Passionirates: Why Allowing People To Download Your Music Might Make You Successful

Has anyone else noticed that despite the seemingly never-ending number of startup music services, only a handful ever are used by the public at large? For the most part, all I ever hear about these companies is an article about their inception on hypebot or Digital Music News, and then they proceed to fade into oblivion. In a recent article Neil Cartwright explains why so many of these companies never go anywhere: they aren't appealing to the right crowd. Neil, citing The Tipping Point to prove his point, says that most companies try to market to the indifferent masses when they should be aiming at the passionate few.

The article includes a chart, which classifies 12% of the population as being passionate about music. Enthusiastic fans make up 25%, casual fans make up 27% and the people who couldn't give less of a fuck come in at 37%. Most music services (including artists and record labels) try and aim at the last category, when they should be aiming for the first. The reason is that people who are passionate about music actively seek it out more then anyone else. They spend countless hours trawling through the underbelly of the Internet to find new and exciting bands. And after crawling through all the crap, they will share any gems they find. They'll post about it on Facebook. They'll blog about it. They'll play it for their friends. They'll talk to anyone who will listen (and even some who won't). Why? Because this new band/service/label/whatever is FUCKING AMAZING!!!!!!

From here, the effect grows and grows, trickling down through the enthusiasts and casuals, until it reaches The Tipping Point and manages to get the great unwashed on their side. This is how a band or music service (really, any service, but it's more true of music and art) gets big: not by going directly to the masses, but in a sort of trickle-down effect (Reaganomics, when applied to music, apparently does work after all). According to Neil, this is why most startups fail, and how the big services (he names iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon) got big in the first place.

This is also why you should let your music be pirated and shared. In fact, you should upload it to the Pirate Bay and Demonoid yourself. You should hand it out to your local record store clerks. You should throw your album or demo up on Mediafire, and send it to every niche blog that'll take it. Why? Because these are the methods by which the enthusiastic fans find their music in the first place. Don't take my word for it though, check out this study that shows that people who download music are 10 times more likely to pay for music as well. This is the mark of the enthusiast: someone who defends their downloading by saying "I'll pay for what I like", and actually will.

And I should know. After all, I am an enthusiast. I used to run a blog that reviewed and, ahem, "shared" music. A majority of my money and energy goes towards discovering new music. At last count, I have about 8 months worth of music (that's sorted, there's at least another month that I haven't gotten through yet) if it ran continuously, and I have listened to all of it at least once, often more then once. I have also talked about bands, and then watched them get big: local thrash metal band Havok being one such example. While I can hardly attribute their success to myself alone (I'm not nearly narcissistic enough for that), I can contribute it to the combined proselytizing of me and my ilk.

This is why you should let people download your music: it gets it into the hands of the people who matter, in terms of marketing. And because it's free, an enthusiast is more likely to take a chance, and give you a listen. Granted, at this point you need to be talented enough at whatever you do to catch and enthusiasts ear, but if you ever had a realistic shot at being successful, you needed that talent anyways. If you do manage to impress the Passionirates (passionate pirates, for those of you who struggle with portmanteaus) though, then it's off to the races.

Music As Water

I read an interesting article recently about how the concept of music as water may well be harmful to the future of the music industry. Given that this concept is the driving force behind subscription services such as Spotify, it caught my eye.

Simply put, the idea of music as water says that we will treat musical products like we treat water, we pay for all that we can use on a monthly basis. This idea came about because of the way that music has come to be viewed similarly to water. It's freely available, there's a lot of it, we use it often and we get it on demand. Some of these points have been true of music for a long time (the quantity and how much we want/use it), others have come about with the advent of digital piracy (free-ly available and the ability to get it on demand).

The article points out that music as water reinforces an already existing consumer devaluation of music. If we cater to the idea that music is essentially free, we backup the notion that music is almost worthless economically. This would be backed up by the perception of the music industry being in trouble as a whole, and rampant piracy. It would seem that these troubles would stem from a consumer attitude not valuing music as a whole, and therefore not paying for it. Given how harmful this attitude already has been, fueling it further could be a disaster.

However, maybe these perceptions aren't as accurate as we thought. Another recent hypebot article states the number of people who buy music is growing, and has been for the last couple years. The former article also mentions that the author has also seen growth from streaming services, but attributes this to an older generation who is used to paying for music.

However, this conclusion seems to be the biggest fallacy present. After all, though generations existing prior to the information age are more used to buying music, they are also less likely to buy music period. According to "This Is Your Brain On Music" as we get older, we tend to stop looking for new artists. We become set in our ways to an extent. While this certainly doesn't apply to everyone, I would argue that older people who do continue to voraciously consume new music do so because they have always done so, and are set in their ways as well. Even so, the majority of new music is consumed by a younger audience, and one that is used to being able to get it for free. Given that they can get things for free, why would they spend money on it?

Though we may use piracy and streaming services, the second article demonstrates that we also tend to buy (in some form) the music we truly care about and value. This is music is essentially a piece of culture, and the culture someone owns says a bit about who they are. It's a way of showing to others and to ourselves that we truly belong to the culture conveyed by the music we own. It's like the difference between owning a painting and looking at a digital scan for free via Google Images. While there is literally no sensory difference between the two mediums, the former shows others that we truly like this artist. While we may have a motive ulterior to simply enjoying the piece, that motive is enough to encourage us to plunk down money for it. This is because music, and all art, is social in nature.

Given this social aspect, I truly believe that people will never entirely move away from owning music. While they have moved away from ownership, this is because ownership was often necessary to check something out if it wasn't on the radio. Given that this is no longer true, people are only buying what they truly value. This is in part why singles sales have outstripped album sales. In many styles, an album is a collection of a couple of good songs and mediocre filler. Since they don't value filler, and don't need to purchase it in order to get what they truly desire, they don't buy it.

While the first article has a point, it is flawed in several aspects, and this comes from the fact that the author is viewing music as a product, and not as anything of cultural value. He is making the same mistake that he is decrying in the younger generation. While music as water could be potentially bad, it will never get as extreme as he seems to think. After all, even though we all have water bills and freely available water fountains, if we truly need it enough, we will still buy bottled water. In other words, despite being able to get music for free, if we truly like some artist or album enough, we will buy it.

Culture as Product

There was a rather interesting article on hypebot about the notion of culture as a product. While the article was very nebulous and abstract, he does lay down some interesting ideas about a company that would focus on culture as a product (although he somewhat confusingly equates the two as being identical).

Basically, the idea is to have a story revolving around what problem you want to solve, build features into the culture product to alleviate those problems, ship the feature and learn from the feature being added.

All this talk about culture reminds me of the manifesto that has been making the rounds on the Internet. Called We, the Web Kids, it's give an interesting insight in to the hivemind of Generation Y. In it, the author talks about how growing up on the Internet has changed the way our generation views the world in a very fundamental way.

The manifesto talks bout searching around for several answers before determining the best one ourselves, and the section about the fact that we can talk to anyone, anytime and as a result, the demanding of mutual respect in our interactions. In particular, the line "We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along." sums things up rather well

The reason that these were interesting to me were because of a third article about what to do with people's attention once you get it. In it, the article reinforces everything we've heard about how social media is good, how it should play a big part in a band's marketing strategy, blah blah blah. The poignant bit was about how social media offers bands a chance for 'authentic communication' with fans.

It is this communication which has driven the success of direct to fan marketing, social media and even p2p file-sharing (which got us into this 'mess' in the first place) for indie bands. Not to mention, this authentic communication resonates strongly with the message put forth in the manifesto of the Web Kids. It shows us that the artists aren't gods to be admired from afar, but people like you and me. It's real, and above all else, it's respectful.

The idea that Ethan put forth in the first article isn't how to turn culture into a product. Record labels have been doing that since their inception. Rather, it's how to continue doing that in the framework of the Digital Age culture. You need to continually keep updating and interacting, and tell a story while doing so. Social media has put the soul and personal touch back into business. This is somewhat ironic since it (and digital technology in general) has been decried as being both soulless and impersonal.

Irony aside, the important message in all of this is that developing culture around your product is vital to your success and it's easier then ever. The internet allows us to foster connections worldwide at the speed of light. Given how easy it is to talk to and buy from anyone, people don't give you as much time as they used to. It's nothing personal, they have a lot of things vying for their attention. The way to keep their attention (and theoretically, their money) is to foster a culture or coolness around your band, and to do so personally.

Additionally, making things easy is a must. It goes along with the idea of mutual respect and the ability to access several different sources for the same product or information. Like this article states, don't be surprised when people move on to a different product (in this case, piracy) when you don't make it easy for them to access.

To summarize, a band's success depends upon the culture they form around themselves, the ease of access to that culture and how engaging (and personal) that culture is. Because if you don't, like the manifesto states, we are ready to swap up to something new and better. And there are plenty of options to choose from.

Speculations on Spotify

In this age of rampant piracy, Spotify has been heralded both as the music industry's savior and a massive scam on already beleaguered record labels and artists, depending on who you ask.

Hypebot has had a lot to say about the service since it's inception, and this week has been no different. Of particular interest to me was this article that says that Spotify has hit 3,000,000 paying subscribers. The article estimates that Spotify has 12,500,000 users worldwide and a conversion rate of 20% is nothing to sneeze at. Spotify also accounts for 42% of all Swedish record label income (Spotify is based out of Sweden), which is kinda cool and shows that they might be onto something.

However, not everyone is happy with the new streaming service. For instance, indie artists have reason to be mad, as for all this growth they only see $.001 more per streaming. Furthermore, Spotify reportedly has been asking for more money. Despite all this success and paying indie artists next to nothing Spotify is still in financial trouble. While there is no way to verify this, due to Spotify's (somewhat worrisome) lack of transparency, I can speculate as to why this is: the majors

You see, the majors have all invested in Spotify (have shares and what not) and negotiated there way into premium royalty rates. Without their support (read:i catalogs), Spotify would never have been able to take off the way it did. And it would appear that they are bleeding the service dry before it ever reaches its full potential.

Which is sad, both because of the potential Spotify has, and because this is another in a long line of mismanagement of new technologies by the record industry. Record labels really need to hurry the hell up and come to terms with the fact that times have changed, and that they are most likely never going to be the giants that they once were. Especially if they keep pulling stunts like this. The consumers value of music as a product has changed, and their business models need to change accordingly.

However, even if it fails, Spotify still demonstrates some very important facts about modern music consumers. Their most basic subscription plan offers people unlimited music without ads, the ability to import their music collection and the ability to share it with friends. The last perk is the one worth noticing, since the first two are easily achievable through piracy (and don't tell me storage space is an issue, a TB drive is about $100 and will hold more music then most people will ever listen to). Music still plays a large social function (which is why live shows haven't gone away, and won't until we are all living in the Matrix), and many (myself included) form at least a bit of their identity around it. Being able to show your friends that you are as indie/underground/metal/punk/hip(ster)/pop/alternative/etc. as you appear to be has (an admittedly narcissistic) value to it. A value of $4.99/month to be exact

Additionally, the premium service offers high quality audio, offline accessibility, the ability to "take it abroad" (not sure how this differs from offline, but whatever) and will let you take it on your mobile. Again, the last one is the only thing that differs greatly from the benefits afforded by piracy. Not because it is hard to transfer pirated media to a mobile device, but because with Spotify you don't need to keep changing out said media manually. It appears that having instant access to any song ever made on the computer isn't enough anymore, we need it on our smart phones too (because musical ADD is a horrible, horrible affliction). And even though this shows that society's collective attention span is maybe a minute tops, it doesn't matter. Because people will pay for it, despite having the option to get music for free, and that's really what counts.

If Spotify does go under, the next service (for there will be another, Spotify is a game changer) will be wise to keep these benefits in mind. They should also try and avoid the mistakes Spotify has made by giving indie artists equal (or substantially better) treatment and negotiate harder with major record labels to pay reasonable (read: sustainable) rates. Although if Spotify does go down, I imagine the next service will have an easier time pulling this off. Because once it goes away, the majors will start to miss that revenue and realize what a good thing they had going. And how they managed to completely fuck it up. Again.