Forty thousand. That’s the number of songs being added to Spotify every day. Per year, that’s nearly 15 million. With AI, we are approaching a world where we could easily create 15 million songs per day. Per hour even. What might that look like?
Can music experiences performed by robots be Authorful? (photo: Compressorhead)
The music trend we can most linearly extrapolate into the AI age is that of utilitarian music: instead of putting on an album, we put on workout music playlists, jazz for cooking, coffee time Sunday, music for long drives.
Artists have become good at creating music specifically for contexts like this. It often forms a big consideration in marketing music, but for also the creation process itself. But an artist can’t be everywhere at once. AI can and will be. Meaning that for utilitarian music, artificial intelligence will have an unfair advantage: it can work directly with the listener to shape much more gratifying, functional music experiences.
This will lead to the rise of Authorless Music. Music without a specific author, besides perhaps a company or algorithm name. It may be trained by the music of thousands of artists, but for the listener it will be hard to pinpoint the origins back to all or any of those artists.
Do we want Authorless Music? Well, not necessarily. However if you track music consumption, it becomes obvious that the author of music is not important at all for certain types of music listening. Yet we crave humanity, personality, stories, context.
Those familiar with trend watching and analysis, know to keep their eyes open for counter trends. When more of our time started being spent on social platforms and music became more anonymous due to its abundance, what happened? We started going to festivals in numbers never seen before. So what counters Authorless Music?
The counter trend to Authorless Music is Authorful Music. Although there will be a middle space, for the sake of brevity I’ll contrast the two.
Authorless Music
Authorful Music
Origin
AI-created or obscure
Human-created (ish)
Focus
Specialised in function
Specialised in meaning
Relation
Little emotional involvement
Strong emotional involvement
Trait
Personalized
Socialized
Authorless Music: primarily driven by AI or the listener is unable to tell whether the listed artist is a real person or an algorithm. The music is specifically targeted towards augmenting certain activities, moods, and environments. Due to its obscure origin, the listener has little emotional involvement with the creator (although I’m looking forward to the days where we can see AI-algorithms fan bases argue with each other about who’s the real King / Queen of AI pop). In many cases it will be personalised to the listener’s music taste, environment, weather, mood, etc.
Authorful Music: primarily created and / or performed by tangible people or personalities. It will be focused in shaping meaning, as it is driven by human intent which embeds meaning by default. This type of music will maintain a strong emotional link between artists and their fans, as well as among fans themselves. This music exists in a social way – even music without lyrics, such as rave music, exists in a social context and can communicate that meaning, context, and intention.
With the increasing abundance of music (15 million tracks per year!), the gateway to Authorless Music has been opened. What about Authorful? What experiences will we craft in a mature streaming landscape?
Two important directions to pay attention to:
Socialising music experiences
It’s so easy to make and manipulate music on our smartphones now. Whether it’s music as a standalone or accompanying something on Instagram or TikTok. One reason for this massive amount of music being added to streaming services is because it’s easier than ever to make music. With apps that make it easy for people to jam around with each other, we’ll see a space emerge which produces fun tools and basically treats music as communication. This happens on smartphones but is strongly complemented by the virtual reality and gaming space.
There is a lot of information around music. What experiences can be created by exposing it? What happens when the listeners start to enter the space between creator and listener and find their own creative place in the music through interaction? (I previously explored this in a piece called The future of music, inspired by a cheap Vietnamese restaurant in Berlin)
Examples of this trend: lyrics annotation community Genius, classical music streaming service IDAGIO, and projects like Song Sommelier.
Special thanks to Data Natives, The Venue Berlin, and Rory Kenny of JAM for an inspiring discussion on AI music recently. You’ve helped inspire some of these thoughts.
New to MUSIC x? Subscribe to the free newsletter for regular updates about innovation in music. Thousands of music professionals around the world have gone before you.
MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE is on a bit of a hiatus. I started it 2 years ago with the goal of shedding light on topics that I felt were being neglected.
Two years later, I feel more positive about the conversation in the music business. Besides that, great newsletters (like Platform & Stream) and writers (like Cherie Hu) have emerged and cover a lot of the topics I set out to cover with MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. So what role can I play now in moving the conversation forward?
I have been doing a lot of thinking about whatâs next. How will all these trends we discuss combine? What are we not talking about? Where are the opportunities? What is the next generation of artists doing? What do they know that we donât?
By thinking about this, I have slowly been reinventing MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE along with the topics I cover. Music as a business is a complex ecosystem. Music as a phenomenon has kept generations of musicologists and philosophers occupied in discussions without conclusions for millennia. The question I have been answering is: what do I find important and what is nobody talking about?
Inspiration
By focusing on innovation in music, and always expanding my musical and artistic horizons, I have seen some developments over the last year that are starting to click together. I am now of the opinion that we are seeing the emergence of an important new generation of music that is going to spawn its own ecosystem.
Broadly speaking, music & the internet has had two phases so far:
Phase 1: the great disruption
Letâs call it the Napster moment. It led to the first new status quo. The rule it imposed was this: âanything that can be stored in digits can be communicated digitally through networks.â (this rule has also been called âinformation wants to be freeâ) This introduced music, and its business ecosystem, to the age of networks. Instead of moving products through distribution and media channels, it now moved through networks⌠and anyone that wanted to play the game, no longer had to find a way into the channelsâââeveryone was on the network.
MySpace Tom: a friend for everyone
Phase 2: the MySpace moment
This phase is probably heralded by what I call the MySpace moment. MySpace grew as piracy thrived. Communities formed. We understood what social media could mean for music. Then MySpace collapsed and there was nothing there to take its place. Instead, the smartphone enabled the next generation of music and social platforms. On-demand music services like Spotify and SoundCloud appearedâââboth making an impact on modern music culture far exceeding MySpaceâs. Communities formed again.
Phase 3: the SoundCloud moment
So whatâs phase 3? The streaming economy is maturing. We are still figuring out how it will work exactly. Let the constant lawsuits between musicians, songwriters, labels, and streaming services be a testament to that. The shitty smartphones we used to have, have been traded in for phones that are more powerful than the computers on our desks a few years ago. AND they have cameras on both sides, AND we have fast internet, ALL the time. Queue YouTubers, Instagram stars, as well as producers rebooting their careers by becoming Snapchat personalities. đ
Meme culture went mainstream. People retiring now, with lots of free time on their hands, have been using the internet for 20 years. People reaching maturity now donât know the world without internet. They may have been carrying smartphones before taking their first chemistry class. It introduces new questions and phenomena in our culture and in music. A 2017 headline that captured one of those phenomena well was: âRapâs Biggest Stars Are Depressed & So Are Their Fansâ.
Net art commenting on internet & mental health.
OK OK OK SO WHAT IS PHASE 3?!
I canât tell you. We can only see it once itâs there. But I can tell you how to be part of it.
With each of these shifts media culture shifted, so you have to look at what changes media culture is going through right now. Artificial intelligence, voice activated devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality all play tremendously important roles here. We still donât know what the SoundClouds, Facebooks, Spotifys, PewDiePies and Justin Biebers (discovered through YouTube) of this phase will be, but we do know what technologies and media formats they may employ.
When MySpace started collapsing, everyone wanted to figure out what the ânext MySpaceâ would be. There was no next MySpace. Not in the way anyone was thinking about it. Ultimately, Facebook and SoundCloud filled that gap and took things way further than MySpace.
So what would the next SoundCloud look like?
This is what I know about the next SoundCloud. It can be clunky. In fact, it may be better if itâs not easy to use (e.g. Snapchat): kids will spend time figuring out how to move into virtual spaces where they can do their own thing. P2P services were not easy to use at first, torrents werenât easy to use, and as elegant as it was, SoundCloud was not as easy to use as MySpace in its early days as long as you were trying to use it for MySpacey purposes.
It has to do 1 thing extremely well though (letâs call it âkiller featureâ). I remember that SoundCloudâs waveform & commenting feature was so great that artists were learning basic code, so they could remove MySpaceâs standard players from their profiles and add SoundCloudâs waveform.
Then it has to have high cultural appeal. The waveform helped SoundCloud travel. It was cool. Itâs hard to say what it will be like for the next SoundCloud⌠But perhaps itâs a cryptotoken. Blockchain is cool and cryptocurrencies are cool. They have cultural appeal, partly because of their association with ordering drugs online via the Tor network. But also because they represent dissent against the status quo, whether thatâs valid or invalid. And the first cryptocurrency millionaires in music are already here. 50 Cent.
Perhaps Mat Dryhurst, a prolific thinker and artist (some may know him from his work with Holly Herndon), will be proven right and we will see a tokenized SoundCloud. Fingers crossed, because I admire what theyâve done and the role theyâve played in helping modern music & internet culture take shape.
But what aboutâŚ
We assume too often that what comes next follows more or less linearly from what was there before. By doing so, we discount important developments and blind ourselves to their potential impact. In previous paragraphs, I have done exactly that. So itâs time to clean up my mess.
What is internet culture?
First of all, I need to clarify what I mean when I talk about internet culture or online culture. I am talking about audiovisual aesthetics, language, cultural memes like jokes, discourse about identity, politics, society and psychology. These emerge online. From bedrooms. From people of all ages and countries, connecting online to collaborate, iterate, remix, and discuss in virtual space.
This has manifested through music genres like vaporwave and nightcore (example below), but also more serious topics, such as a cultural emphasis on mental health, and identity (most notably gender identity). Then thereâs a darker side to it too. The alt right has been able to create so much impact, from bedrooms, by using the same internet culture dynamics that previous examples utilizeâââeventually memeing Trump into the White House. They accomplished it as part of an alliance of mostly pre-internet organisations, institutions, and structures, but those organisations couldnât have pulled this off without their internet army.
When I talk about internet culture, or online culture, I do not mean to suggest a separation between online and offline. Iâm just pointing at the origin. As a matter of fact, the internet has become such a standard part of our lives that we are online even when weâre offline.
On a free weekend day, leave your phone at home. Go explore the city. Go to parts youâve never been. Soon, you may get lost and want to check Google Maps. You may see something fascinating that youâd like to photograph and share on Instagram or Facebook. You might take a mental note to look that building up on Wikipedia when you get home to get more history.
By now, our minds are always online. Even when we believe weâre offline.
Always online
This is the number 1 thing that changed over the course of aforementioned phase 2. Even when smartphones arrived, we werenât online all the time. But now we are. The fact that we are always carrying devices around that are connected to fast internet, with cameras on both sides, and with great screens compared to those 5â10 years ago, is one of the most important realities for the future of music.
Musical.ly, sold last year for around $1bn, comes to mind.
Mixed reality
How platforms deal with âmixed realityâ may be as crucial as the question of how the previous generation dealt with the rise of the smartphone. Back in Facebookâs younger days, the company was struggling to crack mobile and eventually took drastic measures to become mobile-first. Getting ahead of the problem this time, Facebook entered the virtual reality space in 2014 through the early acquisition of Oculus VR for $2bn.
But I donât think itâs VR as a medium that will have the high cultural impact that the internet did. I think itâs about the interface to other aspects of our experience. Itâs why I believe the below video of Mark Zuckerbergâs wife, Priscilla Chan, calling Mark from âthe real worldâ while heâs in a VR version of his home, was one of the most important tech showcases last year.
Skip to 4:50 if the video doesnât auto-play from there.
Offline and online is blurring, so what does that imply for music?
Instreaming
Late last year I attended a gig that has really started falling into place since. A friend from Holland (Victor, also known as S x m b r a) was coming to Berlin to do a gig. I met him when he was mostly known for writing for Generation Bassâââan important blog for underground bass music culture. He is extremely plugged in and knows so much about trends in music (particularly online niches), so I really trust him as a music curator.
He is also part of something called c a r e, which is described as:
c a r e is a post-internet party taking place online. c a r e is about sharing together. c a r e is a future sensation. this digital experience enables you to connect with internet kids worldwide. it also provides the opportunity to meet and discover artists and people which have common interests. we are a based world community that meets at url parties. we are glad to invite you to this virtual concept of partying. we hope youâll enjoy the event! see you online.
Through c a r e, he teamed up an interdisciplinary collective called Clusterduck which specialises in internet culture. Together they organised a âurl / irl partyâ as part of Clusterduckâs Internet Fame project, which is part of the Wrong Biennaleâââa global event celebrating digital art.
During the event, an audio & video stream connected people from their bedrooms to the âirlâ event. These people could interact with each other online, but they were also âinstreamedâ so their chat messages & webcam feeds on Tinychat would be shown inside the party. The founder of c a r e, who wasnât present in person, is even billed on the poster and broadcasted a DJ set from url to the irl space in Berlin.
A lot of people at the âirlâ part of the event were familiar with some of the people they saw on the âurlâ part displayed on a prominent screen above the dancefloor & bar. So it created this sense of community & connection and blurring of irl & url.
You could walk into such an event and think itâs just some young folks who set up some webcams, but when you see it as part of the greater trends in our all-absorbing media & tech culture, what was happening there becomes way more significant.
Internet culture and music
I will be going way deeper into this in future articles and newsletters, but I want to give you an example of what I think people should be paying attention to.
For example, the Sponsored Content album by an artist called Antwood. Itâs a perfect example of the post-internet avant-garde expression in music. Antwood:
âIn the past year, I found that ASMR [dubbed by Google as the biggest YouTube trend youâve never heard of], which I had previously used as a source of foley in my music, was a fairly effective sleep aid. Iâd been using the videos in this way for a few months, when I noticed a popular ASMR YouTuber announced a plan to incorporate ads into her videos; quiet, subtle ads, woven into the content. What bothered me about this was that these ads would target viewers, such as myself, during times of semi lucid vulnerability. This disturbed me, and I unsubscribed.
Sponsored Content explores this idea of subversive advertisement, at least superficially. Itâs obviously about the ubiquity of ads and the commodification of online content. The unlikely placement of ads in the music aims to force the listener to become hyper-aware of being advertised to rather than passively internalizing it. But after the record was finished, it became undeniable that really it wasnât so much a âconcept recordâ about advertisement; itâs as much about intentionally devaluing the things Iâve invested myself into, and over-complicating my work. When I realized this, I considered taking the ads out, and playing the music straight. But I left the record as it is: honest, flawed, with a little humour, and slightly up its own ass.â
Iâve compiled over 25 hours of albums and releases that I feel adhere to this trend in music (Spotify playlist). My playlist biases towards the club & nightlife variants of this trend, but the visual and musical aesthetics & themes should give you a good understanding of what this is about. The most famous example is probably Arca, who has produced for Kanye West and BjĂśrk.
Aforementioned Holly Herndon, who toured with Radiohead, uses AI in her work: âWe have an AI baby that weâre training on our voices; on our voices and on the voices of our ensemble. Yeah, itâs learning how to talk and how to sing, so itâs freaking weirdâ.
Another great example of the post-internet trend in arts and music is YouTuber Poppy, who recently released an album called Poppy.Computer on Mad Decent.
Besides the obvious commentary on internet culture & society on her channel, Poppy plays with the uncanny valley hypothesis of robotics professor Masahiro Mori. The hypothesis suggests that humans feel fine with robots that are obviously not human, but the more semblance these robots get to humans, the stronger our feelings of eeriness and revulsion.
In music, perhaps the best known example of a post-internet genre is vaporwave:
Over the last 2 years, I have written a lot about the music business ecosystem. Always with an innovative angle, but often focused on the type of big issues that are discussed and decided about in boardrooms. While those things are immensely important, itâs also reactive. Reaction doesnât set trajectoryâââit can only adjust it.
My focus is going to shift from the boardroom to the bedroom. From complex issues with big financial implications, to profound ideas that may not always have a clear link to monetization. It is a focus on the creator, the inventor, the innovator.
The newsletter has always placed emphasis on utility. I want what I do to be useful in some way. The most important way in which I try to do that, is by showing what is next, which I will continue to do. What is next is already hereâââyou just have to know where to look.
This is our culture we are talking about. That is primary.
That is what enables the business around it. Which is secondary.
MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE. Those words say it all.
(This post originally appeared on Medium, which I’m moving away from. When you can avoid the large platforms, you should.)
Building up a following as a DJ in the social web’s early days: a how-to for time travellers. đŤ
Back when I was in college, my friend and I would go to a lot of parties. We also used to rap in a band together. Up until then, I had always been writing a lot of lyrics and would visit every hiphop gig in my city. When there was nothing better on, we’d go to student parties in a local club that gathered around 800 people every week, and in between dancing and chatting, we’d be rapping our lyrics over the beats of popular songs.
Then one day we stumbled upon the drum ‘n bass scene (with regular parties in my hometown being hosted by the renowned Black Sun Empire). I always thought electronic music was not for me, but it changed the way I looked at electronic music. Instead of trying to make beats on FL Studio, I started playing around with making electronic music. Then, one day, I stumbled upon a simpler tool that allowed me to mix tracks together. It carried the tacky name Mixmeister, but it is still my all-time favourite tool for making mixes from the comfort of (what was then) my bedroom.
I still wish a company like Native Instruments or Ableton would buy this firm, and release a better and renewed version of their software that hasn’t worked on my Mac for years. But I digress.
Up until then, I had been writing lyrics. Lots of them. Daily. I was involved in the “textcee” scene, which is how people participated in online rap back when it was still a little tricky to record and upload tracks. I participated in battles, topical challenges, wrote about complex (and often silly) subject matter, and really got my creativity out — all in text format. It was easy to distribute, light-weight, and it had its communities and forums.
Pre-Soundcloud
For DJs, it was harder. Bandwidth was not great, and back in 2006 or so, when I started, there were no good online communities. There was no Soundcloud, there was no Mixcloud, and YouTube only allowed videos of up to 10 minutes. My tools of choice, for hosting DJ sets, were YouSendIt, uploaded.to and MegaUpload. They were iffy and you always had to monitor that your files were not taken down, but they would do.
I thought a lot about the format. I never mixed over 80 minutes, because I wanted to make sure that fans (if I had any, and it was hard to tell pre-Facebook & Twitter) would be able to burn it to CDs and listen to it from their cars or home stereos.
I would write detailed information about my tracklists, for a number of reasons:
It’s only fair that the creators of the music get acknowledged – especially since I was sharing their music without permission;
If one of my listeners liked a track, I wanted them to be able to know what it was (there was no such thing as Shazam);
I put detailed time markings, so that people would be able to identify the transitions and the amount of work I’d put into blending tracks together.
I would post them to the forums where I was already going (as well as my MySpace), where I already had my fans because of my texts, together with the links. Here’s an example of such a tracklist:
Then I started a blog on Blogspot to post all the mixes. People would subscribe via RSS and get the posts through their RSS reader. I even added a way to get email updates when the RSS feed would be updated, by using a popular tool at the time called FeedBurner. When posting my mixes to forums, I would also always include download links but also a link to the blogpost, so I could build up my followers there, too.
I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was doing really helped with SEO. If people were Googling those tracks, they’d often find my blog, because not everything was on YouTube, today’s major streaming platforms were non-existent, and the underground was not represented well on iTunes. By sharing my mixes everywhere, I was also generating a lot of backlinks. I was publishing multiple mixes per month. Throughout 2007 I published as many as 35.
Then Soundcloud arrived on the scene
I’m not sure how or when I discovered Soundcloud, but it must have been in its early days back in 2008. I managed to register my first name as my username, which I have held on to ever since, despite people trying to hack my account and even being hit by a trademark claim by an American rapper (after I rejected offers to buy it).
This is where things really started taking off. Now I was able to collect streams instead of downloads. It was so incredibly convenient. No wonder DJs flocked to the platform. All fans had to do now was hit play, but the option to download and listen in high quality was there too. On top of all that, I was able to timestamp my mixes in a much more interesting way: by commenting the tracks.
Something else happened too. By tagging my mixes, it was possible for others to find my work. And by browsing tags, I was able to find other DJs. This was a first. Never before had there been as big a community of DJs. Never before had it been so easy to connect to others. Never before had it been so easy for producers and DJs to connect from the comfort of their bedrooms.
I started listening to other DJs. Commenting everywhere. I continued the same strategy of tracklists and tagging, which maybe also helped my SEO on Soundcloud. But I also didn’t give up on my website until many years later when Facebook was more established and it was getting hard to get people to visit websites. Owning your audience was important, and I always knew this. I needed to have my own place to keep the people who are interested in what I do connected to me.
Then in 2009, Soundcloud changed the rules of the game for DJs.
The first big DJ revolt on Soundcloud
When Soundcloud started, they allowed everyone to upload 4 tracks every month. Tracks could be of any length, or at least long enough to fit a DJ set, but if you wanted to upload more than 4 in a month, you would have to get a paid account. This was great for DJs, but it didn’t last.
In October 2009, Soundcloud switched over to a model with a maximum amount of minutes per account. Even if you’d upgrade to the most expensive monthly package there was no way to get rid of the maximum. It caused an uproar (link to discussion with participation of the founders – but layout is messed up, because it’s a cached page). I participated and tried to be understanding. The model made sense for producers, who were more likely to spend money on Soundcloud. It sucked for DJs though. I wanted DJs to think about what kind of model would allow for Soundcloud to monetize them and very actively participated in the discussion.
The people who participated in that discussion got lucky, and it’s really a token of how user-centric Soundcloud was in those days. A link was shared with the participants, where they could list their accounts, and they were given 30 extra hours. For me, that was about 30 extra DJ sets and it has lasted me to this day (I never matched my 2007 streak) — and I should have probably mentioned this in my ‘Benefits of Being an Early Adopter‘ piece. And props to David Noel, who was Soundcloud’s community lead. The email exchanges (and exchanges on Soundcloud’s support community) that I had with him stuck with me. I was writing my thesis at the time and when I graduated and got into music startups those exchanges were a big inspiration for my early career.
Life goes on
As Soundcloud grew into the giant it is today, I grew along with it. My taste grew, my following grew, my tactics and strategies evolved, and I saw new genres flourish on Soundcloud, such as moombahton.
Before all the download-gate bullshit, that make you jump through hoops, follow random accounts, like Facebook Pages, etc., it was pretty convenient to get free downloads from Soundcloud. I actually set up an IFTTT script that would automatically download tracks I favourited to my Dropbox. This way I could discover new music while I was working at Zvooq by day, in passive mode, and then by night play around with the files in my mixes.
I participated actively in the new, emerging online scenes. Commenting on tracks and connecting to amazing new talent emerging from the internet, rather than from a particular network of DJs. This got me a lot of listeners. I started making mixes in which all tracks were available to download for free. This had value in different ways:
I knew for sure that all DJs would be ok with me uploading this;
People would listen to them, because they knew they can find and quickly download new tracks through there;
I would link to all the tracks and afterwards comment on them to let people know I had featured their work. Sometimes they would share my music on their social media (this is before the repost function on SC).
If you’re not communicating your music this way, if you’re not networking with your inspirations, you’re not doing it right. This is probably how I got most of my plays from 2012 to now. Tactics and landscapes change, but some principles are true forever. Participate!
Other tactics not listed above:
Make playlists on 8tracks with the tracks of my mixes in order to promote my mix;
Try to win followers via social listening platforms like turntable.fm;
Make short mixes and post them on YouTube in order to find new audiences;
Facebook & Twitter accounts through where I would connect to segments of my audience.
My demise as a net-DJ
Then things got harder. It wasn’t any particular issue, but a lot of factors combined to halt me.
I switched to a Traktor S4 controller with Traktor software, so now I had to do all my mixes live. I’m a perfectionist, so this decreased my output. Digging also got harder: the communal nature of Soundcloud changed and a lot of DJs stopped offering their tracks as downloads (even when they’re not selling them). Others would put their stuff behind download gates, which just made it a pain in the ass to collect tracks and way more time-consuming. This also decreased my output.
As the number of mixes I put out decreased, so did the growth of my followers and my exposure to my audiences that were not directly connected to me. Followers ‘churn’ even when they stay part of your follower count. This means that followers go inactive on the platform they follow you on, so the follower count no longer translates to playback or other forms of engagement. This doesn’t matter so much when you’re new, but if you’re working on something for over a decade, it matters.
All of this compounded. It’s been about 5 years since I had a mix that got ~5k plays. And 8 years for 15k. But the lesson here is: to rack up following & plays, you can get lucky with a hit or just be insanely productive.
I’m at peace with what happened and now that I’m in Berlin, with talented friends as producers, plus friends in companies like Ableton and Native Instruments, I’m slowly getting back into DJing and producing. I haven’t put out a track in a decade, and no mix in 2 years, but I’m surrounded by the right people to get back into it… and do things right with all the experience I’ve collected plus that surrounds me. (if I actually end up having enough time — the irony of working in music)
Key takeaways
If I had to distill this into key lessons (and I do, because I owe it to you after reading 2000 words), these would be my main takeaways:
GET THERE EARLY. I got really lucky with being early to Soundcloud, but it also helped that what I was doing back then was not as common as it is now. Stay on top of developments in sounds and genres, and be slightly ahead of the curve, so you can shine a spotlight on up & coming talent. It will pay off when someone blows up.
BUILD YOUR FOLLOWING. Don’t trust in platforms: own your following. Connect them to your presence in many places, get their email addresses. Make sure your following is loyal, build trust, be consistent. If you’re slightly ahead of the curve, they know they’ll always discover new artists through you.
ALWAYS CREDIT PEOPLE. Scenes are small. Help each other. If you play someone’s music: list it. Don’t have time to provide a tracklist? Then you don’t have time to be a DJ. Sorry.
BE HELPFUL. This is connected to crediting: help people to understand the music they’re listening to. They’ll connect to you for this.
BE CONSISTENT & PRODUCTIVE. My best days were when I was a student. I don’t know how I found the time in between college and 12-20 hours of side jobs per week, but often I’d get home and get to mixing. I’d be doing stuff with music almost every spare minute. That’s the only type of dedication that really works.
I’ve had my run. Maybe I’ll do it again, but in a different way. I still like DJing, but prefer to do it live now. Besides, I have other ways to enjoy music now, such as my day job at IDAGIO, as well as MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE.
But to the generation that’s out there, on the cyber highways, hustling: best of luck & I hope this piece helps you.
How do we deal with bad players in music when every listen translates to payment?
For a few weeks in a row now, Chris Brown has appeared in my Spotify Release Radar. I’m not sure why, because I don’t follow him, nor do I really listen to similar music, but that’s a different topic.
The issue I have is: I do not want my streams to put money into the pockets of abusers (Chris Brown has a history of violence towards women, and victim-blaming). So that means I can’t really listen to my Release Radar in the background, or most curated playlists for that matter, because I want to make sure Spotify never plays those tracks to me.
I’m singling out Spotify here, because I’m an avid user: basically all streaming services have this problem. I’ve made the case for a global ban button for particular artists before, when I wrote about the Moby problem on Spotify. Basically, in curated environments, it would be nice to give some control back to the user and let them blacklist certain artists they’re not comfortable with.
Not only would this give listeners a more manageable overall experience, but it would also allow people to immediately make sure their money doesn’t go to abusers (and in the aftermath of the Weinstein fallout, surely Hollywood’s revelations will start spreading to the music business too).
But there’s another issue: in the streaming era, how do we listen to controversial artists without sending money their way?
For example, some brutal details around rapper XXXTentacion came out a while ago. He comes across as an abusive monster, and regularly gets into fights with fans. Yet, he’s still very popular. I’m curious why – is the music that good? I opened Spotify to check him out, but stopped myself from hitting the playback button, being aware that listening means money will go towards him (or his label, and seriously, they should do a Netflix and drop this dude + donate profits to causes that help victims / survivors of abuse).
But the ‘Chris Brown problem’ is that dudes like this keep being put into popular playlists, keep appearing in users’ personal playlists through algorithm recommendations. As listeners, we need a way to shield ourselves, and prevent our money from going into the pockets of these people.
If Spotify and other services are serious about their passive ‘lean back’ experience: give us a blacklist button. Let us ban Chris Brown.
Meanwhile one Reddit user has a suggestion for when artists you like collaborate with such people (which I’m sure a lot of readers won’t like):
The average smartphone user downloads less than 1 app per month, according to comScore. The era of apps is ending, and we’re moving in an era of artificial intelligence interacting with us through messaging apps, chatbots, voice-controlled interfaces, and smart devices.
What happens to music in this context? How do you make sure your music stands out? How do you communicate your brand when the interface goes from visual to conversational? And what strategic opportunities and challenges does the conversational interface present to streaming services?
The case for a passive discovery mechanism for friends’ playlists on Spotify.
This article started with a tweet on a Saturday evening. Simply put: I wish I had a better interface to discover playlists that are popular among my friends.
Spotify should make a tool that: – every day surfaces ~5 playlists – made by friends, or regularly listened to – with some taste similarity
Mark Newman rightfully pointed out that Spotify doesn’t show much interest in surfacing user-created playlists. As a matter of fact, they have even been deemphasising them over the years. Instead they opt for sending people to their own playlists. And their priority makes sense. They have to compete with giants like Apple, Google, Amazon: companies that have money to waste, while Spotify has money to raise.
Streaming is going mainstream
I’m sure to most of us it feels like it’s mainstream already. Hear me out.
Spotify, and other streaming services, are now focusing on consumers beyond the early adopter. These are people that are happy listening to the hits from the radio. These are people that like predictable music experiences. And they’re the bulk of the market.
In order to successfully compete for them, streaming services have to deliver very consistent streaming experiences to these people. This comes in the form of speed, functionality, but also content and programming.
User-created playlists fall outside of Spotify‘s editorial guidelines and metrics that they set for their editors, so it makes it unpredictable. Then again, features like Discover Weekly carry some inherent unpredictability with them: it’s what makes them fun and addictive.
The metrics that a feature like this probably needs to deliver on would look like:
Amount of time spent listening to music on Spotify in a specified timeframe (the feature should not lead to less playback);
Some kind of retention metric (should lead to a more engaging product, with less people stopping to use it).
Spotify’s friend activity & navigation
I like seeing what my friends are listening to in the right hand bar. Occasionally, but hardly ever, I click on something someone is listening to, and musically stalk my friend.
The reason why I hardly ever tune into my friends that way, and why I think it’s probably not an often-used feature, is because you tend to see it when you’re already listening to something. It’s not really positioned inside the product as a starting point; it’s more of a distraction.
Starting points, in Spotify, are either search or are presented in the left-hand menu. They are your playlists, or the other navigation points, such as podcasts, browse, and Daily Mix.
The prominent placing of Your Daily Mix stands out to me. I find the feature a bit dull and repetitive, but perhaps that’s because I’m on the end of the user spectrum that explores more than returns to the same music. The point is: Spotify gives prominence to an algorithm that generates 5 daily playlists for users. It’s somewhat unpredictable, compared to what they feature in Browse, but it tries to get people into a daily habit, and its prominent placing suggests that this may be working.
What should also be noted is that none of these navigation items include anything social, despite the entire right-hand bar being dedicated to it.
Browse is boring
I’m always disappointed when I open the Browse tab. I never really see anything surprising and I keep seeing the same things over and over, despite not engaging with them.
There are so many super interesting playlists on search, particularly those by third parties, and I need a way to surface them without finding out on curators’ websites, social media, by using search, or by visiting artist profiles.
Your Daily Friend Mix
So, back to my original tweet, and the requirements for getting a social feature to work well:
Should lead to people regularly coming back;
Should lead to increased playback (or at least no decrease).
What are the constraints?
Not enough friends to meaningfully populate an area;
Friends don’t listen to playlists;
Friends only listen to the same playlists as you;
Friends’ tastes are too dissimilar.
The first issue here is already tackled by the way Spotify handles Discover Weekly and its Daily Mixes: if they don’t have enough data on you, they won’t present these features to you. So in short: if there’s not enough useful data to present meaningful results to you, the feature should not be shown.
However for many users there would be meaningful data, so how to make sure that the suggested content is also meaningful?
The UX of recommendations is a big topic, but in simple terms, there should be thresholds and ceilings on similarity:
Recommended content should not have a similarity higher than 90% to user’s collection;
Recommended content should not have a similarity lower than 10% to user’s collection & listening history.
The recommended content can be playlists made by friends, or ones that friends regularly listen to and / or are subscribed to. The percentages are made-up, and there are a lot more things you could factor in, but this way you make sure that:
Content in the section is interesting, because you’ll discover something new;
And it’s not too random or too far from your taste, so you’ll always find something you’d want to listen to while opening the section.
If that’s taken care of, then people will keep coming back. Why?
Because it’s super fun to discover how your taste overlaps with friends, or to discover new music with friends. I also think such a feature would work better for Spotify‘s demographic than the more active one-on-one music sharing type of functionality (that Spotify removed recently).
Spotify needs a passive way to connect with music through friends
The messaging functionality that Spotify removed showed low engagement. That’s because music one-on-one recommendations are demanding on both sides. Instead, what has shown to work best on big streaming platforms, are lean back experiences. Discover Weekly is an example of that: it’s focused on the result, rather than the action. The action for discovery is exploration: with Discover Weekly, it’s Spotify‘s albums that do most of the exploring for the user.
That’s what the social side of the service needs. The Friend Activity feed is boring. It hardly ever shows something I’d like to listen to, but I do know my friends listen to music I’d be interested in…
What I need is a section that I can go to when I’m looking for something new to listen to, and then shows friends as social proof for that content. It allows me to connect to friends in new ways. Perhaps even strike up a conversation with them on Facebook Messenger.
Through c a r e, he teamed up an interdisciplinary collective called 
