✘ There's no playbook to success in the music industry
And: No meritocracy in music; The night belongs to us; ROSTR's behind the scenes Coachella; Community engagement is so 2022; I don't want to be an internet person; What's after the Creator Economy
I hope you all had a great start to 2023! It’s going to be a year of experiments driven by AI, blockchain, and a whole host of start-ups and boundary-breaking artists. Like I said in the last newsletter of 2022 - let’s forget about scale this year. The reason I mention my expectation of experiments is that I’ve been seeing these playbooks pop up around getting into Web3 music. They are all, basically, the same. Compare this Artist Web3 Strategy from the excellent NVAK Collective with this list from Elcee, which he put together on the back of his first 30 days researching in music and Web3. It’s basically not rocket science. Be present, make friends, give time to others - and then when you have a drop reach out to your collectors and create a community. Easy does it, but it’s not. All you can really do is read all those playbooks and give it your own spin. And that means experimenting.
The Web3 example
The blockchain financializes everything, but it’s also an opportunity to redress some of the major issues facing the music industry. The overall revenues of the recorded music industry centre around streaming. And with streaming, there’s also this playbook which deals with playlisting, drip release strategies, etc. And this goes back to getting on radio, or getting featured on the right late night TV shows, etc., etc. Web3 is an interesting example, because it’s recent and more and more people are trying to figure it out. It’s also just about to go into a phase of maturation. There’s different ways that artists became successful in Web3:
Going down the PFP route, creating a collection around music that focuses on traits and which involves an active secondary market and a focus on the floor price
Going down the route of bringing culture on chain and tapping into the various community who get triggered through this culture
Both of these mean that you need to spend a lot of time ‘being present.’ And that sounds just like the Creator Economy, which involves a lot of short-lived hype and burnt-out creators. You could dive deep into this, but the room for more artists doing this gets exhausted. Similarly, it’s difficult to be the first to try something and get people’s attention and support. Take Mark de Clive-Lowe’s $BuyBack, which he used to buy back the rights to older records he put out through labels. It worked, but would it work again? More recently, we see artists dropping on Sound.xyz and we ask how we can replicate what they’ve done. Instead, we should ask about how to take that Sound.xyz drop into a broader ecosystem of developing, dare I say it, the artist brand and the community attached to that.
What’s next?
More artists will come into the Web3 and experiment this year. Most of them will try to follow what other have done or replicate successes. They will fail. Especially in Web3, but this extends into the broader music industry, we need to experiment and turn things to our own stories. It’s a cliché, but you need to start with the why. Why does this project matter to you? Why would this work? And how can it be expressed in a way that evokes an emotional response from people who hear the music and the story? We’ve had the same questions for years, but the answers will be different in 2023. You, as the artist, need to figure that out yourself. There is no playbook, there is, however, support and finding that will be the most valuable tool to success.
LINKS
⚖️ Estée Blu: The music industry is not a meritocracy, and it's harshest on Black women (Estée Blu)
“My stories are embedded in this infuriating and shameful data. And due to the harm that racism in this sector causes to the body, mind, social and financial status, I’ve had to step back and redefine what success looks like for me. And that begs me to ask a few questions: What is success for a Black British woman in music? Does success look the same for us all? Or is it centered around what a Black woman needs to survive the musical climate? Every Black woman is free to answer these questions in the way that best suits their journey. But for me, success truly means no longer living in survival mode, and embodying liberation.”
✘ I’ve written it before, but this confirms once more that there is no meritocracy in music. Success isn’t created alone, it’s created in context and is different for everyone. Let’s fight this notion that all we are judged on is our quality every step of the way.
🌃 The 24-hour city: the night belongs to us (Helen Parton)
“But to have a truly successful night-time economy, everything from toilets to transportation need to be considered. Paul Broadhurst, Lamé’s colleague at the Greater London Authority (GLA), leads a policy team developing a fairer and more sustainable 24-hour city. He wants to consider the needs of a nurse working the night shift or a delivery driver.”
✘ There’s value in the night-time economy and I think everyone reading this newsletter will know this. It’s good to have these pieces to help with arguments when people think differently or are dismissive.
👩🏿🎤 Behind the scenes: Coachella ‘23 (ROSTR)
✘ Nice visualization from ROSTR again, there’s the classic overview of the line-up itself as well in there, but I highlighted this because it’s still an issue - unfortunately. The more we realize this, the more we can be active about changing it.
🕸️ I Don’t Want to Be an Internet Person (Ginevra Davis)
“Internet people, or people whose entire identities are wrapped up in their online presence, represent a new direction of culture. You don’t have to live in or know about the real world to be important. You can loop around and around in a tiny online world with its own values and characters, and that is enough.”
✘ This is an incredible article that goes into how we want to be online versus how we are online as well as the incredibly fractured world of cultures that we can hop in and out of.
🫂 Community engagement is so 2022. Here are 10 things you should obsess over instead (Rosie Sherry)
“It’s hard to get people to join communities, be sure to celebrate your upwards graph of new members joining. However, take it further than that, the community experience is more than just joining and onboarding. Map out a member's journey with or for them. Discover their joys. Their pains. Their goals and ambitions. Understand the problems they want to solve. Give them what they never new they never knew they needed.”
✘ If you deal with community in any way, read this, follow Rosie, sign up to her newsletter.
🪡 What’s after the creator economy? (Yancey Strickler)
“Creating and releasing work alone is lonely. We’ve all felt it. The structures of the creator economy convinced us we had no choice but to compete against each other for eyeballs and attention — an assumption that only the platforms themselves truly benefit from.”
✘ I like how Metalabel is trying to find a model to fix this. People simply work better in tandem with others, especially if they’re aligned in what they want to create, achieve, impact.
MUSIC
The start of the new year never sees many new music releases, but there’s one record that came out of which I’m already sure I’ll be listening to it throughout the year - Iggy Pop’s Every Loser. It’s not only got an array of famous collaborators, but it’s just so damn good. It’s a bit like a trip across his entire career wrapped up in new songs.