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 wouldnât 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?
Iâve been getting into a new way of thinking about music by stepping into classical. Suddenly, thereâs not 1 original and then some âlesserâ remixes and covers. Thereâs 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 thereâs an relatively undisputed âbestâ, but often it comes down to personal taste, preference, and opinion.
In the last century, music went through an enormous change. It went from âfolkâ to âpopâ. Hereâs what I mean with each phrase:
Folk: music thatâs not âownedâ 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 thatâs 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 âfolkâ by default, it became âpopâ 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. Peopleâs 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 âfolk-ifyâ modern pop music. Itâs 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 weâre structuring the navigation in content on IDAGIO (such as: composers > works > recordings and performers) some day could become relevant for âpopâ?
It would mean people would be able to browse based on songwriter, and then see all the pop songs related to that writer. Theyâd 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.
Weâre reaching an interesting time: weâre 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 thereâs blockchain, which is a good technology for tracking the complexity involved with a very nested type of ownership if we indeed âfolk-ifyâ pop music (without radically overhauling modern notions of intellectual property).
Music doesnât have to become more participative, but it can. I think thereâs 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, SonĂĄr+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.
With the platformization of the web, creatives are set up to compete for attention while the platforms that host their content benefit from monetization at scale. It’s an important issue, but to say creatives have been screwed over by default helps nobody, mostly because it’s incorrect.
When reading Jon Westenberg‘s recent comments about creatives’ current challenges, I found myself disagreeing with the premise and much of what stemmed from it. I feel it’s important to walk through the presented thoughts and refute them or at least provide a different perspective. I normally don’t do these types of articles, but since it’s such a widely shared piece, I feel it’s important to do this, because it’s an unconstructive mindset to adopt.
Creatives, seeing yourself as a victim doesn’t help you. It disempowers you. It gives you an off-putting aura that communicates a sense of entitlement. That’s not to say that you’re not entitled to fair pay and treatment. Just compare it to the work floor: you’re entitled to salary, but if you give off a sense of entitlement it will annoy colleagues, superiors, and clients.
Jon starts off with his own experiences as a writer and speaker, explaining how requests come in:
âŚuntil you tell them you want them to pay for your expenses or even a fee. Then they disappear pretty damn fast.
Which is your own fault for violating the golden ruleâââbloggers and writers must never try to get paid.
I’ve encountered this. For a long time, this used to be my personal golden rule: I was afraid that paid writing would take the fun out of it, but instead paid writing makes me a lot more comfortable with spending big chunks of time on research and narrative. Now, I’m very strategic about when I write for free and when I don’t. Some sites help me reach new audiences that wouldn’t otherwise encounter my writing. Some don’t. Some benefit from the visibility I can give them, and for some that doesn’t matter. Sometimes I’m just really busy and can’t afford to spend my time on unpaid writing.
When writing’s unpaid, I try to make sure I convert the audience to my Twitter account and newsletter. When writing’s paid, IÂ leave the question of credits up to the client.
When I first started charging for writing, I was nervous, but now I’m comfortable with it. I get occasional requests, and some I’ll answer with a cost estimate. Some requests then disappear, indeed, but that’s fine – it’s part of my strategy, and I don’t expect people to know beforehand that I expect payment. The free writing I do fits into a wider strategy: it helps me build my network through which I acquire clients for consultancy work.
I’ve never experienced any type of animosity when charging money. It’s about managing expectations, clearly explaining yourself, and simply getting comfortable with asking for something.
Itâs also becoming increasingly difficult to look at publishing online or being an artist or recording music or starting a publication as a full time career.
I think we’ve gone through the hardest phase. People are used to mobile payments and subscriptions for digital content now. Many people are familiar with crowdfunding. Publications like The Correspondent are showing that membership models with fair payment for writers are viable. Blendle shows micropayments for articles are viable when properly designed and introduced to the end user.
If you’re an independent artist or writer, you could set up a Patreon, where fans of your work pledge to make a fixed contribution for every piece you publish (this is something I’m considering for my newsletter (EDIT: done!)).
It’s getting increasingly viable to look at creativity as a full time career.
The big problem is not the money. It’s the attention you have to compete for. We’re all creators of content – so what’s the role of creatives?
If you do want to get into creative work, youâre going to have to see it as a side hustle. Not your main gig. Thatâs just the way it is.
This is actually good advice. Take time to build up your audience. Take time to figure out your business models. The business models of earlier days are not set in stone anymore. You need to be innovative. Don’t rely on the old. Don’t do new things in an old way. Find new ways.
Weâve made it easier than ever to make stuff, and harder than ever to make enough money to live. And every day, thereâs a new âdisruptiveâ startup that does more damage.
What they âdisruptâ is creatorâs profits, most of the time. Thatâs what music streaming did.
Woah, woah, woah. Have we forgotten about piracy? Piracy disrupted creators’ profits. In part, because certain industries thought they could hold back certain developments and buy more time. They couldn’t. Piracy soared, and then… Music streaming disrupted piracy.
People donât want to pay for content. They want to consume it for free, or monetise it for themselves.
Sure. People don’t want to pay for chocolate. Don’t want to pay for a new smartphone. Don’t want to pay for a Toastmaster 3000 in just five easy instalments. But all those companies have figured out ways to get people to pay. The ones that didn’t are dead. There’s nothing that stops creatives from finding business models, but they need to bear in mind two important points:
Optimize your business model so that you can compete for attention;
Don’t look at the past for how to monetize.
For example, I usually tell musical artists to look at YouTubers instead of the recording business. YouTubers and livestreamers make great use of crowdfunding, donations, subscriptions, and sponsorships. Make that which generates attention available for free, so it travels far and wide, then monetize the scarce and exclusive. It’s the same basic principle I’ve been repeating since 2011, when I published my thesis about marketing music through non-linear communication (networks).
If you tell people youâre an artist, theyâll tell you thatâs not much of a career path and you should get a real job.
Was this ever not true? Westenberg’s next point is that people building tech startups for artists are celebrated. This may be true (though he’d be surprised how many obviously dead-on-arrival startups there are). I think startups being celebrated by default mostly stems from people not understanding tech startups. As the phenomenon of tech startups matures and becomes more mainstream, it’s drawing a lot more criticism. I hear people on radio comparing startups to “getting unemployment compensation paid for by investors.”
The article’s most interesting bit looks at the amount of followers Nicki Minaj has on Instagram (77 million) and compares it to the amount of albums sold (800k). He follows it up with the following question:
If a mega star like Nicki Minaj has a conversion rate that low for actual sales, what does that mean for indie creators?
Conversion rates are likely much higher. Artists like Minaj have a lot of followers who are not fans. Or a lot of people who like the music, but are not that into it. Artists at such scale are public figures – people follow them and know about them, not just for their music, but also for their personalities and fame. Indie artists are more likely to have more engaged fans, and if they devise a smart strategy they can monetize more than just 1% of them. They don’t have to depend on the type of ‘mass’ strategies employed for acts like Minaj, which inevitably lead to low conversion rates.
Weâre giving money to tech platforms to become âUnicornsâ off the backs of creatives, and driving creatives out of business.
Alsoâââitâs an awful lot harder for a writer or an artist to get paid for playing concerts. And even if they did, theyâre still not being paid for their creative work, theyâre being paid for their personal appearance and thatâs not the same thing.
It’s competition. People are willing to do it for free: that makes it hard to charge money for the same thing. And the latter part of his statement is true, but it’s arguably not so different from before. Did people buy plastic discs with music on them in order to pay for the creative work, or did they just like how the music made them feel? Do people pay for music because of the pure creativity or also because of the personality behind it?
You need to be smart about these dynamics and not fall into the trap of feeling helpless. Develop a personal strategy that will help you to effectively build and monetize a fanbase.
Yes, there are real problems. The platformization of the web is an issue, and automation could kill a lot more jobs, so it may be important that in this late stage of capitalism we divorce income from work, at least partly through something like an unconditional basic income. But then we’ll have even more people creating content, more people competing for those same eyeballs, and that is where the root of the problem lies.
How the convergence of 2 trends opens up new business model opportunities for artists.
When I landed in Russia to get involved with music streaming service Zvooq, my goal was to look beyond streaming. The streaming layer would be the layer that brings everything together: fans, artists, and data. We started envisioning a layer on top of that, which we never fully got to roll out, in big part due to the challenges of the streaming business.
It was probably too early.
For the last decade, a lot of people have been envisioning ambitious direct-to-fan business models. The problem was that many of these were only viable for niche artists with early adopter audiences, but as technology develops, this is less so the case today.
Letâs have look at a few breakthrough trends in the last year:
Messaging apps are rapidly replacing social networks as the primary way for people to socialize online;
Better data plans & faster internet speeds have led to an increase in live streams, further enabled by product choices by Facebook & YouTube.
Messaging apps overtaking social networks is a trend thatâs been underway for years now. Itâs why Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 for a whopping $19 billion. While 2.5 billion people had a messaging app installed earlier this year, thatâs expected to rise to 3.6 billion in coming years. In part, this is driven by people coming online and messaging apps being relatively light weight in terms of data use.
In more developed markets, the trend for messaging apps is beyond text. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack have all recently enabled video calling. Other apps, like Instagram, Snapchat, Live.ly, and Tribe are finding new ways to give shape to mobile video experiences, from broadcasting short video stories, to live streaming to friends, to video group chats.
For artists that stay on top of trends, the potential for immediacy and intimacy with their fanbase is expanding.
Messaging apps make it easier to ping fans to get them involved in something, right away. And going live is one of the most engaging ways to do so.
Justin Kan, who founded Justin.tv which later became video game streaming platform Twitch (sold to Amazon for just under $1 billion), launched a new app recently which I think deserves the attention of the music business.
Whale is a Q&A app which lets people pose questions to âinfluencersâ. To have your question answered, you have to pay a fee which is supposed to help your question ârise above the noise of social mediaâ. And Whale is not the only app with this proposition.
Yam is another Q&A app which places more emphasis on personalities, who can answer fansâ questions through video, but also self-publish answers to questions they think people may be curious about.
Watching a reply to a question on Yam costs 5 cents, which is evenly split between the person who asked and the person who answered. Itâs a good scheme to get people to come together to create content and for the person answering the questions to prioritize questions they think will lead to the most engagement.
What both of these apps do is that they monetize one of the truly scarce things in the digital age.
Any type of digital media is easily made abundant, but attention can only be spent once.
These trends enable creating an effective system for fans to compete for artistsâ attention. I strongly believe this is where the most interesting business opportunities lie in the music business at the level of the artist, but also for those looking to create innovative new tools.
Make great music.
Grow your fan base.
Monetize your most limited resource.
This can take so many shapes or forms:
Simply knowing that your idol saw your drawing or letter;
Having your demo reviewed by an artist you look up to;
Getting a special video greeting;
Learning more about an artist through a Q&A;
Being able to tell an artist about a local fan community & âcome to our city!â;
Having the top rank as a fan & receiving a perk for that.
Each of these can be a product on their own and all of these products will likely look like messaging apps, video apps, or a mix.
A lot of fan engagement platforms failed, because they were looking for money in a niche behaviour that was difficult to exploit. People had to be taught new behaviours and new interfaces, which is hard when everyoneâs competing for your attention.
Now this is becoming easier, because on mobile it can be as simple as a tap on the screen. Tuning into a live stream can be as simple as opening a push notification. Asking a question to an artist can be as simple as messaging a friend.
So, the question for the platforms early to the party is whether theyâll be able to adjust to the current (social) media landscape, or whether they let sunk cost fallacy entrench them in a vision based on how things used to be.
Thereâs tremendous value in big platforms figuring out new ways for artists and fans to exchange value. They already have the data and the fan connections. Imagine if streaming services were to build a new engagement layer on top of what already exists.
Until then, artists will have to stay lean and use specific tools that do one thing really well. Keep Product Hunt bookmarked.
Finding your way to success can be confusing as an artist. Hereâs 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.
Youâll learn some new tricks to get better at what youâre 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 thatâs unique to you. This is important, because itâs unlikely youâll ever be âthe bestââââsimple mathematics. However, if you make a sound that stands out, you donât need to be the best, you just have to make something remarkable.
Seems like an obvious step, but it often needs repeating. If youâre 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 itâs 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 donât 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 weâll spend more time on their platforms.
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 itâs not fun for you, youâre going to get exhausted and inconsistent eventually.)
Step one point five: finding your audience.
If you understand your musicâs 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. Donât ask for permission, but communicate to them once your remix is done. After all: their repost helps you reach their audience and chances are theyâll have a bigger audience than you. Play nice. And donât put your remix on Spotify or other monetized places without permission. Itâs less about the legal issues, and more that itâs 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 Redditâs 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 thereâs 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 donât 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, donât be shy. Make sure youâre 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 youâre not ready. The feedback youâll get will be valuable, but itâs also a good chance to get into the mind of label A&Rs, learn how they think, and youâll 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.
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 theyâre doing, and if thereâs a panelist you find interesting, grab them for a chat. Theyâre there to speak to people and theyâre interested in meeting you.
Basically: talk to people, and if itâs uncomfortable, then take a friend with you whoâs good with that. The music business is a network business, so understand that youâre 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 fickleâââso 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. Itâs incredibly valuable, so if youâre 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. Itâs 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 20â25% open rate.
Ads & remarketing. Sometimes itâs 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, youâll get some data about the people that checked out your release and youâll 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. Donât abuse peopleâs permission to appear in their feeds or inbox, because theyâll unsubscribe or learn to ignore you. Good luck winning their attention back then.
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, Iâve learned there are roughly two types of house parties:
The type where you get let in, stand around a room with strangers, where nobodyâs really entertained and just waiting for the host to come chat with them, and thinking of an excuse to bail ASAP. đŠ
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 havenât even seen the host in an hour, because youâve been having such a good time with their friends. đĽ
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:
âHaving a great time? Letâs get some more people in here! Text your friends. BYOB.â
Facebook Groups are an excellent way to do this. It also lets you mix fans that youâve 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 doesnât have to be just your music.
Step four: âshut up and take my moneyâ
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 itâs 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 shouldnât have to be charity, so donât put yourself in the position of having to beg fans to âplease buy my album.â
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. đš Itâs just a matter of getting into the right frame of mind. Letâs 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 youâââthatâs just a nice bonus. But for themselves.
Recap
Step zero: make really great music. Keep working on your skills. This is by far the most important part. Itâs the fuel for everything else. If nothing seems to be working, it may just be because your music is not good enough, or simply doesnât 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 peopleâs 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 fansâ 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 othersâ attention on you and can help amplify your message. Be the host of the most fun house party theyâve ever attended.
Step four: âshut up and take my moneyâ. Besides conventional revenue streams, you should be creating things that are so exciting for fans that theyâll thank you for the opportunity to spend their money.
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 youâre 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 youâre ready to build your team:
Work with people that inspire you. Donât work with assholes.
And for fuckâs sake, keep your focus on your music.
Your music always comes first.
With the rise of live streaming and new media models, donations deserve another consideration.
Napster, the early file sharing service, not only introduced many to piracy. The platform also exposed two competing world views. One believed that information should be free and the other believed in combating such ideas. They were both wrong.
As a teenager, and still today, my personal sympathy went out to those who saw a better world and wanted to accomplish that by facing down large corporations. Their envisioned world was never satisfactory enough for me, though. It seemed oversimplified. One of the most common tropes youâd hear would be:
âArtists should just release their work for free and let people donate. Iâd love to be able to donate to my favourite artists.â
An example of a common donation request.
At that time, there were only about half a billion connected devices. Most of the worldâs population wasnât online yet. Those that were, and thought this way, were a minority projecting their own behaviour onto others. Itâs common: most music startup founders do the same thingâââoverestimating how much people care about music. Simply put: the donation model could not scale.
The model didnât take into consideration the complexity of the way music is made. Letâs say artists were able to make a living off of donationsâââthis benefits the most visible artists; the singers, but not the songwriters. How should money from donations then be distributed so that itâs fair? Does the intention behind the donation matter? Questions like these are the reason why thereâs so much legislation around creative work.
An elemental overview of merely the royalty distribution part of the music business. Via Bemuso.
Time passed and two trends have developed. Firstly, there has been an explosion of artists who do everything by themselves. Households in many countries now no longer have just 1 family PC, and music production software is easy to attain. This has led to a rise of âbedroom producersâ, many of which are world famous and make a good living off of music.
The second trend is that the internet has become more real-time. Ten years ago you wouldnât consider sharing memories online that would only be visible for 24 hours. Now, two of the worldâs most popular apps, Instagram and Snapchat, not only encourage, but thrive because of that behaviour.
Fast wireless connections and increasingly powerful devices have enabled livestreaming. Anyone whoâs ever âgone liveâ on Facebook or Periscope knows that it changes the creative process of making a video. Live video streams are not just a new way to broadcast, theyâre a creative format.
Trends mix and influence each other. If you want to understand where things are going, you have to understand how trends converge and diverge. In this case, the two highlighted trends have culminated into a particular reality: donations are becoming a viable part of artistsâ business models.
Understanding how donations are becoming viable is easiest by looking outside of music. Donations are already an important part of the economy on Twitch, a platform for broadcasting gameplay, which also encourages creatives to start streaming.
Gamers use donation apps to display tip notes in the live video stream. Some apps actually automatically read out the tip notes on-stream. Tipping is done for various reasons: to actually show appreciation, to encourage the chat to discuss a certain topic (or more likely: to emote-spam), to request a song, to ask for expert feedback, to get their name or joke into a YouTube highlight reel, etc.
For popular streamers, itâs hard to interact with the chat, because thereâs just too much to read it allâââand they also need to focus on their game. Tip notes provide a way for viewers or fans to rise above the noise and get the streamerâs attention.
The takeaway here is that donations do not seem to occur for altruistic reasons in most cases. The exact ratio would make for an interesting study. Much of the donation behaviour happens due to the desire to interact, stand out or to get a request fulfilled. Itâs a behaviour enabled by the immediacy brought on by the rise of high quality live streaming.
Some streamers highlight their top donators by keeping their names visible (in bottom).
Musicians that want to incorporate donations into their business model will need a clear strategy. Firstly, itâs unlikely that donations on their own are viable if the goal is to make a living off of creative work. Although if you do it all yourself, like many artists these days, you get to keep the whole cut.
Secondly, the reason why donations are becoming viable is because of live streaming. This means the artist needs to be able to consistently generate audiences and that takes time to build. One-offs are a recipe for failure, especially if they donât sit within a broader strategy.
Live streams being a creative format of their own means that there needs to be an intrinsic motivation to work in this way. Else one wonât be able to muster the consistency and grit necessary to succeed. The question for the artist is: âis this medium compelling enough for you to spend a significant amount of your time on it?â
Whatever the answer, the trend is clear. As artists are embracing the live format, with younger ones even coming into maturity with it, weâll see donations make a comeback. This time, not as charity, but as a well-planned part of artistsâ business models.
An example of donations on Chew.tv, a live video streaming platform for music.
Matthew Adell about founding MetaPop and the surprising amount of money being left on the table by artists &Â labels.
Itâs 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 MetaPopâs place in it.
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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:
âWhat is not getting solved, because people just think itâs hard?â
This question formed the basis of Mattâs search for intractable problems in the music business. Having always had an interest in derivative works he decided to investigate this problem, because âespecially in music, weâve seen the behaviour of people making remixes without authorisation really become explosive,â 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.
âWhat we learned is while mashups have hits every now and then, there arenât 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 werenât 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.â
So as a starting point, they honed MetaPopâs technology on single song remixes and found that theyâre better at finding single song remixes than YouTubeâs 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.
âSo, 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.â
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, itâs 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 youâre reaching another demographic that you otherwise wouldnât. MetaPopâs 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 itâs so valuable to artists and there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, then why has nobody cracked this before?
âIt wasnât solved before, because there was no money. And itâs complex. Each country has its own laws for how to deal with derivatives.â The rise of streaming means that now there suddenly is a way to monetize. You wouldnât be able to track the vinyl bootlegs and monetize them, but with all the music platforms out there now, thereâs 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, weâll see much less takedowns than we do today, with there being more systems in place to monetize instead. This is where MetaPopâs place is, as a rights-clearing house for derivative works.
Thereâs 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 theyâve managed to attract and host is an impressive feat, and testament to many years of experience the team has throughout music & tech.
MetaPopâs 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.
âNobody else has the right mixture of experience, tech and relationships.â
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Personally, Iâm 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:
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.
The remix is the internetâs language: whether itâs 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 shouldnât have ignored the inner city kids sampling in the 80s and 90s to create hiphop, but now thereâs just no getting around it.
