If you want to start a music brand, don’t wait until the pandemic is over

Without live music, it may feel like a bad time to start a music brand. However when considering the realities of the post-pandemic landscape and the opportunities on the road to there, now is exactly the right time.

Post-pandemic

We’re probably a year away from things going back to normal. People are hopeful for the summer season, but it may not look like last year’s summer at all. Germany’s top virologist, Christian Drosten, has warned that 2021’s summer could be much worse than 2020’s:

“The fact that we had such a relaxed summer in 2020 probably had to do with the fact that our case numbers stayed below a critical threshold in the spring. But that’s not the case now.”

Getting case numbers down remains hard, because of the high infection rates in many areas and the newly mutated virus strains which are more contagious.

Drosten argues against early relaxation of lockdowns to avoid scenarios of overload in hospitals in the summer – which would lead to a summer lockdown. The article doesn’t mention what early relaxation means, but it will obviously be difficult for politicians to extend current measures deep into spring. Which, tragically, means that we have a realistic scenario of a summer spike in COVID-19 cases.

The longer this goes on, the greater the wear on the infrastructure that brings so many musicians and fans together: agencies, events, clubs, suppliers, the artists themselves… they’re all facing uncertainty and many of them will not make it to the finish line. This means that the normal we’ll go ‘back to’, will be quite different from the normal we knew before. In a sense, this can be seen as music’s 9/11 moment in the sense that there’s a demarcation of before and after or perhaps more aptly: music’s second Napster moment.

From 2021 onward, live music will have to do more with less. This may create an (even) more competitive landscape. While music fans’ eagerness to see live music and party may create large demand, the infrastructure to supply that demand is highly regulated (think: crowd & fire safety, noise regulation, alcohol licenses, sanitation, etc.) and may not be able to scale back up quickly.* I suspect there will be a lot of emerging opportunity in the informal sphere (house parties, illegal raves, etc.).

It will be hard work to launch a music brand in the competitive space of post-pandemic live music, so get started now so you’re positioned to seize the opportunities when they emerge.

* Sidenote: if this scenario of undersupply plays out like that, it will be interesting to see how it affects pricing and what role livestreaming can play to make up for the limited supply.

Pre-“post-pandemic” opportunities

What opportunities can you leverage today in order to set up a resilient music brand for the post-pandemic landscape?

Wielding influence and getting opportunities in music is highly correlated by your ability to get things in front of an audience. So, building a music brand is about building audience. If you can show you can get a crowd to a venue, the venue is more likely to give you a chance or better conditions (e.g. not having to pay fees, getting weekend slots, etc.). The same for the artists you can attract: if you can create significantly more opportunities for the artist than they already have, they’ll consider working with you. So, aside from defining your music category and brand positioning, goal number 1 should be:

Build visible audience.

If you don’t have any music you can release, start with curation. The mix of channels you’ll maintain is quite similar to when you release music. Consider the below:

  • Instagram. In my opinion one of the most important tools for music networking right now (read: Instagram vs SoundCloud: the battle for the center of music culture). For posts, focus on shareable content like memes related to your subculture / genre / scene. Instagram creates extra visibility for new features, so at the time of writing that means: create reels and add the music you stand for. Use stories to drive your audience to your other channels (set up a Linktree or similar) and to recycle previous posts to your audience’s growing audience.
  • TikTok. There are a lot of articles about how, if you’re after Gen Z, you should use TikTok. That’s bullshit. The platform is growing beyond its early demographics (John Lennon and David Bowie have profiles there now). So if your audience skews older, then get there before other music brands in your scene get there. Cut in front of them. When they join the platform, you’ll not only be an example to them, but also to the artists and events they represent.
  • Spotify. Playlist follower counts are public, so this is an important way of building visible audience and connecting people to your brand on a regular basis. Brand connection bonus: unlike with social media, people actually don’t have to look at their screen to be connected to you through curated music.

    A basic strategy would be to create two playlists. In the first, you just add all relevant tracks you can find. Try different searches for your genre and see what shows up. Claim gaps by using keywords in your title and playlist description. I did this with a Jersey club playlist I made (though I didn’t have a specific goal in mind) and was shocked to find out it had grown to hundreds of followers. Use a playlist organising tool (here are some) to reorder your playlist weekly or monthly, so that it always looks fresh when people land on the playlist (some tools remove and re-add all tracks, which creates new “added to playlist” dates for all tracks).

    Set up a second playlist, but restrict its length to 20-30 tracks. Change at least half of the tracks each week and make sure most music is released recently (e.g. last ~3 months). Add the day of the week that you refresh it to the title or description, so people know with what interval to come back to your playlist. Give everyone else a reminder through your social media whenever you refresh your Hyperpop Sunday, Post-punk Monday, Wobble Wednesday or 2step Tuesday playlist.

Depending on your scene and whether you’re releasing music yourself, you may use other channels like SoundCloud, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook (for the groups and events), etc. But as a start, don’t take on more than 2-3 channels. Get them up and running. It’s a lot of work.

Later on, you can set up a network on Discord, so that the creators and fans of the music you’re promoting on Instagram and Spotify can actually talk to each other, share music, etc. A community will help you to spot trends, new talent, and potential new collaborators (for example, you’ll probably have a need for visual artists, since your mediums are mostly visual).

If you’re planning on doing events, make an extra effort to showcase local talent and to build local audience: you’re going to need it when you start hosting your first events.

Develop experience in audience activation.

Your business will depend on your ability to get fans to go to gigs, buy merchandise, stream music, etc. As soon as you get some type of following, you should start learning about how to do these things.

Livestreams are a perfect way to learn how to get people excited and committed to something. If you’re not ready to sell tickets, that’s fine: people are paying with their time, so there’s still a transaction that will inform you about their commitment and the quality of what you’ve put together.

Financially and emotionally, it’s a lot less painful to have a livestream with only a few viewers than it is to have a new release flop or have DJs and bands play to an empty room. Livestreams are your training wheels for the real thing.

Livestreams also let you know who’s in the room, plus you can connect with a global pool of talent (timezones permitting) rather than whoever shows up to your local events. This allows you to build a network significantly faster than previously (with exceptions of those times a genre starts bubbling up online and is not represented well offline, e.g. the early days of moombahton).

You can also go beyond the livestream and throw full-on virtual events in Minecraft, in plug.dj, or various other tools. Make sure to record these events, since it will provide you with content you can share through your various channels.

Finally, these digital counterparts of the live music experience will have some role to play in the post-pandemic landscape. Having experience in this area will give you a special advantage.

In conclusion.

Just a two-word conclusion if you’re thinking about starting a music brand.

Start now.

Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash

This soon-to-launch Minecraft club changed my mind about virtual raves

An exclusive preview of a Minecraft venue based on a closed down Berlin night club called Griessmuehle. A look at the user experience behind virtual club design.

Early on in the lockdown I threw a few virtual raves, but decided they’re not for me. Simply put: I thought they’re not engaging enough to compete with all the other things I could be doing. I hear you: they have an important role. I agree with that, but I think they typically do poorly in terms of fulfilling that role.

4 key roles for virtual raves:

  • A place for a scene to connect.
  • A place to discover new music & talent.
  • A place to for artist-fan connection.
  • A place for entertainment.

With very few exceptions, I feel these roles are fulfilled better in other places. Scenes connect on Instagram and to a lesser extent Soundcloud nowadays. These platforms are also excellent ways to discover new underground music, bootlegs, and remixes that you won’t find on Spotify or other large streaming services.

As for entertainment… There are productions with dozens of millions of dollars in funding at our fingertips through video streaming platforms, television, video games, etc. And personally I enjoy the latter, because I can play games (with friends) while listening to new music. When it’s actually convenient for me.

It’s like virtual raves are fun and engaging for the organizers and performers, but much less so for the audiences.

So if you know me from a nightlife context: that’s why you’re not seeing me at many livestreams and virtual raves. But last week’s look at a new Minecraft club has made me changed my mind.

Inside LiveJar, a virtual club based on a closed real-life venue

Minecraft raves are not new. Perhaps the most prominent organizer that’s still active, Club Matryoshka, started throwing them in the summer of 2019. Around the same time, a Reddit user named throwawayforlewdstuff built a Minecraft version of legendary and notoriously hard-to-get-into Berlin techno club Berghain. This same person, also known as gibier_, has now created a new Minecraft version of another Berlin club together with a group of other artists.

The Minecraft venue is based on Griessmuehle. Which was easier to get into than Berghain, but that difficulty is now inversed. Berghain now functions as an art gallery due to the pandemic, so if you have a ticket, you’re in. However Griessmuehle was forced from the location that the Minecraft venue is based on – you’ll never be able to enter it again. So no matter how well we tackle the damage done to nightlife by extended shutdowns, the reality of real estate development will continue to have an impact on nightlife.

Last week (Sept 30), LiveJar had a beta run to test the server and collect feedback. What follows is a rundown of the experience. I’ll do my best not to give too much away, because I think they’ve captured an important element of good nightlife venues well: photos, videos and stories won’t do it justice – you have to go experience it for yourself.

When you join the server you’re spawned outside Griessmuehle (or LiveJar). As you walk up to the door you’ll see a large and rather unfriendly looking bouncer. You’re also greeted by the ambient sound familiar to anyone who’s ever queued outside a club: muffled techno beats. Sitting comfortably at home for half a year, I’d actually forgotten about that rush just before entering. A mix of anxiety and enthusiasm. I had not realized how much I’ve missed it.

They run the audio through a plug-in called OpenAudioMc, which allows Minecraft server admins to map music to certain areas. When joining the servers as a listener, the plug-in runs in a browser window you keep open in the background. As you move through the map, the music will play through the browser and will change when you switch rooms.

Entering the venue was particularly exciting, because of the familiarity of the layout and how well the team captured certain details. Most importantly, it was fun to just wander around and see what’s going on in familiar places, less familiar places that I actually never spent much time in, and unfamiliar places that the artists added, like extra rooms and floors and certain objects.

A good club will draw you in and make you forget about the world outside. It puts you in a place where time is frozen. A place where you can experience, explore, and interact. I think I spent a good hour exploring the map and I still don’t feel like I’ve seen everything. Since it was a beta, there were not many people around, so it was a bit like showing up at a party way too early. And a rave is not a rave without ravers. Minecraft allows people to customize their avatars, so I’m looking forward to seeing all these areas populated with people in creative costumes.

To make sure people move around the map, the makers have hidden drinks around the map like easter eggs. There are 3 types and each of them has its own effect on the player upon consumption. I won’t spoil what they are. There are also bars in the venue, which allows people to attain these drinks in exchange for donations (powered by tebex.io) that the organizers use to cover their costs, pay DJs, and donate to charity.

The venue’s staff have special controls in their inventory, which allows them to play with the lighting and smoke machine in certain rooms.

Some of these effects are intense. Especially if you’re under the influence of one of the virtual beverages. It can be really disorienting. You will definitely walk into a wall at some point. At first this bothered me, but it also echoes the experience of Berlin’s early techno clubs (well-documented in the WE CALL IT TECHNO! documentary on YouTube). Remember being on the way from the dancefloor to the bar (or vice versa) when the smoke machine fills up the room and you just decide to stay where you are for a moment until the smoke clears up? It’s part of the experience, it’s part of the unknown of these nights that make them so exciting and the admins behind LiveJar have managed to recreate this well.

Currently, the creators of the server are preparing for launch. They’re looking for artists and organizers who want to play on their servers and bring their audiences in. You can get in touch with them (kelit, devBowman, gibier_ aka throwawayforlewdstuf) on their Discord server.

They’re also looking for additional staff members to help with the scenography and an experienced Minecraft server admin in order to scale the experience to more users.

Better than real life?

I feel virtual events have a chance of doing things that you can’t do in real life. Those things are necessary in order to fulfill the criteria outlined in the bullet points at the start of this article. I previously wrote an article about 8 ‘generatives’ that can give virtual events an edge over real life events, so let’s see how LiveJar stacks up:

  • Magical powers: ✅. Whether it’s the drinks or falling from high distances and living to tell the tale: you’re definitely something more than human on the server.
  • Interactivity: ✅. An important aspect of the interactivity for me was the exploration aspect as well as trying out the various drinks in various places and seeing what would happen. I set a goal to go out to find a drink and come back to the dancefloor, wait for the wildest smoke and light effects, and then take a drink and see what it’s like (woOoAaoahH). I didn’t actually consider exploration as part of interactivity when I wrote my original article, but it’s definitely an important element.
  • Context synergy: 🔲. This box will be ticked as soon as they start populating the server with artists. Certain artists and scenes definitely make sense in the context of Minecraft and / or Griessmuehle.
  • Artist proximity: 🔲. Even though sets have to be pre-recorded due to technical limitations, the organizers expect the DJs to be present for the rave. Even with a handful of people on the server during the beta, there was a lively chat, so I assume this box will be ticked as soon as they launch.
  • Fan community or scene networking: 🔲. Similar to the previous bullet point. This actually lends itself really well to it. Especially since the map is large with lots of different areas. It’s possible to change the server-wide chat into more localized chats (e.g. you only ‘hear’ people in your area of the map). This makes it possible to have multiple dancefloors and areas with various adjacent scenes hanging out. The admins hadn’t set up the server this way during the beta, but mentioned it had been on their minds.

    Just one caveat: the requirement to purchase Minecraft could be a barrier to bringing a scene onto the server. Will people who have already purchased a console or mobile version of Minecraft also purchase the PC version?
  • Global proximity: ✅. It seemed like most people on the server were French (despite 95% of the conversations happening in English). So yes, definitely a good way to connect scenes across borders and get music fans from various cities into the same room and exposed to each other (an aspect normally reserved for touring DJs and traveling fans).
  • A role to play for the viewer: ✅. Like I wrote above: this will be so exciting with more people on there, with customized avatars, bringing increased interactivity and life to the various areas of the map.
  • FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out: ❓. You tell me. Do you think you’d attend the launch event?

One more time in case you skipped over it above: you can stay up to date or get in touch with LiveJar by joining their Discord server at https://discord.gg/DXvrx3W.

As for Griessmuehle: they’ve since found a new location to reopen.