What is the next record? Moving beyond the recording industry

What will the next format be to usher in a new music industry, like the record did in the 20th century?

The 20th century saw the rise of consumerist culture as a response to mass production causing supply to outgrow consumer demand. An example of this phenomenon is 20th century fashion which became highly cyclical (and wasteful), marketing new clothes for every season. After World War II, it became common to use clothing to express oneself through styles and fashions which often went hand-in-hand with music subcultures, just think of hippies, skinheads and punk music, hiphop, funk, or disco.

“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.”
Victor Lebow (Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955)

Consumerism helped turn the recording industry into the most powerful part of the music business ecosystem, something which had previously been dominated by publishers. It changed music. The record player moved into the living room, then every room of the house, and the walkman (now smartphone) put music into every pocket. Music gained and lost qualities along the way.

Previously, it had been common for middle class families to have a piano in the home. Music was a social activity; music was alive. If you wanted to hear your favourite song, it would sound slightly different every time. With the recording, music became static and sounded the same way every time. And the shared songs of our culture were displaced by corporate-controlled pop music. People stopped playing the piano; and creators and ‘consumers’ became more clearly distinguished culturally.

With streaming, we are reaching the final stage of this development. Have a look at the above Victor Lebow quote and tell me streaming does not contribute to music being worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.

The rules of mass production don’t apply to music anymore, since it’s no longer about pressing recordings: anything can be copied & distributed infinitely on the web. The democratisation of music production has turned many ‘consumers’ into creators again. Perhaps this started with drum computers, which helped kick off two of today’s fastest growing genres in the 70s and 80s: hiphop and house music. Today, this democratisation has turned our smartphones into music studios, with producers of worldwide hits making songs on their iPhones.

We see more people producing music, our Soundcloud feeds are constantly updated, Spotify‘s algorithms send new music out to us through daily mixes, Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Fresh Finds, and we now have the global phenomenon of New Music Fridays. With this massive amount of new music, we are simply not connecting to music in the same way as we did when music was scarce. We move on faster. As a result, music services, music providers essentially, place a big emphasis on music discovery as a result. We shift from the age of mass media, and mass production, to something more complex: many-to-many, and decentralised (music) production on a massive scale.

Has consumerism broken music culture? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, consumerism is also what producers of music creation software and hardware depend on, which contributes to the democratisation of music and returning musical participation to the days of the piano as the default music playback device.

If streaming is the final stage of the age of the recording, then what’s next?

Embedded deep in the cultures of hiphop and house music, we can see what cultural values are important to the age of democratised music creation. Both genres heavily sampled disco and funk early on in their lifecycles. One of the most famous samples in hiphop and electronic music culture is the Amen Break. With the advent of the sampler, the drum break of the Winston‘s Amen Brother became widespread and instrumental to the birth and development of subgenres of electronic music in the 90s.

Not so long ago, ‘remix culture’ was still a notion one could discuss in abstract terms, for instance in the open-source documentary RiP!: A Remix Manifesto which discussed the topic at length. Things have changed fast however, turning the formerly abstract into a daily reality for many.

Since the documentary’s release in 2008, social networks have boomed. Back then, only 24% of the US population was active on social media, but now that’s ~80%. With the increasing socialisation of the web, as well as it being easier to manipulate images, we saw an explosion of internet memes, typically in the form of image macros which can be adjusted to fit new contexts or messages.

The same is happening to music through ‘Soundcloud culture’. Genres are born fast through remix, and people iterate on new ideas rapidly. A recent example of such a genre is moombahton which is now one of the driving sounds behind today’s pop music.

Snapchat filters and apps like Musically let users playing around with music and placing ourselves in the context of the song. Teens nowadays are not discovering music by some big budget music video broadcasted to them on MTV, they are discovering it by seeing their friend dance to it on Musically.

Music is becoming interactive, and adaptable to context.

Matching consumer trends and expectations with technology

Perhaps music is one of the first fields in which consumerist culture has hit a dead end, making it necessary for it to evolve to something beyond itself. People increasingly expect interactivity, since expressing yourself just by the music you listen to is not enough anymore to express identity.

Music production is getting easier. If combined with internet meme culture, it makes sense for people to use music for jokes or to make connections by making pop culture references through sampling. Vaporwave is a great example. But also internet rave things like this:

Instead of subcultures uniting behind bands and icons, they can now participate in setting the sound of its genre, creating a more customised type of sound that is more personally relevant to the listener and creator.

Artificial intelligence will make it even easier to quickly create music and remixes. Augmented reality, heavily emphasized in Apple’s latest product release, is basically remix as a medium. When AI, augmented reality, and the internet of things converge, our changing media culture will speed up to form new types of contexts for music.

That’s where the future of music lies. Not in the static recording, but in the adaptive. The recording industry that rose from the record looked nothing like the publishing industry. It latched on to the trend of consumerism and created a music industry of a scale never seen before. Now that we’ve reached peak-consumerism, and are at the final phase of the cycle for the static recording, there’s room for something new and adaptive. And like with the recording business before, the music business that will rise from adaptive media will look nothing like the current music industry.

The future of music, inspired by a cheap Vietnamese restaurant in Berlin

I spent the last week living from an Airbnb while getting started with my new job at IDAGIO in Berlin. Down the street from my Airbnb was a cheap Vietnamese place, where I ate a couple of times. They always had Vietnamese pop music on, but one day they had a CD by a Vietnamese singer covering Western pop songs. In English. I thought about it for a little: why wouldn’t they just play the originals?

These cover releases are often financially motivated, but since the restaurant has to pay some collection society, and a Spotify subscription gives you all the music for just $10, I figured that the reason for this music playing was probably not something financial.

I then wondered: could it be that they simply have more of a connection to the Vietnamese performer, and prefer to hear these works from his mouth?


I’ve been getting into a new way of thinking about music by stepping into classical. Suddenly, there’s not 1 original and then some ‘lesser’ remixes and covers. There’s a composition, with the author of that work often having deceased before modern recording technology, and then there are countless recordings of performances of that work. Sometimes there’s an relatively undisputed ‘best’, but often it comes down to personal taste, preference, and opinion.

IDAGIO screenshot

In the last century, music went through an enormous change. It went from ‘folk’ to ‘pop’. Here’s what I mean with each phrase:

  • Folk: music that’s not ‘owned’ by a single individual or corporation, but rather by the culture in which it was born. A song is not necessarily known for a particular performer, but instead is performed by many performers: ones that reach success far and wide, as well as local performers who just like to sing in front of a crowd in evenings or weekends.
  • Pop: music that’s controlled and owned. Songs are known for their original version and original performers. In this sense, the meaning extends beyond the charts, and into modern day underground rock, metal, and to a certain extent hiphop and dance music.

Recording technology in the 20th century brought about a transition: where once music was ‘folk’ by default, it became ‘pop’ instead. The rise of mass consumerism and cheap global distribution decreased the amount of time a song needed to spread geographically. These was now also a default version through which basically everyone became familiar with the work, rather than through their local performer or traveling bands.

While this system has generated a vast amount of money, and a huge music economy, I also think that music as an experience has lost a lot through this. People’s relationships with works are more superficial and performers are less incentivized to be the best performer of a certain work, since they can basically be the only one.


Back to the Vietnamese restaurant.

I got to thinking: what if we can ‘folk-ify’ modern pop music. It’s already being done to a certain extent. The remix culture on Soundcloud is a great example of it, and so is the cover culture on YouTube. What if the way we’re structuring the navigation in content on IDAGIO (such as: composers > works > recordings and performers) some day could become relevant for ‘pop’?

It would mean people would be able to browse based on songwriter, and then see all the pop songs related to that writer. They’d then be able to explore each song, and all the performances of it. They could sort by proximity: either offline (geographic), or online (based on your social graph and digital footprint). This could make the performance they listen to more personally relevant, just like the CD in the Vietnamese restaurant is to the owners of the restaurant.

It could make music more participative, and in a way it already is becoming so: YouTube, Soundcloud, remix apps, democratization of production tools, cheap hardware for recording (like our phones), Musical.ly, performances on livestream… The two most remix-heavy genres we know, dance and hiphop, are the ones most influential to the millennial demographic and younger. Both house and hiphop were born of affordable drum computers and samplers, of looping existing records, reinterpreting them, creating a new performance out of something that already existed.

The hard part has always been incentivizing the rights holders. Just look at the lawsuits.

We’re reaching an interesting time: we’re getting very good at interpreting really large datasets. Machine learning and AI are set to revolutionize our every day existence in just a few years. Then there’s blockchain, which is a good technology for tracking the complexity involved with a very nested type of ownership if we indeed ‘folk-ify’ pop music (without radically overhauling modern notions of intellectual property).

Music doesn’t have to become more participative, but it can. I think there’s a good economic case for it, but it still needs to be the product of deliberate choice of individuals. People in government can look at funding music education, and modernizing it, because the computer is the most important instrument for our generation (I know some of you will strongly disagree: find me at Midem, Sonár+D, or c/o pop and we can discuss over a beer). Musicians can think of how they can invite fans to contribute or interact with their music. People with entrepreneurial mindsets can think about solving some of the issues related to rights, or look at how musicians can monetize this type of interactivity.

And we all, as listeners, simply need to do one thing more often: sing.

Music for the Snapchat generation: conceptualizing Music Stories

Whether you’ve ever used Snapchat or not, you have felt the influence of the social app’s design choices. How will it shape the future of music?

Snapchat is perhaps best known for its photo filters

Snapchat created something called ‘Stories’. Stories are composed of photos and short videos that stay available for 24 hours. They allow people to get a look into other people’s days, including celebrities. The feature has been shamelessly copied by Facebook and integrated in Instagram, but the low-barrier channel-flicking content format is now seeing integration in unexpected places.

Forbes launched Cards, Huffington Post launched storybooks, and Medium launched Series. This led David Emery, VP Global Marketing Strategy of Kobalt Label Services, to ask the question: what will the Snapchat for music look like?

I decided to take a stab at the challenge and conceptualize how people may interact with music in the future.

How people engage with content

I specifically looked at Soundcloud, Instagram, and Tinder for some of the most innovative and influential design choices for navigating, sharing, and engaging with content. Soundcloud for the music, Instagram for visuals, and Tinder for how it lets people sift through ‘content’. I apologize in advance for all the times I’m going to refer to people on Tinder as ‘content’, but that’s the most effective way to approach Tinder for the sake of this article.

Learning from Soundcloud

One key strength of Soundcloud is that every time you open the app or web client there’s new content for you. Either from the artists you follow, through its Explore feature, or through personalized recommendations. People should be able to check out content as soon as they open the app.

Text is easy to engage with: you can copy the parts you want to comment on, quote it, and comment. With audio this is harder. Soundcloud lets people comment on the timeline of tracks, which makes it much more fun to engage with content. YouTube solves this problem by letting people put time tags in comments.

If you really love the content, you can repost it to your network. This makes the service attractive to content creators, but also to fans, because the feature gives them a way to express themselves and build up their profiles without actually having to create music themselves. Compare this to Spotify, where the barrier to build up your profile as a user is much higher due to the energy that you have to put into creating (and maintaining) playlists.

Recommendations mean that people can jump in, hit play and stop thinking. Soundcloud is one of the few music services that seem to have found a great balance between very active types of behaviour, as well as more passive modes.

Learning from Instagram

There’s a reason why I’m highlighting Instagram instead of Snapchat. Instagram has two modes of creation and navigation. You can either scroll down your main feed, where people will typically only post their best content OR you can tap one of the stories at the top and watch a feed of Snapchat-like Stories. Tap to skip!

Instagram makes it really easy to create and navigate through content. Stories’ ephemeral quality reduces the barrier to sharing moments (creating) and makes people worry less that they’re ‘oversharing’. Snapchat’s filters, which Instagram hasn’t been able to clone well (yet), make it easy to create fun content. People open up their camera, see what filters are available, and create something funny. No effort, and it’s still fun for their friends or followers to watch.

Learning from Tinder

The brutal nature of dating services is that profiles (people) are content, which also means that the majority of users will not be interested in the majority of content offered on the service. So you can do two things: make going through content as effortless as possible and build a recommendation engine which delivers the most relevant content to users. Tinder’s focus on the former made them the addictive dating app they are today.

Quickly liking and disliking content is like a bookmarking function which also helps to feed information to recommendation algorithms.

If you really want to dive deeper into a piece of content, you can tap to expand it (open profile), but basically the app’s figured out a great way to present huge amounts of content to people, of which the majority is ‘irrelevant’, and make it engaging to quickly navigate through it.

Must haves

The key qualities of social content apps right now are a high volume of content, easy creation and interactivity, and fast navigation. Bookmarking and reposting allows for users to express themselves with little effort.

Breaking it down

This is the most important feature for the end user. There are already a lot of good services in order to access large catalogues, to dive deep, to search for specific content… Music Stories should not try to compete with that. Instead it is a new form of media, which needs to be so engaging that it will affect the creative decisions of artists.

Soundcloud’s feed is a good example, but so is Snapchat’s main Stories screen (pictured below). Both show the user a variety of content that they can engage with immediately by hitting the play button or by tapping on a profile image.

The content in the app needs to be bite-size so users can get a quick idea of the content immediately and decide whether they like it or not. If yes, they should be able to go deeper (eg. Tinder‘s ‘tap to expand’) or interact, like reposting. If not, they need to be able to skip and move on.

When a user has an empty content feed, you can serve recommendations. When a user went through all new content already, you should invite them to create something.

You want people to be able to lean back, but ideally you’ll pull people into your app a few times a day and get them to browse through some fresh content. To get them to re-open the app, there needs to be meaningful interaction. That can come in the form of swipes, comments, or remixing.

One of the cool things about Snapchat is that you can discover new filters through your friends. Think:

“Woah, you can be Harry Potter? I want to be Harry Potter, too!”

So if we extend that to Music Stories, creating some music idea needs to be as simple as making yourself look like Harry Potter or face-swapping with a painting or statue in a museum.

Snapchat is why millennials visit museums. (jk)

This means that artists should be able to add music to the app in a way that allows people to remix it, to make it their own. All remixes can stay linked to the original. You could even track a remix of a remix of a remix in the same way you can see repost-chains on Tumblr.

How do you make it easy to create and to interact with music?

That’s the biggest challenge. People are shy or may not feel creative.  You could let them use images or video (like Musically), or you could let them replace one of the samples in the beat with a sound from their environment (imagine replacing the “yeah” from Justin Timberlake‘s SexyBack with your own sound), or you could let them play with the pitch of the vocals.

Options need to be limited, easy-to-understand and manipulate, and inviting. It should be as simple as swiping through Snapchat filter options.

Through creation and interactivity, users build up a profile to show off their music identity. Content is ephemeral, unless you choose differently (like on Instagram). I’d go for ephemeral by default and then give users the option to ‘add to profile’ once content reaches a certain engagement threshold. This will need a lot of tweaking and testing to get right.

Interactions are not ephemeral. Reposts go straight to profile, until you undo them.

Stories are all about being able to jump through content quickly. Tinder’s Like / Dislike function could work in Music Stories as a ‘skip’ and ‘bookmark’ function. By letting people bookmark stuff they’ll have content to come back to when they’re in a more passive mode. Perhaps an initial Like would send music to a personal inbox which stays available for a limited time, then when you Like content that’s in that inbox it gets shared to your profile, or saved in some other manner.

Music Stories should NOT be a Tinder for Music. Tinder’s strength is to let users navigate through a lot of content that doesn’t appeal to them, while making the interaction interesting. It’s an interesting model that manages to create value from content that may be irrelevant to some users.

Translating to features

The next steps are to start translating the concept into features. This means user stories (what you want users to be able to do with the app) need to be articulated clearly. Mock ups of specific interactions need to be drawn and tested with audiences. Challenges need to be considered, like the classic issue of getting people to start creating content when there’s no audience in the app yet (Instagram solved this by letting people share content to other social networks).

Now I invite YOU to take this challenge and develop the vision for Music Stories.

(Don’t forget to read David Emery’s original post, which prompted me to write this piece)

 

The value of fan remixes as part of artists’ content strategy

Putting fan remixes in the spotlight is a hundred thousand times more valuable than taking them down.

The scarcest good on the internet is attention. Any savvy artist, manager, or label employee knows this and develops strategies to sustain the attention of fans over long periods of time.

This comes in the form of content strategies, where the social media outlets of artists turn into media with frequent updates. It’s a pretty tiring process and can take a lot of focus away from other important activities.

Social media is so exciting…

But it’s necessary.

One way to sustain attention is to connect fans together and have them keep each other’s attention on you. It’s something I wrote about in 2011 and preceding years, and since then, a lot has changed. For the better.

We have powerful connected devices in our pockets at all times. Our web browsers have also grown more powerful, with the Web Audio APIs enabling a lot of new possibilities. And basically everyone is on social media now.

Throughout the last year, I’ve spoken to the founders of apps and platforms like Pacemaker, MetaPop, and 8Stem. All enabling people to take existing music and mix it, or remix it, and then publish it. Legally.

None of these would have been possible 5 years ago, but with current technology and in today’s landscape they make a lot of sense.

Remix culture is going mainstream and ‘listeners’ are increasingly being shifted from passenger to driver’s seat.

Instead of creating all of your own content, why not let fans do some?

As a matter of fact, they’re already doing it. Look at the fanbases of the Monstercat and Lapfox Trax labels. It seems exceptional, but it’s just about the culture you create around yourself as an artist or label.

Instead of taking down unauthorized remixes, give them a spotlight.

So what if there’s no immediate way to get those 5 cents of revenue from the 5,000 streams it’s going to garner? It’s a hundred thousand times more valuable having an inclusive culture in your fanbase, and a following of fans that actually participate in what you’re creating.

And when I say a hundred thousand times, I mean it.

Taking a fan remix down over a tiny bit of revenue can alienate a fan and stop them from spending money on you, but the value of a highly engaged fan that actually helps you seed your content strategy… Could it be $5,000? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes even more.

Gradually, a participative culture will emerge.

It takes time. There are no shortcuts. You are building.

But you’ll create something that ultimately doesn’t just save you time — you’ll create a fan culture with an output that can inspire you.

Success in music: defining your personal strategy in four steps

Finding your way to success can be confusing as an artist. Here’s what you should be focusing on.

At the Play & Produce conference in Ghent, Belgium, I joined a panel about digital revenue streams with Jef Martens (Basto / LazyJay), and Sebastien Lintz who does digital for Hardwell, artist management at Sorted, and is label manager at Revealed Recordings.

We discussed a lot of topics, some of which are covered in this article, but a lot of questions were left unanswered when we ran out of time.

So, for all those musicians that want to turn their craft into their livelihood, I wanted to create a basic resource to be able to refer to. This article goes over:

  • Making good music.
  • Getting your music in front of the right audiences.
  • Networking (!).
  • Retaining your fans & building community.
  • Monetization.

You’ll learn some new tricks to get better at what you’re doing, but more importantly: the below teaches you to develop your own strategy. Dive in!

Step zero: make really good music.

Before anything else, you need to make great music. This is part skill, part taste, and part understanding of trends. The best music is timeless, but before it becomes timeless, great music has to be timely.

As your skills develop, so will your ability to develop a consistent sound that’s unique to you. This is important, because it’s unlikely you’ll ever be ‘the best’ — simple mathematics. However, if you make a sound that stands out, you don’t need to be the best, you just have to make something remarkable.

Seems like an obvious step, but it often needs repeating. If you’re feeling lost or overwhelmed, know that the most important thing to work on is to develop your music and your skills. Everything develops from there.

Step one: getting your music heard.

Make a lot of music and release a lot of music. Make sure it’s easy to find, to stumble upon, to access, and to share.

There are a variety of tools that help you distribute your music to a lot of different places, like Labelgrid, or distributors like CD Baby and TuneCore. They help you to be everywhere your (future) fans might be.

In order to be discovered, make sure to put time into the artwork and accompanying description for your music. The description provides keywords for people to find your music, so don’t hold back on mentioning the names of bands that influence you, genres, etc.

Make it easy to share your music. Great music is inherently viral. Since YouTube is the most universal music player, you must have your music on there. Make sure the title has all the relevant information plus an indication about the type of music, to guarantee more clicks when people share it.

Regarding the artwork, you should understand that we live in the age of feeds. Social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram encourage us to scroll endlessly, because it means we’ll spend more time on their platforms.

Make sure your artwork is a scroll stopper.

It doesn’t have to be fancy, just effective.

7 Maine Coons Head Bopping

If your sound is good, people will share it (hence step zero).

From there, you need to find your audience.

(pro tip: get your music everywhere, but figure out what channels work best for you and double down on them. Doing a little bit of everything is a good way to not get traction anywhere. Make sure you actually enjoy using the channels you focus on, because if it’s not fun for you, you’re going to get exhausted and inconsistent eventually.)

Step one point five: finding your audience.

If you understand your music’s audience and where they hang out, or who else they listen to, you can start doing specific things to get your music into their ears, such as:

  • Remix other artists in your genre. Don’t ask for permission, but communicate to them once your remix is done. After all: their repost helps you reach their audience and chances are they’ll have a bigger audience than you. Play nice. And don’t put your remix on Spotify or other monetized places without permission. It’s less about the legal issues, and more that it’s just bad for human relations.
  • Connect with communities in your genre. On Reddit you can find loads of communities where producers are helping others to learn to master their art. You can also connect to communities around certain genres or prominent labels inside a genre. If Reddit’s not your thing, you can find groups like these on Facebook too.
  • Pitch your tracks to channels your audience follows. These may be blogs, YouTube channels, or internet radio stations. You can be more creative also: if there’s a popular video game streamer on Twitch that listens to a lot of music like yours, you could reach out to them, offer to make a personal theme song for them in exchange for a certain amount of airtime on their stream. Be creative.
  • The value of being (one of) the first. On our panel, Sebastien Lintz pointed out that being one of the first people on a platform can have big advantages. So keep your eye on new apps that pop up, get on there, try them out, see what happens. This is how you secure a first-mover advantage for a specific segment. Not convinced? Just look at what Vine and Musical.ly have enabled.

Step two: develop strong relations with people.

Success in music is usually a combination of music skills and people skills. When you see an overnight success, what you don’t see is the many years of preparation involved in that.

An artist may be young, but the team around them will know exactly who to talk to, who to ask for favours, the right people to work with, etc.

So, don’t be shy. Make sure you’re frequently in the same room as people who can help you. If you have a chance to pitch your music and get feedback, then go do it, even if you think you’re not ready. The feedback you’ll get will be valuable, but it’s also a good chance to get into the mind of label A&Rs, learn how they think, and you’ll know who they are if you run into them again.

These things happen in live settings, but sometimes people like Sebastien call for artists to submit music & have it publicly reviewed.

Other things you can do:

  • Speak to the DJs, promoters, organisers, etc. at local shows.
  • Go to conferences and set aside your shyness. Go chat with people, find out what they’re doing, and if there’s a panelist you find interesting, grab them for a chat. They’re there to speak to people and they’re interested in meeting you.

Basically: talk to people, and if it’s uncomfortable, then take a friend with you who’s good with that. The music business is a network business, so understand that you’re building relations that will last your entire career. Start early.

Step three: retaining your fans.

With the previous steps, you should have a way to get your music heard by people. Attention is fickle — so the big question here is not how to get people to listen to your music, but how do you get people to listen to your music again? And again, and again, and again.

You need to feed them to places where you can reach them again. It’s incredibly valuable, so if you’re annoyed with vloggers telling people to subscribe in every video: place yourself in their shoes. And do that!

Find the best ways to reach people. Facebook posts, once you scale your fanbase, may only have a 5% reach. Tweets are similar. It’s one of the reasons why I started a newsletter to talk about the future of music. For the last year, the open rate has been close to 50%. The typical artist newsletter has a 20–25% open rate.

Other methods to get your messages to your fans:

  • Download gates, like ToneDen, which allow fans to download your music in exchange for following your social accounts, incl. Spotify. Downloads as an incentive work well with certain audiences, but realize that ‘FREE DOWNLOAD’ in 2016 is nothing special.
  • Ads & remarketing. Sometimes it’s worth it to pay for ads. For instance, if you create a unified link for your release with a tool like Linkfire, you can integrate Google Analytics & AdSense. This way, you’ll get some data about the people that checked out your release and you’ll be able to target them on sites they visit, or when they Google something… Got a show in a town with a lot of fans? Set an ad that reveals your show the next time they Google for something fun to do on the weekend.

The basic jest of social profiles is this: be consistent, stay relevant, and frequent. Don’t abuse people’s permission to appear in their feeds or inbox, because they’ll unsubscribe or learn to ignore you. Good luck winning their attention back then.

You can also use ephemeral content, like Snapchat, to become part of fans’ habits.

Step three point five: building your fan community.

I love using the example of the fanbase as a house party. In my many years of awkward beers with strangers, I’ve learned there are roughly two types of house parties:

  • The type where you get let in, stand around a room with strangers, where nobody’s really entertained and just waiting for the host to come chat with them, and thinking of an excuse to bail ASAP. 💩
  • The type where the host lets you in, immediately introduces you to people you should talk to, suggesting topics you can discuss, and then at some point in the night you realize you haven’t even seen the host in an hour, because you’ve been having such a good time with their friends. 🔥

Building a community is a great way to get your fans to keep their attention on you, even after you leave the room. Not only that, but you now have the power to get back into the room, shut everyone up, and ask people to amplify what you have to say:

“Having a great time? Let’s get some more people in here! Text your friends. BYOB.”

Facebook Groups are an excellent way to do this. It also lets you mix fans that you’ve known for a long time (eg. friends), with first generation fans, and later fans.

Help keep the community active. Get people to talk about music, art, whatever you find interesting and is somehow a relevant connector. The music shared in the group doesn’t have to be just your music.

Step four: “shut up and take my money”

Having a connected fanbase allows you to intimately understand who the people that listen to your music are, what they care about, how their minds work, what they find cool, etc.

This allows you to better package the experiences you provide to them.

In music, the money is in the package. Whether it’s the live show, the download, merch or something else.. This means you can make the music you believe in, while also developing ways to make money off of it.

I usually hold up Yellow Claw as an example of a group that understands their fans really well and have developed multiple business models based on that understanding.

Basically, what it comes down to is this:

  • Great music shouldn’t have to be charity, so don’t put yourself in the position of having to beg fans to “please buy my album.”
  • Instead, think the other way around: what can I make for my fans that will make them thank me for giving them the opportunity to spend money on me?

No need to employ dark voodoo techniques. 👹 It’s just a matter of getting into the right frame of mind. Let’s call it the Kickstarter State of Mind.

Successful Kickstarters are a combination of:

  • A great product or idea (a metaphor for your music).
  • A charismatic call to action (a metaphor for your artist persona and brand).
  • Exciting rewards for contributing money.

Go spend some time on Kickstarter and see how price tiers work. Usually they cater to different types of audiences, or fans with differing levels of commitment. But they all have this in common:

People are super excited to be able to spend their money. Not for you — that’s just a nice bonus. But for themselves.

shut up and take my money

Recap

  • Step zero: make really great music. Keep working on your skills. This is by far the most important part. It’s the fuel for everything else. If nothing seems to be working, it may just be because your music is not good enough, or simply doesn’t stand out. Sorry.
  • Step one: getting your music heard. Get your music everywhere, take into account what your music looks like when people share, and double down on the channels that work best for you.
  • Step one point five: finding your audience. Use other people’s audience (OPA) by remixing, pitching curators, connecting to communities, and securing a first-mover advantage.
  • Step two: developing strong industry relations. Make no mistake: the music business is a business of human connections. Start early. Be nice & professional.
  • Step three: retaining your fans. Keep your fans’ attention by connecting them to your socials and finding other clever ways to reach them again.
  • Step three point five: building your fan community. Fans help keep each others’ attention on you and can help amplify your message. Be the host of the most fun house party they’ve ever attended.
  • Step four: “shut up and take my money”. Besides conventional revenue streams, you should be creating things that are so exciting for fans that they’ll thank you for the opportunity to spend their money.

Success in music: defining your personal strategy in four steps

Is it that simple?

Well, yes.

The hard part is that you need to put in a lot of hours. You have to be smart and relentless. Practice grit. You have to persevere, but also know when to cut your losses.

As long as you’re flying solo, take a look at job descriptions at labels or management agencies to understand how to strategically release music and build towards milestones.

Once you’re ready to build your team:
Work with people that inspire you. Don’t work with assholes.

And for fuck’s sake, keep your focus on your music.
Your music always comes first.

Monetizing remix culture: Beatport’s former CEO about his new mission

Matthew Adell about founding MetaPop and the surprising amount of money being left on the table by artists & labels.

It’s 2016 and artists still have to think like lawyers when working on remixes. As someone whose music consumption primarily exists of remixes and sampled works, this is a very personal pet peeve of mine. The topic is, finally, getting some attention beyond lawsuits and takedown notices.

Earlier this year, a task force from the US Department of Commerce presented their findings of a 2-year study, suggesting that a compulsory license is undesirable. Instead, it recommends that the marketplace be left alone to figure this out. An upcoming key player in this marketplace, is MetaPop: a platform that connects labels, producers and remixers, co-founded by former Beatport CEO, Matthew Adell. To date, MetaPop has signed on over 5,000 labels and helps them clear and monetize fan remixes.

I spoke to Matthew about how it got started, why remixes are so important, and the future of the remix landscape and MetaPop’s place in it.

~

A year after selling Beatport to SFX, Matt decided to step down and take some time off. After some time spent relaxing, he started looking for a new challenge, asking:

“What is not getting solved, because people just think it’s hard?”

This question formed the basis of Matt’s search for intractable problems in the music business. Having always had an interest in derivative works he decided to investigate this problem, because “especially in music, we’ve seen the behaviour of people making remixes without authorisation really become explosive,” indicating that remixes account for 10% of all music listening on YouTube.

To find this out, he teamed up with Michael Mukhin, former CTO of Boomrat, and built a piece of technology called Remix Finder. The purpose of the technology was to understand derivative works online. To start, they created a huge index of remixes, mashups and DJ sets on YouTube. The index contains track information, metadata, and engagement metrics, and over time they could also start seeing the speed and frequency at which these derivatives were taken down. If at all.

“What we learned is while mashups have hits every now and then, there aren’t a lot of mashups that generate a tremendous amount of engagement on YouTube. DJs have some of the tastemaker names in the world, but we found that other than after-movies from really big festivals, DJ sets weren’t really generating that much engagement on a global scale. The work that was really generating the most engagement, and was leaving the most possible revenue on the table, was what we call the single-song remix.”

So as a starting point, they honed MetaPop’s technology on single song remixes and found that they’re better at finding single song remixes than YouTube’s Content ID tool. On YouTube alone, they identified over 8 million remixes that are currently not monetized for the original artist nor the remixer. This could mean hundreds of millions of dollars currently being left on the table, because according to MetaPop just 2.5 million of those fan remixes generate over a billion plays per month.

“So, we have built a system now that allows rightsholders and remixers to come together on our platform to authorise and monetise all of these fan remixes.”

The platform is intended for all genres. In fact, they found that country music is one of the more popular remix genres on YouTube. But why should artists care about remixes in the first place? Matt explains how back in the day, one would have to press vinyl bootlegs to get remixes out there. It was a slow process.

Now music has become part of a constant flow of social media. As a musician, it’s nearly impossible to create enough music to feed this constant flow by yourself, he explains. For remixers, it can help them get noticed, and for the original artist it means an expanded fanbase, and increased revenue.

It makes sense. If you make country music, and someone makes an EDM remix of your track, suddenly you’re reaching another demographic that you otherwise wouldn’t. MetaPop’s revenue split, 70/15/15 to the original artist, remixer and MetaPop respectively, can form a great incentive to monetize remixes, as opposed to taking them down.

If it’s so valuable to artists and there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, then why has nobody cracked this before?

“It wasn’t solved before, because there was no money. And it’s complex. Each country has its own laws for how to deal with derivatives.” The rise of streaming means that now there suddenly is a way to monetize. You wouldn’t be able to track the vinyl bootlegs and monetize them, but with all the music platforms out there now, there’s suddenly a lot more data.

Matt also understands that older generations of original artists were more wary of remixes, but this is becoming less the case today.

In the next 10 years, he expects remixes to become even more prevalent, because the software and hardware necessary to create them is becoming ever-accessible. In this landscape, we’ll see much less takedowns than we do today, with there being more systems in place to monetize instead. This is where MetaPop’s place is, as a rights-clearing house for derivative works.

There’s still a long road ahead. The team currently consists of 5 people, with all the technology being built by 1. The thousands of labels, remixers, and original artists they’ve managed to attract and host is an impressive feat, and testament to many years of experience the team has throughout music & tech.

MetaPop’s currently in the process of raising a Series A investment round, so that they can start going global and bring in more music from more places. Besides single song remixes, they want to expand their footprint to cover other forms of derivatives, too, like mashups. The goal is, quite simple: to be able to monetize derivatives more widely and more efficiently.

Are MetaPop going to be able to crack this problem? Matt is confident.

“Nobody else has the right mixture of experience, tech and relationships.”

~

Personally, I’m happy to see people cracking away at this problem, because its importance is underestimated. There are 2 trends that make it urgent to create a legal base for derivative works:

  1. Adaptive music: generations are growing up expecting interactivity from everything in their environment. This is the generation that is growing up trying to swipe magazines, televisions and windows, believing they should be able to interact with it. Their music is going to be adaptive to fit the situation and whims of the listener.
  2. The remix is the internet’s language: whether it’s attaching a gif to a tweet, changing the caption on a meme, or filming yourself playbacking on the wildly popular Musically, we use the remix to express ourselves now. Music genres are increasingly behaving like memes: they often start with remixes by bedroom producers giving existing tracks another twist. Take vaporwave, moombahton, nightcore or even edm-trap as an example.

This is the way people interact with music now. The world shouldn’t have ignored the inner city kids sampling in the 80s and 90s to create hiphop, but now there’s just no getting around it.

Remixing is the new default.

~

Matt and I are both speaking at Amsterdam Dance Event (19–23 Oct).
Come see us.