The digital age is demanding for artists. Simply releasing audio is often not enough. You have to take care of artwork, video material for Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, and then you still have to figure out how to get people to actually pay you.
The time has come for a new band member – even if youâre just a bedroom producer. That band member is the visual artist.
The case Iâm making is not new. It has happened before. On a tremendous scale. Back in the early days of hiphop, DJs needed MCs to hype up the crowd. As MCs moved center stage, they needed DJs to keep their shows dynamic, so these two different disciplines combined and allied. It was necessary for the format of that day.
The format of this day is audiovisual. It needs to compete in feeds, it needs to stop people from scrolling, and has to get them to unmute the video in order to hear your music.
Like the DJ and MC in the 1980s, the musician and the visual artist face similar problems today:
You need to get your work in front of peopleâs eyes;
And, outside of certain well-established business models, itâs challenging to monetize.
For the visual artist, you are usually the client, not the people who watch the final work. So theyâre used to be commissioned to create their art. Itâs you who monetizes the live performance and the recording. Teaming up creates the possibility to do both, together, like for brands.
Advantage #1: combining business models generates new revenue streams for the musician and the visual artist.
But before the business model comes getting your work under a lot of eyes. That requires honing your skills plus defining and refining your style. This can be challenging by yourself, but in partnership you can work off of each other. Instead of stepping in when a big part of the creative product is already finished, the visual artist can be involved in the creative process from the beginning. This has the effect that the music and video are integrated elements of the same work, rather than two separate works, and over time, the symbiosis between the artists develops further.
Advantage #2: music and video are interwoven elements, rather than separate works made at different points in time.
Advantage #3: the creative product is a new container uniquely suited for, and born out of, the digital landscape.
The song, as we know it, came from the record. Weâre still thinking in songs, but it has lost its novelty as a format. While audio-only music is obviously not going anywhere, the most engaging material on social networks right now is video. Moving image is powerful â it took a while for video to take over the web, but with growing data caps, increasing network speeds, and great cameras and screens on our mobile devices, video has finally conquered the web.
What is also not going away is the live experience. In fact, itâs one of the most important revenue sources. Engaging live shows are hard if youâre a solo musician. If youâre a band, theyâre tricky in terms of logistics, and possibly costly.
If you can do a live show with just 1 or 2 people the economics are much better. Bringing not just your own music, but also your own visuals that extend from the experience you provide on your site, your album artwork, and your audiovisual experiences on YouTube, Instagram, and other social media.
You should actually be able to charge a bit more for your bookings, because of this show element.
Advantage #4: the economics for live are better, and you get to offer a very integrated experience to fans.
Advantage #5: it gives a live, real-world experience to the visuals â which is something that may be trickier to achieve if the visual artist were on their own.
For some good examples of artist collectives who strongly emphasise this audiovisual fusion, check out NAAFI, ZZK Records, NON, and Meneo:
Donât spend your time on something broken, when you can do something that works even better.
Unless youâre a huge business with a lot of legacy to deal with, the shape of the long tail doesnât matter. It doesnât matter whether music is getting increasingly âwinner takes allâ. This graph does NOT matter:
Going into music, you know that the economics are messed up. Everyone has told you so. Unless you havenât told anyone youâre going into music. Even thenâââopening one music business blog will tell you the samething. Constant bickering over the way money is distributed, who gets paid, how much, why not more, why not less, ticket scalping, streaming royalties, exclusives, royalty split disputesâŚ
Itâs not pretty.
So you know that you should not create a reality for yourself where youâll be dependent on the outcome of the ugly side of the music business. Create one where it doesnât matter.
As soon as you commit to that, the overall economic picture of the music industry wonât matter quite as much.
What matters most
You should be focusing on your music, and on your fans, and on people who make music just like you. Focus on positivity.
Money is not the problem. Your attitude is.
Be proactive. Tell people about your music constantly. Find out who the programmers are for the venues where you want to play. Who the authors are of blogs or YouTube channels that post similar music. Comment. Message them. Ask them for feedback. Be humble and positive.
One day theyâll give you a chance. But they have to SEE that youâre working hard at it, so document your progress. Post at least 5 things to social media every day. Maybe even 10. Snapchat and Instagram Stories make that SUPER easy.
If youâre a band: set everyone up with access. More content.
You need to stand out above all the noise and you need to sustain peopleâs attention, so they donât forget about you, so they donât move on, so you keep appearing in their Facebook timelines and their inbox.
Peopleâs individual attention long tails are the only long tails that matter.
You have a camera on your phone. Get in front of it. Document. Share.
It doesnât have to be perfect. It has to be genuine. If you work hard, it will get better over time. Then people will feel part of your narrative, part of your story⌠and that it was kinda shitty early on is actually great: people LOVE a good underdog story.
If youâre worried about being boring because you spend too much time in your studioâââset up a livestream. Sure it could get boring, but there will be highlights.
What about the money?
Then youâre going to make money on your own. Away from the rat race. Away from the long tail. Your fans are part of your story. Set up a Patreon. Use Kickstarter to launch new projects. Give them a way to commit.
If you work hard at it, people are going to take note. Including people with money. Influencer marketing is one of the hottest areas in marketing right now. Sponsors are going to show up. Reject all of them, except for the ones that really make sense. Donât trade in your fans for money. Be you.
If you have a huge excited fanbase, theyâll be LOUD. People will hear you. So the deals will come. The shows will come. Their size will grow and so will the money you make from them.
This week MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE turns one. Born as a newsletter on Revue, itâs now (finally) a sustainable company. That word, sustainable, comes with a caveat, because it currently still depends on me selling my time. Thereâs 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.
Hereâs what happened next. đż
People will hire you for your most visible skill
Iâm not a writer. I write a lot, but I wouldnât consider it as a full-time profession. Yet itâs 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 Iâm actually a strategist. I keep a wide overview, and have a few topics that Iâm more knowledgeable about than many people in my niche. This allows me to find value through combining things.
I had always said Iâd 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 thingsâŚ
But what if youâre running on savings and those bigger, better things take a while to materialize?
So, I caved in: fine, Iâll 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 elseâŚ
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.
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 didnât 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 wasnât 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 youâre 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 youâre 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.
Moderating a panel about interactive music experiences at Border Sessions.
Leads can take a looooong time to convert
Iâve had a lot of people reach out to me to figure out potential collaborations. Most of those went nowhere, yet.
And thatâs fine. People are busy. Priorities shift.
It made a big difference when I shifted my focus from 100% international to local. Somehow, locally, itâs 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 thatâs a different story.
Basically: donât 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 youâll be too busy to worry about the ones that didnât 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 timeâŚ
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 donât find anything to do, just get some part-time job, because last-minute invites are also unlikely to happen.
Itâs 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, theyâll know they can call you. Even better: they might not realize a problem can be fixed, if it werenât for knowing you. We often ignore things that seem like they canât be improved, not being aware of the problem⌠so by being present in peopleâs 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 donât find super inspiring. Just stay focused on quality and promise less, deliver more.
There is real risk in selling your time
It doesnât 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 wonât 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 Iâve 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. Iâm 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, Iâll 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 Festâs 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 FUTUREâs direction
But donât worry: I wonât 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, Iâll have more time on my hands from mid-March, so if youâd 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 oneâs a wrap! đž
Itâs 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.
Iâm proud to be part of such an intelligent, forward-thinking, global community. Hereâs to the future! đ¤ â¤ď¸ď¸ đ¸
(If youâre feeling generous, help me work through my reading list đ)
On establishing an artist narrative in the digital age.
Last week I came across Lucy Blair Petterssonâs 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.
Iâve 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 peopleâs 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: itâs 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 âwhat do we talk about?â 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 âIâm a girl like so many others, singing about the issues we all have.â Although, admittedly, Iâm 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 peopleâs attention and then showed himself to be thoughtful, intelligent and humorous. Itâs 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 Iâll 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:
Itâs not the narrative that gets shared, itâs 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 Blackâs 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 itâs 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 itâs useful, it will get shared. If youâre 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. Theyâre powerful tools to communicate ideas and some of these stories have managed to live on for thousands of years.
Your overarching artist narrative doesnât have to include all six of these, but theyâre useful to think about when crafting content based on your narrative.
Think about what story you want your fans to share. Think about what they are likely saying already, if anything, and whether thatâs exciting enough to actually make people listen.
Be brutally honest to yourself: âthat guy from our hometown who was featured on the radio everywhereâ may sound cool to people from your hometown, but nobody else will care if thatâs the only story. You want people to tell your story and have someone reply: âdid you know heâs actually from our hometown?â
Pitfalls!
Donât 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 youâll 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 youâre not nearly as successful as them?
If itâs not close to you, and if you donât fully believe in it, itâs not a recipe for longevity. Most acts donât make it as big as they hoped to, so itâs usually not a problem to abandon a narrative you donât like.
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. Iâm 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.
Itâs 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 Iâm an early adopter of a service called Revue. So I chose âOtherâ. 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 servicesâ most important users. This may mean that you can interact directly with the serviceâs 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. âWe 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.âÂ
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 âfirst 100/500/1000 users are the most important users youâll ever have.â In part because you canât think about everything yourself and users help you figure out things you missed.
He adds:
âEarly 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.â
Being an early adopter makes it easy to stand out
There are benefits beyond being an important voice for founders. If youâre active in a young community, itâs easy to build a profile for yourself.
Sales can be interchanged with users, or other metrics youâre tracking.
Be active, engage with others, and if what youâre doing on the platform is really good, youâll build a following. This will get you featured. The power of being featured is that startups usually aim for something named hockeystick growth.
If youâre featured when the growth suddenly starts accelerating, you benefit from the network effect, because new users often end up following existing accounts, since they wonât 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.
Iâve had similar experiences with Revue, where my newsletter was featured, and if I had more time, Iâd 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. Itâs a place where people post new products and services, so youâre 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:
Iâm working with a startup thatâs 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.
Iâm going to be writing a lot more about this topic once weâve got everything set up for you to give it a go, but if youâd like to get on the list and be among the first users: use this link.
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. Itâs a pretty tiring process and can take a lot of focus away from other important activities.
Social media is so excitingâŚ
But itâs necessary.
One way to sustain attention is to connect fans together and have them keep each otherâs attention on you. Itâs 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, Iâve 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 todayâs landscape they make a lot of sense.
Remix culture is going mainstream and âlistenersâ are increasingly being shifted from passenger to driverâs seat.
Instead of creating all of your own content, why not let fans do some?
As a matter of fact, theyâre already doing it. Look at the fanbases of the Monstercat and Lapfox Trax labels. It seems exceptional, but itâs 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 thereâs no immediate way to get those 5 cents of revenue from the 5,000 streams itâs going to garner? Itâs a hundred thousand times more valuable having an inclusive culture in your fanbase, and a following of fans that actually participate in what youâre 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.
Get a read of how many of your fans also make music.
Figure out how to make it easier for them to make their own edits.
Got a lot of bedroom producers as fans? Release stems.
