Automate, or Get Automated: How to Save Yourself from the Robot Revolution

robot evolution

By 2025, a quarter of the people you know will be displaced by smart software or robots in their place of work. Already, many people find themselves unemployed, underemployed or part of ‘hidden unemployment’ because they’ve simply stopped looking for work. It’s inevitable — technology and automation is going to advance faster than we can invent new ‘jobs’. Researchers at the World Economic Forum predict that by 2020, 5 million jobs could be lost in the US due to the disruptive nature of automation.

There are political solutions — some advocate the institution of an unconditional basic income. It could negate the necessity to depend on the support of friends or family who still hold employment, eg. by taxing the megacorporation oligarchies springing out of these developments in tech, and provide some freedom to a displaced workforce and a little bonus on top for everyone still fully employed. It could usher in a creative golden age, where people can afford the risk to spend more time making music or using the advancements in 3D-printing, peer-production, etc.

But politics is slow. Either you’re too young and restless to wait for it, or you’re so aware of your impending demise that you simply don’t have the patience. Both may apply.

What can you do now?

In order to understand automation, you’ve got to apply automation.

This will make you a valuable asset to organisations, and if it somehow doesn’t, at least you’ll know how to do more with less.

Automation is an investment. Often, it takes some time to set something up and to tweak it to get it just right, but if you do it right, it gives you a return on investment within weeks, days, or in some cases hours.

My favourite tools for automation are Buffer and IFTTT.

buffer

Buffer is a super powerful tool that helps you buffer your social media posts. You can set particular times of day when things should go out. You have a queue which you can keep filled up. To top it off, Buffer even recommends relevant articles, images and quotes you can add.

It tracks performance data and then recommends the best times to post things and lets you automatically adjust your schedule to those times with one click. Very helpful when you have followers across multiple timezones.

If you really want to get a grasp on automation, you should start using IFTTT right away.

IFTTT stands for If This Then That. It’s the basic statement at the heart of programming. The service lets you tie together services you’re using and then set a condition on one service that triggers an action on another. Some examples:

ifttt

Spend some time on IFTTT and try some of their ready-made recipes like the ones above. If you’re feeling brave and creative, set up your own recipe to automate something you do regularly (eg. copying items from a team task management tool to your personal to-do list). Remember that these automations can be used to create something new, like raw datasets, which can then be organised and automated for other purposes.

A final pro tip: tell your friends about this tool and see what type of things they automate. You’ll be surprised and inspired.


Some bonus material:

Cool automation story: Bandcamp created a simple ticker that would post to their team communication channel every time someone bought a song, so they could celebrate their success. They realized it’s a good music discovery tool, so they put it on their frontpage.

  • The inspiration for today’s post is levels.io’s talk “How Technology is Shaping our Future: billions of self-employed makers and a few megacorporations” >>>
  • How to become your own social media editor >>>
  • Music business growth hacking 101: how to scale your fanbase & revenue sustainably >>>

This article’s title is completely tongue in cheek 😜


Written for my weekly newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing and subscribing.

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Great Content and the Power of Networks

Back in 2009, when I started working on my thesis about marketing music through non-linear communication, I came to a realization. I was going to be digging through a lot of data, information and doing my own qualitative and quantitative research: this is something other people will be interested in also. So, as I was making discoveries, I started tweeting my findings. This helped me build a following.

Back then, people didn’t have 100k+ followers on Twitter, so it was easy to reach out to any academic, artist, thought leader or executive on there. Even before graduating, I was hired by a Swiss music startup to do online communication strategy. Then I found a talented designer who was willing to design the beautiful site my thesis lives on, for free. I published my thesis and emailed all those influencers I had reached out to and interviewed earlier. Many of them shared my thesis to their social media pages. It got me an invitation to speak at Midem, one of Europe’s most important music business conferences, where Ian C Rogers (former CEO of Beats Music, later Senior Director of Apple Music) announced me as Mark Ronson was leaving the stage together with an important marketing exec from Coca-Cola. It was probably the first time I experienced impostor syndrome.

In the meantime, I had been hired to do product strategy for a company in Moscow that operated a music streaming service, a kind of ‘Spotify for books’, and a knowledge platform. They had noticed me because one of the people I interviewed had shared my thesis on his Facebook page. It was a massive opportunity for someone fresh out of university and my years there were intensely educational.

I hate the phrase ‘content marketing’, but a great content strategy synergizes so well with the rules of the networked age. It helps you build an audience, hold that audience’s attention and, if the content is good, it leverages the power of networks.

This is why the cost of putting music behind payments is sometimes higher than the potential return. If the music is easily accessible, and shareable, you can leverage other people’s audience. You can leverage the power of networks. This is why it’s so important to find ways of capturing value that goes beyond content-oriented transactions. If you’re looking for inspiration, spend a few hours on PledgeMusic, Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Patreon this week and see what others are doing. You can do it too.


Written for my weekly newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing and subscribing.

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How Media is Changing (Us)

We’re living Marshall McLuhan’s reality — the media theorist best known for the phrases ‘the medium is the message’ and ‘global village’. McLuhan has often been called a technological determinist, believing that the tools we create end up reshaping our society and ourselves. He believed that the evolutions in the use of media, and particularly mass media, had a profound impact on the human psyche.

“Print is the technology of individualism. If men decided to modify this visual technology by an electric technology, individualism would also be modified.”

When talking to music business circles, I often express the fact that we need not bother with a phrase like ‘the digital age’ to describe our current time. We should refer to it as the networked age — in which anything that can be digitized can float freely through networks. This is a fundamental truth to understand and the industry’s inability to understand it has created (and recreated) problem after problem.

Piracy was considered the music industry’s big problem. Now, piracy is no longer the hot topic, because licensed services have managed to stop the financial leakage and the industry looks like it has stabilized. These services, and particularly streaming services, have done a great job at understanding the reality of the networked age, in which information travels freely, and have built something that acknowledges that and adds value that certain segments of music consumers are happy to pay for.

The general industry never acknowledged the reality underlying piracy, instead seeing it as an obstacle to be overcome, and after dealing with the worst of piracy it has set its sights on something new: the streaming services. Yes, streaming royalties are low, because the real price of accessing content in the age of networks is zero. These services have figured out clever ways to inflate this price and now they’re under pressure. In our networked age, access to content was never the problem, and many have been suckered into thinking that if this problem can be solved, all financial woes will be behind us. Dead wrong.

3D 2

Media changes us. We all grew up in the age of mass media and millennials are growing up in a world of connected mass media. This has significant effects on our psychology. One study uncovered that we’re not bothering to remember facts extensively if we know we can retrieve this information with a simple search. This doesn’t just go for encyclopaedic information, but also for details of our personal lives.

There’s discussion about a phenomenon called the ‘filter bubble’, a theory which states that the internet and internet communities allow people to ‘unsubscribe’ from any type of information that they don’t agree with and thus live in a digital world which feeds back confirmation. The filter bubble is disputed, but despite that, people suffering from psychosis are finding help in online communities that offer alternative explanations to what psychiatrists would say: yes, the CIA is gang stalking you.

Everywhere we go, there’s an information layer that we’re acutely aware of. We know that we can retrieve information about our surroundings whenever we need it. When something interesting happens to us, or we see something worth taking a picture of, many of us will instantly consider the value of sharing it to the web. Even when we’re offline, we’re online.

3D 3

  • The Google effect: instead of remembering specific new knowledge, we remember how to retrieve it.
  • The Instagram effect: looking at the world around us from the perspective of sharing.
  • The Facebook effect: staying up-to-date with social connections without necessitating interaction.
  • The Amazon effect: entering the information layer while out shopping, to get more information about products and price comparisons.

In the next few years, a new generation of changes is going to drastically increase the reach of our connected reality and its information layer. Developments like artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality are going to change the way we communicate, create, behave, interact, and interface with the world around us.

These changes happen rapidly and are the result of human design choices. The effects of these design choices reverberate far beyond its system or user interface. It is completely pointless to think of how we can translate yesterday’s reality into today’s world. Not only do you get to the present reality a day late, but you’re there with yesterday’s mentality while people are already done designing tomorrow.

If you want to be a relevant player in the music business, or any business for that matter, you have to understand intuitively the way our networked reality influences the everyday perception and behaviour of the members of our societies. There will be things about it that you’ll like, and things you won’t like.

The question is: understanding and utilizing our networked reality, how do we design a better tomorrow?

McLuhan

Building Attention-Holding Habits — Gaming Industry Lessons for the Music Biz #2

hearthstone

The currency of the web is attention. Not because so much of the web is ad-funded, but because attention is its scarcest good and the first step towards monetization. In the networked age, the basis of success in music is the ability to grab people’s attention and hold it.

The digital masters of holding attention? Game designers, who tap into the most effective strategy for holding attention: building habits.

Dailies

Many games have concepts of daily resetting quests that will reward the user for completing the quest every day. It may be as simple as just logging in, or it might give you a specific task. Fitness apps employ this concept, too. As does Seinfeld.

💡 If you run a service or have a fanbase, consider: with what frequency do you want people to engage with you? How do you get them to return to you with that frequency?

Progress and completion

Classic video games employ the concept of ‘levels’ to give people a sense of progress and completion. Nowadays, in the age of more open-ended games, completion is often indicated in absolute numbers (eg. quests completed) or percentages (eg. amount of world explored). We hate leaving things unfinished and game designers are not alone in knowing this. Companies like Facebook and LinkedIn are using completeness to encourage people to add more information or perform specific tasks.

LinkedIn profile completeness

You can combine completion with dailies, making it necessary to perform dailies in order to get to completion.

💡 Help fans visualize how much of your music collection they’ve already listened to, or bought. Adding a buy button to missing releases will drive sales. Imagine rewards for people with certain levels of completion. What can you do for people who’ve completed all dailies within a certain time period?

Expiring goods and content

Another easy way to get people to come back is by adding expiring content. This could come in the form of points or leaderboards that reset each week, certain virtual goods that can only be bought or won for a certain duration, or alternative rule sets that are only available for a limited time. This is an area the music business has traditionally been good at, from flash merch sales, to ‘early bird’ ticketing schemes. There’s a big difference though: in games, expiring goods exist to drive habit-forming behaviour, so that people get hooked. The way you need to think about it is as designing someone’s experience, rather than simple tricks to extract money from them.

Two music examples
Main Course, a label specialising in underground dance music, lets people download new releases for free from their Soundcloud within the first week of release. After that, you can only purchase them through stores like Beatport or you have to go through the inconvenience of piracy. Result: people will check their Soundcloud at least once a week.

Spotify has also managed to get people to shape habits around expiring content: the Spotify Weekly playlist of songs specially recommended for you. They see upticks in traffic on Monday, when it’s pushed to all users, and on Sunday when users save music they discovered to new playlists before the playlist expires.

💡 How can you excite your fans or users with expiring goods? How can you utilize expiring content to drive behaviours and relationships that last?

Experiment

Play around and try new things. See what happens. If you get interesting results, get in touch and I’ll help you spread the word more widely.


Written for my weekly newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing and subscribing.

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