✘ Let's forget about scale in 2023
And: Web3 as a tool for ambitious artist funding; Biggie Smalls in the metaverse; Matching Shazam data to other data sets; Web3 and user ownership; The role of AI in creative disruption
What a year, eh? So much has crumbled or outright crashed in 2022, but there’s also plenty of pockets of optimism. What strikes me about this, is that it seems like everything that crumbled or crashed has been the companies with the sky-high valuations or those building on the promise of what might be. I know, I know, this how venture capital works. You create a valuation based on delivering results at some point in the future assuming that things will continue to get better. And, yes, there’s risk involved, as we’ve seen all too well in 2022. Contrary to this, the pockets of optimism I’ve seen don’t have high valuations, nor do they build on a promise of delivering in a couple of years’ time. For 2023, I see this becoming a trend. And this trend will follow something a lot of people in tech already know: focusing on actual problems people face instead of strategic business goals.
Here at MUSIC x, we’ve talked about alternatives to scale before. Bas wrote about ‘thinking small’ in April 2021. I’ve written about ‘minimum viable community’ and ‘flipping the funnel.’ One of the things to take away from this style of thinking is that it focuses on user-centred design, on creating engaging content and on building meaningful relationships. In other words, if you’re building something, this is where the actual problems are that need to be solved. And the onus shouldn’t lie on just one artist, or a single band. Tackling these issues, then, means making sure you can tap into a squad of people to work together, to align, and to pull through. Ideally, this squad is made up of an ever-changing set of people fully depending on the task at hand.
Forgetting about scale doesn’t mean that you can’t focus on a broad array of options. There’s value in direct-to-fan tools as much as there is in crypto as much as there is in the streaming economy. It’s about finding the right set of combinations to unlock the world you want to build. Whether you’re an artist or a start-up, there’s a vision for where you want to go. Moving away from ideas such as hitting a certain number of users, disrupting an industry, or becoming a ‘unicorn’ or the next Taylor Swift will allow you to focus on creating something useful and meaningful.
While the variety of revenue models are vast and there’s myriad ways to build, grow, and sustain communities, it’s important to focus - and to focus on the foundational things, not the shiny new toys that grab your attention along the way. Put differently, focus means saying ‘no’ a lot. Want to focus on what you can do with NFTs, do it. But don’t also try to grow and monetize a YouTube audience or your monthly listeners on DSPs. Of course, if one thing feeds the other, perhaps you can do it - but then make sure you have the right squad to pull that off.
So, in 2023, focus on finding the right people, with the right skills. Don’t think about a big exit, don’t think about breaking into the top 10 of global streaming charts. Set out to create the best relationships that will allow you to pull together a squad of people who can make something work together. Then set out to create a world and build the right trust systems so you can distribute the ownership. And, finally, set your own metrics.
💙 A quick note to thank you all for reading this year, it’s amazing to have this outlet and it’s my favourite thing to make connections through this newsletter. This is the last one for 2022 and we’ll be back on 12 January in your inboxes.
Lots of love, also on behalf of Bas,
Maarten
LINKS
🪛 Web3 as a Tool for Ambitious Artist Funding (Dave ‘BlackDave’ Curry)
“I know what you’re thinking, “you can’t be serious,” but I am. I think I’m smart enough, capable enough and have proven myself enough to be worth taking a risk on. If you’ve been in web3 for any amount of time, you know that I educate, innovate, have great taste in both anime and clothing, and have freely tweeted better ideas than companies getting funding in this niche tech landscape. I’ve built out a whole website (s/o Bonfire) to make it easy for you to throw in on this idea, one .00025 ETH token at a time.”
✘ I love the experimental nature of artists pushing the envelope in the Web3 and BlackDave is at the forefront. (and, yes, I bought the token)
🎟️ I just watched Biggie Smalls perform ‘live’ in the metaverse (Tanya Basu)
“Smalls’s hyperrealistic avatar is not just an impressive technical feat. It is also a crucial test of two big questions we’ll soon face if metaverse platforms gain traction: whether people will pay to see an avatar of a dead artist perform, and whether that business is ethical … What’s remarkable about Smalls’s performance on Friday was the realism. His moves, mannerisms, and facial expressions were stunningly lifelike.”
✘ Of course, Tanya also goes into what didn’t work so well, but the progression with this type of tech is fast. Her question whether all this is ethical and, by extension, how the revenues should flow from it, is a necessary debate.
🗄️ A Quick Music Data Exercise — Matching Shazam Data to other data sets (Chuck Fishman)
“One of the issues that faces any artist marketer who is trying to track radio airplay is that each platform that offers radio airplay monitoring displays the data set a bit differently. More importantly, some radio monitors only track broadcast radio while others are only catching the online streams of broadcasters and internet only radio players. Each radio monitoring platform has a specific set of stations (broadcast and online) they monitor, so one platform may catch airplay of a specific song, while another may not if it they do monitor the station where the airplay occurred.”
✘ I always appreciate Chuck’s analyses, especially because it gives people the tools to go out and replicate it for their own data sets.
🪟 The Long View: Web3 and User Ownership (Li Jin & Jesse Walden)
“Today, we are still far from realizing the ideal of an internet dominated by token-driven, user-owned networks. Most token designs currently fail to align incentives sufficiently to unlock faster and more sustained growth than centralized companies. And in some cases, bad actors have leveraged tokens to propagate outright scams. But many experiments have made incredible progress, and to gauge the current status, we’ve found it helpful to explain tokens in the market today along a spectrum: from those that are critical to the functioning of a product or protocol, to those that offer a legitimate and compelling promise of utility, to extreme economic experiments, and finally, outright fraud and scams.”
✘ This is, of course, an optimistic piece, but it’s also a good read to see how important it is that the bad players get flushed out. A token in this ownership economy has nothing to do with all the meme coins we’ve heard about. It’s a radical new layer of ownership focused on the digital world.
🤖 Creative Disruption: The Role of AI in Shaping the Future of Art, Design and Media (Jasper.AI, OpenAI, Vana, Midjourney, DALL·E 2)
“As AI technologies continue to advance, they are transforming the creative industries in significant ways. From music and art to literature and film, AI is being used to automate routine tasks, generate original content, and even create works that challenge our very definitions of creativity. But as AI becomes an increasingly powerful tool for the creative process, it is also raising important questions about the role of human creativity and the ethics of AI-generated works.”
✘ The creative agency Move78 just realised this and if you’re interested in AI and how it could continue to impact our worlds this has a useful bit of history as well as going into all the potential and pitfalls around the tech.
MUSIC
It’s that time of year, and that means that whenever I have one of the annoying earworms I hum this and sing it in my head. Might help one of you as well.
