5 Easy Ways to Stay on Top of Trends (for Busy People)

There’s a certain advantage to being ahead of the curve. In an age of constant disruption, the benefits of learning about a new tool or technology before your competitors can be immeasurable. So how do you stay aware of new trends and developments in your field or industry? Below are 5 convenient ways. They just take a minute to set up.

Newsletters

Yes, it’s 2016. Yes, newsletters are one of the best ways to stay up to date on trends. Browse for great newsletters on NewsletterStash or Revue. If you’re using Gmail, you can add a +tag behind your name in your email address, so that incoming newsletters all get tagged the same way. Like so: name+newsletters@gmail.com. This helps you filter them into separate folders so they don’t clutter up your inbox. It’s called subaddressing and many email providers besides Gmail support it too.

Facebook Groups

For every topic you can think of, there’s a Facebook community. Members share relevant links relating to the topic and you may find the discussions useful too. Also, it can be a good way to connect to other professionals in your domain.

Reddit

Like Facebook, Reddit has a ‘subreddit’ for all kinds of topics, like privacy, transhumanism, freediving, the list goes on. Search for some interesting ones, subscribe to them, unsubscribe from the default ones, and return to Reddit regularly. You now have a curated page with links and discussions relevant to your interests.

Twitter

You probably already know the name of some thought leaders and interesting publications or blogs in your domain. Follow them on Twitter. See who they retweet. Follow them if relevant. See what recommendations you get to follow accounts. Soon you’ll have a constant flow of, more or less, relevant content.

You can also build lists of people who’ve posted tweets with a specific hashtag. Lists are a useful way to build more tailored streams.

You might even get to know more about the people you follow, where they get their information from, and perhaps discover a new newsletter, Facebook group or subreddit. Don’t forget about the unfollow button when someone keeps cluttering your feed.

Audible

Ever busy with your hands, but not that busy with your mind? Amazon’s audiobook service, Audible, offers audiobooks on every topic. It recently also incorporated podcasts in its app, so you can learn while you cook, workout, cycle, or shower. For a $15/mo membership, you get 1 free audiobook a month. You can actually try Audible for free and get two free audiobooks.

Here are some top notch audiobooks about the future and how to study it:

Got more? Ping me on Twitter.

Now that you’re all set up, why not learn how to efficiently share what you know on social media?


Disclaimer: yes, those are affiliate links. They help me keep the blog and newsletter running.

The 2010 Google Patent You Should Know About in Pokemon Go’s Wake

Six years ago, tech media widely reported a Google patent that would let it replace real-world ads on billboards, with virtual ones in Google Street View. Google, after all, is in the ads business, so if they create a virtual layer that represents the real world, they’re going to place their ads in that virtual layer.
Google Street View Patent 2

The VP of Product for Google Maps and Street View at the time was John Hanke. Hanke is also known for being the founder of Google’s internal startup Niantic, which was later spun off and created Pokémon Go. The game uses Google Maps for its virtual layer and has its own information layer on top of that. Pokémon Go has tens of millions of daily active players and has managed to do what Google Glass was supposed to do: make augmented reality mainstream.

John Hanke

Augmented reality is an excellent space for advertising. It generates a ton of data on users that helps you serve them with relevant, local and timely suggestions. The company to make the most money off of this, is not the one that does the advertising, it’s the one that owns the network. The large investments we’re seeing in virtual reality by the tech giants have nothing to do with games, or even the mundane applications of the technology they’re investing in. The investments are about who is going to control the primary augmentation layer people will use.

For some, it might be a lifelong dream to just create a cool augmented reality game that gets people off the couch and into the real world. But for others, this is about more – it’s a virtual land grab and defining the rules before others do, so they can scale these patents to their full potential.

Go deeper: read my longer think piece on augmented reality, advertising and music on the Synchtank blog.

Advertising, AR banner

The Global Implications of VKontakte’s New Music Licenses

Last week’s most important music business news could well be the deal struck between Russian social network VKontakte (VK), and all 3 major labels. It follows a long history of conflict between VK, sometimes referred to as Russia’s Facebook, and the music industry. It seems like the music will stay freely available to VK users, and the service will start testing various monetisation models through new functionality aimed at its music listeners.

Two major implications of this deal:

  1. VK was like a Napster meets Facebook. Anyone could upload music (and other types of media) to it and anyone else could retrieve and access that music. For free. Now, suddenly, this behaviour has become monetized.
  2. There is a global ecosystem of unlicensed music apps that rely on VK’s huge music database to source their content. I assume the majors were not willing to license that, so we should start seeing some of these apps struggle to maintain catalogue.

In Russia, music is social

To understand the significance locally, you should know a couple of things about Russia’s online music landscape. Due to the presence of basically every song you can think of on the country’s most popular social network, people have grown up consuming music inside a social layer. This has made the online music landscape in Russia inherently more social than in many other countries.

Facebook has Pages, VK has communities

A few years ago, the battle between VK and the music industry looked more like a war. It was threatening to destroy an important pillar in Russia’s live music business: the VK communities centered around music.

Moderators of these communities regularly post music to the groups, so for many of the groups’ followers it’s a way to get fresh playlists, find new songs, or connect to familiar tunes. There are groups for well-known superstars, like Drake, for local pop singers, like Dima Bilan, but also for lesser-known niche artist like the Dutch producer Boaz, who has worked with artists ranging from Major Lazer to Yellow Claw and has largely remained in the background.

When promoters are organising shows, they reach out to communities like these to connect to audiences of tens of thousands of people. Sometimes they pay moderators to promote a show, or just offer some free tickets. These communities have been instrumental in driving audiences to shows in Russia & other CIS countries. The fact that these groups can now survive is a big win for VK and the wider music business. Not only do they drive audiences to shows; they also provide valuable data that helps to identify tastemakers & influencers, and potential hits.

What should VK do next?

The presence of a vast music and video catalogue on VK has given it a good competitive advantage over Facebook. VK is the 3rd most popular site in Russia, way ahead of Facebook, which is number 8. It trails Yandex, Russia’s Google, which is reportedly discussing a partnership with Facebook.

VK must leverage its unique advantage to stay ahead of Facebook, and offer a unique, competing experience, that could also appeal to users outside of Russia. These users would already be locked into the Facebook ecosystem and will thus not be interested in joining VK as just another social network. Even if they would be, it’s unlikely VK as a classic social network can attain the critical mass it needs in new, Facebook-dominated markets.

Another threat is the rise of messengers including Telegram, which was founded by Pavel Durov, who also founded VK, but parted on complicated terms. Messengers have been an expected threat to social networks for years, which is why Facebook spent $21.8 Billion on acquiring WhatsApp and offered $3 Billion for Snapchat in 2013. More recently, Facebook has invested heavily in Messenger, launching a bot platform in April this year, which is now host to over 11,000 bots, like the DJ Hardwell bot.

VK is not well-equipped to compete with messengers, yet, and should start making efforts to maintain relevance in a mobile-first landscape, which in emerging economies may also mean mobile-only for big parts of its audience.

This means 3 things:
  1. VK is in dire need of a clear, focused mobile strategy;
  2. VK can use its licensed music & media offering as a competitive advantage;
  3. VK should consider unbundling in similar vein to what Facebook has done with Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, so that they can make products that will appeal to Facebook users, too.

Sidenote: VK is partly owned by Mail.ru, which also owns Russia’s second most popular social network Odnoklassniki. Both are included in this licensing deal. The latter has an older user base, so VK will have to target demographics below 35 years old.

Monetization

With all major licensed music services reporting losses, it’s unlikely that music on its own will be profitable for VK. It should consider it a loss lead for the foreseeable future and use it to strengthen its market position. This is not to say they shouldn’t start experimenting with monetization, they definitely should.

Key strategic points for VK:

  1. Stay away from subscription models for now – it is really complicated to convince people to start paying for something they’re used to getting for free. It’s something big parts of the music industry have struggled with for decades now – don’t let this thinking infect your business model.
  2. Carefully study the social data behind VK music communities – what drives interaction, what makes things go viral, what excites people, etc. VK, like Facebook, is in the ads business. These factors are not just crucial for developing new products, but also for their core business model.
  3. Focus on building a new social product for mobile that would fare well in today’s messenger landscape. One of its most important ingredients should be music.
  4. Add mictrotransactions. It’s the easiest way to get people to pay for digital goods in emerging markets. People are not used to recurring subscriptions, many people have pay-as-you-go mobile plans, and microtransactions play nice with mobile wallets, which reduces friction around payments.
  5. Do NOT connect the microtransactions directly to music. Get people to pay for things other than music, but use the music to drive those purchases. For example, imagine if musical.ly were to charge users for video filters. Creating the association of paying for music will kill your business before starting. First, let people get used to making payments around music. VK already has experience in selling virtual goods, like avatars, virtual flowers, etc.

I believe microtransactions, in VK’s case, are more likely to bring repeat revenue from users, at a larger scale, than subscriptions can. If they must do subscription — offer new functionality instead of pay-gating what users already had for free. Make it different from established players like Zvooq or Yandex.Music, or from Spotify which tried to launch in Russia and then withdrew. Bear in mind Soundcloud’s and YouTube’s difficulties in converting free users to subscribers. It’s notoriously difficult to convert users from unlimited free to paid. Price for impulse decisions, so people pay before doing the math that they can do workarounds to get the music they want without paying.

VK, now licensed, is probably the largest social music service. Where music services have always struggled to create a functional social layer, VK has managed to blend music and social networking seamlessly. It will be interesting to see what’s next.


Written for my weekly newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing and subscribing — it’s of great help.

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4 Products That Show the Future of Music

Tomorrow is the product of today, so let’s take a look at the innovative tools artists, brands, promoters and labels are using to bring about music’s near-future.

SoundStage: Make Music in VR

http://soundstagevr.com/

soundstage

SoundStage lets users immerse themselves in a virtual environment full of tools and instruments to create music. Not quite ready to seriously compete with digital audio workstations (DAWs), but its early days for VR so it will be interesting to see what products like this turn into once they reach maturity.

Thought: virtual reality doesn’t adhere to real world physics, which means we can be much more creative in designing instruments and interfaces for music creation.

Similar: TheWave VR

Qrash: Connecting Promoter & Audience

https://www.qrash.nl/

qrash

Qrash lets users find the best events in their area and get good deals on them. The biggest promise for this app is getting last minute deciders to your venue, spontaneously. In cities like Amsterdam or Berlin, where nightlife stretches deep into the morning, it’s particularly useful, because if you have a sold out event, but half of the people leave at 3am after the headliner is done, you can offer discounted fares to people who show up to fill the club back up. Qrash is currently in an early stage and only active in The Netherlands for now. If I were a VC, I’d be having some serious talks with this team.

Thought: by keeping audiences connected to event organisers in real-time, apps can solve inefficiencies in the live business that date back to the pre-internet age.

Similar: Jukely

Hardwell Bot: Automated Artist-Fan Interaction

https://www.producthunt.com/tech/hardwell-bot

You know what’s hotter than Pokémon Go? Messenger bots. Nah, just kidding, but messenger bots are pretty hot too. We Make Awesome Sh has created a bot for one of the world’s biggest DJs: Hardwell. It lets fans vote on new tracks, send in fan art, give voice shoutouts that may be featured on his weekly podcast, access merch, and subscribe to alerts.

Thought: how can bots be used to increase fans’ feeling of proximity? Can artist bots provide experiences that are valuable enough to monetize?

Similar: Record Bird, AudioShot

Landmrk: Geocaching Music

http://www.landmrk.it/

landmrk

Landmrk lets you attach content to specific locations — when a user is at that location, they can unlock the content. It allows for white labeling, so it’s easy to imagine revenue generating business models for this. Imagine: partnership between apparel brand and artist. Visit the branches to get access to free, full tracks of the upcoming album.

Thought: there are three ingredients to strong brand partnerships:

  1. Good artist-brand synergy
  2. Great music
  3. An engaging tool

Similar: AudioDrops, Central Park


Written for my weekly newsletter MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. If you enjoyed reading this, please consider sharing and subscribing — it’s of great help.

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Wtf is Pokémon Go and what does it say about the future of music?

Instead of being a responsible adult this weekend, I went out to catch Pokémon around my city on my skateboard. It’s a beautiful game. Here’s one of the places it took me to:

windmill

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past 72 hours, you must have heard of Pokémon Go by now. You might already have seen players wandering around, looking for a particular Pokémon.

Nintendo’s new hit game seems to fulfil the dream millennials grew up with: to travel across the land, searching far and wide, and catch each Pokemon to understand the power that’s inside (). Within two days of its release on July 6, it already had more installs than Tinder, and matches Twitter in amount of daily active users (link).

pokemon go vs tinder twitter

Social media platforms are filled with amazing stories from good to bad, rich to simple.

Layering different realities

The game makes you walk around ‘the real world’ and catch Pokémon. Everyone sees the same activity zones on their map. If there’s a rare Pokémon nearby and you’re in a densely populated area, chances are you’ll meet other players. Then there are Pokéstops, often linked to statues and monuments, which give you special items that help you catch more Pokémon.

Pokémon Go is the first big augmented reality (AR) success. With its filters, Snapchat has already shown that AR is ready to go mainstream for communication and entertainment purposes. Pokémon Go takes it a step further by taking the ‘information layer’ and mixing it with the offline layer. There is so much information available online about all the things we pass on our daily commutes. Now a video game shows how to layer this information onto the real world in order to create a new and engaging experience.

It makes sense. Video games have some of the most advanced interfaces. Products can sometimes get away with bad user experience (UX), but compensate with functionality. Video games are UX.

But I hear you thinking…

Cool story bro, but wtf does this have to do with the future of music?

Music is heavily impacted by changes in technology. When recording & pressing became cheap, a niche part of the music business suddenly became known as ‘the music industry’. Album artwork proliferated due to the arrival of cheap printing (H/T Roey Tsemah who mentioned this in our panel at Border Sessions). The mass spread of colour TVs added the music video to the essentials that need to be taken care of when releasing a single.

Now, we all have connected devices in our pockets that are more powerful than the computers on our desks a few years ago. So far, music as a format hasn’t changed much. But this type of change happens slowly, then suddenly. Music no longer has to be static by default, and it won’t be. It will be 3-dimensional, it will be interactive, it will be adaptive, it will be intelligent, it will be augmented.

Music has been augmenting reality for 35 years

Sitting on the metro with classical music augments your experience. So does biking through nature with punk rock. For many of you, or your parents, a Walkman was your first mobile device, not a phone. Some of us can’t even imagine going outside without our headphones. We need music to augment our daily activities.

One day there will be a major platform for adaptive music. In a way, it will be something like Pokémon Go. With challenges, unlockables, microtransactions and trading. A real economy where the money-rich, time-poor can benefit from the value created by the time-rich, money-poor.

It will have a global catalogue of songs, which are non-static. This means you can let them react to your environment or activities, but not necessarily. By leveling up, you can unlock new parts of the catalogue, new features, new filters. If you happen to have an amazing session with a non-static piece of music, you can save it, so you can hear it again or friends can listen to it. These types of activities help you level up and earn you virtual currency.

Clever entrepreneurs are working on these platforms right now. Some have been for years. There’s GEOBEAT, a recent Midem Labs finalist. There’sWeav, by one of the Google Maps creators. Whitestone, a platform for interactive audiovisual experiences. RjDj, by one of the Last.fm founders (RjDj is defunct, though recently released a new app ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (??)).

Each of these have a different way of bringing about this future. It doesn’t even have to be about one platform — what I wrote is just a sketch.

What matters is this:

  • Technology changes music itself
  • Music has not yet responded (much) to the last 2 decades of development of mobile technology
  • Music has always played a role in augmenting our reality
  • Augmented reality is the base of the next generation of music and music business

And it’s not starting now. It has already started.


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

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Are pay-per-stream royalties costing artists tens of thousands of dollars?

Is it fair that a 50-second song costs the same as a 20-minute composition? Back in the days of album-driven sales, track length didn’t matter much. If an album contains 50 tracks of 1 minute each (punk, grindcore), it would sell for roughly same price as an album with 3 tracks lasting 20 minutes each (post-rock, ambient).

Streaming services have changed this. Payouts occur on a per-stream basis. All songs treated equally. This means that if the amount paid per-stream is something like $0.005, Godspeed You! Black Emperor would make just 2 cents every time someone listens to Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (runtime: 1h27m).

Royalty rates are variable and depend on total revenue vs total amount of plays. Spotify uses this formula:

spotify royalty formula

I took a look at Spotify’s top 50, since they publicly communicate the number of playbacks. Assuming a pay-per-stream rate of $0.005, which may differ from reality, I summed the total plays to understand the volume of the royalty pool and the cut each track would take. Then I took into account track lengths and compared the two. The difference for Spotify’s top hits runs into tens of thousands of dollars — per song.

streaming seconds winners

streaming seconds losers

If charts were based on time spent per song, rather than total number of plays per song, here are the biggest risers:

  • Drake “Controlla” (24 → 15)
  • Nick Jonas “Close” (32 → 23)
  • G-Eazy “Me, Myself & I” (35 → 26)

And the biggest fallers:

  • Mike Perry “The Ocean” (27 → 36)
  • Shawn Mendes “Treat You Better” (16 → 25)
  • Major Lazer “Light It Up (Remix)” (15 → 31)

Changes in accounting make a multi-million dollar difference

The top of Spotify’s global chart is not the most important area in terms of implications. The implications are greatest for artists and labels who produce music in genres that are structurally paid less per minute than other genres.

Spotify currently claims to have 100 million monthly active users. 30% of which are subscribers. They’re adding 1.8 million users per month. 80% of Spotify users use it multiple times a week, 25% use Spotify more than 20 days per month. It likely serves over a billion streams daily. Apple Music has13 million paying subscribers. Other services hold millions more of users. All streaming hours and hours of music each month. According to the IFPI, streaming revenues amounted to $2.9 billion in 2015.

Massive pies are being built that need to be split fairly. Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan recently uncovered that indie music’s global market share is closer to 38% rather than the 20% conventionally believed and added:

“This matters not for bragging rights but because in the digital marketplace, market share shapes the deals that are struck, with more market share translating into better terms. So a more accurate measure of share can help the independent sector compete on fairer terms.”

Debates need to occur about market share, pay-per-stream versus time-based royalties, and the way subscription payments are divided. Streaming services are not the ultimate deciders in this: they’re locked into pay-per-stream royalties with the industry through contracts with differing renewal or extension cycles. Therefore, these changes need wide coalitions to occur. It would also help to have a truly competitive music streaming market that nurtures models beyond the typical $10/month all-you-can-eat services.

Streaming is here to stay. It’s a necessary layer for a healthy music landscape. In this landscape, it’s currently very difficult for artists to practice autonomy over the pricing of their music. Two $20 albums of equal length receive completely different payments for the same amount of plays if their track counts differ.

Is that fair?

streaming rates table


Disclaimer: the royalty rate used in this article is based on an assumption and taken from a Billboard article dating back a year. In reality, royalties are slightly more complex eg. through subscribers’ streams counting heavier than ad-supported users’. Any total numbers resulting from using this assumption are therefore completely fictional.

However, even fictional numbers are useful in debating this. Whether the exact number per specific track is smaller or greater doesn’t matter. We’re still talking about how billions of dollars are distributed each year.

Hat tip to Cherie Hu for early feedback and sharing some data points.

Top image: Ocean of Sorrow, a work by Javad Alizadeh (CC/BY/SA).


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

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