The economics of 24/7 lo-fi hip-hop livestreams
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View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) http://hotpodnews.com/presents.... The fine print of innovation in the music business. This is issue #76, published on January 31, 2020. Happy Friday! January is almost over, brace yourselves…
One little celebratory note to start off: My Patreon page (patreon.com/cheriehu) has surpassed 200 paying members!! The page is about to turn one year old, and it’s definitely grown a lot more than I expected since last February. So grateful for the overwhelming support, and I’m excited to see what the future holds. :)
Now, moving on to today’s main stories: The economics of 24/7 lo-fi hip-hop livestreams
With their instantly recognizable combination of nostalgic, mellow, boombap beats and colorful, anime-inspired looping GIFs, 24/7 lo-fi hip-hop livestreams on YouTube have won the hearts and studious minds of millions of listeners. Much ink has been spilled on the scene’s swift rise (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/594b3z/how-lofi-hip-hop-radio-to-relaxstudy-to-became-a-youtube-phenomenon) , dynamic community (https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/40366/1/youtube-lo-fi-hip-hop-study-relax-24-7-livestream-scene) and perhaps problematically leanback nature (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/against-chill-apathetic-music-to-make-spreadsheets-to) over the past several years.
I wanted to dive into an angle that has not been explored in depth yet: How, if at all, do today’s lo-fi hip-hop artists, labels and curators sustain themselves financially? And how are they approaching their future growth and evolution, as the lo-fi hip-hop economy becomes ever more saturated and commoditized?
In general, I think anyone interested in the music industry should be studying the modern lo-fi hip-hop economy closely, for a few reasons:
One, the scene totally upends conventional wisdom about how money flows in the music industry, at least from the artist’s perspective. Most people in the industry today will tell you that indie artists rely more and more on touring and live shows to make ends meet, in light of increasingly low margins on streaming. Yet, in the lo-fi hip-hop ecosystem on YouTube and Spotify, virtually all producers in the scene make most of their money from streaming, with little to nothing from live events. The picture is totally flipped.
Two, it demonstrates the dangers of artists commoditizing and homogenizing their craft in the face of overreliance on playlists for exposure. In the lo-fi hip-hop landscape as most people know it today, songs are interchangeable, indistinguishable commodities, while artists are unrecognizable to the average ear. And it’s the larger content aggregators and curators — not the artists — who are at the top of the food chain.
(This piece first appeared in Hot Pod (https://hotpodnews.com/the-economics-of-24-7-lo-fi-hip-hop-youtube-livestreams/) , Water & Music’s partner newsletter about the podcasting and on-demand audio industry. The version on my Patreon page, linked below, includes a small correction around Strange Fruits’ business, plus a bonus section with my thoughts on lo-fi hip-hop’s prospects on the touring circuit.) Click here to continue reading. (https://www.patreon.com/posts/33553841) Five takeaways from Tinashe’s first virtual concert
In November 2019, R&B veteran Tinashe released Songs For You, her first independent release after leaving (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tinashe-no-longer-signed-rca-795297/) longtime label RCA Records early last year.
Less than 48 hours ago, she decided to do something that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the mainstream: rather than embark on a traditional tour, she opted to give her first performance of Songs For You in virtual reality.
In partnership with virtual-entertainment startup Wave (http://wavexr.com/) , Tinashe staged a 30-minute virtual concert for tens of thousands of online viewers across YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWIc8XWKF_U) , Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/OfficialTinashe/videos/185135265899758/?notif_id=1580349636359728¬if_t=live_video_explicit) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1gqxvEkyWYOJB) . Wearing a full-body motion-capture suit, the artist controlled an avatar onstage in real time as she danced with several prerecorded virtual backup dancers behind her.
With the help of a studio engineer, she also sang live vocals over a set list that included the Songs For You tracks “Hopscotch,” “Stormy Weather,” “Same Room for Us,” “Know Better” and “Die A Little Bit” — the order of which was determined in part by crowdsourced votes from viewers.
The concert wasn’t 100% smooth. For one, it started around eight minutes late — but Tinashe helped pass the time by occasionally appearing in the YouTube livestream’s chat forum herself. (It’s funny how we’re mostly used to concerts in real life starting later than the listed time, but expect virtual shows to be more prompt.) The YouTube livestream also froze several times throughout the show, while the Facebook stream became super glitchy, such that the number of concurrent viewers dropped from around 500 to less than 100 by the halfway point.
But aside from these technical issues, I found the concert to be an enjoyable experience that gave me more revelations about the power and relevance of virtual concerts in 2020 — especially as the format expands from a rather niche, gamer-centric activity that’s accessible only via a virtual-reality headset, to a more mainstream kind of entertainment that’s accessible wherever fans are already active. Click here to continue reading. (https://www.patreon.com/posts/33588888) 10 different ways to prototype your music
In my latest book research update on Patreon, I share some of my thoughts on why the concept of “prototyping” a piece of recorded music with customers is still considered unconventional — or even taboo — and how new technology is slowly eroding that mindset.
In the worlds of tech and design, a prototype is an early, bare-bones draft version of a product — often called a “minimum viable product” (MVP) — built with the purpose of testing a given concept with a small set of users. For example, it’s typical for streaming services like Spotify to test new features like social playlisting with select power users before releasing those features to the wider public.
Prototyping a product or feature before its official release is both normal and encouraged in the tech industry, as it allows developers to validate (or invalidate) their ideas quickly and get feedback on what is and isn’t working, thereby reducing risk of failure.
But it doesn’t compute with the way musical creative processes traditionally roll out, for a few reasons: * For tech and design, the purpose of a prototype is to understand meet a market need through iteration. In contrast, many musicians aren’t looking to meet an external market need; they’re looking to express their own, personal creative vision, and to meet their own, internal, emotional needs, independent of what the market might be looking for at a given time. * In addition, many musicians are perfectionists who will spend months or even years working on a given album. They won’t be happy releasing a product that’s “just good enough”; nor will they be OK with potential fans viewing their creative work as “disposable.” Yet both are requirements for a prototype mindset.
With all that said, the music industry could stand to benefit from embracing a prototype mindset more often. After all, both recorded and live music can be super risky and volatile businesses, and getting any kind of early feedback about market demand or audience perception can go a long way in reducing said risk and maximizing one’s chances of sustainability and success. Click here to access (members only). (https://www.patreon.com/posts/33290383) Good reads
We just got our best look yet at Spotify’s mysterious music streaming gadget, the Car Thing, and it has built-in LTE wireless (Business Insider) (https://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-car-thing-photos-details-user-manual-2020-1) I’m not sure why this hasn’t been covered more widely in the music/tech media: New filings from the FCC reveal more information about Spotify’s behind-the-scenes car hardware device, which is humorously named “Car Thing” and is still not available to consumers. As Bani Sapra writes, the device is black, green and ovular, and includes features such as voice controls, built-in 4G/LTE (to stream music without pairing to a phone) and a cache so that the music doesn’t stop when cell reception is low. To me, this all sounds strangely similar to an independent competitor on the market that is available to consumers, called Mighty Audio (https://bemighty.com/) .
Music Industry Investigation Report (The Creative Independent) (https://thecreativeindependent.com/music-industry-report/) The results of a comprehensive survey of nearly 300 musicians and industry professionals about topics including but not related to financial privilege, diversity, streaming payment models, professionalism and career sustainability as they relate to indie artists’ careers. It’s still a limited sample size but, as the Future of Music Coalition has pointed out (https://twitter.com/future_of_music/status/1222206849631563776) , working with a larger sample size for this kind of research is time- and resource-intensive. (The Creative Independent is owned by Kickstarter (https://thecreativeindependent.com/) .)
Is Beijing About to Become an “International Music Capital”? (RADII) (https://radiichina.com/is-beijing-about-to-become-an-international-music-capital/) Interesting analysis from RADII, an independent publication focused on Chinese culture and innovation, about Beijing’s ambitious plans to expand the value of the city’s music and creative industries to US$17.2 billion by 2025 — and how those ambitions might conflict with the local government’s previous attempts to clamp down on independent music venues and performance spaces.
We Should Have Bought the DVDs (New York Times) (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/opinion/future-dvds-streaming.html) I’m a big fan of the New York Times’ speculative “Op-Eds From the Future” series, and one of their latest installments, written by Veronica Walsingham, is especially relevant to the music industry. What happens to our sense of ownership and culture once media becomes “channelized” and we start paying more for our collective media subscriptions than we did for a cable package? What I’m listening to
Every February on Twitter, fellow music journalist Gary Suarez (https://twitter.com/noyokono) hosts the Music Writer Exercise (MWE), which challenges participants on a daily basis to listen to one album they haven’t heard before and then write a tweet about it. I started MWE last year, but abandoned the effort for no good reason, so am trying it again starting tomorrow. Here’s my list of albums (https://twitter.com/cheriehu42/status/1222926362660478978) . Wish me luck! 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 $200+/month, you can access a wide range of perks including: * A closed, members-only Discord server, consisting of regular updates and analysis on the most important music and tech news * Exclusive essays and article previews * Updates on my book research * Monthly video hangouts with me
…and much more! Thanks so much for reading! ❤️
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