Now that a considerable amount of investment money is coming into the Los Angeles ecosystem, there’s been a lot of talk about how these changes might come to effect the music and entertainment industries in the years to come. Judging by the critical stance that the tech industry tends to take of traditional media practices, it seems pretty clear that a lot of investors are currently seeking to create platforms that will directly compete against the long-time arts and entertainment incumbent: Hollywood.

Pasadena, CA-based incubator IdeaLab and Los Angeles-based accelerator Amplify. Photo Courtesy of Inc.com, article written by Christina Desmarias

The SOPA/PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act/Protect IP Act) debacle in many ways can be said to be part of an ongoing effort by the industry to maintain their monopoly on cultural production, but it’s fairly clear by now that the recording industry, at least in its traditional forms, is gradually dying away. The influx of investment and startup talent coming into Los Angeles will likely be very disruptive, turning traditional media practices on its head — even with all of the changes that technology has already made on the music world, what we’ve seen so far is likely to be only the tip of the iceburg.

For most musicians, these developments should work mostly to their advantage: more competition between business entities usually lead to more competitive hiring rates, since it drives up demand for talent who can contribute to ongoing and up-and-coming projects. In the information age, innovation and creativity are highly sought after traits — art and entrepreneurship have conceptually been thought of as two separate things, but there’s enough parallels and common interests between the two mindsets to make a successful merge between the two something very plausible. Not only is it plausible, but it’s now becoming a very tangible and realistic path to take.

But these changes are not likely to come easy. In a recent blog post, Compromise vs. Problem Solving, entrepreneur and investor Brad Feld writes:

My brain is an engineers brain. I’m focused on learning and solving problems. Over the past few years I’ve been completely baffled by my experience interacting with politicians and their staffers. When I present a solution to a problem (e.g. the Startup Visa) I immediately watch a negotiation begin to ensue. Three years later, even non-controversial, obviously beneficial things like Startup Visa are still stuck in a discussion. [...]

This generated a breakthrough insight for me. I’ve been increasingly frustrated with politics and public policy discussions that I’ve been part of. It’s because I’m in a problem solving mode. While some of the folks I’m interacting with are also in this mode (which causes me to stay engaged), many are in a compromise mode. They don’t care whether or not we actually solve the root cause problem – they just have an agenda that they want to get into the mix legislatively and are negotiating for it with the goal of reaching a compromise.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the issues surrounding the Startup Visa, Feld’s remark epitomizes a lot of what the entrepreneurial mindset is about: problem-solving, “actionable” ideas, usefulness, and value-creation. The art world, on the other hand, moved away from these utilitarian values in the latter half the the 20th century in favor of a “purer” aesthetic philosophy. (e.g. art for art’s sake, personal expression, etc.) While this a gross oversimplification of the issue, there’s enough of a gap between the two streams right now that it might pose some problems for future art and entertainment related ventures if it’s not addressed early on in the process.

From the website of Steve Blank

The good news is that these gaps are just that: gaps. In the upcoming years more musicians will be learning and trying their hand at entrepreneurial methods, while founders in the entertainment/media sector will be having to work much more intimately with artists than they have in the past. There might be some bad blood between Silicon Valley and Hollywood at the moment, but in startup ventures there are plenty of opportunities to make new connections with a fresh and forward-looking mindset.

In a lot of ways, investors are looking to bring in the culture of entrepreneurship — something that served Silicon Valley so well during the last couple of decades — into Los Angeles at this point in time. Cultural clashes seem inevitable, but is likely to be a good thing for the city in the long run. The art and entertainment industries are currently in dire need of innovation, while the tech industry stands a lot to gain from learning about how culture works and how it’s created. It may be useful now to start a dialogue between the two, and maybe arrive at some sort of compromise in how things get done. Either way, a little more clarity probably couldn’t hurt.

I’m lucky in that I was able to work on creative projects with engineers in the past, and my brother also happens to be a very proficient programmer. A lot of the ideas and suggestions below comes out of my experiences working with him and others with music-related projects, so hopefully some of this information might be of some use to others.

Musical Pain Points

When coming up with product ideas, entrepreneurs train themselves to identify “pain points” in customers (i.e. real problems that people face in day to day life), then attempt to come up with innovative solutions to remedy them. These problems can range from minor annoyances (social media improvements, better cell-phone messaging) to serious concerns (security, health), and can be found in virtually every part of society. The natural inclination of the entrepreneur would be to come up with a utilitarian solution (bigger, faster, cheaper, more efficient, etc.) and “prove” to investors and customers that it can be made to work. When these assumptions are proven in front of an audience, this creates a “need” for people to have it, which naturally leads to the creation of paying customers. This method has a long track record of working very well in certain areas of business and is very appropriate for some types of startup companies.

Music, however, cannot be treated in the same way. Orchestras don’t necessarily fair better than solo acts, faster musics aren’t always better than slower ones, and initial pricing usually has no correlation to how well a piece of music is going to fair in the long run. Technology-based media companies (YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, etc.) have managed to revolutionize how content is received by the general public, but most of them have stopped shy of actually producing content in themselves.

From Sweetspot Strategy

It’s possible to measure the efficiency of media websites by its user-numbers, delivery time, revenue/expenses, and so on. These numbers have the kind of specificity that engineers like to see, which may partly explain why a lot of effort has been put in those types of ventures in the last couple of years. But an honest look at the situation would say that these companies are largely in the business of content delivery and distribution, rather than production. In Los Angeles there’s an unique opportunity for startup companies to get involved in both, utilizing the talent that already exists here in the city.

What are the “pain points” in creating music, however? Can music be said to be “solving a problem” in some way that makes people “need” them?

Unlike say, food, shelter, or water, though, none of us technically “need” music in order to survive. Yet in the entire history of humanity there has never been a culture or society that didn’t have an active musical community in some shape or form. Somewhere within this phenomenon lies the answer to what musical “needs” are, and I think that these are the types of questions that the startup community will be asking themselves when they start to get their hands dirty in the messy process of content creation.

As a starting point, we can look at a few common places where music can be found:

Community Events Private Events Business Use Concerts Recordings Psychology Education Research/Experimental

Religious, Corporate, Interest-Based, Community-Based, Political Weddings, Birthdays, etc. Background Music, Commercials, Presentations, etc. Bars, Auditoriums, Concert Halls, Cafes, etc. Soundtracks (Film/TV, Video Games), CDs/MP3s/Vinyl Music Therapy, Music “Healing” Procedures Instrumental Lessons, Music Appreciation Universities/Colleges, Government Institutions

Most working musicians will at least have had some experiences working within most, if not all of these mediums in some way or another. Professional freelancers have the ability to curb their personal tastes when needed, if the gig requires them to play something that they have no personal connection with. But startup projects require more than hired guns — the artist needs to believe in the project itself in order for their talents to reach its full potential. Incidentally, this level of vigor are how “great performances” are created: there’s something unmistakable and unforgettable when action and ideas are in perfect alignment, and this type of intensity will often overshadow any technical errors that can be found in its execution.

For startup companies interested in breaking into the industry, everything on the list above constitute viable options toward the creation of innovative business models. Probably due to the glamorization that Hollywood portrays of its lifestyle, however, there’s a tendency for a lot of people to focus only on giving concerts and making recordings. But they’re by no means the only way to do it. Alternative models often have opportunities to stand out that may not be possible in already saturated markets, and in many cases may prove to be more fruitful in the long run.

On a personal level, I’d like to see people pay more attention to these other options, especially in the areas of research and education where there exists a strong community of people who’re highly passionate about their work. Expanding the market into areas outside of the recording industry can help make musicianship a more viable and realistic career path for many.

Digging Deeper Into Content Creation, Customer Development

The chart above is a list of possible business models that revolve around the idea of music. But so far we haven’t even touched on the idea of content creation, because that would involve coming up with an explanation of the origins of creativity and what makes us enjoy the things that we do. These are issues that have been debated since the beginning of time and many, many, things have been written about it by scholars, philosophers, and scientists throughout the ages. All of them have been more or less inconclusive, or tentative, at best.

This is an example of what "research music" looks like. This used to be my main area of focus.

This is the Pandora’s Box that nobody in the tech industry has wanted to touch so far, because by its nature the issue a very difficult subject to talk about. And the utilitarian mind of the engineer often has trouble understanding or applying ideas that come from these discussions because a lot of it will initially seem counter-intuitive or contradictory. Sites like Google and YouTube manage to avoid the box by passing on the responsibility of content creation to others — either Hollywood, advertising agencies, or the users themselves. I’m assuming, though, that at least a few music startups that originate in Los Angeles will probably want to get into the business of content creation. These projects will have a higher chance of creating something groundbreaking, precisely because its more difficult and will be attempted less often.

Music startups in LA will have its unique challenges because it involves reconciling three cultures that have in recent history moved in opposite directions from one another: content production, content distribution, and the ideas of the individual artists themselves. Content will vary wildly from group to group depending on how it’s organized and the people who are involved with the process. Founders will also have to come up with answers to age-old philosophical questions that are more or less unanswerable, like “why does humanity continue to make music?” or “what does music tell us about the world and ourselves?”. If the last few sentences inspire rather than discourage you, you’re probably an entrepreneurial-type (or a just a plain-ol’ crazy person) that might be up for the challenge. You won’t find “the” answer to these questions, but the answers you come up with will end up defining what you, your company, and your brand is about, so they’re questions worth giving some serious thought.

Going back to the idea of “pain points”, people instinctively know is that life can sometimes be difficult, and that music is one medium we use in order to “cope” with various situations. It’s one of the main reasons why music is here to stay, even if it has never been considered an “essential” good. Here are a couple of examples that I’ve heard from customers regarding how music has “helped” them in some way:

- It helps them get through the day, e.g. work.
- Inspired them to do something or stand up for something that they believed in.
- It helped them get through “tough times” – personal, professional or otherwise.
- Introduced them to people and places that they otherwise wouldn’t have found out on their own.
- Made them feel connected or a part of something greater than themselves.
- Stimulated their creativity, giving them additional insights into their own line of work.
- Seems to keep kids busy or off the streets.

As it stands now, translating musical language into plain English is a highly specialized skill that only a handful of people (musicologists, music critics) receive formal training for. Most customers probably aren’t going give too many details beyond these generic descriptions because they’re not likely to have too much experience describing their musical preferences like the former professions do. Music also tends to be a very personal thing, so they may also be reluctant to reveal too much to you on initial contact. Because of this, it’s necessary for entrepreneurs to familiarize themselves with their customer base and figure out how to earn their trust. (As it is done in any other line of business.)

This is what my music looks like now: simpler, easier to play, easier to understand. This piece will get performed some time later this year.

Even with their trust earned, the subject is still a very difficult topic to talk about, so there are plenty of opportunities for things to go awry during the customer development process. If these discussions aren’t framed in the right way the entrepreneur is unlikely to get the level of specificity that they need in order to better guide their experimentations. I’ve seen really bizarre questionnaires that ask people things like “does this artwork make you feel happy/angry/sad?” or “on a scale of 1 to 10, how ‘emotional’ does this make you feel?” and so on, even though they don’t really reveal anything useful about the product or the effects that it has on its users.

On the other hand, when asked for what kind of music they would like to see made, most people will probably give you something like “good”, “catchy”, “cool/rad” — none of which are particularly helpful for the musician during the creative process. When musicians talk to people who don’t have any musical training, the conversation often resembles two people from different planets trying to have a meaningful dialogue with one another, and a lot of the content that you might see out there are a result of these awkward conversations. If the music sounds awkward or forced, there’s a good chance that the conversations people were having behind the scenes were like that as well.

So it’s largely up to the entrepreneur to figure out what people are trying to “get at”, using their knowledge of music theory/history/culture/science/psychology at their disposal. Here’s where customer development strategies can come in handy: observe what they do, not what they say. If you’re paying attention to people’s reactions, it’s usually pretty obvious whether or not they’re excited about something or not. But it may take more than one try…maybe a couple, or maybe 50. This method usually tends to yield better results than simply having people fill out survey forms.

Digging even deeper, most artworks can be said to fall in between the spectrum of two main categories: escapism and realism.

Nyan Cat, for instance, is an example of an escapist work. Nobody really knows why its there, why it exists, or where it came from, but they enjoy it precisely because it lets them think of something outside of their day-to-day existence. People are often surprised by the amount of cheery and happy songs that come out difficult situations (economic depressions, times of war) but these works are made precisely because it provides a contrast to the things that are actually happening around them.

On the other hand, the recent What People Think I Do/What I Really Do meme is an example of an art form strongly rooted in the idea of realism. People look at them, identify with what’s going on, and enjoy them because it says something about themselves or the world. The common phrase you’ll hear around these pictures are: “so true”.

So true.

In truth, all artworks contain a little bit of both so they’re not mutually exclusive, even though they are contradictory. (This part of the issue is where a lot of engineers have trouble wrapping their head around, since they’re trained to eliminate and remove contradictions in their work.) The violence that can be found in a lot of video games, for example, is not “real”, but can be said to be a reflection and commentary on the happenings and events around the globe through the use of representation and metaphor. Escapism allows for a temporary getaway from the happenings of the world, while realism allows people to “free” themselves from the truth by directly confronting what’s there. (The truth will “set you free”, so to speak.) The reason why these games are so popular isn’t by accident — it provides for a powerful experience because it has the ability to appeal to both sides of the spectrum at the same time.

Talented artists have the ability to pull off either or both at the same time, but in most cases will come to prefer one direction over another. (I tend to be more adept at the “realism” approach since as a scholar, I’m trained to pursue “truths”. ) Audiences, too, will usually have a preference in regard what they want their music to “do” for them. Keeping this in mind can improve your chances at building a cohesive team, or finding clients/customers that might be interested in your line of work. There’s no magic formula to how these things work, but understanding creative ideas in these terms can help to narrow a project’s focus in order to move things forward.

What all artworks seem to have in common is that they make the promise of greater freedom for both its creators and its audiences. Freedom means different things to different people, and the means of getting there will vary from experience to experience, so the possibilities continue to be endless. People still put a lot of faith into the mythological powers that is supposedly contained in musical practices — on the surface this might sound like a good thing, but in reality it often work againsts the musician’s interests. Audiences of today tend to expect a lot — they want it their music to make them happier, cooler, smarter, sexier, funnier, more cultured, and perhaps give their life more meaning in some way.

In essence, if it’s left up in the air the customer is likely to expect this from you: everything. Entrepreneurs should be prepared to sharply define what they do so that they can avoid misplaced expectations and actually deliver on their promises. You don’t have to promise that you can solve all of your client’s problems — maybe just a few.

Anyone have any other ideas? I can only scratch surfaces in one blog post, but there’s enough interest/responses in this topic, I’ll write more. Let’s keep the discussion going!

Contact me or follow me on twitter!

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Musicians

When I first launched my site, the number of visitors who came would be sporadic, unpredictable, and would usually trail off into nothingness a day or two after I let people know that I posted something new. After making a few tweaks in how the site was organized, though, I started getting what seemed like a “regular” traffic base — the numbers are still relatively small compared to big-name blogs, but at least the ticker has never hit 0 since. More importantly, I started getting random emails from people who’re in areas related to my research showing genuine enthusiasm for what I was doing. (Authors, professors, grad students, business people, musicians — many of them coming from notable institutions and careers.)

I owe a lot of this success to SEO, or what’s called “Search Engine Optimization” practices on the web. Optimizing your webpage in this manner is actually a lot easier than you might think — doing small tweaks here and there can drastically improve your odds at getting noticed by the general public, so it’s definitely worth the few extra minutes that it takes to do. A lot of the guides out there have the “hows” but not the “whys” of its benefits (especially for music-related projects) so I decided to put up a quick DIY guide with those things in mind. People will often pay thousands of dollars for these types of services, but you can get away with doing it on your own and in some cases might even do a better job since you’d be more familiar with what’s going on in your own projects.

For starters, if you’re a musician but don’t have a blog already, it’s recommended that you start one immediately because that’s what Google and most indexing services are going to prefer to see in the near future. Even if you don’t happen to update it very much, what the internet wants to know is that you’re still alive and active in the music-making field in some way, and blogging is one of the easiest ways of letting people know what’s going on. If you put in the time to write something interesting/insightful/useful, you’ll also be perceived as being as the go-to person for whatever style or genre that you’re playing in, which can give a healthy boost to your credibility.

This is how blogs work...I think.

I think there’s still a stigma attached to the word “blogger” in the music world for whatever reason, but it’s not necessary to identify yourself as such in order to take advantage of the tools that the medium has to offer. You could just think of it as a regular music site with a beefed-up “news” section, which is probably what musicians will find most useful for their purposes anyway.

It’s usually recommended that you do this through your own self-hosted or blog-specific sites rather than using the “update” systems of Myspace, Reverb Nation, Last.fm et al. mostly because the former tends to perform much better in search engine rankings. You’ll also eventually want your own easy-to-remember URL to act as your “home base” for collecting and organizing all of your other interests and activities into one place. If you don’t have the means or know-how to set up your own hosted site, a lot of blogging sites now have the option to buy custom URLs from their end, so it can also be set up that way as well.

The URL “www.yourband.com” is better than “yourband.bandcamp.com” or “www.reverbnation.com/yourband” because it lends itself to more credibility while also making things less confusing for both yourself and your listeners. If you’re on more than one music site (which is common), people need to immediately know where to bookmark if they want to keep up with your latest activities. If you decide to change sites in the future, which will inevitably happen given how quickly music sites rise and fall, keeping the URL consistent will allow you to make the move without losing any of your fan-base. If you need to post audio or video examples they should either be self-hosted or embedded from other sites in order to keep the user’s experience consistent.

What to write about? That’s a subject for another post, but for now let’s just assume that you’ve written a few things already and just want to get the word out. SEO is designed to help the author do this by allowing their posts to “target” their potential audiences. If you’re like me and don’t have the budget to hire someone but at the same time don’t want to spend a whole lot of time online just marketing things, this option can be a very good one. You might think of it as getting yourself listed in your local library’s catalogue — when done effectively, traffic will grow organically by connecting people who’re interested in certain subject matters to your projects as they wander around the web.

While there’s a ton of blogging options out there right now, WordPress is the industry standard at this point in time due to its professional layout, power, and flexibility that its plug-in system provides. But almost any platform will do as long as it lets you link to other sites and set your keywords/tags for every post that you make. The key is to be thorough and organized with everything you do, big or small.

In Part 1, I talked about my experiences applying the idea of Minimum Viable Products to music, while Part 2 focused more on the human aspects of starting a company or being in a musical group. This section takes a more broader perspective by looking at how musical groups and business models relate to each other in terms of their size. These ideas are not exclusive to perspectives that come out of the “Lean Startup” approach, but musicians who’re interested in entrepreneurship will inevitably run into the phrase scaling, so it’s a concept that’s definitely useful to have under your belt.

In his lectures and presentations, Silicon Valley guru Steve Blank uses a simple chart to explain the evolution of business models:

Startup companies come up with new and untested ideas, which they then attempt to formulate into a sustainable model to generate value (for society) and revenue (for its employees and investors). Blank argues that the goal of every startup is to discover a business model that shows it has proven value, then “reiterate” the execution of its ideas. The goal of the entrepreneur, in other words, is to move from left to right in the chart above.

All corporations, no matter how large, were at one point a startup company. (Think Bill Gates, who started tinkering with stuff in his garage.) How companies get from small to big is done through the process of scaling, which is a phrase used to describe the process of a company’s successful expansion. Entrepreneurs will spend time researching, testing, experimenting, and developing something according to their personal vision. Once something workable has been “discovered”, however, they will then go heavy into distribution mode: vendors and clients are contacted aggressively, manufacturing and production goes into an all-time high, while their marketing team goes into full-swing in an attempt to get the word out.

All of this activity is essentially motivated by the idea that the product that’s being shipped will eventually be successful in generating a profit. When the returns are high, the company can then hire more people to start the process all over again — this time, in a wider market. If you sold 100 copies of your CD and made $300, what would happen if you expanded your company to sell a million? A 100 million? This process is, in essence, an expansion of an institutional form that happens as a result of the repetition and reiteration of a single idea or vision. It attempts to increase value and influence by ballooning smaller successes into larger ones. It’s also not unlike what composers do when they write musical works.

In the music world, this chart would look something like this:

Like entrepreneurial ideas, musical innovations start with “tinkering”, whether it’s improvising chords on the piano, jamming out with the band, or just fiddling around on your instrument during practice times. These ideas are then organized into compositions, recordings, or songs for bands or groups to play.

Beyond size and , the two charts can also serve as descriptors of institutional norms and tendencies. From left to right, various types of spectrums can be drawn across these lines:

Having worked in both ends of the spectrum as a musician and an employee, I can say with some confidence that these descriptions tend to hold true for the most part. It’s not that one is better than another, but that people tend to have preferences for what they want to see from their artists and businesses. The “tried and true” model certainly works for some, especially if they’re not looking to waste their money on something that they don’t enjoy. This stability is, however, also a point of contention among people who’re left wondering why the movie industry makes 324 sequels to Shrek, or why their local orchestra decides to program Beethoven and Mozart 125 times every season. In many ways these institutions are just doing what they’re designed to do, which is to reiterate what they have discovered a long time ago.

When I was working for large companies and institutions (like UCLA) I used to write very very long reports that meticulously documented every detail of what I did for every project — and they seemed to love it since they could use it to justify/analyze/forecast my work within the larger framework of the organization. After I started hanging out with entrepreneurs, I quickly realized that nobody really cared about such things…most things written in print was seen as being useless, since situations and contexts changed so rapidly that by the time the report was done the company would have already moved in a completely different direction.

In a nutshell, this seems to highlight the major differences between the two ways of thinking. I’ve discovered that I’d probably be the most happy somewhere in the middle of the two, maybe leaning a little bit to the red, but this might be different from person to person.

Inspirational poster for startups. I did not take this picture. You're welcome! (Photo Courtesy of Foter.com)

It should be noted that musicians don’t scale in the same way that traditional companies usually do. There are lots of examples where bands have played with live orchestras as its accompaniment, but there aren’t too many groups who started small then suddenly decided to introduce more members into the ensemble when they became more popular or successful. It’s probably best to think of music groups as an identity, metaphor — or brand — that surrounds the record label as an institution. Music groups usually debut at the size that they plan to stay at for a very long time.

The record labels themselves *can* scale if their product line proves to be a success, but for singers and instrumentalists, their identity is very much determined by the people who are in the group, which is something that typically needs to be preserved. It’s not unusual for major-label artists to have hundreds of people working to promote their work, but these efforts are, by in large, unseen by the general public.

In this respect software-based startups are now very much similar to the music business — their product is their identity, which is its main point of interaction between the people who have worked on the project and the rest of the world. You might occasionally experience something useful or insightful, but there is also an element of entertainment built into these products since its “user experience” is seen as something that is very important. Some technology-based entrepreneurs have said that they see themselves very much as being performance artists, and I think the claim is a pretty apt one.

Another thing that differentiates the music from the business world is: jobs. Musicians unfortunately don’t have the MBA -> Corporate Job career path that business majors often do, so the vast majority of them are forced to start from all the way left of the chart in high-uncertainty land. Having a high tolerance for such is usually well-advised. Learn to improvise, learn to adapt.

New York-based venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently wrote a blog-post called Post-PIPA Post that seems to give some indication that SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) bills are close to being dead at this point in time. Thanks to the efforts of protests and lobbying of the internet community and the tech sector, the bills were made politically “radioactive” enough that a large number of politicians have since then rescinded or reevaluated their support for the two measures in the last few weeks. The battle seems to be largely over, at least for now, and people are once again looking for possible solutions to these problems.

I’ve been participating and contributing to the SOPA “blackout” events of the last few weeks, but as a content producer (musician) I can sympathize with some of the concerns that Hollywood and the entertainment industry has on its plate. In the way the law was written, however, it would have given *anyone* the power to shut down a website — without due process — by simply filing a complaint in a guilty-until-proven-innocent style judicial process. Personal interests aside, this should give some indication as to why SOPA and PIPA was widely and passionately opposed by people from a wide array of cultures and backgrounds. It runs counter to the ideals that this country was founded upon, while encouraging a business environment that seemingly ensures mutual destruction for all parties involved. Simply put, the bill had nothing good to offer to anyone if they were to consider their long term interests.

But piracy still continues to be an unresolved issue, and this extreme reaction by the industry may reflect the level of anxiety and uncertainty that they perceive themselves to be in right now. Measures like these are likely to resurface if the tech sector and content producers aren’t able to come to some kind of compromise or agreement in the near future, and it’s the artists and consumers that stand to lose the most when these political battles are waged on a regular basis. There is a need now, more than ever before, for people to come up with innovations and solutions that can effectively balance the interests of the two parties involved.

Since the internet became a widespread phenomenon, I’ve been wary of making CDs, DVDs, or any “album” in general, since the idea of making money through record sales seemed pretty dubious given how easily they can be copied and distributed over the web. So I never bothered going through the trouble of creating one, even after spending 10+ years of studying, composing, performing, improvising and producing music. I’ve always preferred the live performance experience, so I chose to focus on that instead of laying down tracks.

According to basic laws of supply and demand, the more abundant something is, the less it’s worth: digital duplication, then, effectively kills any viability of someone making a living purely through their recorded products. Irony is inherently built into the process of internet notoriety, because it essentially means that the more popular something becomes, the quicker it loses its value due to saturation. (aka. esteem dilution) Most consumers can see how quickly “hits” lose their value soon after their release, so it’s not a pattern that anyone isn’t familiar with already — in the entertainment world, things go up and down very quickly for this very reason.

An honest look at the situation will undeniably show that there are very few musicians, if any, who are able to make a living just selling CDs or MP3s. This is a truth that the music industry is all too familiar with, but the tech industry also has a responsibility in acknowledging that this is the reality for many artists today. Louis C.K. recently had a big success on the internet by selling his concerts directly online, but his “already-famous” situation cannot really be applicable to artists who are lesser-known or are in their aspiring stages.

Google SOPA Infographic

Given how obvious and common-sensical the above arguments are, it may seem like the situation is without hope for those looking to make a living off of their recorded content. This mindset, however, comes as a result of treating music as if it were a product in-it-of-itself, rather than being thought of as a service that musicians provide for its audience members. The act of putting on live concerts is something that cannot be pirated, because it’s an experience that is unique to that place and time. (This has historically been the bread-and-butter of working musicians anyway, even among major-label artists.) Musicians will sometimes focus on reproducible goods (recordings, merchandise, album art, videos, etc.) rather than on activities with unique value, which can sometimes come to work against them. Reproducible goods go hand in hand with distribution channels and performing rights organizations (PROs), which has its own set of rules that most musicians are ill-equipped to handle — if they’re even aware of their existence to begin with.

In many cases, PROs are just something that musicians sign up for because someone told them to do so, while most of them end up forgetting about them in the long run after they find out how confusing and time-consuming just maintaining their membership can be. The system is so chaotic and unorganized that there’s often no way to know where your works end up going. The average musician, if they’re lucky, might occasionally get a random check that pays for their royalties for a broadcast that may or may not have actually belonged to them. I’ve gotten checks for things that I wrote and publicized, but sometimes the check just doesn’t end up coming at all — in other cases, I would get royalties for works that I had nothing to do with, broadcasted in places that I never even heard of. After a while you just stop taking the system seriously because it doesn’t give you any reliable indication that they’re even remotely keeping track of what they’re supposed to be doing. There’s gotta be a better way to do this, right?

In the tech sector, Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, and other content distribution channels can be said to be service based companies, and they largely see themselves as being so — one solution would be for musicians and content producers to align their methodologies closer to what these companies in order to make themselves more compatible with their business models. (e.g. streaming media, interactivity, digital/electronic content, etc.) In return, these companies should make themselves compliant and cooperative with digitally-based PROs (SoundExchange, more traditional PROs if they happen to catch up) by providing accurate and reliable information about what’s being played on their sites. If done with enough transparency and ease of access, this should provide a two-way street between content and distribution, encouraging people to create more things in exchange for compensation. The company can then use this content to attract advertisers and promote their own brand name. In a sense, content producers working under these models end up owning part of the company, since their returns (based on hits and plays) will correlate directly with the company’s overall health.

In order for this to happen there may be a need for people to change how they interact with music overall — from the idea of “buying/selling a product” to “employing/contracting a service”. Rather than counting record sales, musicians should be counting exposure, reactions/feedback, usage (in other mediums) and prospects of gaining future work. In the ever-fluid, unpredictable environment of the digital age, the idea of the historical, immutable record may no longer be a viable option. This may seem counter-intuitive to traditional lines of thinking, but in the Web 2.0 World, this is more likely to make more sense.

My hunch is that Google/YouTube is beginning to move toward this model, so I’ve been adapting my next project to try to take advantage of this shift. (It’ll function somewhat like an album, but it’s more or less just a YouTube playlist when it comes down to it.) The completed product will be out in a month or 2, so we’ll see how it goes.

The introduction in Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup opens with a story about himself and his company – not one of success, but of failure. As if depicting a scene from a tragic movie, he describes a night in which he and his co-founder were arguing with each other, drifting aimlessly in the pouring rain, when they both came to realize that their company was going to go under and there was nothing that they could do about it. He described the feeling of it as if the world “fell under” him that night.

In his book, Ries mentions that people who have never experienced this type of failure may have trouble understanding what he had gone through. I think that for anyone that has gone through the process of “breaking up” with a band or ensemble, though, this story will probably strike a chord with them in some way. Promises that you made to friends and family become broken, all the hard work you’ve put in instantly evaporates, and your adversaries that said that it couldn’t be done end up being proven right. While the mediums themselves might exist in very different fields, startups and musical groups share the same sentiments of camaraderie and passion that makes its dissolution all that much more painful.

In my experience, drama and conflicts don’t happen because of failure. Failure is an experience that most can relate to, so people can be surprisingly empathetic if the situation is presented with some honesty. Emotions do become stirred, however, when there’s a sense that an expectation of some sort was betrayed in some way. In Ries’ story, up until that fateful night, everything was “seemingly” going well — they had a great product, an extremely talented team, and an idea that was at the right place at the right time. They gained fame and notoriety within their circles, and the signs of them being the “next big thing” were all there. But in the end, this did not stop things from going sour and the project ending in failure. How did things get from good to bad so quickly?

Vanity Metrics

Disillusionment is a phenomenon that occurs when the individuals or groups are forced to confront the realism of a “rude awakening” — the fact that what they had previously believed to be “good” or “beneficial” to them turned out to be false or illusory. “Vanity Metrics” (another phrase coined by Ries) can be a propagator of this type of thinking, which often poses a danger to an organization’s long term health. Its destructive power comes from its ability to convince people that things are going well, even if reality is just the opposite.

One example of a "vanity metric".

Ries’ example of a “vanity metric” was data that showed that the # of registered users on their site were increasing at an exponential rate with no signs of it slowing down. From looking at this chart, you might assume that their team managed to hit the “jackpot” and the future would be rosy and bright from that point on. What the developers didn’t take into account, however, was the second graph, which showed that the number of paying customers, %-wise remained virtually the same. In combination, what the data really showed was the fact that the work they were doing to the software itself was largely counter-productive, since they weren’t able to gain any more conversions from their additions and revisions. Their company as a whole, despite becoming more popular, was starting to stagnate.

As most people are aware by now, there are countless numbers of musicians that earn their “15-minutes of fame” then quickly disappear into the shadows, never to be heard from ever again. These cycles of rising and falling stars occur so frequently because many allow themselves to get complacent during their initial climb, unable to stay afloat after people’s attentions start to move onto other things. Given the erratic nature of popular taste, it’s usually a mistake to assume that any given trend will continue for very long — convinced of their own success, however, many musicians do this anyway and end up paying its price. A musician’s “staying power” is the equivalent of “value” in the business world: What’s left of something after all of its hype has been stripped.

For certain figures, (e.g. Britney Spears, Courtney Love, the late-career of Michael Jackson) what we see of them is so clouded in scandal and drama that we may find ourselves no longer talking about their music after a certain point. In these cases, the idea of “value provided” is no longer relevant since their careers become an expression of pure vanity — fame for fame’s sake. It can be expected that public opinion of the icon will then go negative, while their lives may take a turn for the self-destructive. In Silicon Valley, this would simply mean another failed startup — in Hollywood, however, the industry may decide to turn this downfall into a showcase in itself, e.g. Reality TV shows, gossip rags, publicity stunts, pornography, etc.

Though not necessarily representative of the culture industry as a whole, because certain sectors of art and entertainment businesses thrives on providing “negative value” for its audience members, it’s particularly of importance for musicians to be aware of “vanity metrics” and the effects that it may have on their careers and livelihoods. It’s not that popularity is something that is necessarily bad in itself, but that a clear understanding of what it really represents can help artists avoid being consumed by its allure.

'Generic, Mass-Produced Images of Stardom', my very own conceptual/lazy artwork.

Among aspiring musicians, many will compete over the “opportunity” to perform at top-tier venues, tour around the country/world, talk with the press/media, have their music distributed over large networks and audiences, and so on. As an imitation of what celebrities do, these things are seen as “pathways” toward stardom or a lucrative artistic career. Many will go to great lengths in order to acquire these “experiences”, through the rationalization that it will help build their “resumes” or “credibility” for the future. While some of these practices can have some educational value for musicians in their early stages, when carried out for too long it can easily turn into a perverse situation where the musician ends up serving their employers for the “opportunity” to work for them. In the music world, vanity is such a powerful motivator that it often overrides common sense and people’s instincts toward self-preservation.

The reality is that the opportunities that celebrities enjoy is an aftermath of their efforts and standings, not of its causes. Success comes as a result of some combination of skill, luck, intelligence, connections and market timings, all of which have the capability to contribute to the well-being of a musician’s career. The good news is that thanks to advances in information technologies, many of these factors can be controlled and predicted much more effectively now than they could in the past. What definitely does not work, however, is attempting to gain fame and fortune for its own sake, under the assumption that it will lead to better things in the long run. This is a time-honored recipe for tragedy, which many have fallen prey to, both in history and in current practice.

Unfortunately, these are the things that nobody wants to talk about in the business, since it usually works to the advantage of producers and administrators who’re looking to exploit the efforts of aspiring and younger artists. Educational institutions have also remained largely silent on these issues, graduating class after class of artists who are wholly unprepared to handle the realities of how the industry works. Even when these problems are talked about in the open, solutions are rarely proposed; the common wisdom has now become a form of cynicism, where it is seen that the only way to win the game is to get out of it altogether.

There is, however, an alternative.

I once went to a talk where an entrepreneur mentioned that he had produced a YouTube video that had more than 24 million hits, with several million returning hits per month. I thought that the accomplishment was pretty impressive and that he must have been really proud of it, but he himself was fairly dismissive of the whole ordeal. “It hasn’t lead to any new customers”, he said. It was something that made him feel good about himself for a short while, but the reality was that the video wasn’t really helping the company in any way — people watched it, shared it with all their friends, then ignored any of the company’s attempts at getting them interested in their products and services. He identified his “success” as a form of vanity, and was able to blank it out from his mind when making important decisions regarding the future of his company. How was he able to do this?

Validated Learning

In its imitation of scientific practices, “validated learning” methodologies propose the idea that businesses should frame their experimentations and actions around metrics that are actionable in some way. In a nutshell, this basically means that people should have an hypothesis of some sort whenever starting or working with new ideas or projects.

The Startup 'Feedback Loop' is inspired by the hypothesis-testing-analysis methodologies from the sciences.

Artists and musicians have widely varying and often very personal reasons for developing their creative ideas, which can make it more difficult to come up with hypotheses that can be “measured” in the same way as in the sciences (physics) or business (finance). Nonetheless, musicians who possess great skill never arrive there by accident. The act of practicing, especially when done intelligently, can be seen as mini-experiments that contribute to the musician’s overall “progress” — using the feedback loop chart to the left, “building” can be seen as the act of making sounds, “measuring” as an analysis of its result, while “learning” as the process of reflection that occurs before deciding what to do next. Intuitively or intentionally, this cycle of hypothesizing, experimenting and analyzing helps musicians to improve in their skill in such a way that feels definite and real.

If you talk to musicians regularly enough, you might occasionally see an excited look on one of their faces after they had made a “breakthrough” in one of their practicing sessions. They had, perhaps, found a new and more-effective way of pulling off a certain technique, method, or idea on their instrument that was previously giving them trouble. This revelation basically means that they have discovered something that they can use for the rest of their lives and share with others who may be experiencing similar issues as them. These “moments of enlightenment” are very similar to (and as valid) as ones made in the sciences, since they have the capacity to contribute and enrich the knowledge pool of the medium as a whole.

The “validated learning” framework can be applied to both the musicians’ career-planning and their practice/rehearsal strategies as a way to help them make more productive use of their time. We’ll start with the former notion first:

Validated Learning – Marketing Hypotheses

George Howard, music consultant and professor at Berklee School of Music writes:

Conversion means getting someone to do something you want him/her to do – like download a free song, take a poll, buy a song, give you an email address, etc.

Your entire career is about first reaching people and then getting them to “convert” to do the thing you want them to do.

Therefore, you must define your goals before you can “convert them.”

– From 7 Ways to Increase Your Odds of Success in the Music Business in 2012

“Conversion” is a term used by startups in order to explain the phenomenon of a customer coming to “believe” in the company’s product or service. For musicians, a “convert” is essentially the same as a “fan” — someone who happens to enjoy your work. Customer development strategies of the “Lean Startup” approach focus its efforts around these metrics as a way to measure progress and developments in a company’s business model.

Depending on your career or skill level, “success” may be defined differently depending on what “making progress” means to you. Some goals can be very simple, others practical, a few personal or social, while some can be very ambitious. In very broad terms, a few of them may include:

Music can be some or all of these things at once, which can be said to be a testament to its power and influence that it wields upon the human race. But no matter what the case, it’s important that these objectives are defined very clearly so that you’ll know if/when you’re getting closer to or further from your goals. (In group contexts, getting everyone on the same page is especially important, even if the goals themselves may occasionally change.) In order for this approach to work, specificity and transparency is an absolute necessity: If money is the goal, define how much you want per month; exposure, what kind of demographics and how many people; messages/rallies, for whom and why, and so on. Internet tools (Google Analytics, Facebook “Likes”, Twitter “Favorites”, etc.) can help to keep track of how these efforts are progressing, but the information that comes from these sources needs to exist as part of a broader framework in order to give it meaning.

The most compelling reason to use the “Lean Startup” method is its ability to get you out of what entrepreneurs call “The Land of the Living Dead”. This is a world where work is done for its own sake, advancements/improvements are nowhere to be seen, while having no overall direction in where anything is going. It’s an environment where things happen, but without any cause or meaning — a land where its inhabitants are simply drifting from one thing to the next for no reason. It’s the world of the postmodern condition, in other words.

Right or wrong, the “Lean” approach saves you from making the same mistakes over and over by giving you clearer benchmarks on how to define and validate your goals and objectives. When done correctly, at the end of every hypothesis->testing->reflection cycle there should be very clear indicators that either proves or disproves your initial idea. If proven right, proceed further — if wrong, adapt/revise your hypothesis then try again. If experiments fail repeatedly despite continuous revisions, then it may be time to make a “pivot” — a drastic switch in direction that may literally have life-changing implications. The feedback loop cycle is a self-correcting method that, when reiterated enough, eventually leads you to discover a “workable” idea. As long as this process can be done regularly and honestly, progress will seem more and more like an inevitability, rather than an happy accident.

I'm not sure if I understand the metaphor here, but this is what "Validated Learning" in Google Image Search gave me.

After I first made the decision to become a professional musician, my goals initially didn’t fit in any of the categories listed above. Enamored with the academic process, I had considered myself to be a “research composer” for the most part, so my primary objective was to create/discover new methods and processes for achieving new sounds. In my early works most of my music had no emotional content, no marketing value, no message, and I definitely had no “fans” in the traditional sense of the word. But my objective was to work my way up the ladder of the ivory tower and become a researcher/professor, so none of those things really mattered to me. I was genuinely happy with what I had produced, since I validated and documented all of my results up to that point.

Since then I’ve managed to present my works in various conferences, had a number of opportunities to get my music performed in public settings, and am currently enrolled as a Ph.D candidate in music at a very good university. It’s not your typical Hollywood achievement, but I’ve found that the idea of “success” is largely how you define it — one advantage of working in a creative field is that it gives the individual the power to determine what this really means to them. But you do need to define what those goals exactly are, large or small.

A lot of my objectives have changed since becoming interested in entrepreneurship, but I’ve found that the process of “goal setting” has largely remained the same, which leads me to believe that the “Lean Startup” approach is something that can be applied in a wider variety of contexts. Everything starts with an hypothesis or an idea, then the audacity/curiosity to find out the truth. The two things in combination can become a very powerful framework for harnessing creative ideas and outputs.

Entrepreneurs have found the “feedback loop” concept useful because it allows them to structure the “flow” of the process of continuous experimentation. Early startups need this structure because the majority of their ideas are untested, thus making them extremely unstable. Being that most musicians (particularly aspiring ones) are in the same boat, these methods can help to give their creative projects more direction, whether its being done on an individual or institutional level.

Validated Learning – Rehearsal Hypotheses

For bands and smaller ensembles, “jam sessions” are often an essential part of their creative process. They give performers the opportunity to get to know each other (both musically and personally), while these open-ended exercises serve as essential “brain storming” sessions for musicians to hypothesize and test out their own ideas. The quickest way to cycle through the feedback loop is through improvisation exercises, which can often be done in less than a minute or two.

Before realizing that Jeffrey Agrell had beaten me to the project, I used to maintain an improvisation for musicians blog where I attempted to devise and collect exercises for individuals and groups to use in order to structure their improv sessions. Books like the ones above can be seen as collection of “hypotheses” for musicians to use at their disposal, which can be a very good place to start for many beginners.

Improvisation can be said to be an exercise in balance between control and loss of control, order and chaos, learning and unlearning, creativity and destruction. There are no “mistakes” in improvisation, just as there are no “bad” ideas in entrepreneurial ventures as well. What determines an idea’s overall value in the end, however, is the musician’s intentionality — his or her actions in relation to their intent. The honesty and directness of this method is what allows improvisation to separate itself from art forms that rely on stylistics alone.

In order for musicians to “test” their intentionality, however, an explicitly stated hypothesis becomes a necessary part of the process. Each session starts with an idea, which is then either validated or invalidated through the act of performance. Its results, when properly documented, can then be reflected upon. It’s generally recommended that you record everything you play — not necessarily because you’re going to end up keeping everything, but when framed correctly, every session can become an opportunity to improve your craft and discover new ideas and techniques. The key is to be brutally honest about what was intended vs. what actually happened, since the temptation to move goalposts or attribute everything to “subjectivity” will always be there. In order for the process to work, there is a necessary dedication towards clarity and transparency.

For beginners, I usually recommend the “ABA”, or start-departure-return model as a starting point. Arguably the most common musical form that exists on the planet today, this exercise trains musicians to execute an idea, deviate from and/or contrast it, then return back “home”, both spontaneously and intuitively. This form is seen in all types of genres, from classical, jazz, folk, electronic, rock, etc. so it has a fairly wide range of potential applications.

In pre-composed musics, this exercise can often take the form of a “literal” return — cases where the “A” section comes back perfectly identical to how it was played at the beginning of the song. When the “ABA” exercise is improvised, however, something interesting happens — the “return” is similar, but never identical. In the midst of being in the “B” section, things change and it then becomes impossible for the music to reiterate the original theme in the exactly same way. The theme, then, has somehow evolved in some way since the beginning of the exercise. The reason why the “ABA” form strikes a chord with so many people is simple — it’s a metaphor for many of the things that we experience in life: departure and return, conflicts and resolve, camaraderie and rivalry, lessons learned, and so on. In this sense, the improvised versions of the exercise tends to be more “realistic” in the sense that it doesn’t attempt to portray the process as a perfect, mechanical exercise.

After you start getting comfortable doing a few of these, you can then start making up your own “games” that might have more relevance toward your specific style or situation. At times these exercises may feel silly or contrived, but keep in mind that authors like Clayton Christensen have argued that innovations, even ground-breaking ones, often have the appearance of it being “toys” in the beginning. So don’t be afraid to have a sense of humor and have fun with it!

The ideas above can be applied and used in more “structured” musics (composed, fleshed-out songs), but improv was used as its main example since it’s simply the fastest way to get through the feedback loop cycle. These exercises can be a great way to go through a bunch of ideas really quickly before making the decision to polish or develop them any further, acting as its own “minimum viable product”. Details of the latter can be found in the Part 1 section of this article.

Hopefully this article gives some idea about “vanity metrics” and how “validated learning” methodologies can serve as antidotes to the problems that the former can cause. Part 3 will look at scale and scaling in relation to musical ensembles. Stay tuned!