✖️ Inclusion, diversity, fairness: an open letter to the music & tech community
And: Classical music and the color line; DJs and whether the pandemic changed how they work; Coachella issues lifetime NFT passes; Sustainable virtual careers; The rise of avatar communities
This is an open letter to all founders, to everyone working at start-ups, and to everyone involved in developments around the metaverse/Web3.
Hi,
We probably don’t know each other, but I’m going to ask you to stop and think about a few things before you continue whatever awesome music and/or tech thing you’re working on. But first let me say that the music industry needs you, we need innovators and creatives and we need people who push boundaries and who get excited about what’s as yet unknown. However, you also carry a lot of responsibility. First to society as a whole and second to musicians specifically. This may be where you sputter a bit and tell me that what you’re building is different because it will solve the whole monetization problem from emerging artists or something similar. Great, but please hold your breath and listen to me here.
Musicians
Let’s talk about musicians first. They are the lifeblood of a $23 billion global industry. And yet, throughout history, musicians have always come last. They are mostly afterthoughts when business plans are being put together. When they play a show, everyone gets paid and right at the bottom of the spreadsheet there’s just a pittance left for the artists. Or, even worse, they can go around the audience and ask for a donation. I know, this isn’t a new thing. Steve Albini just this week explained how this is a systemic issue that pervades the music industry and especially when major labels are involved.
So even when you’ve moved past that point of being asked to ask your audience for a donation, while they at the very least just overpaid for an India Pale Ale, you get hit with the major label conundrum: give up your copyrights for a nice upfront fee. In his thread, Albini explains how musicians are still put last in these negotiations.
The great thing about this is that it’s actually not difficult at all to put artists at the front of the line when it comes to the economics of the music industry.
You pay them a fair price when they play live
You pay them when you play their music
If you’re setting up a new venture check to see whether you’re infringing any copyright. When in doubt, reach out to the artists involved.
If you’re setting up a new venture that purports to support artists, talk to some of them to see whether any of them actually want what you offer and whether what you’re making represents what they need and/or stand for.
I see you’re all nodding along here, but this is apparently difficult for a lot of people. So many in the tech world still feed themselves with the Zuckerberg ‘move fast and break things’ motto. However, if what you break is the exact thing that fuels the industry you’re trying to profit from then you need to check yourself.
And yes, I’m talking about stuff like Hitpiece, an NFT marketplace that tooks a bunch of music metadata from Spotify through its API and listed it on their website. This infringes copyright on so many levels (from image to music), but mostly it’s just an idiot move. There’s those who believe it’s a clever marketing ploy to grab attention. If that’s the case, it’s an astonishing kick in the teeth for musicians. Have a song about this from Jonathan Mann.
Metaverse/Web3
Time to move away from artists specifically and over to society more generally. What we’ve seen in Web2 is that inclusiveness, diversity, and representation mostly fell by the wayside. Ristband, a company building a music-focused metaverse, has just released a report on diversity inside what’s currently the metaverse. Here’s one of my favorite parts and something I encourage everyone who’s building to also do.
“As an experiment with interns at Ristband, we entered virtual worlds in the opposite gender. In some platforms stereotypes became quickly apparent, while in others moderation played a key role in fostering a positive environment. In others, the lack of attention to users and featured content- available to anyone with access to the internet- was shocking.”
You need this kind of experience if you want to build something that’s actually inclusive and representative of a diverse group of people.
Reading through the whole Ristband report, I also want you to think about how certain groups of people simply don’t believe they have what it takes to participate. Sacha Judd gave a presentation around 5 years ago about this exact topic. Feel free to watch the whole thing or read it. What Judd showed is how a group of One Direction superfans self-taught a bunch of skills. The idea that hit Judd was the following:
“I realised that I was spending all this time trying to think about how to engage women with technology, and I was ignoring the fact they already were. They were essentially already video editors, graphic designers, community managers. They were teaching each other CSS to make their tumblr themes look more gorgeous, and they were using Chrome extensions in anger to make tumblr do what they wanted. These were basically front end developers, social media managers, they were absolutely immersed in technology, every day, and we weren’t paying attention, because they were doing it in service of something we don’t care about.”
Let that sink in for a moment. Especially, when we consider that when Judd asked these women whether they were interested in a job in tech - which they mainly weren’t - and then asked what kept them from having such an interest. The responses can be summarized as people who have been told, directly or indirectly, that tech isn’t for them. So let’s simply stop doing that. Tell everyone you know they have skills. And instead of then telling them how to get or develop skills, put yourself in their shoes and show them they have already developed these skills. If you still feel the need to explain, try to only explain what opportunities there are for specific skills.
Okay, I hope you will all take this to heart and I look forward to seeing positive change throughout the rest of the year and beyond. Let me finish with this quote by Hunter S. Thompson:
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
Thanks for reading,
Love, Maarten
LINKS
🏳️🌈 Diversity in the metaverse: Report (Anne McKinnon)
I just want to highlight this report I mentioned in my letter above again here. The aim of the report is for it to be a living, evolving document.
“Incredibly excited to share Ristband's first report on Diversity in the Metaverse. It's our priority to build an open, accessible, diverse, and fair platform. We encourage people to reach out to us, share experiences, write contributions and share research that we can make available to continue to forward discussion on this incredibly important topic … We would love to hear from you!”
The full report can be found here.
🧑🏿🎤 Classical Music and the Color Line (Douglas Shadle)
“The canon’s narrow demographic is not a new issue—it has faced mounting public criticism for many years—but its persistence in concert halls decades beyond the literary “canon wars” exposes the industry’s thoughtless acceptance of its flaws. Despite recent commissioning efforts by the country’s wealthiest organizations, such as the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, classical music culture, far more than the culture of other arts, remains essentially fixated on canonicity—on apotheosizing “the greatest” composers and “the best” repertoire. The result can be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, hamstringing many ensembles—especially legacy institutions—with relatively narrow programming, and race has always been a telling line along which these exclusions have been drawn.”
⏺️ Has the pandemic changed the role of dance music artists forever? (Shawn Reynaldo)
“As of now, even the most promising initiatives and experiments that have emerged during the pandemic are looking more like additions to existing practices than full-on disruptions of the status quo. Most artists are still dependent on gigs for survival—a prospect that becomes increasingly dicey as the pandemic wears on—and while new business models make for intriguing talking points, widespread adoption is still a ways off.”
🧳 Coachella will sell lifetime festival passes as NFTs (Mia Santo)
“That the festival is dipping into the NFT craze is perhaps unsurprising — in November, Coachella parent company AEG renamed the Staples Center the Crypto.com Arena — and other traditional companies have shown there’s plenty of money to be made by attaching physical products and services to digital goods. NFT resales often net profits for the original seller, too, which could be a boon for something as permanent as a lifetime pass. If the NFTs are resold, Coachella, photographers, art installation artists, and design artists will receive a royalty.”
⚡ Roblox says artists can “sustain successful careers virtually” without playing real-world gigs (Ali Shutler)
“The team at Roblox don’t see it as an either/or situation, and expect to see more interaction between live concerts and virtual concerts. “Artists will choose to perform to thousands of fans in the real world while simultaneously performing and interacting with millions of fans around the world in the metaverse,” said Vlassopulos.”
🥸 The Rise of Avatar Communities (Charles Uneze)
“Most DAOs aren’t in the content-creation business. Nor should they be. There are no algorithms for taste. Every film or TV project is its start-up, and once the project is finished, you have to start all over again from scratch. Maybe some NFT projects would need to outsource their idea to Hollywood studios, or gaming companies who will create a 3D avatar off their NFTs, hence creating more immersive experiences which improve virality.”
🪗 The Music Industry - Part 1 (Tom Leighton)
“This post outlines the general structure of the music industry and how and where money is generated, and most importantly if you’re an artist, songwriter, or rights-holder — how you actually get paid. There’s never been a more exciting time in the industry and I’m stoked to write about this weird and wonderful world of the music business. I’ll be digging into how the industry functions and share some opinions, thoughts, and insights along the way.”
MUSIC
The latest release on Ilian Tape is by re:ni and it’s a collection of forward-thinking bass music. It’s got a hint of dub, a lot of breakbeats, and my favorite part is that even though it’s only four tracks re:ni manages to build a dazzling arc of tension into the EP.