When to leverage platforms, and when to own your audience

Platforms born out of the web 2.0 wave of internet startups, like Facebook, Medium, and Spotify, have done a great job bringing huge audiences together. But building your presence on their platforms can come at the cost of them owning your link to your audience.

I was having a small discussion on Twitter with Arnon Woolfson, a smart strategist in entertainment, brands, and partnerships, which arose in response to Facebook now allowing you to link Groups to Pages, allowing for easier management of fan communities.

Personally, I see a lot of opportunity in this. Facebook is pushing groups as a feature (meaning it’s more visible in news feeds), and I’ve long been a proponent for making sure your fan base is interconnected. However, rightly so, Arnon had some objections, particularly regarding not having good control over your fan relationship.Ā Music streaming coop Resonate‘s founderĀ Peter Harris even went as far as to call it digital serfdom, which is a powerful analogy.

Digital serfdom

The idea is that in order to be able to attain success, you more or less have to leverage aforementioned web 2.0 platforms. As you leverage these platforms to build your connection to fans, the ones to get the most value out of that are not the participants of the relation, but the platform itself. This is a tragic reality of the dominant model for the social web as it has emerged in the last 15 years.

This is also something that will continue to be the status quo until platforms that offer an alternative distribution of value manage to create products and communities that are as sticky and as compelling as the ones they’re competing with.

When to leverage

I believe one of the key skills for people building up profiles in the digital age – whether bands, brands, or personal – is being able to move audiences from one platform to another. You should focus on 2 or 3 platforms at a time, leveraging the ones that work best for your specific purposes.

The number 1 thing young companies, brands, or artists cannot afford is friction. ItĀ has to be easy to discover your music or product. Then you have to do everything you can to make sure you can reach those people who discovered you a second time. For me, Twitter filled this role for a long time: discover my writings, follow me on Twitter, and then see my future writings. Then one and a half year ago, I decided to ‘cash out’ my Twitter following by converting them into a newsletter following. I now have over 1,500 email addresses of people who work in similar fields, and can reach them directly to their inbox (and do so every week).

Twitter stopped being effective for me. Less than 10% of my followers were actually seeing my tweets. Now, my weekly newsletters have an open rate of over 50%. For a long time I published my articles onĀ Medium, and then that stopped being effective, so I stopped (I’ve noticed positive changes recently so I started publishing there again occasionally). I always usedĀ Medium as a platform to drive people to my newsletter.

If a platform stops being effective for you: stop using it.

Don’t invest too much time into it. Make sure you can reach your followers through other channels, and then focus on those channels that are most effective.

When to own

Focus on ownership, e.g. bringing fans to your own app or club, when that is more convenient for the fans too. Else you’re going to lose a lot of opportunities, because perhaps only 1 in 20 people will convert from Facebook to your app, and you’ll have put a lot of energy into something that simply doesn’t work well.

Spend a lot of time thinking about your long term goals and what kind of data you’d need in order to successfully measure how well you’re doing. Then look at whether the platforms you’re leveraging offer that data or not. If not, figure out a way that you might be able to drive behaviour from those places to other places where you can get that data. If that’s no good, then you need to figure out how to get your audience onto a platform that gives you more ownership.

This was one of my issues with Medium: I couldn’t get enough data on my audience. I didn’t really know where they were coming from, and didn’t know who was clicking what, what part of my audience was returning, etc. With my newsletter and own website I know this perfectly.

That’s why I was happy to hear about the Facebook Groups announcement, because I could start building a community for the newsletter there while still maintaining ownership over the data & relation to them. (the group is called MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE Backstage)

A golden rule?

Leverage digital serfdom. Even if you want to change that system: it’s easier to corrupt and co-opt it than to completely avoid it.

Create a place or channel you own: this can be through email, SMS, or other, but it’s important you get enough data from it, and you can provide people with an incentive to join your channel this way. Then when leveraging any platform, always figure out how you can use it to add people to your owned channels.

No need to reinvent the wheel. No need to build your personal ‘Facebook for fans’. Just use what works, while it works, and always be ready to move on to the next channel.

The best writing tip I ever got

Back in high school, one of my favourite teachers was this guy in his 50s who taught natural sciences. He had a lot of humour and actually treated us like adults. He did this by making everyone understand that they’re there for their own education and he was merely there to help. If you weren’t interested, fine, don’t come.

This was 15 years ago, so I’ve forgotten most of what he told us, but there’s one sentence I will always remember. He was complaining about the quality of the papers that were being handed in, which were mostly factually correct but contained a lot of grammatical and spelling errors. He said:

If you can’t be bothered to read over your own work at least once before handing it in, why do you expect me to want to read it?

Proofreading sucks. Especially on a deadline. I think in uttering that line, he was probably just talking about respect, but it stayed in my head for years.

This one line helped me become a better writer. I only write things I’d want to read myself, and I try to write in a style that I enjoy reading. If my proofread is not enjoyable, I won’t publish. This actually just happened prior to penning this piece. I wrote an article about how music startup founders overestimate the value of music. It’s a thought I’ve been playing with for a while, but while proofreading the piece I realized it’s not there yet. So I’ll owe you that one.

This is not just about writing. This is about making things. If you don’t enjoy the process of revisiting that thing you make and going through it again and again, then you shouldn’t expect others to find joy in it either.

Make with love. With joy. And always keep in mind: you’re the first to be confronted by the results of your creation.

AI-created non-human music will need human narratives

To me, it’s beyond a doubt that we’ll all be listening to AI-created music within a few decades, and probably much sooner. The most important way in for this type of music is mood playlists. After the first couple of songs on such playlists, most people tune the music out and get back to their main activity. Does it really matter who has created the song then? Does it matter whether they’re alive? Does it matter whether they’ve ever been alive at all?

[EDIT Aug 15: a small disclaimer since a piece linking here makes an incorrect claim. I don’t thinkĀ allĀ AI-created music needs a human narrative. I believe the future contains a lot of adaptive, and generative music. More on my point of view in this piece: Computers won’t have to be creative]

We are all creative, and therefore I think it doesn’t matter whether computers will be able to be creative. We are creative as listeners. Computers will be able to predict what we like, then test thousands of versions on playlists until they have the exact right version of the song. As a matter of fact, AI offers the prospect of personalized music, or music as precision medicine as The Sync Project calls it.

A point that’s made often is that AI-created music lacks part of the story people expect with music. People bring it up as an obstacle that can’t be overcome, but it feels like that’s just because of a decision to stop thinking as soon as the point is brought up. Let’s think further.

For one, I think AI-created music already is and will continue to be born in collaboration with people. People will increasingly take the role ofĀ curators of music created through algorithms. Secondly, why not give music a story?

Last week at IDAGIOĀ Tech Talks, the music streaming service for classical music where I’m Product Director, we had the pleasure of hearingĀ Ivan Yamshchikov talk about his neural network capable of music composition. With his colleague, Alexey Tikhonov, they fed their system 600 hours of compositions and had it compose a new work in the style of Scriabin.Ā The human narrative was added at the end: as it was performed live by acclaimed musicians (see below).

This is how you get people to knowingly listen to music by artificial intelligence. Most consumption of AI music will be through ignorance of the source of the music. Yet people will warm up to the idea of AI being involved in the music creation process, just like they warmed up to electric guitars, samplers, and computers being used as instruments.

And that’s the narrative that will make it human: artificial intelligence as an instrument which requires a whole new skill set for artists to successfully work with it, and evoke in listeners what they want to.

I’m a millennial and I share more music through Instagram Stories than any other medium

The top row on Instagram excites me. I check Instagram more often & only bother scrolling down the feed once a day, if I don’t forget. I’ve previously explained how Instagram’s Snapchat-cloned Stories functionality represents a great marketing opportunity for artists. Now I want to signify its broader importance to music, and social media in general.

Instagram's top row containing stories
Instagram’s top row containing stories

āš ļø You should be paying a lot of attention to Instagram Stories

Remember Facebook back in 2007-2010? Back when people were still posting Facebook updates in third person?

2008-style third person Facebook status update
2008-style third person Facebook status update

Back then, Facebook was so compelling to just post stuff to. It was useful and fun, despite having to write status updates in third person being kind of awkward.

People would post a lot. Interaction would be high. Much of what people were posting was public. Then everyone’s family started to join. Random people from different moments in your life started adding each other. And more recently I’ve been getting more friend requests from people I know professionally than LinkedIn invites.

Facebook is not fun anymore.

Facebook is useful, but it’s not fun. People are more careful about what they choose to post. And now, people who have been using the internet since the 90s are reaching retirement age. Your family is going to be on Facebook all day; watching you.

Just posting quick thoughts on Facebook makes no sense anyway. My Facebook used to be full of “anyone want to grab a drink tonight?” but now you can’t be sure if that message even gets seen by friends. Facebook is not a timely medium anymore. If you want to do ‘spontaneous drinks’ with random friends, you better post a status update 2 days in advance.

Instagram used to be fun

The thing people used to say about Instagram, was that that’s where all the young people fled as their parents and other relatives started using Facebook. It was fun, because it was actually instant: you had a sense of what friends were up to. The filters made it easy to make decent photos and have them look ok, or artsy, or whatever.

But over time, people grew aware once more that what they post is there to stay, started feeling self-conscious, and a lot of the fun faded.

Fun is why people create

When people are having fun they interact, they dance, they talk, they laugh, they share, they kiss, and they open up. This is why Facebook was so good: people were mindlessly posting things because it was fun. Then they became self-conscious. This is why Instagram was so good, but then people became self-conscious. And this is what Snapchat absolutely nailed with their ephemeral content.

I doubt Snapchat invented the idea, but their timing of launching an app where users can share moments that expire every 24 hours was perfect. Their augmented reality filters gave people a way to keep sharing, to keep creating, even when they were uninspired. Super fun.

How Instagram became fun again

Facebook, which owns Instagram, tried to buy Snapchat, but their offer was declined. I guess the Silicon Valley version of “if you can’t beat them, join them” goes:

“If they won’t join you, copy them.”

So that’s what they did.

Instagram became fun again. Their filters are slowly becoming better, but Snapchat still has them beat: it doesn’t really matter. Instagram has this ecosystem of personalities that are looking to get discovered, looking to bind audiences to them, and Instagram is a great way to get new people to find you.

You use image posts with hash tags to get people to find you (and those lame auto follow/unfollow scripts). Instagram models also use Tinder‘s Instagram integration: they just go match with a lot of people and then some of them will convert to Instagram followers. And then, through Instagram Stories you keep your audience engaged with you, at least once every 24 hours.

How I’m using Instagram Stories

I tend to watch all of my friends’ stories. I’ve never really cared for following personalities or brands on Instagram, but most of my friends do that, and they also check those stories.

I post videos and photos to my stories basically daily, and often 5 to 15 a day. You don’t worry too much about what you post: it expires, and if it’s bad you know that people can just flick through stories fast anyway. This gives incentive to create powerful content too: you know it has to be fun from the first second, and you know having some diversity makes people come back to your stories often.

Things I post:

  • ‘Moments’: being in the office on Sunday, travel, having lunch with friends, nice views, parties, etc.;
  • Hints: previews of what I’m working on (I actually added the title of this article to a story);
  • Calls: “anyone want to join me for…?” — it really doesn’t matter what the picture that goes with it is, as long as it’s fun and doesn’t confuse. I was looking for someone to join me to IKEA and I put that call in a pic with graffiti.
  • Time-lapse vids: these are a really fun way to put a lot of content in one short story and communicate action, e.g. moving from the office to a party on Friday;
  • Vids of vids:Ā fits into moments, but basically if you’re at home watching artsy YouTube videos, weird Japanese commercials, memes, whatever, you can post quick snaps of that too — it helps with diversity & it’s FUN;
  • Creative:Ā doing funky stuff with the filters, pinning surfers šŸ„Ā to foam in the bath tub while the water flows, reality distortion like Hyperspektiv, using Pantone‘s photo app, etc.;

And then there is music.

Why I’m using Instagram Stories to share music

In that context, using Instagram Stories to share music makes so much sense, it’s so much fun.

When you post a 4 minute YouTube video to Facebook, nobody listens. Ok, maybe that 1 dude that always reacts with a lot of emoji, but nobody else. When you insert a short clip combined with an interesting visual into your Instagram Stories, you have a captive audience.

I wrote about Instagram Stories last month, and I don’t like repetition, but I’m so excited about this: the web is about doing what gets you the most attention, and the highest quality attention. I don’t know any other medium, other than my newsletter, that gives me a better type of attention than Instagram Stories.

And my newsletter is basically professional. So if it’s just about friends, then Instagram Stories is the best for me.

Plus people engage! Instead of acknowledging you by clicking a meaningless like button or heart icon, they actually reply to your public stories. With words! Like human beings!

They’ll say: “wow, that’s such a cool track, I didn’t know you were into that too!” or “did you know they have a concert soon?” or “what is this? can you send me more of this?”

Media changes music

The record changed music. MTV changed music. Then the internet changed music by allowing the emergence of global undergrounds. The playlist economy changed music because producers now optimize tracks to lower the skip rate, bringing the vocals into the first few seconds of the track.

The Stories format could further affect music, because it stresses the importance of making an impact with a song, even if people hear just a few seconds of any part of it. Good music has that already, so fingers crossed: we’ll see much more great music made.

Follow me on Instagram: @basgras

Read more:

How pop replaced folk music & how we’ll get it back through tech

I finally figured out one of my life goals. I want to make our shared collective culture more participative. Itā€™s abstract, but itā€™s the first time in my life that Iā€™ve been really confident about the fact that Iā€™ll be happy to spend decades on solving a problem.

Some people are planners; they know exactly what they will be doing 5 years from now. I donā€™t even know what continent Iā€™ll be living on then ā€” let alone what Iā€™ll be doing. But that changed, partly through MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE, but also by the kind of crossroads presented to me when I needed to make the choice between joining IDAGIO or continuing MxTxF as an agency.

Iā€™d been there before. Over a decade ago, I was dropping out of the second study I had started. I knew my parents would be furious if I didnā€™t bundle the announcement of dropping out with an announcement and a clear direction for what I did want. Iā€™m not the type of person to set clear goals for these things and then chase them ā€” it doesnā€™t give me the intrinsic motivation I need, and most goals are materialist and arbitrary. Iā€™m an intuitive person, so I needed to do some introspection & look for patterns that would reveal what are those intrinsic motivators.

At that time, I found that Iā€™m fascinated by all aspects of communication ā€” from advertising, to intercultural communication, social psychology, mass marketing, even product development. So thatā€™s what I studied.

This time, I noticed a new pattern, which is one of the recurring themes in what Iā€™ve been doing since I left university. Noticing this helped me set new goals and prioritize various things: doing MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE as an agency would expose me to many different things, but I wasnā€™t sure it would give me the depth that I needed to grow as a professional. I donā€™t want to be a consultant, I want to build things, and help people build things: creating a better world in the process. Joining IDAGIO meant an opportunity to continue developing myself to become one of the best product people in digital music, solve an important problem, and prove that companies can thrive by focusing on ā€˜niche’ behaviours in music.

Now letā€™s get back to the goal and the title of this piece.

The last century radically changed music. Through the recording becoming the default way in which people consume music, major things changed:

  • Music got less participative: you can just hit the play button, instead of playing an instrument or singing;
  • Music got more individualistic;
  • Music got static and would sound the same every time you hear it;
  • Music got more corporate, because the rise of the recording went hand in hand with mass consumerism.

One of the most clever tricks in consumption culture has been to convince people to express themselves by buying, consuming, instead of creating. Fashion cycles have us replacing perfectly good wardrobes.

More importantly, the shared songs of our culture were replaced by corporate-owned pop music.

I talk a lot about how I think music will become more dynamic, less static, more interactive, more adaptive, but I think ā€˜pop musicā€™ is important. We need songs that everyone around us knows, songs to sing along to, to joke with, to play in a party and everyone instantly knows how to go along with it.

This used to be folk music: musicians would hear songs from traveling musicians, and then make them their own. Now that dynamic of ownerless songs, performed by many, has been replaced by pop of which the original is always attributed to 1 performer.

I think itā€™s important that we take away the song from the single performer and make it live among many performers (this is also why I find classical music so interesting). That sounds like a very bold thing to do, and would require a massive change in culture, but actually itā€™s more simple.

We have computers in our pockets that are more powerful than the computers on our desks a few years ago. Weā€™re reaching the end of the smartphone cycle: weā€™re introducing artificial intelligence, smart sensors, and voice-activated devices into out lives. Soon enough, entering commands into a smartphone is going to look as archaic as using MS-DOS would be to a teenager now.

Music has always been quick to react to technology: two of the biggest streams in music right now, hiphop and electronic, were both born out of a shift in technology. We are living in a world on which digital information is increasingly layered on our every day reality. Things are interactive, on-demand, and social. Music as a media format is actually behind on this, but it took hiphop and electronic music 20 or 30 years to reach maturity, for a long time operating outside of what was allowed in legal but also aesthetic terms.

The music of the future will do a better job at involving the listener than 20th century music has. The tragedy of last centuryā€™s music was that it paired with consumption culture, which locked the listener out of meaningful participation, but now the ā€˜listenerā€™ is actively remixing memes, making GIFs, and doing playbacks on Musically in order to communicate with friends.

The new creative generation is coming up, and for them, newly created culture will have a participative dimension by default.

Thanks for reading – hope it was all coherent. I’m in bed with flu, but never missed a Monday deadline for my mail-outs and I intend on never changing that.