✖️ How to accelerate a music & tech start-up?
And: Creator economy growth; Musical rhythms in our brain; There's no creator economy; DAO governance; Creator economy worth $104bn; Parasocial activity; Creator power scale
Hi all,
Following on from Bas, my housekeeping note also involves the slightly later publication of your Thursday edition of MUSIC x. It will go out in the afternoons based on Centreal European Time.
There's so many people with great ideas. There's also many people who have the technical know-how to build products. And then there's a seemingly endless list of problems to solve in the music industry. The idea of an accelerator is to put your company through a crash course in building out your product, learning from experienced hands, and staying hyper-focused on your 'true north'. Often, founders get matched with mentors and after a number of weeks they come out finding their company in a place where they're ready to go out. They move beyond bootstrapping and start to look for a seed capital funding round. What happens when you accelerate outside of a country that has a strong venture capital culture? How do you help to focus companies on growth? And what kind of program should you offer to the start-ups involved?
Creator Economy
👀 The creator economy is growing much faster than music streaming (Cherie Hu)
“Hopefully, the ongoing growth in creator-economy platforms — especially around areas like education — will encourage the music industry to think not only about new kinds of revenue streams, but also new, more expansive views of fan bases and “customers” and how technology can best serve them. And by the data we have so far, the business case for new ways of thinking about the music industry’s future growth is getting increasingly futile to ignore.”
🧐 There is No "Creator Economy" (David Turner)
“Certainly, some artists will gravitate towards that pull with real success, others as seen in certain backlashes to NFTs drops won’t, and many others will just never know this conversation is alive. Venture capital and crypto see a real opening within music during a moment when industry's success feels every more disconnected from regular artist fortunes.”
💰 Why the “Creator Economy” is Now Worth $104 Billion (and Counting…) (Andrew Cohen)
“Large media companies and top-tier creators have already been building audiences on social media and monetizing them off-platform. But now, with these emerging creator-driven platforms and services, smaller creators (aka: the 96% of creators with under 10 million followers) are doing the same.”
🧮 The creator power scale: A formula to determine if platforms are ripping you off (Evan Armstrong)
“To start, we will go deeper into the Twitch example to examine power laws. Power laws are an extremely important component by which to examine whether a platform’s offer is a good one or not, because so much of the internet is dictated by power laws. There has been a hope that the creator economy would be more immune from that dynamic (unfortunately, that has turned out to be not true). From there, we will discuss a formula I created by which you can evaluate whether you are getting taken advantage of by tech platforms.”
🛎️ The attention economy (Ollie Forsyth)
“As creators become one of the biggest attention grabbers in the attention economy, their fans often want to know what they are wearing, learning and consuming. Should more of these platforms in the creator economy integrate live shopping (some already are such as Taobao), this can lead to more startups being created in categories such as Embedded Finance (buy now, pay later), Logistics Infrastructure (making sure your items arrive quickly), Community Platforms and Analytics (for creators to stay connected to you).”
X
🧠 Musical rhythms in the brain (David Poeppel)
“For music that is faster than one note per second, both musicians and non-musicians showed cortical oscillations that synchronized with the note rate of the clips. The researchers therefore conclude that these oscillations were effectively employed by everyone to process the sounds they heard, although musicians’ brains synchronized more to the musical rhythms. Only musicians, however, showed oscillations that synchronized with unusually slow clips. This difference, the researchers say, may suggest that non-musicians are less able to process the music as a continuous melody rather than as individual notes. Moreover, musicians are able to detect pitch distortions much more accurately — as evidenced by corresponding cortical oscillations.”
🗳️ Building and running a DAO: Why governance matters (Tarun Chitra)
“But that’s not necessarily true. DAOs work best when the governance burden related to curation, security, and risk can be reduced faster than the natural increase in coordination costs that accompanies the need to have members involved in voting on every decision made. That’s why it’s important that protocol builders assess the real goals of the organization when deciding whether to form a DAO.”
🗺️ Profiling publishing’s pandemic performance (Eamonn Forde)
“Oron suggested that Europe, as it is approaching digital saturation point, had very little room for revenue growth here when compared to other regions so it was predestined to be significantly hit. Digital may be strong in Europe but it could not grow enough to offset (or even cushion the blow of) the collapse of live in 2020.”
🪞 Parasocial Activity — my interview with Fadeke Adegbuyi (Benjamin Perrin)
I’ve linked to Fadeke’s work on parasocial relationships here before and this is an excellent interview that provides more context into her thinking around this topic.
“We live in an era where everyone has a personal brand, whether it’s on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok. We have a certain image online that can be very different from that of our personal life. On the one hand, a lot of people tend to polish their online presence to gain views, likes and influence. But on the other hand, online creators cultivate this deep intimacy with their audiences.”
Fadeke Adegbuyi
💻 Music journalism in the time of COVID (Kara Bodegon)
“It’s these little normal things - together with their candid selves, bad lighting, or low-res cameras - that humanizes artists. It’s kind of nice. And in a weird and special way, it’s something we’ll always share with them in our hearts.”
MUSIC
Ok, this is a pretty abstract listen. Also, whenever I listen to this I have strong emotional reactions. It’s not the type of music I can listen to and do something else. It’s bass music, but contorted. It’s poetry, but inversed. Hyperdub released it, and the label is a perfect place for an artist like aya.