The Business of Music, Knowing The Ledge
Culture Is Currency
I arrived at Northeastern University, in the fall of 1997, the birthplace of the digital music revolution. When Disaster Strikes blasting out of my dorm room windows. At the time, having grown up in Brooklyn, if one of my favorite artist’s albums was dropping, I’d either be listening to one of their songs on a mixtape or I’d have their album a week in advance of its release date. I purchased a copy of Busta Rhymes’ second album from Beat Street Records right before I left NY for my freshman year of college. On arrival to the campus, I was the plug for exclusive new music!
I met one of my now closest friends, Karim, mainly because I was the only kid at school with a copy of Busta’s long-awaited album. We instantly bonded over our love for the rhymes galore, which quickly expanded into other areas of interest that created a life-long friendship. Thanks, Busta.
That school year, I’d travel back and forth to NY every month, “state to state,” to see my family, but also to pick up the latest mixtape or album before it would hit the streets of Boston. Why? Because having the hottest hip hop music before anyone else was the social currency I used to create friendships, make money, and have a good time. My process came out of the genesis of the spirit of hip hop. At its core, hip hop is a competitive art form. MC vs MC, BBoy vs BBoy, tagger vs tagger and DJ vs DJ, judged by the people. So as a DJ, if you became the life of the party by playing the hottest break that no other DJ had, then your next payday would most likely double along with your attending audience.
Fast forward to almost 20 years of hip hop culture. By 1997, the mixtape scene was in full development and the competition became “which DJ had the exclusive record on their mixtape before it was played on Hot 97 or sold in Beat Street Records?” That game ultimately trickled down to classic hand-to-hand market research: If you have the connect to the connect, then you have the insight on what moves the people. What moves the culture. Why? because culture is currency.
The Gateway Drug
Between 1997 and 1999, the price of CDs had risen. For a college kid getting by on whatever odd jobs, grants, and meal plans I had, spending $20 every time an album dropped started to become very costly. In the fall of 1998, I headed back to NU with a new Gateway desktop computer ready to take on my new major, Management Information Systems at the School of Business.
The roles had now reversed: my friend Karim became the plug. He’d shown up at my dorm room at the start of our sophomore year, with a copy of NaS’ third album I Am, which wasn’t supposed to come out until Spring of 1999. In one of his classes, he’d met another student from the Computer Science school and he had managed to get a burned copy of I Am from him. I instantly told him to take me to the connect. Since I had recently switched majors out of the Computer Science program, I could speak the language and I figured I would be able to talk him into showing me how he was getting the product so early. Sure enough, this kid gave me the keys to a world that would change my life forever.
I immediately plunged myself into the scene. I had access to a T1 line so I could search for any and everything culturally relevant to me, on the internet with lightening speed. Internet relay chat was the preferred method of communication. It not only allowed me to talk with other people around the world with similar interests, but also to access downloads from nodes connected to a vast framework. I was once again the plug. This time supplying more than just my friends, I started to feed the streets of Boston with the culture they craved. At Mattapan’s Finest Barbershop I would get my weekly haircut while making a drop off to my barber Jason, who’d sell whatever I was slinging that week. Little did I know that my life would change again because Karim had taken me to his neighborhood shop, where I’d eventually meet Clinton Sparks.
Digital Dealing
One day I was in the chair getting my weekly fade and Jay began to tell me about his buddy he’d grown up with who made mixtapes. He handed me one. It was titled Maybe You Been Brainwashed and it had a logo/icon on it that looked like the image from The Blair Witch Project. This mixtape featured originals from the artists Clinton was producing at the time and remixes of well known songs and blends. It had an intro that told a story about who Clinton was and how he was going to prove his worthiness to you based on his musical abilities.
I was hooked. It reminded me of Ron G and DJ Green Lantern’s mixtapes. I asked Jason to introduce me to Clinton. We both thought I could help Clinton with getting exclusive records for his mixtapes and in turn he’d give me his productions and remixes which I’d use to barter for access to more digital goods. I couldn’t see it at the time, but I was participating in the evolution of music becoming a form of digital currency. If I downloaded a song, then gave that song to Clinton, then he put that song on his latest mixtape, which promoted that artist, which ended up making that artist more popular, which ended up in some form of commerce exchange, then digital music was certainly much more valuable than just for my listening pleasure.
One of the early problems I found was that information about music was discarded in favor of quick access to songs that fulfilled a user’s listening fix. I, on the other hand, delighted in the cataloging of music. I had even begun to rip every CD I ever owned and meticulously organize every song and album using Winamp and a CD burner. I envisioned that one day I’d have this immaculately curated digital music archive connected to a multimedia home system that I could access the content at the push of a button. I’d scour the internet looking for every bit of information available about a release, so I could attach it to the mp3 or organize it in the folder where I kept that particular album.
During that time, in addition to all of the Hip Hop, House, R&B and Reggae I was consuming, I’d now begun to listen to genres of music outside of my childhood influences. Rock, Pop, Blues, Trip Hop and many other genres began to invade my collection of music. The interest in this music was piqued by my ability to talk people around the world via the internet and then search for music from different regions of the world. In addition to satisfying my own curious listening, I could now impart more eclectic music selections on to my network of friends and customers. The catalog of music that I was building was now becoming a DJ, A&R and production resource — a precursor to how I’ve helped my clients in making culturally significant new music.
Party Like It’s 1999
When Napster came on the scene, initially I dismissed its relevance because I was connected to sources of internet culture that largely remained underground and away from the spotlight, but with better ROI. The ease of use and the ability to specialize my search is what gave Napster its reputation, and eventually the de facto resource for ‘illegally’ downloaded music. It also functioned as trusty tool in the development of my early career as an internet A&R.
In my opinion, Napster was the first streaming service. You downloaded the client and then searched for whatever you wanted to listen to; while it took a bit of time if you didn’t have a T1 connection, you almost instantly had your favorite songs, new or old. Napster didn’t disrupt the music business, laziness did. While kids were using music as a form currency, the industry was trying to force them to pay for what was now infinitely available, Napster or not. The real problem was not that people were rabidly downloading instead of buying, it was that the information to properly identify and track these files was rarely being attached to them, like how credits usually came in the liner notes.
Much like the idea of Blockchain and Bitcoin today, what if kids on the internet had been incentivized to neurotically mine mp3 files encoded with all of the proper credits? Whatever you downloaded, if you properly tagged the files with a standardized set of metadata, you would be rewarded for your efforts. Potential access to more music to download that you loved or faster speeds, all based on your desire and ability to properly tag or correct a file.
The rights holders along with Napster could have then charged a subscription fee to people who wished to access Napster for the sole purpose of downloading music at their leisure. Whenever someone would access this infinite catalog of music, you’d know what was being downloaded or on users’ computers. Everything would be tracked since it was properly encoded with its DNA — the metadata — and all computers on the Napster network would be consistently sending data about their music libraries back to the service.
In 2017, the problem that existed in 1999 still exists. Billions of devices are now connected to the internet, a massive graveyard of millions of dead music files without their properly recorded DNA — music files that would come to life and immediately bring value to an artist’s catalog if the metadata was attached or corrected. The latest solution to that problem has come in the form of Spotify. Founder of Napster, Sean Parker helped to fuel the growth of two of the main services that dominate today’s cultural pipelines; Facebook, then Spotify. The two companies even developed an early user signup authentication partnership which surely accelerated Spotify’s ability to scale their user base to its current numbers. It seems like Mr. Parker got his way after all, in the form of a much more evolved Napster.
Independently Dependent
Meanwhile, the music industry shrunk and with it, the knowledge base regarding the delivery of music metadata and administration of music rights. While there are a handful of recording engineers and A&R admins who still aim to diligently catalog the information related to the creation of the music released to date, there are now a couple of generations worth of new people working in the music industry who lack the education or experience needed to understand this complex system of labeling and calculations to ensure that rights are properly monetized.
D.A. Wallach, former Artist In Residence at Spotify, once hypothesized that by using Blockchain technology or a host of other interesting ways to capture, catalog, and monetize data, rights holders could possibly employ proven historical systems of administrative labeling standards to help connect these smart devices to the digital supply chain and bring these files back to their rightful owners, alive, safe and sound. The change that D.A. speaks of started brewing in 2003, in the form of social media’s birthplace: MySpace.
Myspace standardized and simplified the uploading of content to the internet for the average person, allowing people to build their own personal website, and add music to it, which is essentially what is now known as a user profile. There were plenty of other social networking websites, but MySpace did it best and most broadly.
The MySpace music player gave an artist the ability to showcase their music and their fans the ability to show off their taste in music. At the same time, creating music was democratized by new software like FL Studio and Garageband. Instead of having to sign a record deal and use your money to record in an expensive studio, you could make a song on your laptop and upload it straight to your MySpace page. Your “friends” could then share that song on their profile, so that they could stream it to their “friends.” Your profile was greatly enhanced if you chose something that was hot on the blogosphere. You now appear to have good taste in music. Early social streaming culture in action.
MySpace accelerated the process I experienced in college. The narrative shifted slightly: Culture as currency, became music as currency. Technology shaped user behavior, but also emphasized this natural inclination to trade creation as a form of social coin. It’s not just advancements in technology we witnessed, but the synergy between how art and technology can co-exist. One shouldn’t be without the other; one can’t exist without the other. In music’s case, it shouldn’t exist and be passed around without its DNA — metadata.
In 2005, starting with YouTube and in 2007 with SoundCloud, the user experience of uploading audio and video content became the standard channels for achieving instant success. En masse, artists began to upload their music and videos via simplified interfaces with basic standards to identify the content that was being distributed, if the user owned it. A shareable link or embed code was supplied and you could listen, watch or share your creation immediately. Years later, rights management and content ID functions were built into these platforms so that the rights holders of unauthorized uploads could monetize their copyrights. While there has been some success in that area, money and data are still being left on the table. Mainly due to the lack of standardization of how to record, deliver and catalog the metadata needed to properly identify music based on the various streams of income related to a song and the variety of outlets through which it can be traded.
There’s Not A Problem My Squad Can’t Fix
If you agree that music is currency, then let’s jump into the thick of one our industry’s biggest problems. Music with no metadata is equal to money that should be backed by a physical commodity to insure that it holds value. In the case of the U.S. Dollar or the British Pound, gold or silver equal accurately recorded and verified, robust metadata. In the case of the global catalog of recorded music, it is currently running low on a supply of metadata and the centralized databases that currently house it are extremely archaic or outdated. The solution that I propose is for rights holders to begin using scalable data management technology to standardize the recording, verification, delivery, tracking, monetization and cataloging of music metadata.
While it may take a substantial amount of time and effort to re-catalog the history of recorded music and compositions, from this point in history, we could create a new value proposition for all rights holders. We can start to back our intellectual property (music) with value (metadata) and trade it at rates indicative of the value it holds over time. The value that is evidenced when we continue to listen to Beethoven, Bob Marley, the Beatles and Biggie or make new iterations of their work. The new value proposition that I speak of is where music thrives as a commodity backed form of currency, one that can be validated by systems like identity verification, digital asset management, CRM, cryptography and more.
Today, artists have the ability to sell their music as digital content, physical products, or through live experiences across various formats and platforms. I feel there is a unique opportunity for us to repair the current paradigm in existence. We can create new music industry standards that give rights holders the tools to measure and leverage their value across these new mediums. If we don’t, we will continue to be disrupted by outside forces who understand what our art is worth and how to exploit it.
Over the last 9 months, myself and a group of managers, record executives, publishers, software engineers, consultants, and analysts have worked together to develop a platform that enable artists, songwriters, producers and their various partners to capture the value of their music, generate knowledgeable insights, and create leverage for long term success. In 2018 we will embark on our mission to bring about reparations to a disrupted industry.
“Standing on shaky ground too close to the edge, Let’s see if I know the ledge.”
