Tag: Twitch

Livestream tech breaking down

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

We don’t hear about the livestreams that don’t go well so much. However, technology breaks down and breaks down quite often. This can happen to an artist playing a Twitch show for 50 people, but also to Glastonbury and Driift working on one of the biggest livestream events of the year.

Glastonbury’s Live at Worthy Farm event included lots of great artists and a special appearance by The Smile, the new band including Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. Lots of people, who had bought tickets, couldn’t make it into the livestream. The problem was that lots of the unique ticket codes were flagged as invalid. After almost two hours the solution was to remove the paywall to the event. And since the event was live-to-tape instead of actually live, viewers were also able to rewind for example.

Even livestreaming events that received universal praise suffered their share of issues for individual viewers.

And while individual cases can be just that, an individual’s connection that is problematic, lag created by some error on a laptop or phone, etc. the technological problems are always below the surface.

It’s just too busy

The most common trope surrounding the failure of livestreaming is to do with traffic. Servers need to handle a lot of people entering a virtual door and getting their ticket verified. Two major examples come with Justin Bieber‘s New Year’s Eve livestream and Marc Anthony‘s ‘Una Noche’ livestream from 17 April. The former’s livestream overloaded because 1.2 million T-Mobile users showed up having mostly bought their tickets on the last day. The company hosting the livestream, VenewLive isn’t new to big number of visitors having been set up by a combination of HYBE, Universal, and Kiswe. But just like you have to wait at an arena sometimes, so servers can overload due to high demand. Similarly, with Una Noche, demand seemed to outstretch capacity. In a great article in Billboard, there are two stories: 1) again, lots of people bought tickets at the last moment causing server undercapacity; 2) too many people used the same codes causing the system to crash. Either way, it has led the livestream platform Maestro to change its policy and only host shows that run through their own ticketing platform.

The fix

There’s an easy answer to this problem: a cap on tickets sold. StageIt‘s Stephen White told me that they actively encourage artists and bands to put a maximum amount of tickets per show. This allows for good preparation in terms of what kind of server capacity will allow shows to run smoothly. Of course, it also creates a sense of scarcity. And, indeed, StageIt sees a more even tickets-sold ratio across the period that those tickets are on sale and less last-minute buying then reported for Bieber and Anthony.

Another option is to scale your server capacity, which means you probably have to work with one of the major cloud services such as AWS or Google Cloud. These companies have vast options available to scale server capacity. AWS has an auto-scaling functionality, while Google Cloud allows for automatic load balancing to allow for heavy, unexpected, traffic. The problem here, of course, is that this doesn’t come cheap. The more power and capacity you use, the more you pay. Whether the ticket prices will still cover this is something you want to know in advance and not be faced with last minute or even the day after.

A third option is to use an existing platform that knows how to deal with audiences at scale. Dedicated music livestreaming platforms like VenewLive, StageIt and Maestro – and their are dozens more – are great in terms of offering specific functionalities, such as integrated merch sales, and closed, ticketed, environments. Platforms like YouTube and Twitch already have so much traffic moving through them that any spike from even the largest livestreams won’t impact the overall computational capacity too significantly. They also have other advantages such as different direct payment options, suc as tipping and channel subscriptions. Of course, this is different than buying a ticket, but for artists who aren’t at the level of Marc Anthony or Billie Eilish it might make sense to drive users not to a ticket but to another method of payment. Going back to StageIt, they find that most artists get the highest return not with a set ticket price but with a pay-what-you-can model.

We won’t shake off these issues

I’m a strong believer that livestreaming is here to stay, especially if done well. By that, I mean that the experience of a livestream should be different from that of a gig in a venue. Instead of just pointing cameras at a stage, livestreams should offer viewers a unique experience that feels like it’s made just for them instead of for hundreds of people at once. To achieve this, it makes a lot of sense to use a different platform than YouTube or Twitch, to partner with a provider that makes it their business to create something bespoke. Take to Twitch for a quick and dirty livestream of you or your band in the studio, but make sure to create something with added value if you ask people to pay for a ticket.

The livestream-specific platforms may be more limited in terms of capacity and potentially have other technical limitations. However, these issues will remain as long as livestream. Best thing to do then, is to try and stay in control – as evidenced by Maestro’s reaction to the failed Marc Anthony livestream – and to prepare well. The latter probably means you want to cap your crowd so you know exactly how much server capacity you require. And, finally, let’s make sure we talk about the failures and learn from them. Not all news about livestreams has to be rosy, it’s also okay to tell the world something went wrong.

Music is the creator economy catalyst

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

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

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

Social platforms sized by popularity. Source: Knight Institute

How creators create the most

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

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

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

Adding value

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

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

Capturing value

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

Big Tech and the Creator Economy

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

Source: Peter Yang, creatoreconomy.so

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

Storytelling, a final word

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

Club Cooee

Better Than Real Life: 8 Generatives

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Virtual concerts are not here to replace live music. They’re here to provide a new type of entertainment. Personally, I find the average virtual concert dull and inconvenient. It’s dull because it’s usually not more stimulating than a conversation with a friend, playing a video game, reading a book, watching a show on Netflix, or in some cases even scrolling through my Instagram. It’s inconvenient, because I’m supposed to tune in at a specific moment, whereas all other in-home entertainment in my life is basically on-demand.

So, what is better than all those things? What can make people decide to stay at home, rather than catch some fresh summer air before we head into inevitable winter lockdowns?

Virtual music events have to offer things that other types of entertainment can’t. A virtual event has to leverage the context of music, rather than just transmit a performance to an audience. If it is to be sustainable for musicians beyond the pandemic, because they prefer not to travel as much or want to stay more closely connected with fans on a regular basis, it will also have to be in some ways better than the real life equivalent.

A vast number of livestreams are basically just a poor version of an actual live event. The only edge it has is that you can be lazy and stay on your couch (and it’s easier to social distance with a front door between you and the world). So where does a virtual event have an edge? What can you do online that you can’t do in real life?

This post is inspired by Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free published in 2008. He describes generatives as follows: “a generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. […] In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.”

Putting it into the context of the post, generatives are qualities or attributes that make people choose virtual events over “real life”.

8 generatives better than real life

Magical powers

Let’s start big: we would all love to have magical powers. Whether it’s flying around a (virtual) venue or invisibly teleporting on to the stage to see what the artists are doing. Through virtual live events you can let people do things they literally can’t do in real life – not because it’s illegal, but because of the constraints of our oft-lamented physical reality.

Figure out what makes sense for you as an artist, band, or organiser and then give your audience superpowers. That could be multi-camera setups that let fans jump around the room and zoom in on what you’re doing, virtual environments in which people can move by flying around, or a telekenetic airhorn that you’ve set up to respond to people’s tips on Twitch.

Interactivity

Recognize people’s contexts and attention span. Asking people to sit on their couch and quietly watch a music performance does not fit most types of music well. Most concerts are interactive: people dance, sing, jump, clap, cheer, drink, take photos, meet people, and perhaps jump into a mosh pit.

The home context is different: there’s mobile phone notifications that compete for attention, there’s messaging apps, there’s that untidy corner of the room you will definitely get around to cleaning up some time this week…

Keep this in mind. You can give people an escape from interactions by making events interactive – even if that just means responding to what’s happening in the chat.

Context synergy

Imagine loving a virtual environment like a video game so much that you spend the majority of your free time in it or even just a few hours a week. Now imagine an artist you’re a fan of coming to this digital space that’s like a virtual home to you. Are you going to go outside and do something else? Hell no.

One could argue that the context of Minecraft or Fortnite is part of ‘real life’ anno 2020. In that case: are you going to play on your usual server and miss that concert? Hell no.

Artist proximity

Fans can feel much closer to an artist from the safety of their home and a keyboard than they might in real life. Some people go up to artists to thank them, some don’t because they don’t want to bother them, and some are just absolutely terrified of the interaction. If there is any interaction, it’s usually a quick thank you and signature after a concert and that’s it.

Online, you can leave room for fans to really interact: you can talk about topics, show them what you’re working on, answer questions, and acknowledge the individual by mentioning their name or nickname on the stream.

Fan community or scene networking

Music brings people together. Before the web, listening to music by an artist you were into was the only way for some people to know that there were other people who feel or think just like them (especially young people). Now you can just Google those feelings and thoughts and go down an internet rabbit hole of communities, so while music has lost that monopoly it’s still a powerful force as a connector.

Although people are still connected to various degrees of their social lives (flatmates, family, close friends, colleagues) they are likely disconnected from further degrees such as acquaintances, people they’d run into at concerts, and other people they’d only meet when at events and social gatherings. Furthermore, while performers would see the scene they’re part of in many cities, many fans wouldn’t be exposed to their own scene in other places.

If this is an important aspect to your music, bringing these scenes and communities together online can create social meaning that’s better than a Zoom call with mom (sorry, moms).

We’ve all seen recently what connected fan communities can do.

Global proximity

Similarly, it’s great to feel closer to the rest of the world while being unable to travel. Many dance music streams will have Zoom sessions running which fans can join in order to broadcast themselves. You’ll see ravers sitting in their living rooms or at their desks, waving flags, drinking, or eating chicken (as seen on-stream during Dominator‘s virtual event). Occasionally, some of these webcams will be shown alongside the performers in the main stream, showing a global fan community from Canada to Brazil to Thailand to Italy (in the case of Dominator, that chicken-eating guy’s backdrop was a Mad Max-like stage with cars and motorbikes making jumps behind the DJ – unfortunately the “in-stream” is not visible on the recordings uploaded to YouTube).

If people have friends far away, they can experience that proximity together by tuning into the same stream. While there are ways to do watch Netflix together in a synced session, it’s not as special as coming together in an event that thousands of others are also using to come together.

An example of DJs "instreaming" a fan during Q-Dance's Qonnect event in April.
An example of DJs “instreaming” a fan during Q-Dance’s Qonnect event in April.

A role to play for the viewer

This was already captured above, but I think the principle is so important that it’s worth making it explicit. Instead of broadcasting a stream and implying fans should just sit down and shut up, you can involve them.

Think instreaming by showing fans’ cams to the wider fan community, by improvising based on fan input, or by letting them interact with each other through magical powers. To put it in Ishkur’s words:

A party exists for its own sake and for the sake of its participants. Your job is to contribute; to interact and celebrate. When you go see Tiesto, you are not contributing anything. You are being a spectator. You might as well be dead.

The premise may be awkward as a performer, but make the event about more than yourself. Let the people who attend participate. Make them part of ‘you’.

Personal example from back in March: with Hard Dance Berlin I created a line-up of performers and then used Plug.dj to let the crowd have a chance to go back to back with the DJs, so DJs would play half of their set time and the crowd was responsible for the other half of the tracks played during that time. The event was called DJs vs Berlin. Afterwards, we opened up the decks to the audience queue.

Another example is audience avatar customization as can be done in Fortnite, Minecraft, IMVU, Club Cooee (pictured at the top) and other virtual event spaces.

FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out

I never listened to Slayer much, but when they announced their last tour I got tickets to their show and started listening to their discography a lot. And the show itself? It was awesome. However, similar decisions motivated by FOMO-related impulses haven’t always panned out as well. Sometimes something was a waste of money or a night better spent asleep. Oh well.

My point: FOMO is powerful. It can make people prioritize things that normally wouldn’t be high on their list. Whether it’s a one-time only virtual event like the screening of Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer, the release of limited edition merch during a stream, rotating line-ups like the Verzuz battles, or just having unique sets in your events as a result of improvisation and interaction: all of these create FOMO and make people want to tune in instead of going out.

Bonus: if your event doesn’t go as well as you hoped, but is not terrible either, cognitive dissonance will make sure that people’s anticipation translates into satisfaction. (But remember: trust and attention are fickle: do what you can to avoid disappointing people)

A nod to Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free post, which inspired my own. The post has seen hundreds of comments since publication: if you think I missed something, please leave a comment below.

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Free competes with paid and abundant competes with scarce

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Facebook recently launched a sound library including tracks you can use for free on videos. People criticized the concept in a music business discussion group (also on Facebook, ironically). I would hear the same rhetoric that people have when they say bands shouldn’t perform for free, because it’s not just a bad practice, it is also bad for your peers.

But let’s look at the reality that people in music are complaining about.

1. There are many different types of artists

There are always going to be people who find it awesome to see their music used by other people: even if they don’t get any money for it. They may be college students who are just happy to see their music travel. They may be people working full time jobs who do a little music on the side and don’t depend on the income. They may be professional producers who put out these tracks to libraries as a type of calling card.

Either way: there is always going to be free music and you will always have to compete with it.

2. Giving your music away for free can actually work

You have to have a monetization strategy at the end of this, but the easiest way to win attention online is to make great ‘content’ (in this case music). This content should be available with as few barriers as possible: which means making sure it’s available for free. The second part of your strategy should include steps on 1) how to hold people’s attention after you capture it, and 2) how to identify opportunities to monetize your fanbase (I wrote about it in detail in this thesis).

But sometimes you don’t need a strategy for monetization. It’s not easy to get signed to big labels nowadays and it usually requires you to show that you can build up your own audience. One of my favourite examples of someone who successfully leveraged free is Alan Walker. An EDM artist with tracks that have more plays than some of the most popular tracks from stars like Kendrick Lamar. How? He released his somewhat odd music through NoCopyrightSounds, which specialised in providing YouTubers and Twitch streamers with music they could use for free, without fear that their videos would get taken down. Eventually, they soundtracked the whole subculture and put a new sound in EDM on the map (read more).

3. AI is going to one up everyone

We are seeing amazing developments in AI. The most recent example is Google DeepMind‘s AlphaZero, which beat the world’s best bot in chess after spending just 4 hours practicing. Startups from Jukedeck, to Amper, to Popgun, to Scored are all trying to make music generation easier.

We already see more music being released than ever before, but so far it has still depended on human output. Through AI, music is already being untethered from human productivity. Standing out in abundance is a minuscule problem compared to what it will be 5 years from now.

Free music libraries are the least of your problem

There is no singular music business or industry. Everyone is playing by different rules and all those rules will be upended every time there’s a big shift in technology. From the record player, to the music video, to the internet, to AI and blockchain, music is the canary in the coal mine and you have to have a pioneer mentality or else you are falling behind every day.

The people who are one step ahead may be underground today, but some are the stars of tomorrow.

By all means, let us discuss the ethics. But be careful not to let your opposition blind you to the point where you cannot see how a new generation of music is thriving and leaving you behind. Because then it’s too late. For you.

Dollars on a plate

Are donations becoming a viable part of artists’ business models?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

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 you’d hear would be:

“Artists should just release their work for free and let people donate. I’d love to be able to donate to my favourite artists.”

Donation request from a band
An example of a common donation request.

At that time, there were only about half a billion connected devices. Most of the world’s population wasn’t online yet. Those that were, and thought this way, were a minority projecting their own behaviour onto others. It’s common: most music startup founders do the same thing — overestimating how much people care about music. Simply put: the donation model could not scale.

The model didn’t take into consideration the complexity of the way music is made. Let’s say artists were able to make a living off of donations — this benefits the most visible artists; the singers, but not the songwriters. How should money from donations then be distributed so that it’s fair? Does the intention behind the donation matter? Questions like these are the reason why there’s so much legislation around creative work.

An elemental overview of merely the royalty distribution part of the music business.
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 ‘bedroom producers’, 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 wouldn’t consider sharing memories online that would only be visible for 24 hours. Now, two of the world’s 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 who’s ever ‘gone live’ 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, they’re a creative format.

Facebook Live creation tool

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 artists’ 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.

Twitch tip scare
And sometimes they use tips to scare streamers shitless.

For popular streamers, it’s hard to interact with the chat, because there’s just too much to read it all — and 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 streamer’s 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. It’s a behaviour enabled by the immediacy brought on by the rise of high quality live streaming.

DJ live streaming on Twitch
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, it’s 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 don’t 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 won’t be able to muster the consistency and grit necessary to succeed. The question for the artist is: “is this medium compelling enough for you to spend a significant amount of your time on it?”

Whatever the answer, the trend is clear. As artists are embracing the live format, with younger ones even coming into maturity with it, we’ll see donations make a comeback. This time, not as charity, but as a well-planned part of artists’ business models.

An example of donations on Chew.tv, a live video streaming platform for music.
An example of donations on Chew.tv, a live video streaming platform for music.