View profile

✖️ Spotify's Chris Brown problem 😠 Listening diversity is growing 📈 Critical look at blockchain & music ⛓️

Hi everyone,  Thanks for all the positive responses to last week's mailing. I'll try to squeeze in an
✖️ Spotify's Chris Brown problem 😠 Listening diversity is growing 📈 Critical look at blockchain & music ⛓️
By MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE • Issue #92 • View online

Hi everyone, 
Thanks for all the positive responses to last week’s mailing. I’ll try to squeeze in another video before year’s end. 
I’m going to be spending 3 weeks in Cuba at the end of the year. Any music connections & introductions: very welcome! 
We are still looking for a UX/UI designer at IDAGIO (streaming, reinvented for classical music). Tell your friends. 
Love, 
Bas

From me, for you
Spotify keeps putting Chris Brown, a man with a history of violence towards women, in my Release Radar and it’s really not cool. About:
  • giving users blacklist tools to ban artists;
  • what labels should do with profit made of abusers’ catalogues;
  • how this makes people resort to piracy.
www.musicxtechxfuture.com  •  Share
Streaming music
Listening diversity on Spotify is growing, and its driven by playlists. Users now listen to over 40 different artists per month. For artists & marketeers this begs the question: how do you get people to keep coming back to your music after it’s discovered?
One way to do this is direct-to-artist subscriptions, which is what Mixcloud will be launching soon, according to founder Nico Perez: 
“It’s a little bit like Patreon and a little bit like YouTube. This idea that people have their favourite creators and those are the people they want to support and subscribe to and be fans of, and so we want to be the platform that helps power that.”
Thinking further
David Gerard, who previously wrote about why you can’t put the music industry on a blockchain, takes a very critical look at music blockchain startup Ujo Music’s new project with artist RAC:
“Ujo Music are asking a lot of the right questions. But they don’t have answers, only promises that they might come up with answers in the future. Fundamentally, they are still starting from “blockchain!” and trying to find a problem it can be applied to, rather than starting with a problem and trying to solve it.”
I’m not close enough to Ujo to argue this, but the above is a common problem in the blockchain space in general (music startup Stem is a good example of a startup that took good concepts from blockchain, but decided not to use blockchain). 
Furthermore, I think the usability issues highlighted in the article underscore the fact that many entrepreneurs in music underestimate the difficulty of building good user-facing music services. Adding a technology like blockchain to the mix makes things way more challenging.
Meanwhile the ICOs are not slowing down. Blockchain ticketing startup, Guts Tickets, is trying to raise ~$20 million through its own token sale (GET tokens), having already raised $2.5 million in presale. 
More money things:
Wide view
The Web began dying in 2014, here's how
GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.
staltz.com  •  Share
Fun
How to PITCH a music tech STARTUP to investors
How to PITCH a music tech STARTUP to investors
Awesome video, though I do think the business model needs to be refined: doing all these things seems impossible for a young startup. The burst of creative energy is amazing, though!
Did you enjoy this issue?
MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE

Regular insights about the future of music, media & tech. Written & composed by @basgras.

If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here
Powered by Revue