✖ Lil Nas X, Wendy Carlos & the attention economy
And: Spotify & LinkedIn Clubhouse clones; Glastonbury livestream event; the future is a token; BluesFest Australia cancelled; Twitch stream to TikTok video; Reading & Leeds vaccine passports
Lil Nas X made a meme out of replying to all who responded with cries of satanism to his latest music video. This is part of the performance piece Montero which puts Lil Nas X in a history of intertwining life, music, and tech into one unassailable immersive identity. Music as art has a way of attaching itself to certain personalities through the form of new technologies. How that works and why 'queer', in a very broad definition, is often in the mix for those personalities as they seek to rise through the noise and grab our attention is what I explore today.
TECH
♊ Everybody wants their own Clubhouse. Isn’t that right Spotify? Isn’t that right LinkedIn? For Spotify, I see this mainly as an extension of their ‘audio-first’ strategy allowing podcasters to create live audio rooms next to keep listeners more engaged. For LinkedIn, I see it more as a professional space akin to some of the more successful Clubhouse rooms. It may become easy to attach your LinkedIn to a conference in the future and immediately get added to the live audio room for example.
📒 TechCrunch looks at the broader use of tokens in the world of distributed ledger technologies:
“payment tokens that behave like money, security tokens that are comparable to stocks, utility tokens that provide functions like space or bandwidth and hybrid tokens that mix these tokens into new forms.”
🌾 Ever wondered how to turn those Twitch streams into TikTok videos?
🌉 The end of the catalogue-hype isn’t in sight yet. Paul Simon has sold the publishing rights to his song catalogue to Sony. We’ll be seeing a lot more AI-driven projects to promote all these legacy catalogues in the next few years to make sure those songs keep resurfacing.
🧫 Hip Hop is the fastest growing genre on YouTube. Tuma Basa wrote a blog about what that means for artists and advertisers.
CORONA
🚜 Glastonbury has had to cancel their festival this year, but already promised a different kind of experience. Now we now the first thing they’ll undertake: a livestream of appropriate proportions
🎯 One of the key developments during the pandemic has been the evolvement of livestreaming. Now that the end of pandemic is seemingly somewhere on the horizon, Driift, YouTube and Ticketmaster call for collaboration to develop the coming hybrid model: how to sell livestreams when tours are back up and running?
🔇 BluesFest in Australia got cancelled one day before it was due to take place because of a Covid-19 outbreak
🛂 It’s increasingly likely that the Reading & Leeds festivals in the UK will require a vaccine passport for attendees. Bas and I previously wrote about the role such passports can play and what the up- and downsides are.
🤫 Pollstar looks back at the first quarter of this year and is quietly upbeat about the rebound that awaits us in the live industry.
Music
Considering the topic of today’s main article have a listen to ANOHNI when she was still the lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons