Tag: community

Flipping the funnel: building your fanbase one fan at a time

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

When you’re a successful creator on YouTube, Twitch, or TikTok you need to post regularly. If you take two weeks off you break your business model. Some musicians are playing this game, others are holding on to single-single-album release strategies. They think about album years and work towards tours. This isn’t strange, since touring has been the biggest revenue-generating activity for artists in the past two decades. Part of the creator economy, though, is a move towards direct-to-fan, or perhaps more apt is to speak of direct-to-audience, monetization models. We’ve gone from crowdfunding to subscription and from just music to music experiences, or music that comes with perks that might have nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the personality behind the music. But what’s actually happening when you start monetizing your fans directly? Can you scale intimacy? And how do you flip the funnel to figure out which communities you should cater to in order to find your 100 superfans?

Scaling intimacy

Intimacy is first and foremost about creating a connection between two people or just a few people. Sometimes, a concert can feel intimate even if a band or performer is playing in front of thousands of people. Some musicians just have the skill and persona to give people the feeling they’re singing or playing to them directly. What this means is that they tap into the identity of the listener. One of the key elements of fandom is that the fan attaches their identity to the artist’s music they support. During a live show, this attachment can become a two-way street of interaction, or at least it feels that way for the fan.

Outside of the live concert, it becomes much more difficult to scale intimacy when it comes to music. Of course, it’s possible to livestream your music, but we’re still in the infancy of how to do that well and move beyond the horseless carriage syndrome. One option is to simply talk to your fans directly via meet & greets or similar. The success of this can be seen in the talent list of Looped, a service that provides the tech for various interactive experiences. There’s chefs, actors, athletes, but also lots of musicians. Most of the latter group don’t actually perform shows through Looped. Instead, they host ‘experiences’ where their fans get access to the artists they love in a way they otherwise couldn’t. This doesn’t scale like a concert, but it represents a form of digital intimacy. It can scale, for example, by doing it regularly, or by organising an hour of speed dating where an artist talks to 60 fans for 1 minute.

If we take a cue from some major brands, we see that they often achieve intimacy by finding alignment between their values and those of their consumers. In the creator economy, every artist is a brand and their fans want to align with their values. There’s a lot of over-the-top reactions to NFT drops and the environment, but it shows the power of this value alignment, especially when the alignment shifts. Put differently, intimacy at scale can only exist in a way that fits the values of the artist offering it. Similar to a company with a brand thinking about their ‘why’ before they do anything new and if that new thing fits that ‘why’, so too should artists consider if a new experience, or form of interaction, fits their ‘why’ and fits their community.

The importance of community

First of all, what is community? Or, what does community mean? For me, a community is about a sense of connection between people. To foster a community, or to build a community, means to foster those connections. If you’re good at that in an online environment, you have every chance of creating collective connections that people will want to pay for to be a part of. In one sense, music is the perfect conduit for community, because it inherently connects people. On the other hand music faces an uphill battle because it’s difficult to quantify that connection. Take Toms, the shoe brand that started the buy-a-shoe give-a-shoe model. This is a super easy-to-get model that aligns with a lot people’s values. It’s much more difficult for artists to create such a direct mission. Artists make music because they have an inherent need to. Externalizing that into things that represent the values of the artist and their music takes work.

The Toms comparison is apt in the sense that everyone needs shoes, just like everyone needs music. Some people care about the shoes they walk in, but some don’t care so much. Similarly, some people care what music they listen to, while others are happy to lean back and put on a playlist. If you want to monetize your fans directly, though, you need to be able to speak to them. In the playlist analogy, you need to get them to care enough to go look for you and your music elsewhere. How to get someone listening to a playlist to go your Bandcamp or Patreon page? Or, to put it more bluntly, how to find your 100 superfans?

The key element for Li Jin‘s thinking around 100 superfans is that you add real value to those fans’ lives to get them to pay you around $1000 per year. Premium content and community are strong elements of adding that value and extracting that money. So while we all love sharing our Spotify Wrapped data and that certainly creates a form of community, that’s not what Jin’s talking about here. Instead, this is a connected audience that interacts with the artist they’re all a fan of, but also interact with each other. In order for community to really work, the level of interaction needs to be sustained even without the person or band who built the community present. This allows for a different kind of thinking about how to build this community too, because you need considerable buy-in from the people inside the community.

Flipping the funnel

Traditionally, the funnel is broad at the top and slim at the bottom. You start with a large group of potential customers or consumers and narrow them down to the people who are actually interested in what you offer. If you decide to become a creator on Instagram, for example, your potential audience is around one billion people. Or, if you’re a creator on YouTube, you start off with a potential audience of two billion. Now let’s say that you have 5000 subscribers on your channel. How many of those people will actually convert to tipping you during your livestream? Or how many of those people will actually shift into paying you a monthly subscription fee for your content and some added perks?

Now, if we think about community as this interacting group of people that care about what you do and share your values, we can flip this funnel idea. Instead of starting with your TAM – your total addressable market – you start with a few people who are already interested in what you do. If you’re just starting out it’s okay if this is your parents and your best friends. Start somewhere and convince those people to, for example, take on your subscription fee. Then you start building from there. To do this, you need tools and your first fans need tools too.

The whole premise of Web3 is based on this kind of community I’m talking about here. As such, most of the tools built for Web3 solutions can help artists out here. As we know, however, there’s a barrier to entry for fans, and for artists, to jump on this train. Thankfully, there’s also plenty of ways to start sharing what you do, and for fans to share what they like, outside of Web3. The key element to flipping the funnel is to build a fanbase one by one. This starts with talking to the people you know. Similarly, it starts with your fans talking to who they know. One way they can do this is through Bopdrop, a fairly new social media app that’s fully focused on sharing music. We all love to share what we enjoy listening to, and now we just need to add on that little push that tells people to support the artist we love so much that we think you should listen to them. Not just because you like their music, but because you get something else out of it: this can be perks, access to a creative process, learning how to better make music yourself, etc.

There’s another benefit to flipping the funnel and that goes back to what is often the first community for any artist, which is that of their fellow artists. If we broaden this out a little bit, and go back to the idea of the musician as a creator, the community becomes that of all creators. The next step is to connect the various audiences that all of these creators have. What I see a lot in GÂRDEN is that musicians play together in unique set-ups. Albertine, for example, took the opportunity to play with two musicians to perform her music. Going from one to three artists is an easy way to triple your audience. This type of audience-sharing is potentially a big win for any direct-to-audience strategy. If I like an artist enough to support them directly, I’ll be very susceptible to them telling me to also support another artist. Broadening the scope here, there’s an opportunity for creators of all kinds to share their audiences. Say I’m a watercolor painter with a medium YouTube following. If I then tell them I made this cool painting for this other artist and that people can support them directly: that works. It can be as simple as word-of-mouth and as strong as interpersonal interactions and recommendations.

Blockchain basics: how to start a DAO

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

My recent writing has focused on the community dynamics of blockchain-based ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organisations’ (DAOs). I’ve explored:

In this article I will attempt to explain some of the more technical aspects in clear terms for people with little to no experience with these topics. I’ll be diving into the steps outlined in a tweet by Jess Sloss of Seed Club, a DAO that builds and invests in communities.

There’s a comment section below. If anything is unclear or could be worded better: let me know either with a question or by spelling things out more clearly yourself.

How to bootstrap a DAO

People familiar with English-language startup terminology will be familiar with the term bootstrapping: to start something using nothing but your own funds (or in some cases: zero funds). Continue reading to learn how a DAO might do that.

You can’t have a DAO without a great community. I won’t go into that for this piece, but recommend reading How to grow decentralized communities by pet3rpan (before you click out of this website, consider joining the newsletter, so we can reach you in case you get lost in a rabbit hole ;-)).

📥 Drop an NFT or series (on chain revenue)

I think by now, for many people, non-fungible tokens or NFTs have become synonymous with auctionable digital artworks. This is not incorrect, but it’s a little bit like saying MP3s are music, while actually it’s a technology that has lots of uses in terms of audio encryption. A slightly better way of thinking about NFTs is as collectibles.

Non-fungible tokens allow for tracking ownership, as well as functionality like ‘splits‘ which are commonly used to make sure the original author gets money (in the form of cryptocurrency) every time their NFT is resold. This is done through smart contracts: little computer programs linked to a blockchain database that run whenever certain actions are performed or conditions are met.

Although the most publicised use case is 1 NFT of a unique artwork being sold, there are also countless examples of collectibles where 10 people can buy NFTs that represent identical artworks (e.g. this NFT by musician Sevdaliza). The former case would be described as a 1/1 and the latter as a 10/10 run, like a collectible. A series could be a set of NFTs, like a bunch of 1/1s, multiple 10/10s, or any mix like a 1/1 and a 5/5 drop.

This creates on-chain revenue: value stored on the blockchain that the DAO will use to let the community participate and distribute ownership. That revenue is stored in cryptocurrency.

A recent music-related example of a DAO that funded itself with an NFT sale is Songcamp. With the on-chain revenue, it could afford to cover the fees associated with ‘minting’ (creating) an NFT for the participating artists in its first songwriting batch.

🎁 Give NFTs to dope people (on chain community)

On chain community means that you have a way to track, via blockchain, who are the people in your community. Since tokens like NFTs allow people to see who owns them, it’s an easy way to trace ownership back to a DAO (the link between the DAO and the recipient is forever recorded).

  • Step 1: create an address for your DAO on a blockchain by setting up a wallet which allows for transactions and storage.
  • Step 2: create NFTs with that address.
  • Step 3: send the NFTs to addresses of people you want to add to your community.

Now there is a link between your address and theirs, through the NFT. You can see this happening in the above screenshot, but strip away the interface of the auction house and you get something like this.

Here you can see the transfer of a token from one address to another, here indicated as club.eth, which is the same @club from the Zora auction house screenshot and actually also the Seed Club referred to at the start of this post.

A community or service can let you sign in using your wallet (e.g. Metamask) which is a little bit like the type of ‘Single Sign-On’ you’re used to around the web from Google, Facebook, and Twitter. It can then check your wallet for any NFTs or other tokens (I’ll get into this) and grant you special privileges, ranging from simple access to more advanced features.

I was recently lucky enough to get voted into Mirror, a kind of crypto version of Medium, but way more interesting (thanks for the votes!). To participate in the vote, you have to connect your wallet. If you win, Mirror transfers an access token to your wallet. On Twitter that looks like this:

On Etherscan, a tool to read about transactions on the Ethereum blockchain, the above looks like this:

Here you can see 1 address sending 10 tokens to 10 addresses through the execution of 1 smart contract (you can read the code of that contract here). Bonus points if you can figure out which address I hold. 😉

Overwhelming? No worries, the user experience is easier than setting up an internet connection or email in the 90s. In the end you just need a browser extension like Metamask’s to log in to Mirror and when it sees you hold the correct token it presents you this simple interface for creating your account:

🛫 Launch Snapshot + token gated Discord (gov. infra)

To set up the DAOs ‘governance infrastructure’, you can use a tool like Snapshot to let people submit and vote on proposals, plus you create a community for token holders (I’ve described token gating in the previous paragraphs). The latter is commonly done through Discord.

Here’s an example of a proposal for CabinDAO: a community that is creating a cabin residency program for select creators.

Here the community (or DAO) is voting on a linked proposal. It’s essentially deciding to commit a certain amount of funds (15 ETH) and community tokens to the program.

There’s a list of voters – 15 in total. They’re shown as addresses on the Ethereum blockchain and since Jon Gold has registered his name through ENS, I can recognize him and search for him elsewhere. For example, I can see he used his $WRITE token to join Mirror a few months ago. The votes are ranked by the number of community tokens someone holds (the bottom 13 are cut off). I haven’t looked into exactly how CabinDAO has distributed tokens so far, but usually they’re awarded to early community members and rewarded for participation, contribution, or in exchange for things (or cryptocurrency).

🪂 Airdrop ERC-20 tokens (governance to the ppl)

I’ve explained non-fungible tokens already, but haven’t gone into detail about other types of tokens.

ERC-20 is basically the technical standard for token implementation on smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Remember Mirror awarding 10 people with tokens to join their service? It happened in 1 transaction through the execution of a smart contract.

While no two NFTs are alike (and commonly use the ERC-721 standard), ERC-20 tokens are fungible, meaning that they can be interchanged with one another. In simple terms, if I send you 1 $WRITE token mentioned above and you send me 1 $WRITE token, we end up with the same in the end. Trading NFTs would typically leave us with two distinct items.

Through your community’s smart contract, these tokens can give you voting rights or participation rights in a DAO, e.g. access to a Discord server or the ability to vote on proposals on Snapshot or similar.

This is where you might award the buyers of the NFTs with a certain number of tokens created uniquely for your community through aforementioned smart contract, e.g. if it were for my newsletter’s community, I might call them $MUSICX tokens. You’d also give early community members and other supporters some tokens in your community. This incentivises them to get active and start participating in the governance.

This process of distributing tokens among your community is called ‘airdropping’. Now, there’s just one thing remaining:

Use ETH / Tokens to go do cool shit

Like the Friends With Benefits DAO, you could let people buy their way in through exchanging a cryptocurrency (ETH) for tokens ($FWB). This means as a DAO, you have a certain liquidity from token sales. So as a community, you can use tokens to incentivize certain actions (e.g. creating a residence program for artists in a cabin) and you can use ETH to cover certain costs, from renting the cabin, to infrastructure, to perhaps paying a few developers to build your website.

That’s it. All of the above is using the Ethereum blockchain, but there are other blockchains out there that support similar functionality.

Go organise your community and if you’d like to invite me – send me a token at basgras.eth or a tweet @basgras.

The community-owned rave: event organisers as DAOs

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

This piece explores the intersection of underground rave culture and Web 3 concepts like decentralized autonomous organisations.

Lately I’ve been thinking about an idea I had pre-pandemic. I wanted to set up a local rave night to fill a gap I perceived in Berlin’s nightlife. I mentally prepared myself to do all the heavy lifting involved in setting up a new club night – something I’d witnessed from friends taxiing artists around, losing money on events, having to staff the entrance, handling logistics, and of course doing the promo. The pandemic put all those ideas on hold and helped generate a new perspective on things.

Goal-oriented

I previously explored what artists’ fanbases can look like as blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organisations (DAOs) – I recommend reading it if you’re not familiar with DAOs. One important aspect for DAOs is that they should have a clear reason to exist, so that people have something clear to organise around and identify new initiatives.

For events, that goal is pretty straightforward: for example to run a number of events per year (e.g. 6, 12, 24) with a clear musical and subcultural footprint (e.g. hyperpop meets queer hardtechno).

There are lots of activities to take care of, such as:

  • Artist bookings
  • Travel & accommodation (unless fully local)
  • Artwork & design
  • Promotion
  • Venue decoration
  • Tickets & admissions

Many of these require funds and when starting out there’s always a risk you won’t break even. DAOs can mitigate that risk and distribute the heavy lifting surrounding these tasks to a passionate community.

Community-owned raves

My first association with the above words would actually be ‘free party’ culture and teknivals of the 90s, as pioneered by Spiral Tribe (artwork above). They would travel country & continent with soundsystems and throw public raves that were free to attend (and usually illegal). The idea was that by being at the rave, you were not just audience, you’re a participant – a similar mindset to Burning Man‘s ethos. The teknival scene still exists today, by the way.

But what would a community-owned rave look like if it could somehow be formalized?

  • Persistent community. Most events have an audience that reconvenes and persists through brief gatherings. Part of the audience will be ‘regulars’ and part will be newcomers. It can be hard to know which part is which and to really feel connected. By making sure the community is organised outside of the context of the occasional event, the community can exist in a persistent state and experience connectedness daily. (see also: Why local is the answer to a future of new normals)
  • Shared outcome ownership. The community puts together the events. This may be a representative democratic process, where people get elected to a board or special crews, e.g. for artist selection, brand and artwork, and perhaps various ongoing activities like music releases, mixtapes and podcasts, meetups, listening sessions, etc. This way the output and outcome is a collective responsibility.
  • Tokenized. Participants should be rewarded. Most underground events don’t make a lot of money, and don’t have a goal to make lots of cash, so rewards for contributions could come in the form of tokens which give people the ability to participate in the governance of the DAO or get access to other perks. Event tickets could represent a token, which gives you a way to essentially peg token prices to fiat money and automatically make attendees community members (I’d make sure to only sell 1 per person though – maybe translating actual attendance to tokens, rather than just holding the ticket. I’d also carefully think through the implications of attendance always representing 1 token).
  • Proposals & voting. People can submit proposals for artists, event decoration, and peripheral activities. They can request budgets in the form of tokens which they can hold (for governance or to let them accrue value) or cash out in order to finance their activity.

The exact mechanics would depend a lot on the community and what it wants to incentivise. For example, in some contexts you might want to encourage people to spread the word by sharing photos of the events, but some events might enforce strict no-photos rules so that people can be themselves without the pressures of being seen on social media (or worst case: becoming a meme).

Not public, not private, but community events

One example of how this might work can be gleaned from the Friends With Benefits (FWB) DAO, which is a creative community that requires people to buy $FWB tokens in order to participate. It then rewards tokens, as described in the bullet points above, for certain activities. While I personally would avoid throwing up high economic barriers to participatio, for the sake of inclusivity (which is also why many events in Berlin have flexible entrance prices, e.g. minimum 5, but 10 if you can afford it), FWB has been able to create an economic space where members can reward each other with tokens that can be cashed out in order to finance projects. (I don’t mean to imply FWB in general is not inclusive – it’s just a general concern I have with regards to onboarding people into tokenized communities)

This has translated into a real-life event in Miami recently, with DJs like Yves Tumor and Jubilee, that you could only attend if you held a certain number of tokens. For those from out of town, the community created a city guide which can be unlocked in exchange for tokens. It’s an excellent example of how communities can create value for other members either through direct activities (events) or peripheral (guides) and how that value can then flow around the community. All of this didn’t exist a year ago, so what they’ve been able to achieve and fund is incredible.

Stronger together

Many events already function as decentralized autonomous organisations in informal ways. Connecting it to the Web3 allows the community to persist across the metaverse and leverage NFTs, communal creation, and channel the unique talents of all involved.

It gives a certain predictability too. If you have a big community around your event, it can be tough picking artists for your line-up, since you only have so much time per night, which means not everyone will get to play. If the community becomes self-sustaining and energized, it should be easy for the organisation to make a risk assessment and set up more event nights.

It could even extend its footprint, so that people in other cities can set up local chapters under the same brand. Over time, the DAO becomes representative of a subculture and may see artist exchanges and people traveling to each other’s cities to meet community members there and experience the local chapter’s events. At scale, the DAO and the new subculture might become synonymous, though it’s also possible to think small and keep it to a small, local community of fans & friends.

The choice is yours – and theirs.

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Help me take my writing to the Web3 & support me in Mirror‘s $WRITE race on Wednesdays. Vote here.

Communities exchange value, or how no artist should care how much YouTube pays the industry

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

Music rights holders get paid astonishing amounts of money, but most artists cannot make a living from their art. All the major DSPs love throwing around the big numbers they pay out to ‘the industry.’ Yet, most artists cannot rely on them to put food on their plate. There are, however, many methods that allow musicians to step away from over-reliance on big tech companies or major labels. Most of them involve community, and more specifically community-building.

The big girls

So YouTube paid out $4 billion to music rights holders in 2020 and Spotify, by Music Ally’s calculations paid out more than $5 billion in the same period. In the US, in the first 6 months of 2020, the biggest streaming services together made up more than 85% of total revenues for recorded music. And during the recent DCMS hearings on the streaming economy in the UK, YouTube defended itself by stating that “record labels agree that it is possible we will become the music industry’s number one source of revenue by 2025.” That seems to be a good thing for YouTube more than anyone else as it probably means that even more than 2 billion people will be coming to the service “to experience music each month.”

A major argument that came out of those same DCMS hearings was to ‘simply’ grow the overall pie being paid out by the streaming services. BPI‘s Geoff Taylor, for example put forth that “[t]he total amount coming into the industry should be substantially higher and that would benefit everybody in the chain.” During the hearings, a counterargument surfaced, through BMG, that “the status quo gives the impression it was designed for the convenience of industry players, rather than with a view to the perceptions of artists and fans.” BMG used this point to set up their defence of user-centric payment systems. However, it also paves the way for another argument altogether, something BMG hinted at too in further evidence they presented: the importance of monetizing the artist-fan relationship more directly. And that should be done by building a community.

Focus on community

We’re not new to the idea of community as an important element in artists building out a living for themselves. Just last Tuesday Bas argued that “the one strategy that I feel almost any artist can apply is that of building a community of fans that can sustain you.” This related to DAOs and in my own article about why fans should want to buy NFTs one of the key arguments was that these tokens represent an opportunity for two-way communication between artist and fan. But there’s more to community-building than future-forward web3 technologies. What first of all needs to happen is a shift in mindset. One of the things that struck me in a recent podcast recording for The Daily Indie[in Dutch] is that so few artists actually experimented with building community during the pandemic.

Of course, Patreon, OnlyFans and their like saw fast growth during the pandemic. All the musicians who set up a subscription model or turned to monetize their livestreaming efforts did an amazing job. But for each one of those, there’s plenty others who still rely on their single-single-album release strategy. Why not flip it around? Take Dutch artist POSTIE who is social media first and recorded music second. He posts a video every Sunday and then after a while releases those songs as an album. Another way of putting this is that he doesn’t use social media to drive streams, but streaming services to drive followers.

Image by Alina Grubnyak via Unsplash

The community builders

Let me highlight two people who give some excellent advice on community building. First up is Anna Grigoryan, who writes a newsletter called Community Weekly in which she presents and explains tools to build community. My favorite advice of hers is to find your community mission. That’s where it starts. With the question of who you’re doing what you’re doing for. And then following that question with how you add value for those people. I would also add, that quickly after that, you should ask how your fans, your community, can add value for you. Anna is also very open about her own struggles in building a community around her newsletter. I find this very helpful when thinking about the communities I’m involved with for example.

This is where my next community builder comes in: Jen Lee. I came across her as the community manager from the Means of Creation fans Discord. First thing that happened when I joined the group was that I got a personal note welcoming me and encouraging me to post in a channel. She’s just been interviewed by Peter Yang and that message to me is pure strategy. In the interview Jen puts forward the following idea:

Like building a product, an online community needs to:

1. Exceed user expectations by personally welcoming new members.

2. Overcome the cold start problem by seeding the community with great content.

3. Deliver great UX by focusing the conversation on a few channels.

From these two community builders you have the starting gear to step into the studio. Whether you’ll focus on one of the subcriptions services (Patreon, OnlyFans, etc.), one of the social media (IG TikTok, etc.), the community platforms (Discord, Geneva, etc.), or turn your hand to web3 protocols (DAOs, NFTs, etc.) the basics are the same.

The Call-to-action

It’s as simple and easy as can be:

  • If you’re an artist start experimenting with community building. Do it now and be open with and towards your fans for feedback and interaction.
  • If you’re not an artist yourself, you’ll know them. Help them out by giving them these building blocks.

Together, we can make sure that the focus of the music industry starts to inch away from the shouting big numbers and boasting massive usage stats. Instead, we’ll focus on creating communities where artists and fans exchange value.

Why fanbases need to be networks, rather than channels

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 2 Comments on Why fanbases need to be networks, rather than channels

The foundations of the music business lie in an age of channels. Many current success models still focus on channels, despite living in an age of networks. Due to this mode of operation, a renewed demand for channels has created a landscape of influential gatekeepers over the past decade. But you can still opt to play the network game instead.

The channel landscape

Two clear examples of the new emergence of a channel landscape are Spotify and SoundCloud. Both of them started as platforms that were centered around the user and their networks. Spotify let its users build playlists and those were the playlists it served through its search and other features (actually, for a long time playlist discovery was handled by third-parties like Playlists.net, at the time called ShareMyPlaylists, now part of Warner Music). Over time, playlist brands emerged and Spotify started investing heavily into its own editorial brands – even prioritizing them over ‘user generated’ playlists.

SoundCloud started as a collaboration platform that quickly turned into a music-based social network – in some ways not very different from Twitter, which at one point considered buying SoundCloud and ended up investing $70 million. The main page was its stream, where you can see what people who you follow are uploading. Nowadays, the main page has featured playlists, personalized recommendations, charts, and themed playlists for studying, partying, sleeping, relaxing, etc.

Editorial playlists are channels. Both platforms went from social-first to channel-first and so did the much of the rest of the landscape.

Linearity

Channels are linear. You broadcast down them. You distribute through them one-directionally. In the CD days, if things start travelling in 2 directions in a distribution channel it meant there’s a big problem.

This linearity is what shaped modern music culture as it has emerged in the age of the recording and post-WW2 consumerism. It went hand in hand with the economies of scale that many also unknowingly sign up for when doing music, despite alternative ways being possible.

Non-linearity

We now live in the age of networks. This has been the most profound shift since the internet. Not streaming and not piracy, which are both just symptoms of what happens when something can be turned into data that can then travel without friction through networks.

It has created virality, internet memes, and an overabundance of ‘content’ since creating something and making it available for all to see is easier than ever. That’s true for your track, but also the 59,999 other tracks uploaded to Spotify every day. This problem has meant that platforms like the aforementioned have invested heavily in recommendation algorithms in order to ensure relevance to their users. That creates channels and in the case of certain big social media platforms, it means that people have to pay to actually reach audiences that already follow them.

The landscape also means you can branch off. You don’t need to do interviews in magazines in order to talk to your fans. You can set up your own groups on messaging apps, you can do newsletters, set up forums or Discord communities, etc. It can feel like a handful of companies are setting the rules, but you don’t have to play ball.

Non-linearity in fan communities

Whether you’re an artist, label or startup, how you structure your relation with your fan or user base determines the type of game you will be playing. For contrast, the below graphic looks at traditional linearity in artist-to-fan and fan-to-fan communication and compares it with a ‘network model’. The network model means that as an artist, instead of broadcasting down, you’re placing yourself inside your community of fans.

A community means multidirectional conversations. These conversations exist inside fan clubs, but that information would then have to be moved back up. If, instead of that, you’re participating in the fan community, you have access to more (qualitative) data and insights… with the added bonus that it gives you and others a sense of belonging.

Getting people to pay for something that’s abundantly available is a hard business. The better you understand the fans of your music, the more manageable that challenge becomes… and it will also help you develop completely novel ideas.

5 ideas for fan conversations

Basic rule of thumb: the more you interact with the people who like your music, the better you’ll understand them, which significantly impacts your odds of running a successful business. It also brings up one of the most underestimated challenges in music:

How do you get someone who likes your music to hear you again? They may have heard you on the radio or a playlist somewhere… now how do you make sure they keep listening to you over time?

Below are a few ideas that can help with fan retention and help build your understanding of your listeners in order to unlock new ideas to fold into things like Patreon memberships, crowdfunding perks, limited merch, or whatever you conceive.

  • The chatroom: “just set up a Discord” is thrown around a lot, but the relatively simple concept of creating an environment where fans can interact comes with real challenges. There’s a cold start problem meaning people join empty channels, only to disappear because the community feels dead (which then turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy). There can be abuse, where people spam channels or are not respectful of others. How you plan around these issues and the way you decide to architect your community determines what types of conversations and interactions you enable.
  • The weekly hangout: if you have a limited number of engaged fans, perhaps reach out to them individually and set up a weekly hangout where you all chat about life & music. Over time, bonds will form and people will feel more invested in the success of the reason why they’re connected: your music.
  • The monthly 1-on-1: set up a monthly, individual call with various fans, one on one. Check in on each other. You’ll not just get a snapshot of who people are, but you’ll get status updates, hear how they’re progressing on certain projects… and they’ll hear the same from you. This is one of the Patreon perks I offer to 1:1 supporters and although I expected it to be mostly consultancy calls, I’ve actually gotten a lot of value out of it by learning about new domains.
  • The ‘user interview’: user interviews are something I learned doing in various product roles at digital music services. Whenever you’re exploring a certain challenge, for example a new merch line, you reach out to a bunch of your fans directly and hold an interview with them (that you prepare well beforehand). In this situation, things you might want to find out are how they see themselves, how they express themselves through objects or clothing, how much they spend, how they decide to purchase items, etc. These are 1-on-1 calls and you can find plenty of great resources about this by learning more about a domain called ‘user research’.
  • The co-creation: you can also kick off a project where you co-create something with fans. For example, you could aim to create an audiovisual map and have fans populate parts of this map, based on their location. Working together on something helps you to understand people in new ways, it will let you see how people express themselves, and in what ways they like to be creative themselves.

Besides building a sense of community and connection, it’s important to always consider what you want to learn from these interactions. I could think of dozens of additional ideas for interaction, but what’s most important is that you understand the challenges before you and start thinking what type of insights will help you address those challenges. In some cases, the challenge might actually be to speak to fans so you can get more clarity on what goals to set.

The choice is yours

Not everything has to be in the hands of a few platforms. You can choose to interact directly with fans and you can do it today by DMing some people who recently liked your posts. Break out of the channel paradigm and see what you can build through network. It’s not one or the other: you can play both games. Just don’t be fooled by the dominance of channels. In the words of Black Sheep: the choice is yours.

The benefits of being an early adopter

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Exploring the value of being a first mover, connecting with founders and building a profile in a nascent community.

While reading through a Medium post a couple of months ago, I stumbled upon an email subscription form near the bottom of the article. I’m always thinking of how I can better convert readers to my newsletter, so it immediately caught my interest. Why? Because I had never seen an embedded form on Medium.

Up until then, I had been using a service called Rabbut, which embedded an image that looked like a form and when clicked, would open a new page with the actual form. The new service looked much better. I immediately signed up.

It’s called Upscribe and after signing up, I went to see how I could export collected email addresses. This service, like Rabbut, was geared at the bigger email newsletter services, like Mailchimp, but I’m an early adopter of a service called Revue. So I chose ‘Other’. I got an email from the founder:

So I told him about Revue and after a week he wrote me back, telling me he had added the integration. Super awesome.

Being an early adopter makes you a VIP

Early adopters are often services’ most important users. This may mean that you can interact directly with the service’s founders or chief product person.

Revue founder Martijn de Kuijper mentions that all the time they put into talking to their users is essential for feedback and validation of the product. A feature he says came directly out of user feedback is their recently launched Themes. “We got a lot of requests for HTML templates and customization options, so we developed a new feature that lets people add personality to their digests in an easy-to-customize theme.” 

Other examples of how the Revue team connects with their community are a Slack channel, where they ask people for occasional feedback, but also keep the community connected, and an open roadmap on Trello, where users can see what features to expect and can give input on features through comments.

This means that as an active early adopter, you can have a lot of sway in the product direction of a tool and have it tailored to your needs, with a bit of luck.

Wil Benton, who founded Chew, a livestreaming platform for DJs and other personalities in music, feels that the “first 100/500/1000 users are the most important users you’ll ever have.” In part because you can’t think about everything yourself and users help you figure out things you missed.

He adds:

“Early adopters are critical to you going from janky MVP that only you would ever use to a product a completely random person on the opposite side of the world could (and would want to) use.”

Being an early adopter makes it easy to stand out

There are benefits beyond being an important voice for founders. If you’re active in a young community, it’s easy to build a profile for yourself.

Sales can be interchanged with users, or other metrics you’re tracking.

Be active, engage with others, and if what you’re doing on the platform is really good, you’ll build a following. This will get you featured. The power of being featured is that startups usually aim for something named hockeystick growth.

If you’re featured when the growth suddenly starts accelerating, you benefit from the network effect, because new users often end up following existing accounts, since they won’t have any friends on the platform yet.

Sebastien Lintz, who does digital for Hardwell, manages Revealed Recordings and Sorted Management, recently explained on a panel at Play & Produce in Ghent, that he had had a lot of success by simply being the first with quality content and a good strategy for new platforms, mentioning Musical.ly and Live.ly.

I’ve had similar experiences with Revue, where my newsletter was featured, and if I had more time, I’d love to build a profile on DJ / remix apps like Pacemaker and 8Stem.

Check them out.

Your chance to be an early adopter

I really recommend spending about half an hour a week on Product Hunt. It’s a place where people post new products and services, so you’re among the first to hear about them. If you want to be a super early adopter, you could even sign up to Betalist, where you can get early access to beta versions of products when founders need people to test their products.

And a special opportunity:

I’m working with a startup that’s building a tool to easily message large groups of fans on Facebook Messenger. The idea is simple: you onboard your fans, ask them for a few things like location and email address (just in case Facebook changes algorithms again), and then you can push personally relevant updates to fans about new releases or shows.

I’m going to be writing a lot more about this topic once we’ve got everything set up for you to give it a go, but if you’d like to get on the list and be among the first users: use this link.