Only 1% of a musicians’ life happens on stage, the rest is careering

One of the key things I took away from being a part of the Music Business Day at the University of Utrecht last weekend is that there’s ways to balance the weaknesses and opportunities that the pandemic has respectively exposed and opened up. I’ll look into this by focusing on four things to consider that Catherine Moore highlighted in our panel on ‘music futures, near and far’:

  • People
    • How to measure the market?
  • Place
    • How does music enrich the environment in which we live?
  • Public health
    • What is the role of music & musicians to support mental health?
  • Communication
    • Change the vocabulary around how music works within, e.g., a city: music venue is a sound manager not a noise maker. How do we communicate across disciplines?

Do you really want to be a musician?

When Jonathan Irons mentioned that only 1% of a musicians’ life takes place on stage, it presented a hook that allowed everyone else on this day of music business to contextualize. So much of what we feel is ‘the music industry’ focuses on the live experience. Fans mythologize live events and artists need to perform at 100% night after night on stage. Yet, there’s so much happening around those brief moments that musicians experience on stage. It’s there that musicians, or agencies, or labels, etc. can build a brand and a franchise out of the music.

That’s one thing that became clear: musicians need to treat their music as a business. And the second thing is that if the artist cannot do it, there’s an opportunity for another business to step in and help the artist sell their music. Most musicians grapple with all the many things that are expected from them: keep track of your social media, practice, do community management, write new music, practice more, and so on. Being able to do that requires time and money. As Sarah Osborn, of UK-based Incorporated Society of Musicians, mentioned, employment is one of the weaknesses that the pandemic has exposed within the music industry. So much in the business relies on freelancers and the question was raised whether the music industry will go the way of the acting profession. Will it become normal for a professional musician to have another job and just music doesn’t provide a sustainable life in and of itself?

We discussed this part of the music industry with the students to help them step into it with their eyes wide open and that it’s necessary to approach the portfolio career. Professor Emile Wennekes pushed everyone to put their names out there, either by publishing your music, writing about music, or even engaging in policy. Having set this stage, the day took a turn around Anthony Gritten‘s notion that we should look at career as a verb.

Careering through the music industry

People

When we start to think about the music business as a network that involves a lot of performativity this allows us to reshape our roles within it. Moreover, it takes those brief moments of live interaction between musicians and fans and networks them into more stages of reciprocity. When starting any venture, it’s important to know your market, to analyse your potential audience and find out where they are. If you make music, for example, you can use Spotify for Artists, Chartmetric, etc. to understand where your music is popular. A next step is to create something that brings benefits to both you and the fan. This is the staple of the creator economy, something that underlines the 1000-fan and 100-fan theories. There’s plenty to argue against this theory, but the essence sits behind every creator with a Patreon, every newsletter author who monetizes through Substack, and every band with a Shopify website.

Place

Music has the ability to enrich the environment in which we live and move. Starting with R. Murray Schafer (check out the World Soundscape Project), there’s a whole scholarship on ‘the soundscape’ and its role in determining how people relate to their surroundings. With Barry Truax this notion developed into something more attuned to design, something to influence. What our discussions during the Music Business Day added to this is that we need to embrace more the idea of music as a utility. Creating music for and bringing music into places to help improve experiences, interactions, and even personal psychology is not ‘selling out’ but a valid way to create and add value.

Public health

On the one hand this topic segues nicely from the previous argument around ‘place’. Creating music, making playlists, performing wellbeing are all great ways to help situate music in the cross-section of adding value for the musician and a fan (or not even necessarily a fan in this case). Moreover, there’s plenty of research to support that music has a positive effect both on health care and its associated costs. On the other hand, there’s the mental health risks for musicians, exacerbated by the current pandemic. With many musicians already having trouble securing a modal income through their music, taking out income related to session work and live performance made that even harder.

Communication

Terminology matters. It matters how we communicate and which vocabulary we use. Just think of how different it is to consider a music venue in a city a sound manager instead of noise maker. One key group working hard to change our vocabulary when it comes to music is Sound Diplomacy. Their objective is to show how music, and culture in general, bring economic, social and cultural growth to cities. One thing the pandemic has done is to shine a light on what music and culture bring to the table and how those industries could even help to kickstart the economy post-pandemic. Rebuilding Europe, research conducted by EY for GESAC, the European collective societies, shows that before Covid-19 hit the music industry grew 4% year-over-year, then, in 2020, it shrunk by 76%. And yet, because of the social cohesion attached to music and the power of communication connected to music it has strong potential to help bring about both a social and economic upturn as and when we start to move through the final stages of the pandemic. To help facilitate that, we’ll need to choose our words carefully.

Overall a day of music business left me with a firm notion that there’s only music industries instead of a singular music industry. At the end of the day, we were all quietly optimistic about the future with exciting changes happening right now to how music is created, performed, and consumed. And yet, there was also a strong sense that music needs to increase social capital and that a political voice is necessary to navigate what will be a rocky recovery from the impact of the pandemic.

Start small

This is for all my newsletter readers, or for anyone else building products, launching campaigns, or figuring out how to apply innovation to what they do on a day-to-day basis.

With all the options out there, things can get overwhelming.

You see the status quo, and know things need to change. Lots of things. And so you start making your plan.

You start using all those things you see tech reporters talking about, all the latest toys from Product Hunt, shiny new technologies and programming languages, perhaps you’ll even add blockchain, AI, and do some growth hacking.

And then you don’t get things done.

Either because you’re always shifting attention and don’t see things through, or just because you spend too much time on things that don’t matter. Or both.

For most of us reading this, the question is: is this something people are interested in? Not conceptually, not intellectually, but would they actually use it regularly? Would they pay for it? Would you do things the way you are doing if you already knew it wasn’t going to work?

Serial maker and digital nomad Pieter Levels advocates putting a buy button on websites even when the product isn’t ready. Even when you haven’t started on it. The button doesn’t have to work, it can just show a message that thanks people for their interest and asks for their email address. The point is, you’ve registered someone’s intent to commit.

Every week I speak to about 1,000 people in the music business. Maybe more. Those are the same people every week, and that group is growing. I do that through my newsletter. Which turned into a website, consultancy agency, and now a community. I get my articles cross-posted on popular music blogs, and in newsletters. I get people to cross-follow MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE on various social media, learned to convert people to my newsletter from said social media, generate referral traffic, convert article readers to subscribers, and automated all of those things. But it started small.

It’s me, picking a day of the week to write an article (sometimes long, sometimes short), pick the most interesting music & tech links I’ve come across, and then sending it out with the easiest newsletter tool I could find (Revue). The only tools I used initially were Medium and Revue: both free. I started small and it grew, so other things got added on. Now I have the honour to be able to bring the people I write about together into the same room as I help the c/o pop convention with music tech panel curation (explore the topics).

Start small.

If you want to do something, start doing it. Get good at it. Figure out what people expect and get better. If it takes a lot of effort or a long time to build what you want to build, find a way to build something that mimics it. For example, if you want to start a label, maybe start with a YouTube channel. If you want to start a music service, build a page with music that people regularly come back to.

It’s like building a bridge: your first priority is making sure people can get across – else you won’t even know if people will use it. Once that’s going well, move on to the next step. This is how you make it easy for yourself to make use of all those innovative things you see out there.

Start small.

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. Music streaming coop Resonate‘s founder 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. It 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 on 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 used 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.

My Midem wrap-up: Chatbots + marketing Run The Jewels panels

What a week. I spent it at Midem – one of the most well-known music business conferences organised every year in Cannes. Before I’m off to Sonár+D this week, I thought I’d type up a little update.

About 10 months ago, Midem‘s conference manager got in touch with me to see if we could put a panel together. We landed on the topic of chatbots and Messenger apps, because I think the trend signifies an important shift to a new generation of user interfaces (especially considering voice-activated UI, which will quickly be permeating our daily lives).

It was so great to finally be able to have all these people in the same room, and talk about what they’re doing, get their thoughts out, get them discussing with each other. And the line-up was awesome.

Panel: Messaging Apps, Bots, AI & Music: A New Frontier of Fan Engagement

A quick look at the line-up:

  • Ricardo Chamberlain, Digital Marketing Manager, Sony Music Entertainment (USA)
    Runs a very interesting label bot, which includes messages from artists such as Enrique Iglesias. He also worked on the CNCO campaign with Landmrk, which I’m a big fan of.
  • Luke Ferrar, Head of Digital, Polydor (UK)
    Launched the first chatbot with Bastille.
  • Gustavo Goldschmidt, CEO & Co-Founder, SuperPlayer (Brazil)
    Runs Brazil’s biggest streaming service which not only recommends music through a chatbot, but also builds chatbots for artists, which then drives fans to their service when they want to stream something.
  • Syd Lawrence, CEO & Co-Founder, The Bot Platform (UK)
    Launched the Hardwell bot, which is probably the most well-known example of chatbots being used in music.
  • Tim Heineke, Founder, POP (Netherlands)
    Used to run a cool startup named Shuffler.fm which turned blogs into radio stations and became a kind of StumbleUpon for music discovery, and also co-founded FUGA.
  • Nikoo Sadr, Interactive Marketing Manager, The Orchard (UK)
    One of the most brilliant minds in digital marketing, in general. Previously with Music Ally.

FULL VIDEO:

WRITE UP:

Messaging, bots, and AI’s music evolution by Music Ally’s Eamon Forde

Run The Jewels’ Marketing Panel

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I could also moderated the RTJ marketing panel — which would have been a no-brainer anyway, but having a personal connection to this, made me so excited to do it that I forgot to even introduce myself during the panel.

My first real music business job was with a startup called official.fm. As a student, I listened to a lot of underground and indie hiphop, which made me a big fan of the Definitive Jux label, which put out music by Aesop Rock, Mr. Lif, RJD2, and El-P (also one of the founders). The other founder was Amaechi Uzoigwe, who now manages Run The Jewels. I remember feeling a little starstruck at the time. Now, years later, it was so good to catch up with Amaechi and the inspiring success he’s created for RTJ and himself.

Also on the panel was Zena White, who’s MD of The Other Hand, and does great things for RTJ, Stones Throw, Ghostly, BadBadNotGood, DJ Shadow and more.

FULL VIDEO:

WRITE UP:

How Run The Jewels found fame & fortune: by focusing on fans by Music Ally’s Stuart Dredge

Creatives as victims: are artists really screwed?

With the platformization of the web, creatives are set up to compete for attention while the platforms that host their content benefit from monetization at scale. It’s an important issue, but to say creatives have been screwed over by default helps nobody, mostly because it’s incorrect.

When reading Jon Westenberg‘s recent comments about creatives’ current challenges, I found myself disagreeing with the premise and much of what stemmed from it. I feel it’s important to walk through the presented thoughts and refute them or at least provide a different perspective. I normally don’t do these types of articles, but since it’s such a widely shared piece, I feel it’s important to do this, because it’s an unconstructive mindset to adopt.

Creatives, seeing yourself as a victim doesn’t help you. It disempowers you. It gives you an off-putting aura that communicates a sense of entitlement. That’s not to say that you’re not entitled to fair pay and treatment. Just compare it to the work floor: you’re entitled to salary, but if you give off a sense of entitlement it will annoy colleagues, superiors, and clients.

Jon starts off with his own experiences as a writer and speaker, explaining how requests come in:

…until you tell them you want them to pay for your expenses or even a fee. Then they disappear pretty damn fast.

Which is your own fault for violating the golden rule — bloggers and writers must never try to get paid.

I’ve encountered this. For a long time, this used to be my personal golden rule: I was afraid that paid writing would take the fun out of it, but instead paid writing makes me a lot more comfortable with spending big chunks of time on research and narrative. Now, I’m very strategic about when I write for free and when I don’t. Some sites help me reach new audiences that wouldn’t otherwise encounter my writing. Some don’t. Some benefit from the visibility I can give them, and for some that doesn’t matter. Sometimes I’m just really busy and can’t afford to spend my time on unpaid writing.

When writing’s unpaid, I try to make sure I convert the audience to my Twitter account and newsletter. When writing’s paid, I leave the question of credits up to the client.

When I first started charging for writing, I was nervous, but now I’m comfortable with it. I get occasional requests, and some I’ll answer with a cost estimate. Some requests then disappear, indeed, but that’s fine – it’s part of my strategy, and I don’t expect people to know beforehand that I expect payment. The free writing I do fits into a wider strategy: it helps me build my network through which I acquire clients for consultancy work.

I’ve never experienced any type of animosity when charging money. It’s about managing expectations, clearly explaining yourself, and simply getting comfortable with asking for something.

It’s also becoming increasingly difficult to look at publishing online or being an artist or recording music or starting a publication as a full time career.

I think we’ve gone through the hardest phase. People are used to mobile payments and subscriptions for digital content now. Many people are familiar with crowdfunding. Publications like The Correspondent are showing that membership models with fair payment for writers are viable. Blendle shows micropayments for articles are viable when properly designed and introduced to the end user.

If you’re an independent artist or writer, you could set up a Patreon, where fans of your work pledge to make a fixed contribution for every piece you publish (this is something I’m considering for my newsletter (EDIT: done!)).

It’s getting increasingly viable to look at creativity as a full time career.

The big problem is not the money. It’s the attention you have to compete for. We’re all creators of content – so what’s the role of creatives?

If you do want to get into creative work, you’re going to have to see it as a side hustle. Not your main gig. That’s just the way it is.

This is actually good advice. Take time to build up your audience. Take time to figure out your business models. The business models of earlier days are not set in stone anymore. You need to be innovative. Don’t rely on the old. Don’t do new things in an old way. Find new ways.

We’ve made it easier than ever to make stuff, and harder than ever to make enough money to live. And every day, there’s a new “disruptive” startup that does more damage.

What they “disrupt” is creator’s profits, most of the time. That’s what music streaming did.

Woah, woah, woah. Have we forgotten about piracy? Piracy disrupted creators’ profits. In part, because certain industries thought they could hold back certain developments and buy more time. They couldn’t. Piracy soared, and then… Music streaming disrupted piracy.

People don’t want to pay for content. They want to consume it for free, or monetise it for themselves.

Sure. People don’t want to pay for chocolate. Don’t want to pay for a new smartphone. Don’t want to pay for a Toastmaster 3000 in just five easy instalments. But all those companies have figured out ways to get people to pay. The ones that didn’t are dead. There’s nothing that stops creatives from finding business models, but they need to bear in mind two important points:

  1. Optimize your business model so that you can compete for attention;
  2. Don’t look at the past for how to monetize.

For example, I usually tell musical artists to look at YouTubers instead of the recording business. YouTubers and livestreamers make great use of crowdfunding, donations, subscriptions, and sponsorships. Make that which generates attention available for free, so it travels far and wide, then monetize the scarce and exclusive. It’s the same basic principle I’ve been repeating since 2011, when I published my thesis about marketing music through non-linear communication (networks).

If you tell people you’re an artist, they’ll tell you that’s not much of a career path and you should get a real job.

Was this ever not true? Westenberg’s next point is that people building tech startups for artists are celebrated. This may be true (though he’d be surprised how many obviously dead-on-arrival startups there are). I think startups being celebrated by default mostly stems from people not understanding tech startups. As the phenomenon of tech startups matures and becomes more mainstream, it’s drawing a lot more criticism. I hear people on radio comparing startups to “getting unemployment compensation paid for by investors.”

The article’s most interesting bit looks at the amount of followers Nicki Minaj has on Instagram (77 million) and compares it to the amount of albums sold (800k). He follows it up with the following question:

If a mega star like Nicki Minaj has a conversion rate that low for actual sales, what does that mean for indie creators?

Conversion rates are likely much higher. Artists like Minaj have a lot of followers who are not fans. Or a lot of people who like the music, but are not that into it. Artists at such scale are public figures – people follow them and know about them, not just for their music, but also for their personalities and fame. Indie artists are more likely to have more engaged fans, and if they devise a smart strategy they can monetize more than just 1% of them. They don’t have to depend on the type of ‘mass’ strategies employed for acts like Minaj, which inevitably lead to low conversion rates.

We’re giving money to tech platforms to become “Unicorns” off the backs of creatives, and driving creatives out of business.

This is a legitimate issue. Personally, I’m excited by the discussions in the blockchain-scene, where people are trying to figure out how to fairly distribute the value generated by platforms’ participants. Other than that, you have to strategize: know when and how to use a platform and know when to turn your back on a platform. Make sure you’re in direct touch with your audience, so you can bring them with you when you move away from a platform.

In a reply to a commenter, Westenberg added the following:

Also — it’s an awful lot harder for a writer or an artist to get paid for playing concerts. And even if they did, they’re still not being paid for their creative work, they’re being paid for their personal appearance and that’s not the same thing.

It’s competition. People are willing to do it for free: that makes it hard to charge money for the same thing. And the latter part of his statement is true, but it’s arguably not so different from before. Did people buy plastic discs with music on them in order to pay for the creative work, or did they just like how the music made them feel? Do people pay for music because of the pure creativity or also because of the personality behind it?

You need to be smart about these dynamics and not fall into the trap of feeling helpless. Develop a personal strategy that will help you to effectively build and monetize a fanbase.

Yes, there are real problems. The platformization of the web is an issue, and automation could kill a lot more jobs, so it may be important that in this late stage of capitalism we divorce income from work, at least partly through something like an unconditional basic income. But then we’ll have even more people creating content, more people competing for those same eyeballs, and that is where the root of the problem lies.

Read next: Why should artists be able to make a living off of music?

The “F*ck the long tail” manifesto

Don’t spend your time on something broken, when you can do something that works even better.

Unless you’re a huge business with a lot of legacy to deal with, the shape of the long tail doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether music is getting increasingly “winner takes all”. This graph does NOT matter:

Long tail in music and movies
From: Mass entertainment in the digital age is still about blockbusters, not endless choice

Why it doesn’t matter

Going into music, you know that the economics are messed up. Everyone has told you so. Unless you haven’t told anyone you’re going into music. Even then — opening one music business blog will tell you the same thing. Constant bickering over the way money is distributed, who gets paid, how much, why not more, why not less, ticket scalping, streaming royalties, exclusives, royalty split disputes…

It’s not pretty.

So you know that you should not create a reality for yourself where you’ll be dependent on the outcome of the ugly side of the music business. Create one where it doesn’t matter.

As soon as you commit to that, the overall economic picture of the music industry won’t matter quite as much.

What matters most

You should be focusing on your music, and on your fans, and on people who make music just like you. Focus on positivity.

Money is not the problem. Your attitude is.

Be proactive. Tell people about your music constantly. Find out who the programmers are for the venues where you want to play. Who the authors are of blogs or YouTube channels that post similar music. Comment. Message them. Ask them for feedback. Be humble and positive.

One day they’ll give you a chance. But they have to SEE that you’re working hard at it, so document your progress. Post at least 5 things to social media every day. Maybe even 10. Snapchat and Instagram Stories make that SUPER easy.

If you’re a band: set everyone up with access. More content.

You need to stand out above all the noise and you need to sustain people’s attention, so they don’t forget about you, so they don’t move on, so you keep appearing in their Facebook timelines and their inbox.

People’s individual attention long tails are the only long tails that matter.

You have a camera on your phone. Get in front of it. Document. Share.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be genuine. If you work hard, it will get better over time. Then people will feel part of your narrative, part of your story… and that it was kinda shitty early on is actually great: people LOVE a good underdog story.

If you’re worried about being boring because you spend too much time in your studio — set up a livestream. Sure it could get boring, but there will be highlights.

What about the money?

Then you’re going to make money on your own. Away from the rat race. Away from the long tail. Your fans are part of your story. Set up a Patreon. Use Kickstarter to launch new projects. Give them a way to commit.

If you work hard at it, people are going to take note. Including people with money. Influencer marketing is one of the hottest areas in marketing right now. Sponsors are going to show up. Reject all of them, except for the ones that really make sense. Don’t trade in your fans for money. Be you.

If you have a huge excited fanbase, they’ll be LOUD. People will hear you. So the deals will come. The shows will come. Their size will grow and so will the money you make from them.

Work hard.

Ask questions.

Stay humble & positive.

And communicate your passion. ❤️️

(Oh yeah, and follow my newsletter 📰 and listen to Quibus 🎶)