Rethinking music and fitness/wellness partnerships, with artists at the center
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View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) http://hotpodnews.com/presents.... A Newsletter about Big Ideas in Music and Technology, by Cherie Hu This is issue #66, published on October 14, 2019 Happy Monday!
A few notes before this week’s essay: * I’m giving a talk on how international music landscapes shape tech trends (and vice versa) at Northeastern University this Thursday, October 17, as part of the institution’s Leading Voices speaker series (https://camd.northeastern.edu/event/leading-voices-speaker-series-cherie-hu/) . The talk is free and open to the public, so I’d love to see you there if you’re in town! * ICYMI from the last newsletter (https://us20.campaign-archive.com/?u=3d1b6946215346237ceeb999b&id=702f4ec96d) , I’m working on a book for Bloomsbury Academic about artists and tech entrepreneurship. To help fund research/writing for the book, I’ve created a new, dedicated tier on my Patreon page through which you’ll be able to follow my research journey as I comb through various academic papers and articles, interview interesting people and try to develop a new framework for understanding artist entrepreneurship in the modern era. I’ve already published several posts in this tier, the full list of which you can see by scrolling down to the “My writing elsewhere” section at the bottom of this newsletter. If this is of any interest to you, you can subscribe to the updates (plus all the other exclusive benefits/perks in lower tiers) for $15/month by clicking here (https://www.patreon.com/cheriehu) !
Now onward… Rethinking music and fitness/wellness partnerships, with artists at the center
The lowdown: * Behind recent news like the NMPA’s lawsuit against Peloton and the allegedly “fake” contents of mood and sleep playlists lies a common complaint: that music’s role in contemporary fitness, health and wellness experiences is still undervalued. * This may be in part because the artists themselves are rarely involved in curating such experiences directly — relinquishing them of the power to mediate the contexts in which fans interact with their work. That’s a missed opportunity, given music’s scientifically proven impact on physical and mental activity. * Some of the most interesting music and health/fitness/wellness partnerships emerge when artists and their creative intentions are put in the driver’s seat.
I’m going to start this week’s newsletter with a personal anecdote.
If you’re active in the electronic music scene, you may know of EVAN GIIA (https://dancingastronaut.com/2019/09/evan-giia-makes-her-astralwerks-debut-with-memba-co-produced-single-encore/) — a solo artist who just signed to Astralwerks (https://www.astralwerks.com/) , after several releases with ODESZA’s Foreign Family Collective (https://www.foreignfamilycollective.com/) . She’s been on the road for much of the past year, and is now one of the openers on Big Wild’s tour (https://bigwildmusic.com/shows) .
What not everyone may know is that she only started pursuing music full-time in May 2019 — and before then, she was one of the most popular instructors at indoor cycling studio Flywheel Sports (https://www.flywheelsports.com/) in Williamsburg, teaching under her birth name Emmy Giarrusso (https://www.flywheelsports.com/instructor/90476546) .
I’ve been taking spin classes regularly for the past few years, and Giarrusso was one of the best instructors I’ve had to date. She knew how to keep a sweaty crowd engaged and motivated continuously over the course of 45 minutes, engaging with a dynamic yet manageable range of exercises and tempos throughout. And walking into her class, you knew the playlist would always be excellent, because she was an artist in her off-time and you trusted her curation and tastes. At one point, she even brought in one of her friends to play electronic drums live for the class, which lent the room even more visceral energy. (Spin classes in general are intentionally designed to feel like you’re clubbing: dim lights, loud EDM music, coordinated choreography and the “DJ”-instructor positioned in the center of the room, capturing audiences’ attention.)
The benefits travel in the other direction, too. Shortly before Giarrusso left her instructor position to pursue a full-time music career, she posted on her Flywheel Instagram account about how her experience teaching spin classes helped build her stamina onstage as an artist: The most recent post (https://www.instagram.com/p/BumfB5UnHRpebggIpVFXt-e6V3Sp9lF_O7Rm9w0/) on EVAN GIIA’s Flywheel Sports instructor account on Instagram, dated March 4. Living through this highly personal coexistence of music and fitness has driven much of my interest in those two worlds over the past few years. Music has the power to change the way we think and move like no other art form can, and touring artists know this more intimately than anyone else. I’m always intrigued by experiences that give artists a platform to tap into that power, with the added side effect of promoting physical and mental health for audiences.
And yet, when you look at the most buzzed-about headlines today at the intersection of music, health and wellness, they rarely seem personal, positive or empowering for the music industry.
Instead, they seem to frame fitness as growing thorns in music’s commercial spine. Consider the $300 million in copyright-infringement damages that the National Music Publishers Association is seeking from Flywheel competitor Peloton (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-peloton-interactive-lawsuit/as-peloton-prepares-ipo-music-publishers-seek-to-double-lawsuit-to-300-million-idUSKCN1VY2J7) . Or the mood and sleep playlists on streaming services that, as popular and effective as they may be at their job, seem permanently tinged by a public fear of “fake artists.” (Sample headlines featured below.) The subtext underneath these kinds of headlines is that applying music to mainstream forms of fitness, health and wellness strips the art form of its soul, and ends up doing artists a creative disservice — not to mention financially annoying the hell out of those whose job it is to “exploit” music rights. Another core complaint in both scenarios is that music is pitted merely as an accessory (in some cases unworthy of being paid for) to the primary, functional experience of self-improvement and self-optimization, instead of being valued as a piece of culture in itself.
Yet we all know that music in fitness is not just an accessory; it’s essential, with multiple studies scientifically connecting proper music choices to higher athletic performance. And unless you have musical anhedonia (https://reallifemag.com/vox-populi/) , you likely do have your favorite songs to listen to when you’re happy, sad, excited, frustrated, angry, stressed, at peace. At its most powerful, all music, whether fake or not, is mood music. That’s why we keep listening.
So the question that follows for me is: How can artists leverage this power of their music in a way that gives them more control over brand integrity and monetization?
Part of this solution is cultural, in terms of communicating the value of music more effectively to individual consumers and companies alike (and making sure something like a $300 million lawsuit wouldn’t have to happen again). But another possible answer might lie in the business models behind music and health partnerships and how deals flow, which we will unpack further below. The current status quo, and its intermediaries
According to the Global Wellness Institute, the size of the “wellness market” — inclusive of areas like fitness, nutrition, personal care, beauty and workplace wellness — reached $4.2 trillion (https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/press-room/press-releases/wellness-now-a-4-2-trillion-global-industry/) in 2017.
As I’ve written (https://www.forbes.com/sites/cheriehu/2018/08/02/fitness-marketing-revenue-music-tech/#3e24bd6c8afb) in the past, this could offer a potentially lucrative adjacent revenue stream for the music business, especially with respect to increasing background consumption of catalog. Fitness studios and apps are also proactively partnering more with music companies, to leverage the latter’s pop-culture influence and expertise. Such partnerships tend to take the form either of content licensing from labels, or of tech-level integrations with streaming services.
Examples of software companies that are on the frontlines of these partnerships include Calm (https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2019-10-09/calm-comes-to-hollywood) , Endel (http://endel.io/about/) , Aaptiv (https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/warner-music-group-joins-22m-funding-round-for-digital-fitness-brand-aaptiv/) , Feed.fm (https://feed.fm/) and Weav (https://www.weav.io/) . Others like Peloton, Mighty (https://bemighty.com/) , WAVE Meditation (https://wavemeditation.com/) and smartwatches like the vívoactive 3 Music (https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/602068#overview) combine both hardware and software in their music-driven product offerings.
From the artist’s perspective, however, one challenge with most of these partnerships is the number of intermediaries in the process of delivering great music to the fans who want it. For instance, in the case of labels issuing blanket licenses of their catalog to fitness companies, the map of decision-making and deal flows looks something like this:
This map intends to drives home the fact that tech companies, not artists or even labels, ultimately control the end-user experience with respect to product and content curation. This isn’t all bad; these tech companies know their own users best. But as they also become more powerful gatekeepers in their vertical, artists lose some ability to build emotional connections and relationships directly with potential fans on their own terms.
With fewer middlemen, the flow from artist to fan might look something more like this: Labels can still be involved in this picture, especially because they likely have more expertise around licensing larger volumes of tracks. But the key difference here from the first map is that the artist is closer to the center as a decision-maker and curator of the experience, and hence also closer to the fan.
Examples of this artist-centric approach to fitness partnerships do exist in the music industry already — spanning live experiences, e-commerce and hardware, all of which I’ll outline below — but they are relatively few and far between. The future: Make the artist the creative director
Some of the most interesting partnerships in music/health/fitness come simply from putting artists in the creative steering wheel.
For instance, as recently reported in the Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2019-10-09/calm-comes-to-hollywood) , Calm has already worked with the likes of Moby, Sigur Rós, Sam Smith and Keith Urban on exclusive windowing deals, bespoke original tracks and remixes of music made just for meditation and sleep. This approach essentially makes Calm a vertical-specific Spotify with a built-in label, disintermediating distribution for the specific context of the app. (This likely has to do with the startup’s new Head of Music, Courtney Phillips Spoehr (https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtney-phillips-spoehr-06227722/) , who joined Calm in July 2019 and was previously a Director of Brand Partnerships at Universal Music Group.)
In parallel, artist Toro y Moi (a.k.a. Chaz Bear) served as the executive producer for smartbeats (https://www.drinksmartwater.com/smartbeats/) — a partnership between Endel and Coca Cola-owned smartwater that features exclusive tracks from fellow artists Madeline Kenney, Nosaj Thing, Washed Out and Empress Of, each of which was composed to encourage a different mental state (e.g. flow (https://www.drinksmartwater.com/en/smartbeats/flow/) and “human connection (https://www.drinksmartwater.com/en/smartbeats/connect/) ”). Static versions of the songs are available on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/album/1SYGz1zUxRY2IcERjak45X) , but Endel — the generative music startup that signed a distribution deal (https://www.getrevue.co/profile/cheriehu42/issues/slave-to-the-rithm-not-so-fast-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-deal-between-endel-and-warner-music-168092) with Warner Music Group earlier this year — also created an infinite, generative version of each track that features the artists’ original stems.
What fascinates me about these two projects is that the surrounding rhetoric, coming from the artists themselves, positions music as strictly functional without sacrificing creative integrity.
For instance, on his website (http://moby.com/la/) , Moby writes that he hopes his pair of Long Ambients albums “could actually see someone through an entire night of sleep. My suggestion is to not approach this as music, but to approach it as a sleep aid or tool.” Similarly, speaking about Endel’s approach to music-making, Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi told Digital Trends (https://www.digitaltrends.com/features/toro-y-moi-and-endel-talk-the-future-of-music-and-digital-wellness/) : “It’s a tool. It’s like furniture; it has a function. It’s to make you think more, and it helps you tune out so you can get what you need to get done.”
While this might sound vapid to musical purists, the fact that individual, public-facing artists are endorsing background-friendly contexts around their work — instead of having that context force-fed to them — alleviates some of the criticism we’ve seen around other channels such as more generalized mood and sleep playlists. The future: Break artists in the fitness studio, not just the recording one
My experience with EVAN GIIA and Flywheel has gotten me thinking about potential ways to create musical experiences around fitness that feature the artists themselves, and not just their catalog in the background.
It’s important to clarify that in EVAN GIIA’s case, she didn’t have a “partnership” with Flywheel. She was a proper, paid instructor for the company and made a living from fitness, rather than just using the job as a marketing opportunity.
But as another electronic artist Madame Gandhi (https://waterandmusic.transistor.fm/12) wrote on her blog (https://madamegandhi.blog/2015/03/05/musicminds-soulcycle-as-curator/) back in 2015, there are numerous opportunities for labels to partner with fitness studios on gathering focus group-type feedback about emerging artists. For instance, labels and cycling studios like SoulCycle could co-host record release parties that, in Gandhi’s words, “break artists on a bike.” These studio brands could also very well become labels themselves, developing and premiering artists through their highly loyal, built-in, early-adopter audience. SoulCycle has already implemented an early form of this with live, in-class performances from the likes of Ciara (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE25BVk8N_U) , while electronic group Above & Beyond (https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/dance/8517780/above-and-beyond-flow-state-yoga-album-daybreaker) has done the same with yoga.
Other kinds of experiential partnerships in music and health include festivals that combine music and wellness programming (e.g. Meadows in the Mountains (https://www.meadowsinthemountains.com/) ) and wellness retreats catering specifically to artists (e.g. Orbit DJ Retreats (https://www.orbitdjretreats.com/) ). In this vein, I would not be at all surprised to see an app like Calm or Headspace launch its own music-filled event series as well, featuring meditation-friendly performances from up-and-coming talent. The future: Lean into hi-fi audio
I’ve been following the ongoing expansion of hi-fi audio listening options — most recently with the launch of Amazon Music HD (https://www.amazon.com/b?node=14063680011) , an unusually niche move for the mass-market tech conglomerate. But from my anecdotal experience, the hi-fi audio sector has struggled to communicate its real value add to any mainstream consumer who isn’t already working in the music industry.
Health, fitness and wellness brands might actually be able to help communicate this value more clearly to a wider audience. In fact, there are already several audio hardware companies out there that are pushing health-oriented messaging in their ad campaigns — namely, that it’s difficult to get into the right mental or physical state without the right quality of sound.
For instance, Sonos called its commissioned study on music’s effects on our moods, emotions and physical activity the “Brilliant Sound Survey (https://blog.sonos.com/en/brilliant-sound-survey/) ” — a direct tie in nomenclature to their “Brilliant Sound” ad campaign (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjcUn1zQx-0) .
Another company that potentially falls in this category is WAVE Meditation (https://wavemeditation.com/) — which markets itself as a meditation company, but is absolutely a hardware company first. They have an interesting business model: $199 upfront for a WAVE Bolster (a vibro-acoustic pillow) and a pair of over-ear headphones, plus a $9.99/month subscription to an iOS-only app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wave-meditation-companion-app/id1450849135) with exclusive meditation tracks, which users can access only if they also own the hardware.
The way that purchasing funnel works, it seems that WAVE’s software perk only serves as a means to drive upfront sales of the hardware — and that the former isn’t required in order to make good use of the latter. In fact, in a review of WAVE Meditation (https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-this-smart-pillow-help-your-resolve-to-meditate-11563992115) for the Wall Street Journal, Rae Witte wrote that she was “thrilled to discover that [the pair of headphones] actually works with whatever music you play while your phone is synced. Vibing to BadBadNotGood’s album IV was a surprisingly serene experience.”
An analogous situation to this one would be if Beats (https://www.beatsbydre.com/) offered exclusive access to a meditation app, filled with hip-hop tracks for relaxation, with every purchase of a pair of premium headphones. Wellness is merely a cultural tool to help sell the product, is ultimately unnecessary to bring the product’s general, audio-driven use case to life and could actually be an effective segway to introducing consumers to new music in a premium, high-fidelity context. The future: Build vertical fitness brands around artists
For artists who engage with health and fitness regularly, and are already sharing such experiences publicly with fans, there’s an opportunity to reflect this engagement in the artists’ own merchandise offerings.
This is actually par for the course for fitness influencers on Instagram, many of whom are now CEOs of their own branded lines of dietary supplements, apparel and related items (e.g. Mari Llewellyn (https://www.instagram.com/marillewellyn/?hl=en) ‘s supplement line Bloom Nutrition (https://www.instagram.com/bloomsupps/?hl=en) ). Musicians — especially those who are touring on a grueling schedule, and need to maintain a high level of energy and stamina over the course of several weeks or months — could similarly package their individual fitness approaches in a way that’s accessible and applicable to fans.
Some recent examples of these moves have faced controversy, however: Beyoncé’s official partnership with 22 Days Nutrition — credited with driving her rapid weight loss leading up to her iconic performance at Coachella in 2018 — drew criticism (https://www.newsweek.com/beyonces-crash-diet-gets-slammed-some-fans-after-22-days-nutrition-video-debuts-1451375) from fans, who claimed that the restrictive diet countered otherwise the feminist, body-positive rhetoric in the artist’s music.
But some investors think that that partnership only scratches the surface of what’s possible for an artist to accomplish at the music/fitness convergence. As Brian Penick, Managing Partner of Legacy Entertainment Ventures (https://ent.vc/) , recently wrote (https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8529206/music-tech-investment-areas-guest-column) in a Billboard op-ed: “Can you imagine starting your day with a Beyoncersize workout video while wearing Ivy Park workout clothes and your BeySlay fitness tracker, then enjoying a 22 Days Nutrition vegan protein meal and counting the calories on the Beehave nutrition app? All puns aside, that’s five daily touchpoints to keep Beyonce connected with fans, all with alternative revenue streams outside of her music.”
That level of vertical integration might seem a bit extreme, but Penick has a point: after a certain level in their careers, many artists are also just influencers, selling aspirational lifestyles as much as they are selling records. Such positioning without an owned-and-operated product line to match most certainly leaves money on the table.
“The real opportunity comes when celebrities realize that, while single or minimal recurring payouts from sponsorships, endorsements or licensing deals are good in some scenarios, the bigger returns come from investing,” wrote Penick. “What better to invest in than products and services you associate and market with your brand?” The future: Bring actual human connection back to “wellness”
On a closing note, it’s worth zooming out and looking at the bubbling concerns that the media has recently expressed about the future of the “wellness industry” at large.
Multiple publications, including Vox (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/29/18264703/mindfulness-meditation-buddhism-david-forbes) , Big Think (https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/health-wellness) , The Outline (https://theoutline.com/post/350/the-sickening-business-of-wellness?zd=1&zi=e635oomi) and The Cut (https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/how-wellness-became-an-epidemic.html) , have run articles diving into the dystopian future of a hyper-capitalistic approach to wellness. In my recent piece for NPR Music (https://www.npr.org/2019/07/26/745361267/hello-brave-new-world) , I argued that relying too much on third-party tech companies to deliver the music and sounds that will keep us emotionally in check “only reinforces the gamification of life; it’s not just about capturing and adapting to our emotions and behaviors, but also about controlling them, as if we were animated characters in a MMORPG.”
Others have also claimed that hypercapitalistic approaches to mindfulness have made the practice more individualistic than ever, which is counterintuitive for reducing stress. “Capitalist culture enforces the myth of the privatized, self-centered self,” David Forbes, author of Mindfulness and Its Discontents, told Vox (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/29/18264703/mindfulness-meditation-buddhism-david-forbes) . “[It] help[s] people adjust to the status quo rather than helping to transform it.”
Aside from shifting underlying business models, putting artists at the center of fitness and wellness experiences might also help re-imbue the ecosystem with these aspects of community, relational connection and progress that we need more than ever today. 🌊 ✨ If you’d like to support even more thoughts and conversations on music and tech, I encourage you to become a paying member of the Water & Music ecosystem on Patreon (http://patreon.com/cheriehu?utm_campaign=Water%20%26%20Music&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter) . For as little as $3/month or as much as $40+/month, you can access a wide range of perks including: * A closed, members-only Discord server * Exclusive essays * Previews and bonus material for my freelance articles * Monthly video hangouts with me
You’ll also be supporting the expansion of the Water & Music team as it continues to grow in the coming year. Thanks so much for reading! ✨ My writing elsewhere
I have several new posts up on Patreon, spanning book research and general commentary on recent music-tech news.
I’ve started publishing a regular Artist-as-Startup Digest in my book research tier ($15/month), which compiles interesting entrepreneurial moves from artists and adjacent companies around the world, plus opinions on the current state of music entrepreneurship that are worth considering. The first two digests are below: * September 25 (https://www.patreon.com/posts/30208398) — featuring updates from Brent Faiyaz, Lady Gaga, Madame Gandhi and Taylor Swift. * October 9 (https://www.patreon.com/posts/30446077) — featuring updates from Mr. Eazi, Namie Amuro, Genies and R. Andrew Lee.
Other new Patreon posts since the last newsletter include: * Culture as a tool, vs. culture as an outcome (https://www.patreon.com/posts/30605086) — two different lens through which to understand the meaning of “cultural entrepreneurship.” * Spotify’s Global Cultures problem is an A&R problem (https://www.patreon.com/posts/30520583) — a.k.a. the downside of tying product evangelism and advocacy too tightly to individual people. * Podcast playlists’ rocky history on Spotify (until now), and the rise of “micro-podcasts” (https://www.patreon.com/posts/30398937) — a retrospective of Spotify’s various attempts to combine podcasts and music into a hybrid format, in light of their recent official announcement of podcast playlists (https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-09-30/how-to-make-your-own-podcast-playlists/) .
What I’m listening to
Mono/Poly’s MONOTONIC (https://open.spotify.com/album/6tBuval8S4K62Dqs6hD1HH?si=5qg0bnQAQWScd-VnhWep5A) is a wild ride of sci-fi-infused, electronic funk. Seatbelt required for consumption. Favorite tracks for now: “Easy Living,” “Your Mind” and “Dive Out.”
Vulfpeck’s Madison Square Garden show was insaaaaaaane, and it made me fall back in love with “Smile Meditation (https://open.spotify.com/track/7a00cQDulg05uPkHuFoQiS?si=77m-fserQ2Kocg8hfQmPkg) ” and “Baby I Don’t Know Oh Oh (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQIPXJvX9gY) ” in an entirely different way.
I’ve also been revisiting Tame Impala’s Currents, which was recently included among Pitchfork’s 200 best albums of the decade (https://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/the-200-best-albums-of-the-2010s/) . Epilogue
Spotify now has a whole website dedicated entirely to its native Canvas video feature (https://canvas.spotify.com/en-US) — with a few blog posts discussing how Canvas impacts engagement on songs (e.g. it “increase[s] streams by up to 120% and saves by up to 114%”), plus some “best practices” for what to include in the videos aesthetically.
Coupled with the recent acquisition of SoundBetter, this new campaign forms part of Spotify’s attempt to reposition itself as the most “artist-friendly” streaming service in the market, especially in light of ongoing disputes (https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/21/spotify-overpaid-royalties-songwriters-publishers-crb/) with songwriters and publishers. But Canvas in particular might be even more of a consumer play: more interesting visuals could potentially keep users’ eyes glued to their screens for longer, and keen to discover more catalog on the service and eventually pay for a subscription.
Spotify’s video strategy over the years has been far from perfect (https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/8014966/spotify-scrapping-original-video-report-not-from-playlists) . But any content-related move that helps grow user engagement over time is crucial for Spotify’s bottom line; any subsequent benefits for artists are just the icing on the cake.
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