized by Reddit AMAs can be found in Shimmur

There are also some interesting concepts that could be introduced from gaming, like vanity items, rival goods, and quests.

Hope to see someone finally get this right.

Superpowered — superpowered.com

A mobile audio engine that provides low-latency audio for games, VR, and interactive audio apps. It’s apparently already used by DJ app Crossfader, Uber, and a number of games and other apps, together totalling at hundreds of millions of app installs.

Syncspot — syncspot.net

Syncspot uses an “AI assistant to create and fulfil free-gift media rewards for in-store promotions”. Their homepage lists a campaign that reminds me of Landmrk: users get a call to action to go to a certain location on the map (like a store) to receive a reward. Think Pokémon Go.

Weav — weav.io

This startup has been on my radar for a long time. It lets creators make adaptive music that recomposes itself in real-time, based on whatever the user is doing. I’m a firm believer in adaptive music that adapts to the user’s context and believe the way people currently use music to augment their moods shows the opportunity for adaptive audio.

They’ve built a tool for musicians to create this type of music, as well as an SDK for developers, so they can add a player to their apps which is capable of playing this type of media.

Weav

Fun fact: Weav is co-founded by one of the creators of Google Maps.

Best of luck to Techstars & all the startups.

The benefits of being an early adopter

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Exploring the value of being a first mover, connecting with founders and building a profile in a nascent community.

While reading through a Medium post a couple of months ago, I stumbled upon an email subscription form near the bottom of the article. I’m always thinking of how I can better convert readers to my newsletter, so it immediately caught my interest. Why? Because I had never seen an embedded form on Medium.

Up until then, I had been using a service called Rabbut, which embedded an image that looked like a form and when clicked, would open a new page with the actual form. The new service looked much better. I immediately signed up.

It’s called Upscribe and after signing up, I went to see how I could export collected email addresses. This service, like Rabbut, was geared at the bigger email newsletter services, like Mailchimp, but I’m an early adopter of a service called Revue. So I chose ‘Other’. I got an email from the founder:

So I told him about Revue and after a week he wrote me back, telling me he had added the integration. Super awesome.

Being an early adopter makes you a VIP

Early adopters are often services’ most important users. This may mean that you can interact directly with the service’s founders or chief product person.

Revue founder Martijn de Kuijper mentions that all the time they put into talking to their users is essential for feedback and validation of the product. A feature he says came directly out of user feedback is their recently launched Themes. “We got a lot of requests for HTML templates and customization options, so we developed a new feature that lets people add personality to their digests in an easy-to-customize theme.” 

Other examples of how the Revue team connects with their community are a Slack channel, where they ask people for occasional feedback, but also keep the community connected, and an open roadmap on Trello, where users can see what features to expect and can give input on features through comments.

This means that as an active early adopter, you can have a lot of sway in the product direction of a tool and have it tailored to your needs, with a bit of luck.

Wil Benton, who founded Chew, a livestreaming platform for DJs and other personalities in music, feels that the “first 100/500/1000 users are the most important users you’ll ever have.” In part because you can’t think about everything yourself and users help you figure out things you missed.

He adds:

“Early adopters are critical to you going from janky MVP that only you would ever use to a product a completely random person on the opposite side of the world could (and would want to) use.”

Being an early adopter makes it easy to stand out

There are benefits beyond being an important voice for founders. If you’re active in a young community, it’s easy to build a profile for yourself.

Sales can be interchanged with users, or other metrics you’re tracking.

Be active, engage with others, and if what you’re doing on the platform is really good, you’ll build a following. This will get you featured. The power of being featured is that startups usually aim for something named hockeystick growth.

If you’re featured when the growth suddenly starts accelerating, you benefit from the network effect, because new users often end up following existing accounts, since they won’t have any friends on the platform yet.

Sebastien Lintz, who does digital for Hardwell, manages Revealed Recordings and Sorted Management, recently explained on a panel at Play & Produce in Ghent, that he had had a lot of success by simply being the first with quality content and a good strategy for new platforms, mentioning Musical.ly and Live.ly.

I’ve had similar experiences with Revue, where my newsletter was featured, and if I had more time, I’d love to build a profile on DJ / remix apps like Pacemaker and 8Stem.

Check them out.

Your chance to be an early adopter

I really recommend spending about half an hour a week on Product Hunt. It’s a place where people post new products and services, so you’re among the first to hear about them. If you want to be a super early adopter, you could even sign up to Betalist, where you can get early access to beta versions of products when founders need people to test their products.

And a special opportunity:

I’m working with a startup that’s building a tool to easily message large groups of fans on Facebook Messenger. The idea is simple: you onboard your fans, ask them for a few things like location and email address (just in case Facebook changes algorithms again), and then you can push personally relevant updates to fans about new releases or shows.

I’m going to be writing a lot more about this topic once we’ve got everything set up for you to give it a go, but if you’d like to get on the list and be among the first users: use this link.

Monetizing virtual face time with fans

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

How the convergence of 2 trends opens up new business model opportunities for artists.

When I landed in Russia to get involved with music streaming service Zvooq, my goal was to look beyond streaming. The streaming layer would be the layer that brings everything together: fans, artists, and data. We started envisioning a layer on top of that, which we never fully got to roll out, in big part due to the challenges of the streaming business.

It was probably too early.

For the last decade, a lot of people have been envisioning ambitious direct-to-fan business models. The problem was that many of these were only viable for niche artists with early adopter audiences, but as technology develops, this is less so the case today.

Let’s have look at a few breakthrough trends in the last year:

  • Messaging apps are rapidly replacing social networks as the primary way for people to socialize online;
  • Better data plans & faster internet speeds have led to an increase in live streams, further enabled by product choices by Facebook & YouTube.

Messaging apps overtaking social networks is a trend that’s been underway for years now. It’s why Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for a whopping $19 billion. While 2.5 billion people had a messaging app installed earlier this year, that’s expected to rise to 3.6 billion in coming years. In part, this is driven by people coming online and messaging apps being relatively light weight in terms of data use.

In more developed markets, the trend for messaging apps is beyond text. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack have all recently enabled video calling. Other apps, like Instagram, Snapchat, Live.ly, and Tribe are finding new ways to give shape to mobile video experiences, from broadcasting short video stories, to live streaming to friends, to video group chats.

For artists that stay on top of trends, the potential for immediacy and intimacy with their fanbase is expanding.

Messaging apps make it easier to ping fans to get them involved in something, right away. And going live is one of the most engaging ways to do so.

Justin Kan, who founded Justin.tv which later became video game streaming platform Twitch (sold to Amazon for just under $1 billion), launched a new app recently which I think deserves the attention of the music business.

Whale is a Q&A app which lets people pose questions to ‘influencers’. To have your question answered, you have to pay a fee which is supposed to help your question “rise above the noise of social media”. And Whale is not the only app with this proposition.

Yam is another Q&A app which places more emphasis on personalities, who can answer fans’ questions through video, but also self-publish answers to questions they think people may be curious about.

Watching a reply to a question on Yam costs 5 cents, which is evenly split between the person who asked and the person who answered. It’s a good scheme to get people to come together to create content and for the person answering the questions to prioritize questions they think will lead to the most engagement.

What both of these apps do is that they monetize one of the truly scarce things in the digital age.

Any type of digital media is easily made abundant, but attention can only be spent once.

These trends enable creating an effective system for fans to compete for artists’ attention. I strongly believe this is where the most interesting business opportunities lie in the music business at the level of the artist, but also for those looking to create innovative new tools.

  1. Make great music.
  2. Grow your fan base.
  3. Monetize your most limited resource.

This can take so many shapes or forms:

  • Simply knowing that your idol saw your drawing or letter;
  • Having your demo reviewed by an artist you look up to;
  • Getting a special video greeting;
  • Learning more about an artist through a Q&A;
  • Being able to tell an artist about a local fan community & “come to our city!”;
  • Having the top rank as a fan & receiving a perk for that.

Each of these can be a product on their own and all of these products will likely look like messaging apps, video apps, or a mix.

A lot of fan engagement platforms failed, because they were looking for money in a niche behaviour that was difficult to exploit. People had to be taught new behaviours and new interfaces, which is hard when everyone’s competing for your attention.

Now this is becoming easier, because on mobile it can be as simple as a tap on the screen. Tuning into a live stream can be as simple as opening a push notification. Asking a question to an artist can be as simple as messaging a friend.

So, the question for the platforms early to the party is whether they’ll be able to adjust to the current (social) media landscape, or whether they let sunk cost fallacy entrench them in a vision based on how things used to be.

There’s tremendous value in big platforms figuring out new ways for artists and fans to exchange value. They already have the data and the fan connections. Imagine if streaming services were to build a new engagement layer on top of what already exists.

Until then, artists will have to stay lean and use specific tools that do one thing really well. Keep Product Hunt bookmarked.