With all the choices you can make for engaging people through their mobile phones, apps should be considered a last resort. Why?
Asking people to install an app means friction.
They want to do something;
They see the download app page;
Tap and go to the App Store page;
Wait for the app to install;
Have to login again.
At every step along the way you can lose people. Scratch that. At every step along the way you will lose people. Why?
The reason I hear most often is: so that you have your app on their phone and people can return easily. But do they?
Most people are not like you. Many of the people who read this will be tech early adopters, so itâs likely you use many apps and install them easily. But the typical US smartphone owner downloads ZERO apps per month (other estimates put it at 1.5 per month).
Apps are expensive to develop and maintain, difficult to make quick adjustments due to submission review processes, and not as engaging as other options.
So what other options do you have?
If you think you can get people to install your app, it means you believe you already have their attention. Great.
So you have two things to worry about:
Can the core functionality be achieved through mobile web?
If yes, then the next question is: how do I keep people coming back?
And if your core functionality is âI want to be able to send push notificationsâ then there may still be better ways. In music, examples of core functionality that may be hard to work around are:
Music listening in background, eg. when the phone is in the pocket and youâre doing other stuff.
Functionality thatâs available when the user is offline.
But I digress, because often those functions may be ânice to havesâ and may not be essential. Imagine if a venue has a site where you can check upcoming gigs and also listen to some music⌠Now a marketing manager there may say: âwe absolutely need people to be able to listen to music in the background.â But you can achieve this more easily by offering a Spotify playlist.
Back to push notifications. Keep your eye on messaging apps, because theyâre steadily becoming the new social networks and theyâre notification-based.
In order to hold onto peopleâs attention, you may not need push notifications. You need habit. This requires consistency from your side and design thinking on how to construct a habit forming product that people donât forget about.
You may also use reminders. You could collect email addresses or even phone numbers.
Artistsâ newsletters have a 20â25% open rate. 90% of SMS messages are read within the first 3 minutes of receiving. Since starting MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE, Iâve had a handful of unsubscriptions, but thatâs nothing compared to the number of uninstalls I would have had.
Still think building an app is a good idea?
Write down who your audience is. How do they use the web. Be realistic and donât project your own tendencies. Call a bunch of your users if you have to.
Write down exactly what you want people to be able to do. Frame it as a user story: âI can find information about my favourite bandâs upcoming gigs in my townâ.
Rank your user stories. Then mark the ones that are essential.
Small secret: the ones that you didnât mark as essential, youâll probably never build.
Think of ways in which you can achieve the same end results, without building an app that users need to install. (I can help you with that)
Now look at whether introducing the friction of an app is actually the best way to do it. Carefully count the number of steps required for the user to complete their user story.
Choose whatever has the least friction and still accomplishes your goal.
The 7 words that make up the title, a quote from Steve Martin, deserve to be an article of their own, on their own. It has come to be one of my favourite quotes for âmaking itâ in the music business.
I attend a lot of music business events and sometimes give lectures at schools, and I end up meeting a lot of artists who are asking the wrong questions. Questions like:
âHow can I get this signed to a label?â
âHow do I find a good booking agent?â
âHow do I get people to buy my music?â
The successful artists I know obsess over one question alone:
âHow do I make this better?â
They invite feedback and listen with attention when getting it. Even when that feedback is not coming from a label representative, but an industry outsider, because they realize that in the end most of their fans will be industry outsiders.
So if youâre still looking for a new yearâs resolution, then make it this:
I will focus on improving myself and the art I create.Â
I will make it so good they canât ignore me.Â
I will be critical of myself and invite feedback so I may learn.Â
I will find people who can teach me how to be better, either by direct feedback or by being positive role models.
Because once you get really good, people will find you. People will share your music. People will want to collaborate with you. Youâll get your opportunities. Youâll be able to surround yourself with skilled people who can worry about those other questions.
Focus on yourself, because thatâs where change is easiest to make.
Laziness is good. It teaches us to get results with the least effort possible. If you avoid procrastinative behaviour, laziness can even be a great recipe for success, because youâll be a master at shortcuts and finding the most effective ways to get things done.
I, like everyone, can be pretty lazy at times and it can take a lot of motivation to muster up the motivation for some activities. Over the years, Iâve learned that the strongest motivators for me are either:
Instant gratification, eg. the dopamine triggers created by most time wasting activities and procrastination;
Having a purpose beyond what Iâm doing.
This year I set up the MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE newsletter as a way to âforceâ myself to write something every week. Prior to that, I had âcreatedâ (written) articles mostly sporadically, but now I had a weekly deadline. And I had a vision: I knew that MxTxF was something I wanted to grow, to build, and hold to a high standard. All creation happened within that context.
Creation for the sake of creation is great.
But if youâre striving to achieve something, then the path of random creations is one where youâll depend on luck and pure chance.
So whether you make music, work at a label, or arenât doing anything creative – ask yourself: what could I be building?
Start from doing what youâre already doing.
Why are you doing it?
What are you learning from it?
Does it all fit together?
Does your work add up?
If the answer to the last question is no, thatâs fine. If you make coffee for customers every day, then every day will look more or less the same, and every morning you hit the reset button and do it again. Same day, repeating, with the same results. Whether you fail or succeed in that case depends on consistent performance and random external factors.
The lazy personâs nightmare.
If that sounds like you, think about what you could do that adds up. Then wrap it in purpose.
Back to the coffee example. Letâs say your wrapping in purpose is that you want to become the best coffee place in your town. Now you have a context to fill. Youâll need to talk to your boss and make a plan, you need to figure out what makes a place great, talk to your customers, etc. All of this you can do while doing what youâre already doing.
The lazy personâs dream.
Now letâs look at music.
Stop expecting to get a lucky break. The word luck implies unlikeliness and when you work hard and never get lucky, it can become intensely demotivating.
Create to build.
Youâre building a following.
Youâre building a fanbase.
Youâre building your artist brand.
Every time you release music, itâs a step in building those things.
In that context, you can evaluate your steps.
For instance, 2 times this year, the open rate of my newsletters dropped below 30%. Terrible, because I strive to keep it between 40-50% (higher would be nice, too). In the context of building something, a low open rate is terrible: if you canât win peopleâs attention consistently, then youâll lose it eventually.
So I looked at what I did.
In one case, it was just the subject line that was a bit too pushy and may have caused people to auto-ignore the email, thinking itâs yet another spammy newsletter.
The other case was more difficult, but my hypothesis was that the edition the week before was a bit weaker than usual, so people didnât open it the week after. I didnât have a good way to know this for sure, but it gave me a new way to think about what Iâm building.
What that means is that by placing my creations in the context of something Iâm building, it forced me to zoom out and think more carefully about the greater picture.
You may assume people are not watching your new video, because you posted it on your Facebook at the wrong time of the day, but maybe itâs because your last video sucked. If youâre just pushing out creations without thinking about the greater context youâre building, youâll miss that information.
The value in creating consistently and feeding it into something you can grow is so much greater than the sum of parts. So donât just create; build.
Best of all, itâs a great way to justify laziness. Just donât procrastinate.
Finding your way to success can be confusing as an artist. Hereâs what you should be focusing on.
At the Play & Produce conference in Ghent, Belgium, I joined a panel about digital revenue streams with Jef Martens (Basto / LazyJay), and Sebastien Lintz who does digital for Hardwell, artist management at Sorted, and is label manager at Revealed Recordings.
We discussed a lot of topics, some of which are covered in this article, but a lot of questions were left unanswered when we ran out of time.
So, for all those musicians that want to turn their craft into their livelihood, I wanted to create a basic resource to be able to refer to. This article goes over:
Making good music.
Getting your music in front of the right audiences.
Networking (!).
Retaining your fans & building community.
Monetization.
Youâll learn some new tricks to get better at what youâre doing, but more importantly: the below teaches you to develop your own strategy. Dive in!
Step zero: make really good music.
Before anything else, you need to make great music. This is part skill, part taste, and part understanding of trends. The best music is timeless, but before it becomes timeless, great music has to be timely.
As your skills develop, so will your ability to develop a consistent sound thatâs unique to you. This is important, because itâs unlikely youâll ever be âthe bestââââsimple mathematics. However, if you make a sound that stands out, you donât need to be the best, you just have to make something remarkable.
Seems like an obvious step, but it often needs repeating. If youâre feeling lost or overwhelmed, know that the most important thing to work on is to develop your music and your skills. Everything develops from there.
Step one: getting your music heard.
Make a lot of music and release a lot of music. Make sure itâs easy to find, to stumble upon, to access, and to share.
There are a variety of tools that help you distribute your music to a lot of different places, like Labelgrid, or distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore. They help you to be everywhere your (future) fans might be.
In order to be discovered, make sure to put time into the artwork and accompanying description for your music. The description provides keywords for people to find your music, so donât hold back on mentioning the names of bands that influence you, genres, etc.
Make it easy to share your music. Great music is inherently viral. Since YouTube is the most universal music player, you must have your music on there. Make sure the title has all the relevant information plus an indication about the type of music, to guarantee more clicks when people share it.
Regarding the artwork, you should understand that we live in the age of feeds. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram encourage us to scroll endlessly, because it means weâll spend more time on their platforms.
If your sound is good, people will share it (hence step zero).
From there, you need to find your audience.
(pro tip: get your music everywhere, but figure out what channels work best for you and double down on them. Doing a little bit of everything is a good way to not get traction anywhere. Make sure you actually enjoy using the channels you focus on, because if itâs not fun for you, youâre going to get exhausted and inconsistent eventually.)
Step one point five: finding your audience.
If you understand your musicâs audience and where they hang out, or who else they listen to, you can start doing specific things to get your music into their ears, such as:
Remix other artists in your genre. Donât ask for permission, but communicate to them once your remix is done. After all: their repost helps you reach their audience and chances are theyâll have a bigger audience than you. Play nice. And donât put your remix on Spotify or other monetized places without permission. Itâs less about the legal issues, and more that itâs just bad for human relations.
Connect with communities in your genre. On Reddit you can find loads of communities where producers are helping others to learn to master their art. You can also connect to communities around certain genres or prominent labels inside a genre. If Redditâs not your thing, you can find groups like these on Facebook too.
Pitch your tracks to channels your audience follows. These may be blogs, YouTube channels, or internet radio stations. You can be more creative also: if thereâs a popular video game streamer on Twitch that listens to a lot of music like yours, you could reach out to them, offer to make a personal theme song for them in exchange for a certain amount of airtime on their stream. Be creative.
The value of being (one of) the first. On our panel, Sebastien Lintz pointed out that being one of the first people on a platform can have big advantages. So keep your eye on new apps that pop up, get on there, try them out, see what happens. This is how you secure a first-mover advantage for a specific segment. Not convinced? Just look at what Vine and Musical.ly have enabled.
Step two: develop strong relations with people.
Success in music is usually a combination of music skills and people skills. When you see an overnight success, what you donât see is the many years of preparation involved in that.
An artist may be young, but the team around them will know exactly who to talk to, who to ask for favours, the right people to work with, etc.
So, donât be shy. Make sure youâre frequently in the same room as people who can help you. If you have a chance to pitch your music and get feedback, then go do it, even if you think youâre not ready. The feedback youâll get will be valuable, but itâs also a good chance to get into the mind of label A&Rs, learn how they think, and youâll know who they are if you run into them again.
These things happen in live settings, but sometimes people like Sebastien call for artists to submit music & have it publicly reviewed.
Speak to the DJs, promoters, organisers, etc. at local shows.
Go to conferences and set aside your shyness. Go chat with people, find out what theyâre doing, and if thereâs a panelist you find interesting, grab them for a chat. Theyâre there to speak to people and theyâre interested in meeting you.
Basically: talk to people, and if itâs uncomfortable, then take a friend with you whoâs good with that. The music business is a network business, so understand that youâre building relations that will last your entire career. Start early.
Step three: retaining your fans.
With the previous steps, you should have a way to get your music heard by people. Attention is fickleâââso the big question here is not how to get people to listen to your music, but how do you get people to listen to your music again? And again, and again, and again.
You need to feed them to places where you can reach them again. Itâs incredibly valuable, so if youâre annoyed with vloggers telling people to subscribe in every video: place yourself in their shoes. And do that!
Find the best ways to reach people. Facebook posts, once you scale your fanbase, may only have a 5% reach. Tweets are similar. Itâs one of the reasons why I started a newsletter to talk about the future of music. For the last year, the open rate has been close to 50%. The typical artist newsletter has a 20â25% open rate.
Ads & remarketing. Sometimes itâs worth it to pay for ads. For instance, if you create a unified link for your release with a tool like Linkfire, you can integrate Google Analytics & AdSense. This way, youâll get some data about the people that checked out your release and youâll be able to target them on sites they visit, or when they Google something⌠Got a show in a town with a lot of fans? Set an ad that reveals your show the next time they Google for something fun to do on the weekend.
The basic jest of social profiles is this: be consistent, stay relevant, and frequent. Donât abuse peopleâs permission to appear in their feeds or inbox, because theyâll unsubscribe or learn to ignore you. Good luck winning their attention back then.
Step three point five: building your fan community.
I love using the example of the fanbase as a house party. In my many years of awkward beers with strangers, Iâve learned there are roughly two types of house parties:
The type where you get let in, stand around a room with strangers, where nobodyâs really entertained and just waiting for the host to come chat with them, and thinking of an excuse to bail ASAP. đŠ
The type where the host lets you in, immediately introduces you to people you should talk to, suggesting topics you can discuss, and then at some point in the night you realize you havenât even seen the host in an hour, because youâve been having such a good time with their friends. đĽ
Building a community is a great way to get your fans to keep their attention on you, even after you leave the room. Not only that, but you now have the power to get back into the room, shut everyone up, and ask people to amplify what you have to say:
âHaving a great time? Letâs get some more people in here! Text your friends. BYOB.â
Facebook Groups are an excellent way to do this. It also lets you mix fans that youâve known for a long time (eg. friends), with first generation fans, and later fans.
Help keep the community active. Get people to talk about music, art, whatever you find interesting and is somehow a relevant connector. The music shared in the group doesnât have to be just your music.
Step four: âshut up and take my moneyâ
Having a connected fanbase allows you to intimately understand who the people that listen to your music are, what they care about, how their minds work, what they find cool, etc.
This allows you to better package the experiences you provide to them.
In music, the money is in the package. Whether itâs the live show, the download, merch or something else.. This means you can make the music you believe in, while also developing ways to make money off of it.
I usually hold up Yellow Claw as an example of a group that understands their fans really well and have developed multiple business models based on that understanding.
Basically, what it comes down to is this:
Great music shouldnât have to be charity, so donât put yourself in the position of having to beg fans to âplease buy my album.â
Instead, think the other way around: what can I make for my fans that will make them thank me for giving them the opportunity to spend money on me?
No need to employ dark voodoo techniques. đš Itâs just a matter of getting into the right frame of mind. Letâs call it the Kickstarter State of Mind.
Successful Kickstarters are a combination of:
A great product or idea (a metaphor for your music).
A charismatic call to action (a metaphor for your artist persona and brand).
Exciting rewards for contributing money.
Go spend some time on Kickstarter and see how price tiers work. Usually they cater to different types of audiences, or fans with differing levels of commitment. But they all have this in common:
People are super excited to be able to spend their money. Not for youâââthatâs just a nice bonus. But for themselves.
Recap
Step zero: make really great music. Keep working on your skills. This is by far the most important part. Itâs the fuel for everything else. If nothing seems to be working, it may just be because your music is not good enough, or simply doesnât stand out. Sorry.
Step one: getting your music heard. Get your music everywhere, take into account what your music looks like when people share, and double down on the channels that work best for you.
Step one point five: finding your audience. Use other peopleâs audience (OPA) by remixing, pitching curators, connecting to communities, and securing a first-mover advantage.
Step two: developing strong industry relations. Make no mistake: the music business is a business of human connections. Start early. Be nice & professional.
Step three: retaining your fans. Keep your fansâ attention by connecting them to your socials and finding other clever ways to reach them again.
Step three point five: building your fan community. Fans help keep each othersâ attention on you and can help amplify your message. Be the host of the most fun house party theyâve ever attended.
Step four: âshut up and take my moneyâ. Besides conventional revenue streams, you should be creating things that are so exciting for fans that theyâll thank you for the opportunity to spend their money.
Is it that simple?
Well, yes.
The hard part is that you need to put in a lot of hours. You have to be smart and relentless. Practice grit. You have to persevere, but also know when to cut your losses.
As long as youâre flying solo, take a look at job descriptions at labels or management agencies to understand how to strategically release music and build towards milestones.
Once youâre ready to build your team:
Work with people that inspire you. Donât work with assholes.
And for fuckâs sake, keep your focus on your music.
Your music always comes first.
Keeping a close eye on the music space, I encounter a lot of startups and fledgling products. Unfortunately, a lot of them are misguided, for a variety of reasons, most of which can be prevented. Often, these early mistakes result in painful pivots or founding teams giving up, which is a real shame, as we need more applied innovation in the music business.
Here are the questions I wish music startup founders would ask themselves early on.
Does this work as a mainstream behaviour?
The biggest mistake music startup founders make is they assume that everyone loves music the way they do. Most people simply donât care that much about music. They like it, they love it, but in a very different way from whoeverâs likely to read thisâââlet alone found a music startup.
You need to be very critical of your idea. Itâs ok if it doesnât work for mainstream consumers, but then adjust expectations and target your product accordingly.
Does this work as a mainstream price point?
So letâs say you figure out you have the perfect lean-back experience for music listeners. Youâre creating something thatâs not demanding of its users and doesnât require big changes in existing behaviours. In other words: youâre ready to cater to a mainstream audience.
What about the price point? Price points are difficult to determine and people are notoriously bad at predicting what price theyâre willing to pay for something. If youâre going for a mainstream audience, your safest bet is pricing for impulse purchase decisions.
How does this work rights-wise in the long term?
You canât live on the APIs of YouTube, Soundcloud or Spotify forever. At some point, you need to build your own business. Do you understand the costs involved of licensing? Will content disappear from the service?
Launching light weight is fineâââif youâre looking to test an idea, using an API can be a great choice, but you need to understand your long term strategy, too, and plan for the next steps.
What are the ways in which people already solve this problem?
Changing an existing behaviour is hard work and takes commitment. Itâs risky to assume people will immediately fall in love with your product, drop everything, and never look back. Problems I see entrepreneurs frequently try to tackle are: staying up to date with your favourite artists, better ways to find new music, or giving people all their music in one place.
Are these problems consumers are already aware of? We all have our workarounds, so it may not seem urgent to your target users. Understand exactly how people are currently solving the problem, so that your product fits into a certain behavior and augments it, so that it becomes better.
Radically changing a behaviour is painful for users.
Do I really need to do a consumer-facing startup?
Sometimes entrepreneurs do music startups, because they have a vision for the music business and they want to break into it. Doing consumer facing startups is often costly and makes it trickier to gauge interest and test the market. If your goal is to create a better music landscape, perhaps you could consider solving problems within the music business.
After all, many of the imperfections that consumers have to deal with have a lot to do with problems in the music business internally.
With the rise of live streaming and new media models, donations deserve another consideration.
Napster, the early file sharing service, not only introduced many to piracy. The platform also exposed two competing world views. One believed that information should be free and the other believed in combating such ideas. They were both wrong.
As a teenager, and still today, my personal sympathy went out to those who saw a better world and wanted to accomplish that by facing down large corporations. Their envisioned world was never satisfactory enough for me, though. It seemed oversimplified. One of the most common tropes youâd hear would be:
âArtists should just release their work for free and let people donate. Iâd love to be able to donate to my favourite artists.â
An example of a common donation request.
At that time, there were only about half a billion connected devices. Most of the worldâs population wasnât online yet. Those that were, and thought this way, were a minority projecting their own behaviour onto others. Itâs common: most music startup founders do the same thingâââoverestimating how much people care about music. Simply put: the donation model could not scale.
The model didnât take into consideration the complexity of the way music is made. Letâs say artists were able to make a living off of donationsâââthis benefits the most visible artists; the singers, but not the songwriters. How should money from donations then be distributed so that itâs fair? Does the intention behind the donation matter? Questions like these are the reason why thereâs so much legislation around creative work.
An elemental overview of merely the royalty distribution part of the music business. Via Bemuso.
Time passed and two trends have developed. Firstly, there has been an explosion of artists who do everything by themselves. Households in many countries now no longer have just 1 family PC, and music production software is easy to attain. This has led to a rise of âbedroom producersâ, many of which are world famous and make a good living off of music.
The second trend is that the internet has become more real-time. Ten years ago you wouldnât consider sharing memories online that would only be visible for 24 hours. Now, two of the worldâs most popular apps, Instagram and Snapchat, not only encourage, but thrive because of that behaviour.
Fast wireless connections and increasingly powerful devices have enabled livestreaming. Anyone whoâs ever âgone liveâ on Facebook or Periscope knows that it changes the creative process of making a video. Live video streams are not just a new way to broadcast, theyâre a creative format.
Trends mix and influence each other. If you want to understand where things are going, you have to understand how trends converge and diverge. In this case, the two highlighted trends have culminated into a particular reality: donations are becoming a viable part of artistsâ business models.
Understanding how donations are becoming viable is easiest by looking outside of music. Donations are already an important part of the economy on Twitch, a platform for broadcasting gameplay, which also encourages creatives to start streaming.
Gamers use donation apps to display tip notes in the live video stream. Some apps actually automatically read out the tip notes on-stream. Tipping is done for various reasons: to actually show appreciation, to encourage the chat to discuss a certain topic (or more likely: to emote-spam), to request a song, to ask for expert feedback, to get their name or joke into a YouTube highlight reel, etc.
For popular streamers, itâs hard to interact with the chat, because thereâs just too much to read it allâââand they also need to focus on their game. Tip notes provide a way for viewers or fans to rise above the noise and get the streamerâs attention.
The takeaway here is that donations do not seem to occur for altruistic reasons in most cases. The exact ratio would make for an interesting study. Much of the donation behaviour happens due to the desire to interact, stand out or to get a request fulfilled. Itâs a behaviour enabled by the immediacy brought on by the rise of high quality live streaming.
Some streamers highlight their top donators by keeping their names visible (in bottom).
Musicians that want to incorporate donations into their business model will need a clear strategy. Firstly, itâs unlikely that donations on their own are viable if the goal is to make a living off of creative work. Although if you do it all yourself, like many artists these days, you get to keep the whole cut.
Secondly, the reason why donations are becoming viable is because of live streaming. This means the artist needs to be able to consistently generate audiences and that takes time to build. One-offs are a recipe for failure, especially if they donât sit within a broader strategy.
Live streams being a creative format of their own means that there needs to be an intrinsic motivation to work in this way. Else one wonât be able to muster the consistency and grit necessary to succeed. The question for the artist is: âis this medium compelling enough for you to spend a significant amount of your time on it?â
Whatever the answer, the trend is clear. As artists are embracing the live format, with younger ones even coming into maturity with it, weâll see donations make a comeback. This time, not as charity, but as a well-planned part of artistsâ business models.
An example of donations on Chew.tv, a live video streaming platform for music.
