🔵 Does the success of niche festivals point to a return of the tribe?
Smaller, more focused events appear to be the path forward for festivals it seems
Hi there -
I enjoyed reading Will Page’s article in MBW (linked below) outlining some of the challenges facing festivals at present. I won’t regurgitate his points here, but one that really leapt out at me was the comment that broader focus festivals appear to be the ones struggling most to sell - this year’s cancelled Standon Calling perhaps being a case in point.
I mentioned this article to a friend of mine, who had just got back from the Outbreak festival, which is focused mainly on the punk and hardcore space. This year, it had been a huge success. He remarked that - knowing many of the promoters in the rock, metal, punk and hardcore spaces - festivals like 2000 Trees, ArcTanGent, Damnation, Slam Dunk and yes, even Download had all done a roaring trade.
There has been much talk of “niche” of late; most recently as a reference point in the Charli XCX marketing approach for her Brat album. But it strikes me that perhaps the success of focused, niche festivals speaks to a broader desire now for fans to cluster into tribes once again.
Let’s not forget that for a good while now, music fandom has been a strangely eclectic space, in which is wasn’t odd at all for someone to like a spectacularly broad range of music and genres. In a lot of respects, that’s a good thing: I’m similar in that I appreciate a wide range of sounds.
What that eclecticism arguably reduced, however, was that tribal mentality that some of us might remember so well. Growing up, I have amusing memories of all manner of tension on Carnaby St here in London with goths at one end and punks at the other. Those tribes all hated each other, which is to be expected, because after all, your tribe is the best one, right? Fuck all those others!
Tribes allow a sense of belonging; an “us against the world” kind of vibe. With a world starved of human interaction through the lockdown years, and now being challenged again with the hype around AI, I don’t think it strange that perhaps people are focusing back onto smaller networks that being a shared identity and kinship of sorts.
Can tribes go mainstream? Absolutely - as mentioned in a previous edition, I think most tribes can have their moment in the sun where suddenly it is all mainstream and potentially a little less cool as a result. However I don’t feel it is something we’ve seen for a good while, but all signs suggest that might be changing.
Personally, I think it is a good thing if this is happening. I think it is worth re-sharing this 2019 article from Mark Mulligan, outlining how things were getting more niche and why that was a good thing, not a bad one. Take a read - I’d argue he was ahead of the curve here (and not for the first time!).
Niche media, niche music, niche audiences. It might sound like overkill, but on a certain level, I think this could be the new landscape now, and that excites me as a marketing person.
New spaces are emerging amongst all of this (the rise of private Discord servers being perhaps the finest case in point) and I think that’s giving some worries about how these audiences can be reached. That is a legitimate worry that I share to an extent, but equally, I’ve always felt that good things naturally seem to find their audiences.
Have faith in what you are releasing, first and foremost, but also then work to expose the right audiences to it, be that through organic social media, paid reach, tastemaker websites (there’s a reason The Quietus is still going strong!), hell maybe even those godawful Spotify algorithmic playlists. It can be done though - it just takes time, understanding and perseverance.
Have a great evening,
D.
🎶 listening to “The Seal” by Beak>. If Geoff Barrow was exploring his krautrock influences on Portishead’s “Third”, this track with his band Beak> channels pure Silver Apples vibes, and I’m 100% here for it. If like me you think Silver Apples were ridiculously good, prepare to have that itch scratched with this gem.
📺 watching “Daft Punk "Revolution 909" Sample Discovered!” on YouTube. For me this shows just how great Daft Punk were with their sampling. Ingenious use of the sample to flip it into one hell of a song.
🤖 playing with note-taking AI bots and Notion. We’re just starting to embrace AI note-taking bots here at Motive Unknown, and whilst Otter and co have been doing this for some time, the AI part (which summarises the call and even creates action points) is fantastic. Even better though is having this attend meetings you might not be able to make, so that you can review key points later when you’re free. The icing on the cake? Getting this all piped into Notion where all our knowledge is retained. Couple that with Notion’s own AI and things are getting VERY handy indeed.
Stories from the Music Industry:
25% of music producers are now using AI, survey says – but a majority shows strong resistance
The survey found that 25% of producer respondents are now using AI in the creation of music, although a large majority of those (73.9%) use it primarily for stem separation. Less than half (45.5%) use it for mastering and EQ plugins, while much smaller percentages use it for generating elements to use in songs (21.2%), and very few use it to create entire songs (3%).
👆🏻Hot take: personally I feel this survey reflects my own experiences around AI (ie among friends and from what I see online in communities etc). It is worth reading though as I think it reinforces comments I’ve made in the past, namely that 1) this is all very early days for AI, and that 2) musicians are far more interested in assistive AI than the generative type offered by the likes of Udio et al. I do take issue with the “strong resistance” headline though. That’s misleading IMO.
We’ve got to rethink music festivals.
With festival promoters staring down the barrel of a gun this summer, the question is why? The best effort I can offer MBW readers is to frame the problem so that you can best explain it. To do so, I’m going to explore five issues: costs, supply, and demand are obvious, exploring culture and weather less so…
👆🏻Hot take: some great insights here from Will Page on the challenges facing festivals here in the UK. See editorial above.
Amuse launches ‘Stream Check’ feature to let artists know if their music is being used in streaming fraud
Stream Check offers artists access to a panel where they can review their uploaded music. Each track has a color-coded status bar, reflecting the share of a track’s streams that were flagged as artificial by Spotify over the past month. A status bar marked “low” means there’s little artificial activity, and no action needs to be taken. But an orange (“medium”) or red (“high”) bar indicates fraudulent activity, and Amuse offers artists access to a knowledge database to help them take action and restore their catalog to health.
👆🏻Hot take: knowing that there’s been a huge amount of issues with artists having music pulled due to alleged streaming fraud, I’d argue this is a welcome development if it enables artists to identify issues and act accordingly before music gets taken down.
Hipgnosis Songs Fund shareholders approve Blackstone deal
The saga of Hipgnosis’s ownership is now seemingly at an end, then. Which means attention can turn to what Blackstone has planned for Hipgnosis Songs Fund in terms of investment in new catalogues, and managing the ones it already controls. Historically, HSF has been one of the most active acquirers of catalogues. However, its financial troubles in recent times, with a low share price making it difficult for the fund to raise more money for new investments, had reduced its ability to add to its portfolio.
👆🏻Hot take: the deal is done then. The question for me remains “what happens now?” given Merck will be exiting. Time will tell…
Amazon, Apple and Spotify to challenge Canada's streaming tax
“The approach taken is backward-looking and bad public policy from the current Government of Canada, and fails to acknowledge streaming’s existing contributions to music production,” said DiMA president Graham Davies. “Imposing a 5% levy on streaming services is unsustainable, bad for consumers, and fails to follow the policy directive by Canadian Heritage and the Online Streaming Act. This levy risks raising costs for Canadians and may also violate trade obligations, exposing Canada to economic repercussions.”
👆🏻Hot take: no shock here to see DSPs rejecting this move as it would further eat into revenues and force unwanted price increases just to cover the tax. MBW wrote an interesting piece spotting how Daniel Ek was trying to curry favour on this front.
Notable stories from the world of tech:
While TikTok chases YouTube, Instagram vows to focus on short-form content
In an Instagram Reel, Mosseri said that long-form content would move the platform away from its two key focus areas, which are connecting people with their friends and helping users explore their interests. Mosseri noted these two ideas are symbiotic because people are connecting with their friends over common interests through short-form video. For instance, when you see a Reel that makes you laugh, you send it to others you think would enjoy the video.
👆🏻Hot take: I suspect Instagram are being smart here in that it has already tried the long-form vertical video route and seen it fail. Plus, as Mosseri points out, Instagram is a social network - TikTok is not.
Cloudflare offers 1-click block against web-scraping AI bots
"We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will persistently adapt to evade bot detection," Cloudflare said. "We will continue to keep watch and add more bot blocks to our AI Scrapers and Crawlers rule and evolve our machine learning models to help keep the Internet a place where content creators can thrive and keep full control over which models their content is used to train or run inference on."
👆🏻Hot take: with the usual robots.txt route proving to be ignored by many AI companies, one has to give kudos to Cloudflare for introducing a different system to tackle this issue. It does leave me wondering where this will leave things though if more and more sites block AI. Put simply: if AI cannot learn everything, it will be of diminishing value, which in turn presents existential threats.
How Did Silicon Valley Turn into a Creepy Cult?
For whatever reason, they refuse to notice what the creepy billionaires (who by pure coincidence are also huge campaign donors) are up to. But that doesn’t prevent individuals from acting prudently to protect themselves, and those near and dear to them. And judging by my emails and interactions, the public is increasingly aware and alarmed—they know they are victimized and endangered.
👆🏻Hot take: I’ve written a lot of late about how Silicon Valley is feeling increasingly cult-like a weird - and now it appears Ted Gioia is echoing those sentiments with thoughts of his own. Worth reading.
Looking for something else to read? Here you go:
Is the mobile phone starting to die?
The smartphone market can no longer grow and AI is promising to revolutionize our habits. Experts say that voice commands and virtual assistants will gain prominence over screens. For the moment, new devices such as glasses, buttons or watches will coexist with the cellphone
👆🏻Hot take: a good article from El Pais, looking at how the mobile phone might have peaked and what might follow it.
Smudgy chins, weird hands, dodgy numbers: seven signs you’re watching a deepfake
Look out for surplus fingers, compare mannerisms with real recordings and apply good old-fashioned common sense and scepticism, experts advise
👆🏻Hot take: a handy guide in the (hopefully unlikely!) event you’re having to determine if something is a deepfake or not.