Bas Grasmayer

7 findings from my first year freelancing

Posted on February 6, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

This week MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE turns one. Born as a newsletter on Revue, it’s now (finally) a sustainable company. That word, sustainable, comes with a caveat, because it currently still depends on me selling my time. There’s inherent risk in that, but I digress.

Launching the newsletter, I knew it would take me places, so I dropped everything else I was doing in order to be able to get the most out of the opportunities.

Here’s what happened next. 🍿

People will hire you for your most visible skill

I’m not a writer. I write a lot, but I wouldn’t consider it as a full-time profession. Yet it’s one of the things I get approached for most often.

Even when I was leading product strategy at Zvooq, a music streaming service in Russia, writing was one of my most important skills. It helped me communicate ideas to the team, investors, labels and potential partners. It also helped me keep the team inspired and motivated.

But I’m actually a strategist. I keep a wide overview, and have a few topics that I’m more knowledgeable about than many people in my niche. This allows me to find value through combining things.

I had always said I’d never charge money for writing, but this year I had to reconsider that. I had always seen writing as a means to attain visibility, which would lead to bigger, better things…

But what if you’re running on savings and those bigger, better things take a while to materialize?

So, I caved in: fine, I’ll write for money. My attitude towards it has changed now, because not only does it allow me to work on pieces with even greater quality, but it also brought me something else…

Find a base sustainable income early

Writing has been an easy skill to market: every month, thousands of people come across my articles through recommendations, my newsletter, the Synchtank blog, as well as Hypebot, which occasionally syndicates my writing.

And writing can be done from anywhere. As a matter of fact: I strongly prefer to do my writing out of office, away from officey distractions.

office distractions

One of the real challenges I had was getting to a sustainable income before my savings ran out. I considered getting some part-time job, but I didn’t want to commit myself to a schedule just yet. The following anecdote will explain why:

Last April I got an email on a Monday evening. It was from a well-known music business figure, with a legendary background, asking whether I could be in London for some event on Wednesday morning. After checking the email header to make sure someone wasn’t pulling a prank, or scam, I called up the sender and the next evening I was on a plane to London.

It was an incredible honour to be invited, and I got to present my ideas and vision to a room full of industry execs (my 3 minute presentation). This, to me, was the first confirmation that I was onto something with the newsletter. Had I had a job at, say, a bar, I would have had to find a replacement and I might have missed out on this opportunity.

So I held out as my savings dwindled. I wanted to stay flexible.

Then people started asking whether they could pay me to write… and suddenly I had found something that allows me geographic freedom, an income, and it synergizes with everything else I do.

Find synergy, because you’re selling your time

Some of the things I do now:

Helping a music tech startup with content strategy
Helping a music tech startup with business model development and licensing strategy
Helping 2 artists with management & marketing
Helping a conference curate their music track
Paid writing about trends & innovation in music
Occasionally lecturing about these topics

The thing I love about these activities is that they all add value to each other. Working with the artists gives me a chance to try out new ideas around building a fan base, pitching labels, as well as creative ideas around ideas. For example, I built a chatbot for Quibus recently to let fans unlock some special goodies: now we can use it to send a push notification directly to fans (stay tuned).

If you’re dependent on selling your time, you should make sure your hour becomes more valuable: if you can draw on past work, you can achieve more by spending less time or you can charge a higher hourly rate.

Border Sessions panel — Moderating a panel about interactive music experiences at Border Sessions.

Leads can take a looooong time to convert

I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me to figure out potential collaborations. Most of those went nowhere, yet.

And that’s fine. People are busy. Priorities shift.

It made a big difference when I shifted my focus from 100% international to local. Somehow, locally, it’s easier to get a collaboration off the ground. But that, too, took me some time to figure out: I had been abroad for the bigger part of 10 years and had to accustom myself to the Dutch culture again. But that’s a different story.

Basically: don’t assume positive talks about collaboration will lead to anything tangible. I just ploughed on and focused on expanding my network and the value within it (often by connecting people). Keep seeding. Sooner or later, some of those collaborations will happen and you’ll be too busy to worry about the ones that didn’t happen.

Always save some time to walk around and enjoy the moment.

Make sure you have work during the summer

If I could go back in time…

Dear Bas,

Summer is dead season. Be extra proactive during Spring to find things to do during the summer, because people will be out of office and initiating new collaborations will just be a lot more difficult.

If you don’t find anything to do, just get some part-time job, because last-minute invites are also unlikely to happen.

Instead I spent my time rebuilding MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE’s homepage, improving the newsletter and other web presences, and studying.

Your clients are your best source of future work

It’s obvious, but I feel it bears mentioning, because of what it implies.

We live in a distracted age where everyone is competing for your attention. So the advice I always give to artists building their fanbase is: make sure you stay top-of-mind. For a freelancer, the best way to stay top-of-mind is through collaboration.

The next time someone has some work to do, they’ll know they can call you. Even better: they might not realize a problem can be fixed, if it weren’t for knowing you. We often ignore things that seem like they can’t be improved, not being aware of the problem… so by being present in people’s thoughts, you help them find more work for you.

Invest in your relations.

What this also means is: you now have an excuse to feel great about doing some work with a client that you don’t find super inspiring. Just stay focused on quality and promise less, deliver more.

There is real risk in selling your time

It doesn’t scale. You can only spend your time once. You can only work with so many people at a time. And if you get sick, there goes your income.

It also means unfilled gaps of time may exist between projects, which means you won’t have income for that time.

My goal is freedom. A naive goal for an entrepreneur, for sure, but to me it means: doing what I love while being able to go wherever I want to go.

So a tip I’ve had from a few people is to sell something other than my time. I have a few product ideas that I want to launch this year. I’m also considering setting up a Patreon for MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE, which will probably somehow be tied into those products (eg. funders get early access / lifetime subscription, etc.).

The goal is to create a revenue stream to cover basic costs, like rent. Once I hit that goal, I’ll figure out whether I can scale that revenue stream or add new ones on top of it. A big example for me is Pieter Levels.

Left to right: Music Tech Fest’s amazing 2016 venue (Funkhaus Berlin), one of my favourite meeting spots in Amsterdam (Quartier Putain), panel discussion at Sørveiv Conference in Kristiansand.

So that says something about MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE’s direction

But don’t worry: I won’t suddenly throw up paywalls. This strategy is working well for me, so whatever is free now, will stay free. As a matter of fact, due to my focus on synergy, I aim to deliver you more value over time.

After a year, I finally got to a point where I can set up a steady pipeline of projects (by the way, I’ll have more time on my hands from mid-March, so if you’d like to work together, email me: bas@musicxtechxfuture.com). In part because of shifting my focus to The Netherlands, but also because international collaborations are finally materializing.

Year one’s a wrap! 🍾

It’s been great meeting so many awesome people this year, from Amsterdam to Groningen, London, Berlin, The Hague, Ghent, Kristiansand, and Valencia. Thank you for the follows, the shares, the correspondence, the collaborations, the advice, and the amazing conversations.

I’m proud to be part of such an intelligent, forward-thinking, global community. Here’s to the future! 🤖 ❤️️ 🍸

(If you’re feeling generous, help me work through my reading list 🎁)

Mood augmentation and non static music

Posted on January 30, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Why the next big innovation in music will change music itself — and how our moods are in the driver’s seat for that development.

Over the last half year, I’ve had the pleasure to publish two guest contributions in MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE about our changing relationship with music.

The first had Thiago R. Pinto pointing out how we’re now using music to augment our experiences and that we have developed a utilitarian relation with regards to music.

Then last week, James Lynden shared his research into how Spotify affects mood and found out that people are mood-aware when they make choices on the service (emphasis mine):

Overall, mood is a vital aspect of participants’ behaviour on Spotify, and it seems that participants listen to music through the platform to manage or at least react to their moods. Yet the role of mood is normally implicit and unconscious in the participants’ listening.

Having developed music streaming products myself, like Fonoteka, when I was at Zvooq, I’m obviously very interested in this topic and what it means for the way we structure music experiences.

Another topic I love to think about is artificial intelligence, generative music, as well as adaptive and interactive music experiences. Particularly, I’m interested at how non-static music experiences can be brought to a mass market. So when I saw the following finding (emphasis mine), things instantly clicked:

In the same way as we outsource some of our cognitive load to the computer (e.g. notes and reminders, calculators etc.) perhaps some of our emotional state could also be seen as being outsourced to the machine.

For the music industry, I think explicitly mood-based listening is an interesting, emerging consumption dynamic.

Mood augmentation is the best way for non-static music to reach a mass market

James is spot-on when he says mood-based listening is an emerging consumption dynamic. Taking a wider view: the way services construct music experiences also changes the way music is made.

The playlist economy is leading to longer albums, but also optimization of tracks to have lower skip rates in the first 30 seconds. This is nothing compared to the change music went through in the 20th century:

The proliferation of the record as the default way to listen to music meant that music became a consumer product. Something you could collect, like comic books, and something that could be manufactured at a steady flow. This reality gave music new characteristics:

Music became static by default: a song sounding exactly the same as all the times you’ve heard it before is a relatively new quality.
Music became a receiving experience: music lost its default participative quality. If you wanted to hear your favourite song, you better be able to play it, or a friend or family member better have a nice voice.
Music became increasingly individual: while communal experiences, like concerts, raves and festivals flourished, music also went through individualization. People listen to music from their own devices, often through their headphones.

Personalized music is the next step

I like my favourite artist for different reasons than my friend does. I connect to it differently. I listen to it at different moments. Our experience is already different, so why should the music not be more personalized?

I’ve argued before that features are more interesting to monetize than pure access to content. $10 per month for all the music in the world: and then?

The gaming industry has figured out a different model: give people experience to the base game for free, and then charge them to unlock certain features. Examples of music apps that do this are Bjork’s Biophilia as well as mixing app Pacemaker.

In the streaming landscape, TIDAL has recently given users a way to change the length and tempo of tracks. I’m surprised that it wasn’t Spotify, since they have The Echo Nest team aboard, including Paul Lamere who built who built the Infinite Jukebox (among many other great music hacks).

But it’s early days. And the real challenge in creating these experiences is that listeners don’t know they’re interested in them. As quoted earlier from James Lynden:

The role of mood is normally implicit and unconscious in the participants’ listening.

The most successful apps for generative music and soundscapes so far, have been apps that generate sound to help you meditate or focus.

But as we seek to augment our human experience through nootropics and the implementation of technology to improve our senses, it’s clear that music as a static format no longer has to be default.

Further reading: Moving Beyond the Static Music Experience.

What if Marilyn Manson was a YouTuber?

Posted on January 23, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

On establishing an artist narrative in the digital age.

Last week I came across Lucy Blair Pettersson’s thought piece about storytelling for artists and what we can do to learn more about how fans respond to the stories we tell. It triggered a question in me.

I’ve recently been involved with young artists or new projects and aliases by artists who have already built a fanbase before, and one of the biggest creative challenges is often:

How do we establish a narrative with no historical context?

Why is a narrative important?

Attention is the scarcest good in the digital age, so in order to build a career as an artist, you need to figure out how to sustain people’s attention over long periods of time.

A narrative gives context to the stories you tell. A story is finished, a piece of history, but a narrative provides something that fans can become a part of, something that lives.

But constructing a narrative is not easy: it’s a creative exercise that needs input from the artist and often someone who understands the market for their music well.

The challenge is not necessarily in “what do we talk about?” but more in:

How do we talk about the things we talk about?
How do they fit into the overall narrative?
How do we include fans in that narrative? By speaking to them directly, by implicitly including them, or do we let them aspire to be a part of it? The latter is a strategy often used by luxury brands.
What do we not talk about? This is going to be way more than what you actually talk about. Sometimes you have to make explicit choices, especially when coordinating with a larger team.

All of these decisions shape your brand, and your narrative. And the question that your fans, journalists, and you yourself must be able to answer:

Who are you to be talking about these topics?

The answer may be simple: for Adele, it may be something like “I’m a girl like so many others, singing about the issues we all have.” Although, admittedly, I’m not that familiar with Adele.

If done well, your narrative should make your life easier, as it will make decision-making about content on social media, styling, tone, etc. much less difficult.

With some luck, a narrative can span an entire career.

The Marilyn Manson of the social media age

In a quick email exchange I had with Lucy Blair Pettersson, I mentioned Marilyn Manson. The guy has always been smart, eloquent, and very image-aware. He constructed a narrative that transcended a particular song or release and he did so in the 90s. Imagine if he had been born on social media.

What if Marilyn Manson was a YouTuber?

What I always loved about Marilyn Manson was how he used shock to win people’s attention and then showed himself to be thoughtful, intelligent and humorous. It’s a refreshing contrast among a lot of shock bands with no substance and it made him worth talking about.

Surprise is one of the foremost reasons why people share content.

Perhaps I’ll do a talk at a conference or a university on the topic of re-imagining Marilyn Manson as an artist born in the digital age (invite me and make it happen), but for now I want to leave it as something for you to think about on your own.

Understanding why people share

I have to make an important distinction here:

It’s not the narrative that gets shared, it’s the stories that are part of the narratives that people will repeat.

But your narrative gets turned into a story when people are telling their friends about you, or when journalists are writing about your new album or video.

There are a lot of good books about the topic of what makes things catch on, and Contagious is one of my favourites. The book proposes a STEPPS framework for why people share content:

Social currency: makes them look smart, funny, politically engaged, or something else when they share this.
Triggers: think of a context in which you can repeatedly be top-of-mind for people. The book uses the example of Rebecca Black’s Friday, which sees strong peaks in streams and shares on Fridays.
Emotion: when we care, we share. Content that triggers a strong emotional response, like shock, surprise, or outrage, is more likely to be shared.
Public: if it’s publicly visible it has a higher chance of catching on. Think band merch, but also things like festival wristbands that some people collect and keep on their wrists like trophies.
Practical value: if it’s useful, it will get shared. If you’re a protest band, perhaps you can make a video about how to stay anonymous in this day & age and soundtrack it with your music. If you make electronic music, chances are a lot of your fans will do so too: tutorials are really valuable content.
Stories: the book talks about the oldest stories in existence, which are often parables or fairy tales. They’re powerful tools to communicate ideas and some of these stories have managed to live on for thousands of years.

Your overarching artist narrative doesn’t have to include all six of these, but they’re useful to think about when crafting content based on your narrative.

A trick I learned from Niels Aalberts, who managed the band Kyteman and has an excellent music biz newsletter (in Dutch), is that you have to be able to answer this question:

“[Your name] is the artist who [story]…”

Think about what story you want your fans to share. Think about what they are likely saying already, if anything, and whether that’s exciting enough to actually make people listen.

Be brutally honest to yourself: “that guy from our hometown who was featured on the radio everywhere” may sound cool to people from your hometown, but nobody else will care if that’s the only story. You want people to tell your story and have someone reply: “did you know he’s actually from our hometown?”

Pitfalls!

Don’t overcomplicate it. If you create a very complex narrative, your choices for content, the way you react to interview questions, etc. will become more difficult. The point is to make your life easier.

Choose a direction and draft a narrative that is easy to support consistently. Your narrative is never finished. It builds, it grows, and who you are today may not be who you are tomorrow: the transition will be part of your narrative and just like your fans that moved through the transition with you.

Think carefully about whether you’ll get tired of something. Would you have the stamina to walk in huge boots all the time and put on layers of make-up like Marilyn Manson? Do you see yourself carrying on with the never-serious shenanigans of Die Antwoord for 10 years, even if you’re not nearly as successful as them?

If it’s not close to you, and if you don’t fully believe in it, it’s not a recipe for longevity. Most acts don’t make it as big as they hoped to, so it’s usually not a problem to abandon a narrative you don’t like.

But what if you succeed? 😱

The benefits of being an early adopter

Posted on January 16, 2017 | 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.

Why you shouldn’t build an app

Posted on January 9, 2017 | by Bas Grasmayer

Apps are not the answer.

With all the choices you can make for engaging people through their mobile phones, apps should be considered a last resort. Why?

Asking people to install an app means friction.

They want to do something;
They see the download app page;
Tap and go to the App Store page;
Wait for the app to install;
Have to login again.

At every step along the way you can lose people. Scratch that. At every step along the way you will lose people. Why?

The reason I hear most often is: so that you have your app on their phone and people can return easily. But do they?

Most people are not like you. Many of the people who read this will be tech early adopters, so it’s likely you use many apps and install them easily. But the typical US smartphone owner downloads ZERO apps per month (other estimates put it at 1.5 per month).

us-smartphone-users-number-of-app-downloads-per-month-of-smartphone-users-new_chartbuilder

Most app use is concentrated on 5 apps. Can you be one of those apps and compete with the likes of Google and Facebook, who together controlled the 10 most popular apps in 2016?

Apps are expensive to develop and maintain, difficult to make quick adjustments due to submission review processes, and not as engaging as other options.

So what other options do you have?

If you think you can get people to install your app, it means you believe you already have their attention. Great.

So you have two things to worry about:

Can the core functionality be achieved through mobile web?
If yes, then the next question is: how do I keep people coming back?

And if your core functionality is “I want to be able to send push notifications” then there may still be better ways. In music, examples of core functionality that may be hard to work around are:

Music listening in background, eg. when the phone is in the pocket and you’re doing other stuff.
Functionality that’s available when the user is offline.

But I digress, because often those functions may be ‘nice to haves’ and may not be essential. Imagine if a venue has a site where you can check upcoming gigs and also listen to some music… Now a marketing manager there may say: “we absolutely need people to be able to listen to music in the background.” But you can achieve this more easily by offering a Spotify playlist.

Back to push notifications. Keep your eye on messaging apps, because they’re steadily becoming the new social networks and they’re notification-based.

In order to hold onto people’s attention, you may not need push notifications. You need habit. This requires consistency from your side and design thinking on how to construct a habit forming product that people don’t forget about.

You may also use reminders. You could collect email addresses or even phone numbers.

Artists’ newsletters have a 20–25% open rate. 90% of SMS messages are read within the first 3 minutes of receiving. Since starting MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE, I’ve had a handful of unsubscriptions, but that’s nothing compared to the number of uninstalls I would have had.

Still think building an app is a good idea?

Write down who your audience is. How do they use the web. Be realistic and don’t project your own tendencies. Call a bunch of your users if you have to.
Write down exactly what you want people to be able to do. Frame it as a user story: “I can find information about my favourite band’s upcoming gigs in my town”.
Rank your user stories. Then mark the ones that are essential.
Small secret: the ones that you didn’t mark as essential, you’ll probably never build.
Think of ways in which you can achieve the same end results, without building an app that users need to install. (I can help you with that)
Now look at whether introducing the friction of an app is actually the best way to do it. Carefully count the number of steps required for the user to complete their user story.

Choose whatever has the least friction and still accomplishes your goal.