What the End of the App Era Means for the Music Business

The average smartphone user downloads less than 1 app per month, according to comScore. The era of apps is ending, and we’re moving in an era of artificial intelligence interacting with us through messaging apps, chatbots, voice-controlled interfaces, and smart devices.

What happens to music in this context? How do you make sure your music stands out? How do you communicate your brand when the interface goes from visual to conversational? And what strategic opportunities and challenges does the conversational interface present to streaming services?

 

How to get me to talk about your startup

Tips for pitching newsletter curators. 

1.5 year ago, I started my newsletter to encourage more innovation in music. It has allowed me to shine a spotlight on people, startups, and music companies that are doing fascinating things. I’m really flattered that so many people have signed on and always have something positive to say.

However, I’m not a journalist, and it was never my aim to set up my newsletter as a journalistic medium. My day job as Product Director of IDAGIO, where we’re reinventing streaming for classical music, has me so occupied that it’s often hard to find enough time to put out my newsletter. Many weeks, I get up a few hours early on Monday morning to make sure I get the newsletter done before work starts. I wouldn’t have it any other way: I love what I’m doing.

This means that the typical way you’d approach a journalist really doesn’t work for me.

Don’t send me press releases

Press releases have annoying structures to read and you never really learn much more than what could fit into a tweet. I could never really be bothered with reading them, but now that I’m busier, it really takes some strong willpower to read it. I can only muster that willpower for:

  • Friends / acquaintances;
  • Companies I follow because I love what they’re doing;
  • Bizarre / unique / remarkable announcements.

Nearly no announcement falls into that last category.

Secondly, press releases don’t correspond with the format of articles I do, so it’s a nightmare to incorporate a press release announcement into an article, and I definitely won’t like a press release from my newsletter (with some very rare exceptions).

Don’t pitch curators with press releases.

Don’t let your publicist do the work

This may work for some journalistic publications, but I’m trying to do something different, so I prefer to hear straight from a founder, product person, or someone who’s involved in strategic decision-making.

I try my best to make my newsletter inspiring, thoughtful, and something that people can learn from… PR statements that are signed off on rarely correspond with those criteria.

Oh, and by the way: if you’re working with an agency, check in with them every now and then. There’s one that has been particularly persistent in sending press releases to me, even after I asked him to stop because I’m not interested in the startup’s domain (and he said he would). Then he resumed 2 months later, and just keeps spamming. This does not make me think better about your startup, and kind of makes me want to avoid you altogether, because I don’t feel like dealing with a pushy company culture.

Do write about what you’re doing

The BEST way to get into my newsletter is by writing an article about what you’re doing. However, it can’t be a press release or an announcement, it has to be something like a Medium post that people can learn from. Here are some examples:

These are valuable to my readers, and they’re valuable to me.

Simply: make sure people can learn something from what you’re doing. Don’t sell too hard.

Do get in touch with me directly

Back when I was still doing MUSIC x TECH X FUTURE full-time, I opened all communication channels, including a message for new subscribers to my email to tell me what they’re up to. I also highly encourage replies to my newsletters with feedback, since it guides me in my decision making for upcoming weeks. I also love a good conversation or thought-provoking comment, despite not having as much time to engage with everything anymore.

(by the way, if you want to strike up an interesting conversation, you can also jump into the community: MxTxF Backstage — no self-promo please :)).

I try to reply to every email I get… if I don’t, it’s often because I saw your email, considered it important to get a proper response, saved it for later, and then forgot… so don’t be shy & send a reminder.

One thing I don’t really have much time for nowadays is doing Skype calls. I don’t really enjoy calling, and they really cut into my free time, since I have to make arrangements to be at home. I go to a lot of events (next up: BIME & Slush Music + Slush), so catch me at one of those if you’d like to chat in person — and please don’t turn that meeting into a sales pitch.

Do everything you can to make it really easy for me to include you

Make a Medium post. Make sure it’s well-written. Familiarize yourself with the newsletter, what I write about, and what I’ve written about before. Make sure your post fits well into this context. And send it over with a brief intro.

The things I look for are:

  1. Does this introduce a new perspective?
  2. Can my readers learn from this?
  3. Have I read something like this before?
  4. Does this have an innovative angle?
  5. Is this something I would write about?

I consider #5 even when just featuring someone else’s writing in my newsletter.

Who I write about

I write about the people that are top of mind. People I run into in conferences a lot. People that have been long-time followers of my newsletters. Companies that I think are innovative and doing interesting things.

It’s rare that I will immediately write about something I discover. In many cases, I’ll be following something for many months before I write about it. This has a lot to do with my writing process.

If I get up at 5.30 in the morning on Monday and start writing, I’m going to write about what’s top of mind. I’m going to use examples to explain topics that are top of mind. The things that are top of mind are things I feel strongly about; things that I either love or hate (and I don’t write about the latter, because I want the newsletter to be uplifting and motivating — no time to deal with what we don’t like, when we can achieve so much success by focusing on the positive).

Concluding

All in all, it’s pretty simple: write something that I can easily feature, get in touch directly over email or Twitter, and make sure it’s something people on my newsletter will learn from.

This goes for every newsletter out there, and for every conference curator too by the way.

READ MORE: Moving up the music curation food chain

Oh, and one more thing, since I realized I may be opening some content floodgates here: make sure your writing is timely and timeless. I only put 10 links into each newsletter (3 per category + 1 fun link). If your piece gets outdated 1 or 2 weeks later, I’ll never be able to feature it. Even then: if I think most of the newsletter subscribers will have read it already, I tend not to feature. Tough choices.

I love hearing about innovation in music & love being part of this community.

Keep me up to date!

Treat Twitter like a visual medium & sync your Instagram posts to it

Here’s a little hack I use to share my Instagram photos to Twitter automatically.

Many years ago, Instagram decided to disable its Twitter cards integration, meaning photos posted to Instagram and then shared on Twitter, no longer showed up as an image but instead just as a descriptive text + link. It’s a common strategy for social startups to first leverage other platforms by making highly shareable content, and then slowly making content harder to share so that people spend more time on the platform itself (where the platform can actually monetize them through ads).

For years now, Twitter has steadily been growing into a visual service, instead of a service of status updates and link sharing, and tweets that include images getting higher engagement. Yet many still treat it as the service it once was.

Sharing to Twitter from Instagram with the app’s native functionality is near-pointless. It leads to very low engagement, and you’re typically better off manually making a photo post to Twitter. But why do the same thing twice if you can easily configure a solution where all you have to do is post to Instagram.

Step 1: register with IFTTT

IFTTT is a service that lets you connect different services and automate behaviours between them. The name of the service is an abbreviation of “If This, Then That”, meaning that if one thing occurs in one service, something else is triggered elsewhere.

In our case, that thing that occurs is you posting a photo to your Instagram account. What’s triggered elsewhere is that your Twitter account will post the Instagram photo as a native Twitter photo post with a link to the Instagram post.

Step 2: create a new applet on IFTTT

When you create a new applet, you’ll see the service’s formula structure explained before.

Click on +this and select Instagram. Connect your account, and then choose a trigger. If you only want to share specific posts to Twitter, you can do so through the use of a hashtag that you only use on specific posts. Since I only post every couple of days or less, I’m selecting “Any new photo by you” since I don’t see a need to limit what I’m sharing to Twitter.

In the next step, +that, you select Twitter, connect to the service, and then pick Post a tweet with image. You can customize the tweet text in case you want to add text to your tweets. Keep in mind that any text in the caption you use on Instagram will be abbreviated to make room for the other text. You will see this:

Click Add ingredient and select Url. This way, each time you post a photo from Instagram to Twitter, it actually links back to your original Instagram post, which may help people with placing comments, or converting your Twitter followers to Instagram followers.

The next field, Image URL, should read SourceUrl. SourceUrl is the direct link to the image on Instagram, and Twitter needs this link in order to repost the image. Changing this will break the applet.

Step 3: finish your applet

Think of a nice, easy-to-understand title for your applet and hit the Finish button. You can choose to get notifications each time your applet runs, which means you get notified each time a photo is posted from Instagram to Twitter.

Step 4: see if it works

When you go to My Applets,  you should see your applet. Here’s mine on the left:

When you click on it, it will open a bigger version of it. Click on the cogwheel and you get a screen to configure the recipe. I’ve cut up the screenshot, but if you’ve followed all the steps, you should see something like this:

Make a photo, post it on Instagram, and see if it works. (it may take a while for it to appear on your account)

All done!

Happy posting.

For some examples, I’ve previously set this up for my friends at Quibus and Knarsetand, and I’ve also got it set up for my own Twitter account.

The Instagram Stories rulebook (and 20 creative ideas for your short form videos)

Instagram Stories are the most important development in social media right now. I’ve previously explained why, but the key point is that the short format expiring content makes it fun to create, share, and engage with people who share their moments.

My two articles about Instagram Stories had loads of people getting in touch, following me, and sharing their own strategies. I’m also delighted that I inspired some to take the medium more seriously and get to work on it. In this article I want to go a little deeper to help you achieve more success through it.

Defining success on Instagram Stories

Everyone has their personal goals for social media. I do it just for fun, to keep friends engaged, and to keep my network connected by staying top of mind. I have varying reasons for posting individual story items, but there’s always a bigger picture.

Let’s define success by exploring what failure looks like.

Failure is when you post such low quality or inconsistent items that your audience stops caring. Maybe they mute your story to stop it from appearing at the top. Maybe they stop tapping your name, which causes Instagram to put you towards the end of the top bar. Being inconsistent, low quality, or plain boring will result in a loss of viewership over time.

So, this implies that success means you have a captive audience. An audience that checks in at least every 24 hours, over a long period of time.

Success metrics

  • Time between sharing & viewing: do people check in once a day, or does a large proportion view your stories within the first hour of posting? The latter could imply stronger engagement.
  • Average daily viewers: this should grow over time if you’re doing well. Could also check average viewers per story.
  • Direct replies: are people responding and sending messages in response to your stories?
  • Conversion: location-tagging and adding hashtags to stories exposes your stories to wider audiences — do they end up following you and becoming long-term viewers?

A general rule book for Instagram Stories

I don’t really like rules, but I see some typical behaviour that just doesn’t work, so I need to draw the line. It’s pretty easy to make good engaging content, and pretty easy to avoid making dull content. So let’s do this. 💪

  1. ‘Never’ repost stuff you’ve already posted as normal Instagram photos to Stories.
    People will have seen it. Instagram Stories is not for old content. Stories is for fresh content. The other way around is fine: save your Stories to your camera roll, and then repost it as an Instagram post a day later. Not all your Instagram followers see your Stories, but nearly everyone who watches your Stories will also see your Instagram posts.
  2. Focus on keywords, not long texts.
    Text should be no longer than maybe a sentence. If it’s a sentence, make sure to use good keywords, so people get what you’re saying in the blink of an eye without actually having to read it. People flick through stories fast, so if you’re posting any text longer than that you are posting useless content.
  3. Video > boomerang > static images.
    In terms of what’s interesting content, video usually wins. It’s the most engaging, gives the most information, the most emotion. Uninspired boomerangs are pretty dull, so get creative. The reason why I put boomerangs at this step in the content hierarchy is because Instagram seems to favour them in Explore feeds when you’re location-tagging and hashtagging stuff.
  4. Tag your stories!
    It gives another dimension to your stories, so people can check out the location, what else is in the hashtag, or the person you’re talking about… but it also exposes your content in the Explore tab. This can easily triple or quadruple any individual story item’s audience.
  5. Keep it personal & regular.
    When you follow someone who regularly posts stuff, multiple times a day, you really get a feeling of connection. So that’s what you should be doing. Involve people in the part of your life that you don’t mind sharing. If you’re a musician or band, forget the same old shots of the audience at your gig or the “so excited about this new release” screenshots. Explain why you’re excited by talking into the camera, give people previews, take people backstage, show your journey towards a gig in the weeks leading up, and then on the day itself. Tell the story!
  6. Follow other people’s stories.
    The easiest way to get Stories wrong is by not understanding what they’re for. Check other people’s stories at least once a day! Pay attention to what’s interesting and what’s boring to you. This is something that will change with more long-term engagement, so make it part of your daily media habit if you want to take this medium seriously.
  7. Get creative.
    Repetitive content is what kills long-term engagement. So be creative.

20 creative ideas for Instagram Stories

I’m constantly thinking about what I can be posting, and drawing loads of inspiration from the people I follow. Here are my favourites.

Music

Music builds connection.

1. Take a video with music playing from your phone’s speakers. It captures the audio really well, and sometimes the best annotation for a view or moment is a song.

2. Take a screenshot of something that’s playing. Sounds dull, but if you’re posting a couple of items per day, it will blend in well. The screenshot makes sure people who have their audio disabled will understand what you’re sharing. A phone’s lock screen screenshot will also tell people things like the time of day, and whether you love living on the edge and riding that final 2-3% of your battery.

3. Take a video of a music video. I’ll get back to this further in the list, but sharing small clips by filming a YouTube clip on your laptop is surprisingly engaging… just make sure it’s interesting and not a video that everyone has already seen recently: unless for some reason the fact that you’re watching it is interesting or funny.

4. Use other music sharing apps. Some apps allow you to export small music clips, like Sounds, you can consider using them. But beware: super-polished content will feel like ads and is not very engaging.

Filters

Instagram has some basic photo filters you can use, which you can activate when taking a selfie (e.g. the virtual masks that stick to your face as you talk).

5. Get creative with filters. They’re there to make it easier to make fun or quirky content.

6. Use Snapchat filters, but post on Instagram. Snapchat has the best filters, and they regularly update them, adding new ones. You don’t have to post on Snapchat, just save the Snapchat Story to your device and then import it to Instagram.

7. Use filters in ways they weren’t intended. Faceswap with paintings, apply face filters to people on TV… get creative.

Surroundings

Your surroundings are more interesting than you may think… and there’s more waiting for you to find once you start looking for it. You should be documenting what you see and what piques your interest.

8. Street art and graffiti. Particularly stuff in original places.

9. Nature, grass, and parks. When people check Instagram Stories, they’re likely to be inside… so why not bring them outside? I personally really prefer film over static shots here, because you can capture wind, rain, animals, movement, and sound, and really share that special moment.

10. Going somewhere? Do a timelapse. The iPhone’s default camera app has a timelapse function, and if Android phones don’t have this, I’m sure there are apps for it. Hold your phone in front of your body while you’re walking and convert that 3 minute walk from the metro to the office into a 10 second clip.

11. Friends and people. Netflix founder Reed Hastings once answered that the most consistent thing they see in their data is that people really like stories about people. So bring some humanity into your stories and make it about more than yourself.

Pin text and emoji

If you put text or emoji into your stories, you can pin it to stay attached to a certain item in your video. You can have loads of fun with this.

12. Attach a surfer to the soap in your bath or sink. You can do this before taking a bath or doing the dishes. If you have some foamy soap, run your hand through the water and move it around while filming. Then attach emoji to the foam floating on the water.

13. Zoom in to pinned text. If you are doing a story with a lot of zooming, you can tag text to something you zoom in on. At the start of your story, the text may be barely noticeable until it’s fully zoomed in. Works with emoji too.

Use creative photography or video apps

Here’s two I like:

14. The Pantone app lets you tag certain colours. It’s a pretty nice way to highlight colours in your environment and share to Instagram.

15. Hyperspektiv lets you distort your reality. A very trippy app that lets you make interesting glitchy and psychedelic videos. Powerful, so you can spend hours inside the app, making all kinds of interesting content.

What are you doing?

Share what you’re doing.

16. Watching a music video.

17. Watching a documentary, TV show, or interesting movie.

18. Going to a concert or another type of public performance.

19. Flicking through an art book or going to a museum.

20. The fish tank in your local Chinese restaurant.

Just don’t overdo it: make sure content is not too similar.

21. Food? It’s a cliché, but if you’re able to take a good picture of your food, you can share it occasionally. But keep in mind that it’s usually not the food that’s important: it’s the moment. Involve people in your narrative. A plain beer is boring: a beer after a hard day of work is already more interesting. Capture the moment.

 

Hope this helps you up your content game. And if you’re wondering about how I’m doing it on Instagram (despite not necessarily being the best example), follow me: @basgras

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.