#38: Ephemeral Content's Value 🔑 | Streaming Services as Labels 💿 | Music & Gender 💁 | AI 🤖 | China 🇨🇳
Hi everyone!
I had a blast at Amsterdam Dance Event and it’s been so great meeting so many of you, old and new friends.
The beauty of the ADE conference is that it has a huge business component for 4 days, but at night we all go out and celebrate the results of our work through music we love. And it’s that love that binds us.
Special request: I’d like to be put in touch with smart VCs / investors in the music space. I want to learn more about their perspectives, and I can be of value to them because I talk to so many young companies through MxTxF.
You can reply to this email to contact me.
Love,
Bas
The Value of Ephemeral Content: Becoming Part of Your Fans’ Routines
What some perceive as ephemeral content’s greatest weakness is actually its most powerful quality. In an online landscape where attention is most scarce, ephemerality is key. 🔑
Read this article on MxTxF or Medium. 👀
Last week I had the pleasure of being on a panel with some brilliant minds at Amsterdam Dance Event. The topic: marketing music to millennials. Millennials born in the nineties have a starkly different online profile than eighties babies. For teens, Snapchat now beats Facebook and Instagram as their top social platform.
The popularity of ephemeral content has to do with a number of factors. One teen writes:
No social pressure, because the main metric is view count.
Ephemerality means you don’t need to overthink what you post.
You actually know who’s watching — if people have seen your post, their usernames are revealed.
The world these people have grown up in is different from that of older generations. Eighties babies used to think online was a bit more of a playground. I cringe looking back (and deleting) some of the photos and status updates I posted on Facebook back in 2007–2009. This generation is aware that information lives forever and their strategies for dealing with that include deleting their digital histories frequently.
So for many labels, artists, and managers the question is:
How do I develop a strategy around ephemeral content?
Your strategy will have to acknowledge a few core concepts:
Attention, not money, is the scarcest good on the internet. And everyone’s competing for it.
The online landscape is now a filtered landscape, with algorithms weighing content and deciding whether to show it to your audience, or not.
In this reality, your most important question is: how do I win my fans’ attention again and again and again?
For that purpose, ephemerality is f*#ing amazing. If you content is only visible for a day at a time — your fans will have to make you part of their daily routine. Now your have your fans’ attention: every single day.
Habit is the key to winning people’s attention over and over. There’s a reason why I send out this newsletter at exactly the same time every week. Some of you have actually told me you get a cup of coffee and hit refresh on your inbox around the time my newsletter’s supposed to come in. Not only does that lead to good engagement and nice metrics, but it also gives a great connection between you and your followers — it’s a special feeling. ❤️❤️❤️
Once understood, ephemerality can be engineered. If Snapchat is not your thing, or if teens are not your main demographic, there are other ways to become part of people’s habit through ephemerality. The expiring nature of Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Release Radar is the reason why those features have been so successful and have deeply influenced the product’s direction.
A great example of a music company that has been engineering ephemerality for years, is the Main Course record label. They offer all of their releases for free on Soundcloud in the first week. Many labels do the opposite and try to drive sales first, but Main Course’s strategy makes sure fans check their page once a week. Imagine doing this on a page you actually owned, instead of on a social profile. You can establish a habit and then when fans come and check, you can nudge their attention to important things like gigs or crowdfunding campaigns.
What some perceive as ephemeral content’s greatest weakness, is actually its most powerful quality. Use its expiring nature to build habit, keep your fans’ attention on you, and lead them to where you need them.
Many thanks to my co-panelists Luke Hood (UKF / AEI), Amy Jayne (Hospital Records), Siofra McComb (The Other Hand), Shane Mansfield (Ticketscript), David Ireland (Magnetic Magazine), and Lucy Blair for bringing us together. You’ve inspired me to put these thoughts down.
💡 If you’d like me to work with you on building habit loops — drop me an email: bas@musicxtechxfuture.com or hit reply.
Digital Music Space
How Spotify can become a next generation “label”
Excellent take by Mark Mulligan about Spotify’s strategy going forward.
Projecting trends: do streaming services now compete with labels?
My thoughts on the Synchtank blog (Sep 5) about how streaming services are now starting to act as labels.
The new gatekeepers: streaming platforms are taking over the music industry
Village.fm’s Jason Cherofsky examines how the streaming platforms are steadily becoming the music industry’s new power players. Jason’s building a Product Hunt / Reddit for music and I think it has a lot of potential. Check it out.
Four futures of the music business
Inspired by a book about capitalism’s future, Cortney Harding ponders four scenarios for the music business’ future.
Musical.ly's teenage revolution: how the trend-setting lip-sync app is changing the music industry
This goes hand-in-hand with the rise of the 15-second song format. Better said: it’s a catalyst.
The Chinese music app that wants to be the next Facebook
More thoughts about the future of Musical.ly: “To survive, it must become a full-fledged social network. That won’t be easy.”
Live Music Space
The story of how China's second city became a hotbed for soundsystem culture
For a fundamentally international city like Shanghai, reggae and dub music has taken a long time to find a place—but thanks to a handful of leading lights, it’s beginning to make itself at home. Globalisation of music.
Artificial Intelligence
Computers are learning to write songs by listening to all of them
Scientists at Google and elsewhere are turning to the 30-year-old digital music standard MIDI to teach neural networks how to write music.
Bigger Issues
Things I wish I'd known as a young woman starting out in the music business
Another good read by Lara Baker on this topic. It deserves to be shared widely.
www.huffingtonpost.co.uk • Share
Staring at everyone’s selfies can hurt your self-esteem
All those pictures of people with smiling faces and giddy expressions may cause you to wonder why you’re not having as good a time as those people leading to lower self-esteem and life satisfaction, according to a new study.
That’s all for this edition. Music I’m listening to right now:
Dengue Dengue Dengue’s excellent Siete Raices album, which combines rhythms and melodies from Latin America with powerful beats and deep bass sounds.
Noisia’s latest album: Outer Edges. Noisia’s known for drum ‘n bass, but this album shows how versatile they can be. Again: powerful beats ahead. ⚠️
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Regular insights about the future of music, media & tech. Written & composed by @basgras.
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